In NLP we say that mind and body are an interlinked system.  Any change in the mind will impact upon the body and vice versa.  This really shouldn’t come as any great surprise – except perhaps to the medical profession!

As a result of my recent physical suffering my mental and emotional state has been testy, to say the least, and I have noticed it – as have others.  Small frustrations, ambiguous situations, even simple courtesy from other people that has occupied more of my time and attention than I feel able to give at the moment has tested my patience to the absolute limit.  In other words – the meaning and interpretation that I have placed upon the communications and interactions of others has been subjectively altered significantly by my physical state; and altered in a way that has not been useful.

Well, that’s what happens when you are sick, you might say.  No-one will hold a few harsh words against you.  Point taken and I am sure that is the case but let’s look further.  If we know that one’s subjective physical experience is likely to have a powerful effect upon how we process, interpret and respond to communications from others can this principle be usefully applied in other situations?  I suggest it can.

Recently, I taught a course on Dealing with Difficult People.  A certain number of the principles on that course are also covered on our Conflict Resolution Skills training.  An important focus on those courses (and many of our other trainings) is the interactional nature of relationships – good and bad.  Relationships elicit communication loops where one person communicates with another, the other interprets the communication and responds and so on and so forth.  We have a process of reciprocal influence.  Sometimes this works smoothly and productive outcomes emerge.  In cases where there are strained relationships or active conflict, however, the situation can be different.

In the latter case, as soon as we enter into an interaction with the other person, we are likely to experience a change in state – physiological arousal – through stress, anxiety, fear, anger, frustration or whatever.  Due to these heightened physical states (just as I experienced while battling the disabling symptoms of flu) our perception of, interpretation of and response to ambiguous or neutral statements by others is much more likely to be biased towards perceiving hostility, aggression and other negative traits.  If such a subjective interpretation leads us to respond defensively or with a ‘pre-emptive strike’ so to speak, the likelihood of the situation escalating is self-evident.

So what can we do about this?  Well, one of the fundamental skills in NLP is what we call State Management.  On our NLP Training you can learn to manage, control and select physical and mental states that will give you optimal choice and control, rather than being a helpless puppet-on-a-string and hostage to your own automatic responses.

The possibilities offered for developing more harmonious relationships and moving beyond conflict are exciting.

This characteristic is typical of teams low on self-confidence and lacking mental toughness – not something you would expect to find in the best team in the world. In test cricket when you have lost a wicket it is important to stabilise the team and ensure that you take your time to play yourself in. What happened to England was that when they lost a wicket the incoming batsmen made some poor shot selections. When working with athletes I refer to this as the ability to think clearly under pressure – ‘T-CUP’. A team low on confidence and with fragile mental toughness will struggle to think clearly when they are put under pressure and become distracted by irrelevant factors instead of just thinking about the task in hand.

T-CUP is an invaluable asset for any team in sport or business. Most people, in sport and business, are able to think clearly and make rational and correct decisions in everyday life, but what happens to your ability to stay focused and make informed decisions when the pressure is cranked up. T-CUP when under pressure is something that I help athletes and businesspeople with all the time, in order to ensure that they can stay focused and resilient when it really matters. Whether it is your ability to make the correct decision on the pitch to ensure victory for your team, or the correct decision in a pressurised business meeting to secure a contract for your company, T-CUP will give you a winning edge over your competitors.

At Watt Works we offer a range of consultancy, training and coaching services within the areas of sport psychology, life coaching and executive coaching. Contact Us to find out how we can help you perform at your best.

Many of you will be familiar with the late Christopher Hitchens – the writer, journalist and polemicist who died last December.  Hitchens was particularly well-known for his vociferous atheism and his combative, no-punches-pulled style of debating.

Hitchens locked horns in public debates with many prominent religious figures including the Reverend Al Sharpton and Rabbi Schmuley Boteach.  Hitchens wasn’t backward about coming forward and made excoriating attacks upon religious faith.  It was clear that Hitchens believed that reason, logic and rationale were on his side and that any ‘reasonable’ man or woman should have been won over by his oratory.

