Neuro-Linguistic Programming Models Summary (06 of 14)

Active / Reflective / Inactive

Impulsive  / analyze / avoid

Convincer

“The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” — Ken Blanchard

Have you ever had a  hard time trying to convince somebody of something?   You might not be matching their “Convincer Strategy”.   In Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a “Convincer Strategy” is how a person comes to believe something to be true.  For some people, they need to see it with their own eyes. For others, they need to hear something multiple times from multiple people before they believe it.

In Unlimited Power : The New Science Of Personal Achievement, Tony Robbins writes about the “Convincer Strategy.”

Figure Out Their Convincer Strategy

Robbins writes:

“The convincer strategy has two parts. To figure out what consistently convinces someone, you must first find out what sensory building blocks he needs to become convinced, and then you must discover how often he has to receive these stimuli before becoming convinced. To discover someone’s convincer meta-program, ask, ‘How do you know when someone else is good at a job? Do you have to a) see them or watch them do it, b) hear about how good they are, c) do it with them, or d) read about their ability?’ The answer may be a combination of these. You may believe someone’s good when you see him do a good job and when other people tell you he’s good.  The next question is, ‘How often does someone have to demonstrate he’s good before you’re convinced?’ There are four possible answers: a) immediately (for example, if they demonstrate that they’re good at something once, you believe them), b) a number of times (two or more), c) over a period of time (say, a few weeks or a month or a year), and d) consistently. In the last case, a person has to demonstrate that he’s good each and every time.”

Basically, the “Convincer Strategy” comes down to whether you need to hear it, see it, or read about it, and how many times you need to see or hear it, and over what period of time before you believe something is true.

Match Their Convincer Strategy or You’ll Waste a Lot of Time

In my experience, the “Convincer Strategy” is one of the most important things to figure out when it comes to influencing people.  If you don’t, it can seem like you’re banging your head against the wall. You might have all the facts and figures or all the right data or really know your story, but if somebody is not hearing it in the way they expect it or, more specifically, in a way that matches their “Convincer Strategy”, then you will be wasting your breath.

Sometimes Buy-In Takes Time

When I would pitch my projects, I used to run into resistance from one of the directors.  I couldn’t figure out where the resistance was coming from given that I had good answers for their tough questions, I had the relevant data, and I had done my homework.  Eventually, I figured out that their buy in process takes time. All I had to do was meet with them three times before the Vision Scope meeting. By the third time, the story didn’t change, no new data, but hearing it a third time matched their “Convincer Strategy.”

Emotional Directional Sort

iguring out people is something we all do. We want to know what makes people behave as they do, what their intentions are, and more importantly, to predict what they are likely to do. This important book about Meta Programs goes beyond slotting people in categories.

It may come as a surprise, but our personality is a mental construct developed as a coping mechanism. It is a stable way of perceiving and behaving. Personality is a description of a set of behaviours and states that get evoked in particular contexts.

Meta Programs

Meta Programs describe our habitual style of noticing, thinking, emoting, sorting, valuing, choosing and behaving. They tell us what to delete from our awareness and what to attend to. They are the basis of our strategies and the roles we play.

Thinking in terms of traits makes things static and unable to see how we create our personal reality.

Meta programs reflect our values. We come to value a particular way of thinking and devalue its opposite.

Knowing Someone’s Meta programs

Understanding others and their world can increase our ability to influence and persuade, but also prevent them causing us trouble. We can make informed guesses about someone’s Meta programs in a particular context by paying attention to certain cue words, body language.

Modelling expertise and best practice discovers which Meta programs are vital for particular types of tasks. For instance, quality control needs the ability to work with detail/specifics also known as Global Specific or Chunk Size Meta Program (program 3) to mismatch also known as the Relationship Filter – Sameness and Difference (program 4) and be pessimistic (program 6)

Changing

By understanding our own Meta programs, we can change processes and strategies that aren’t working for us. By making a conscious choice, and directing awareness to what we normally delete we can use a different style.

Dr Hall gives six different patterns for changing Meta programs, including the use of Time Line Therapy and NLP Anchoring

Maps of reality

We relate to the world indirectly through our maps. Research has shown that only 20% of the information we use to create perception comes from the outside. That 80% of information the brain works with is already present.

