Language and the use of words is something many people take for granted and repent hastily when they realise what they said isn’t what they meant! When I say the use of words I don’t mean here talking things up or repositioning a bad or an unpopular idea. There is some skill and thought needed to be an effective communicator to sell your services or sell your ideas, whether that is to others or yourself.
There’s a huge raft of reading material, books, blogs and experts out there that offer to improve the way you speak or think, however there are some straight-forward concepts and practices that can be deployed to help you improve how you speak and think.
Neuro Linguistic Programming
The ideas come from the Meta model within NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and I would encourage you here to keep reading before discounting it on the grounds on what you think you have read before or been told.
I have worked with many sceptical clients over the years who have subsequently had a breakthrough having worked with me working these ideas through.
We need to think about speaking in a positive way – which is something different from someone always sounding or being positive. The brain lacks the ability to distinguish between positive and negative. People will have come across this on many a course when the old pink elephant example comes up: the trainer is talking about communication effectiveness and asks you “not to think of a pink elephant” and what does everyone think about?
As parents, how many of you have said to your young child, “stopping running, you’ll fall over” and then a few minutes later the inevitable happens?
As the brain lacks the ability to differentiate negatives and positives, all it does is delete the negative word (which is there to clarify the instruction to the receiver) and then merely does as it’s asked.
In the child example above, we should therefore say something like “I would like you to walk please”. The child’s brain then instantly knows what to do and complies. If it doesn’t, the instruction can be re-issued as “walk please” in an appropriate tone so the child understands that compliance is required.
Effective communication
We can therefore communicate more effectively by thinking more about what we want to happen rather than what we want to prevent happening and in so doing we should achieve our objective.
The same rule can be applied to thought processes too. A good example of this is when someone is thinking about goal setting or developing outcomes or proposals. We need to be clear about what we want to achieve and, if we are working with a client, that should be about what we want them to achieve by us helping them.
Many people think negatively about how they develop ideas, outcomes and goals and quite often think about stopping doing something to achieve it rather than starting something else to achieve it. Sigmund Freud is quoted as saying that generally people move away from or towards things, and your own make-up will determine whether you have a preference for moving away from pain or towards pleasure.
Choose solutions not problems
Some well quoted good examples of this focus on dieting and smoking and I’m sure you have come across people who have both succeeded and are struggling with these.
How many people have you heard saying, “I’m on a diet, I want to lose weight to go on holiday” and they don’t manage it? Or “I’m quitting smoking as it’s affecting my health” and they have a hard job sticking to it?
In both cases, using Freud’s thinking, you are moving away from a problem not towards a solution – so a fair amount of brain power is still focussed on the problem (negative) rather than the solution (positive).
A small change in the wording of your self-talk or construction of your outcome makes a huge difference. Thinking of the examples above, compare the following ways of phrasing the problem / solution:
“I’m going to start a new healthy lifestyle as I really want to feel and look great on holiday” and “I want to lead a healthy life so am going to become a non-smoker”.
Tweaks in language and positioning of the thoughts make a massive difference, which shifts the brain onto what you want to achieve rather than what you want to avoid so the chances of success are higher as you know what you want to achieve.
In both cases, you will have to either diet (or at least change eating habits) or give up smoking. The difference is that these are the actions you will use rather than what you will focus on as your motivators.
The same can be said for developing mantras or affirmations too, although I think that’s a topic for another day – as is developing robust personal and business outcomes.