I do not for one moment intend to render an opinion on the merits of the religious question.  Rather, I merely intend to point out that Hitchens did not seem to fully appreciate the complexity of what he was attempting to overthrow or the vested interest of his adversaries in resisting him.  Let me explain.

NLP Trainers and authors, Joseph O’Connor and John Seymour observe:

“Our inner world of beliefs, thoughts, representational systems and sub-modalities also form a system.”

I would add that this system includes our sense of personal identity – the “I am…” statements we make about ourselves.  These inner or intra-personal systems integrate with other external systems – the inter-personal systems we share with friends and family, our culture, our community, our society and so on and so forth.  In totality, you have a wide system, made up of the interplay of a number of sub-systems.  What do systems like to do?  Well, if they are fairly stable and produce useful outcomes, they tend to want to preserve themselves and don’t particularly like being disrupted or thrown out of balance.  They maintain their own ecology and homeostasis we might say.

Let’s look at the sort of systems that a distinguished Rabbi, perhaps someone with a teaching position as well as a congregation, his own radio show and a number of books in print will be part of.  Such a person’s personal identity, beliefs, values, family life, relationships, self-esteem, community standing, reputation, career, financial security – just about everything, in fact – are all predicated upon the truth of his religious faith.  The impact of that faith being undermined or shattered is almost unimaginable.  Yet, Hitchens believed that it should readily yield to reason and logic and that his adversaries should have been ready to abandon their religious faith as readily as redecorating their bedroom.

Please be aware that when you are attempting to change someone’s mind, or are disagreeing with them over a matter that is enormously important to them, you may in actuality be attempting to destabilise a critical part of their personal architecture.  Proceed with tact, care and sensitivity.

The degree of insight, problem-solving and creativity that this sleeping integration produces can be remarkable and, literally, world changing. Many famous inventions and masterpieces have originated in dream states.

The chemist, Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, day-dreamed a symbolic representation of the structure of the benzene molecule – a task that had completely eluded his conscious, waking intelligence. The inventor, Elias Howe, similarly had a dream that symbolised the solution to a vexing obstacle in the invention of the sewing machine. Paul McCartney dreamt the classic song, Yesterday. German physiologist, Otto Loewi, had a dream that led him to the discovery of the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. Golfer Jack Nicklaus dreamt of a new golf swing that, when he tried it in real life, transformed his game. Writer Mary Shelley was inspired to create Frankenstein after the story came to her in a dream. In all of these, and many other cases, the raw materials for the creation or discovery were already to hand, but it was the alchemy of sleep (the right type of quality sleep, I posit) that allowed their synthesis into something new and remarkable. Dr. Loewi, who received a Nobel Prize for his discovery, realised this when he stated:

“Most so called ‘intuitive’ discoveries are such associations made in the subconscious.”

Over a number of blogs I have given many, many reasons why sleep should be valued and prioritized. The evidence suggests that if you want your people to be good intuitive problem solvers and to be able to access their creativity, sleep again is a vital ingredient.

Innovative methods such as this sit side by side with more conventional tools on our Creativity Skills course available in London, Cheshire and Belfast.

“So what?” some of you may be thinking, “This is a dog-eat-dog world and I would rather have people at their desk making some type of decision rather than lying in their beds not working at all.” I will allow the short-sightedness of that comment to pass and choose not to observe that every sub-standard decision made through sleep deprivation probably costs infinitely more time and effort to correct (how much time and money was spent cleaning up the Exxon Valdez disaster in contrast to what it would have cost to get the Captain an extra few hours quality sleep – same for the Challenger disaster, same for Chernobyl, same for an infinite number of smaller every-day decisions) and I will merely take issue with the notion that when people sleep they “aren’t working.”

Whilst, to the outside observer, sleeping people may not seem to be doing much, EEGs and other results of sleep research show that a vast amount of activity is going on in the human mind during sleep. We travel through a number of different phases of sleep which include cycling several times through the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage. REM is hugely important in consolidating and integrating new learning. Studies have looked at what happens when volunteers were taught a new skill and then experienced sleep disruption of various types. Those volunteers who had their sleep disrupted during REM sleep periods integrated the new skill much less successfully than those who had their non-REM sleep interrupted. Quality sleep, covering all sleep phases, is essential for effective learning and integration of new skills and knowledge.

In a subsequent blog I will look at why there is even greater sense than might have been imagined in the folk wisdom of ‘sleeping on a problem.’ Concepts such as these are covered on our Working Patterns for Maximum Efficiency course taught in London, Cheshire and Belfast.

In real life people and groups can lack awareness that multiple perspectives are possible. We often have a default perspective that we apply in situations that do not have clear meaning and we act as if that was the only possible perspective. If such default perspectives are healthy and empowering – well and good. For many, however, the default position is disempowering and harmful. In psychology, such habitual perspectives are often called ‘attribution style’. It is well recognised that attribution styles can have a powerful effect upon mental well-being.

So, how many contexts that we believe have cut and dried meaning are actually more ambiguous than we might at first imagine? Research has shown that even such an experience as physical pain can be significantly influenced by the interpretation we place on it. Physical suffering can be created where it would not otherwise exist – simply by the language we use. A bold claim? Perhaps, but one experiment involved two groups of volunteers, each of which were to be given a series of electrical shocks. The shocks were administered by one volunteer to another and a set of written instructions were given for the process. The instructions and the levels of shock were identical between the two groups with one small linguistic difference.

One group was asked to report the “pain” caused by the electrical shock. The other instructions used a neutral word such as ‘sensation’ instead of the word “pain”. The results? The group briefed with the word “pain” reported a significantly higher level of discomfort than the other group. The inclusion of a single four-letter-word had provided a frame within which to perceive and understand a physical stimulus that might otherwise have been interpreted differently. A reality of suffering was thereby called into existence.

In my next blog I will expand further upon what this can mean for us in a range of different contexts.

As an experienced sport psychologist, what I think happened was that Wade started to think about already being in the final and this distracted him from what he needed to do to get there. The key here is that he failed to remain in the present and allowed himself to get distracted by looking into the future.

Once he started thinking about all the distractions that being in a World Championship Final brings, he started to miss his shots. This would have started to slowly chip away at his confidence. Whilst this was happening, Lewis started to take his chances and slowly picked up the individual Legs and, eventually, the Sets required to get back into the match. As Wade’s confidence started to dwindle Lewis’s confidence began to soar. This swing in momentum was amazing to watch and once the game entered the final set I knew that Lewis was now the clear favourite to beat a disconsolate Wade.

One of the things that I always encourage athletes to do is to stay in the present during a performance. As soon as athletes get distracted by dwelling on what has already happened, or start to think about what is going to happen in the future, their performance suffers. Once you have battled hard to get ahead of your opponent don’t let them back into the match by becoming distracted about what might happen in the future.

This principle of being able to anchor oneself in the present, when appropriate, is crucial in both sporting performance, in business and in life. ‘When appropriate’ is the key phrase here. There is a time to reflect upon and learn from the past and a time to plan and strategise for the future. In the heat of competition is not such a time, however. The only way to influence sporting competition in the here and now is to be in the here and now.

This ability to master such temporal orientation, rather than drifting unproductively into the past or future, is one of many skills that we teach clients who avail of our Sport Psychology coaching, training and consultancy services.

In this, the Olympic year, why not give a little more attention to the mental side of your game?

But what about situations in which there is something less undeniably real, something ambiguous, perhaps even something non-existent? You have probably all heard of the Rorschach ink-blot test in which randomly created symmetrical ink-blots are shown to individuals who are asked to describe what they see. The theory is that what a person projects onto this ambiguous stimulus gives insight into their inner world and the filters they use to perceive reality.

Let me give you a similar example from my own recent experience. One the penultimate day of 2011, I was walking along a beach in Northern Ireland when I picked up the stone in the photo below and saw Santa Claus in it. Can you see him?

I suspect you can now, but what would you have seen if I had not mentioned Santa? What would I have seen if it had not been shortly after Christmas with all the ‘priming’ for Festive motifs? Now that you have seen Santa is it possible for you to see anything else?

The fact is, of course, that what is on the stone is simply a random assemblage of colours and patterns with no meaning until seasonal circumstances and my own filters imposed meaning upon it. Then, by introducing this visual stimulus to you within the ‘frame’ of it being an image of Santa Claus, I have shaped your reality and we will both respond to this image as if it really is a depiction of Santa. We have co-created a shared reality out of nothing! We are wizards!

In this instance our creation is a charming and delightful little conceit which gives pleasure. In other circumstances our alchemy may carry greater risk and it pays to use it with care. What is our greatest tool in creating these realities? Language. As I will explore subsequently, developing an appreciation for its psycho-active power is an endeavour well worth the effort.

In the excellent book, Introducing NLP, Joseph O’Connor and John Seymour offer a hypothetical Three Minute Seminar on NLP. The presenter suggests three principle steps:

1. Know what you want – have a good, clear idea of your outcome. About this time last year I wrote two blogs (blog 1 and blog 2) showing you how to set Well-formed Outcomes. I recommend a quick re-read of that.

2. Be alert and notice what is happening – since your Well-formed Outcomes will have been described in sensory-specific language you should be able to know what to notice in order to assess your progress.

3. Be flexible – if your open sensory channels indicate that what you are doing is not taking you towards your outcomes, develop the flexibility to adjust what you are doing in order to bring you closer to your outcome. Flexibility is important – as they say in the military “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

If I may borrow another military analogy, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in World War 2 (and later US President) General Dwight D. Eisenhower stated – “Planning is everything. ‘The Plan’ is nothing.”

These wise words sum up the Three Minute Seminar perfectly. Engage in the process of planning and develop an initial plan but be aware that planning is a process and that you will inevitably have to refine and amend the plan as events develop. How can you know what events are developing? By being alert and noticing what is happening, of course.

There you have it. Simples! I told you I would be brief.

How do I know this about Nick? Well, the more recent stuff is down to straightforward internet research but the rest is due to the fact that I knew Nick at University. He was a year or two older than me, studying Russian (hence his subsequent interest in that country) and was a highly accomplished Inter-varsity debater. He had reached the finals of the World Championships the year before I arrived and was looking for a debating competition partner to go back and take the title. I arrived as a Fresher with the gift of the gab and he asked me to debate with him.

Even back then Nick was a natural entrepreneur. He had run up a large student overdraft and had gone to see his bank manager. Rather than making a re-payment proposal, Nick asked for a further loan in order to set up a business importing formal, dress-shirts from overseas. These magnificent shirts had detachable gull-wing collars – the works, and to add some maverick individuality, they had a large print of ‘Dennis the Menace’ on the back that would only be seen when the evening had gotten to that drunken stage when one’s tuxedo had been discarded. He leant me one once – I wish I had kept it for posterity.

So, opportunity from adversity. Many years further on, after doing business in Russia, Nick had to beat a hasty retreat back to the UK after receiving death threats from a business contact who he had reported to the authorities after the man had ripped him off. That might have caused many to lie low for a while but, struck by his frustration at having to use Tippex to personalise greeting cards for friends, Nick spotted a business opportunity and Moonpig was born.

Why Moonpig? Here’s the fun bit. ‘Moonpig’ was Nick’s nickname at school and he hated it! When he came to Birmingham he hoped to escape it but it followed him there. I recall the despairing look on his face when a fellow debater revealed this cruel moniker to a packed debating chamber of Fresher students who howled with delight (believe me – debating is a cruel sport!)

In looking for a name for his new card company, Nick obviously decided that if he could not escape this nickname he would make it work for him. Moonpig and its logo of a pig in a space-helmet is now successful and instantly recognisable.

So, in 2012, what problems or setbacks will you reframe as containing opportunities to be grasped?