We delete, distort and generalise both with our senses and with our language. It’s the meanings and interpretations we make of events, not the events themselves that cause us to think and feel like we do.

Mental Meta Programs

Attending, thinking, representing, sorting, perceiving and conceptualizing. We create our understanding of the world by inputting, processing and outputting.

1. Representational Systems: Visual System Processing,Auditory System Processing, Kinesthetic System Processing,Gustatory System Processing,Olfactory System Processing
   This is our most central Meta program.
2. Sensing Intuiting
   Sensing uses our senses as we gather and process information. Intuiting moves through the world mind reading and using meaning to determine facts.
3. Scale: General to Specific
   We can package information in various sizes.
4. Relationship Comparison: Sameness (matching) and Difference (mismatching)
   Is how we work with and compare data. Do we notice how things are the same, or how they are different?
5. Information staging: Counting and Discounting
   Is what and how we foreground and background things.
6. Direction – Optimistic and Pessimistic
   Is a powerful pattern, which can affect us significantly in all areas of life.
7. Classification Scale: Either/or and Continuum
   As kids we think broadly and not in either/or terms.
8. Nature: Linear and Systemic
   Linear thinking sees change as rare, hard and painful. Non-linear thinking uses systems thinking to think operationally.
9. Screening and Non screening
   How much of the environment are we able to screen out?
10. Philosophical and Practical
    Philosophical why focuses on origin and source. The practical how is purpose, use and solution focused.
11. Communication Channel: Verbal and Non-verbal
    Do you pay attention to what people say or how they say it?
12. Durability: Impermeable and Permeable
    This is about how we process ideas, beliefs and values in terms of their influence on us.
13. Causation
    These are our different explanations about how things come to be. It is what kinds of causation we notice.
14. Closure/Non Closure
    Can we live comfortably with the unfinished?
15. Information kind: Quantification and Qualification
    Do you favor measurements or meaning?.
16. Stream of consciousness: Focused or diffused
    Do you focus in a direct concentrated way or scatter attention?
17. Conventional: Conformist and Non Conformist
    How we think about fitting in with groups and getting along with people
18. Deliberate/Slow and Witty/Quick
    Do you make up your mind quickly or deliberately?

Emotional and Social Patterns

This group of patterns is about emotional states and power.

1. Convincer representation: Looks right, sounds right, feels right, makes sense
   How do we become convinced about the value, importance or significance of something?
2. Movie Position: Associated (feeling) and dissociated (thinking)
   Do we step into the pictures we create, or observe them?
3. Exuberance and Intensity: Surgence and Desurgence
   Experiencing the movie doesn’t tell us how much we will feel it or the degree we will surge forth with energy
4. Stress Coping: Aggressive and Passive
   How do you cope and think/feel when stressed or challenged?
5. Authority: Internal and External
   Do we look inside or outside ourselves for permission to do things?
6. Attention: Self Reference and Other Reference
   Do you mostly put your attention on the needs of others, or your own needs? Do we focus our attention on we think, feel and want, or on what others want?
7. Emotional Containment: Multi directional and Uni-directional
   This is how we experience and express emotions in terms of focus or diffusion
8. Rejuvenation: Introvert Extrovert
   How do we recharge our batteries when we are tired or stressed?.
9. Somantic Response: Reflective to Inactive and Active to Reactive (Action Filter)
   This program relates to our level of activation when talking or listening.
10. Social Presentation: Artful and Artless
    Artful is shrewd and socially correct. Artless is genuine with fewer social ambitions.
11. Dominance: Power, Affiliation and Achievement
    From David McClelland’s model. How you adapt to the power moves of others?
12. Work Style: Independent, Team Player, Manager, Bureaucrat
    How we get tasks accomplished and work with other people.
13. Change adaptor: Closed or Open to change; Late-Medium-Early Adaptors
    Do we embrace change, or fight it?
14. Attitude: Serious and Playful
    These are two very different ways to filter life, self, others, work, hobbies and the world
15. Persistence: Impatient/Reckless and Patient/Persistent
    Patience leads to persistence, while pressure frequently induces impatience, which undermines persistence.

Conation – Choosing, Willing and Deciding

Will is the sense of choice, awareness of options and the ability to choose. There are two aspects, that of intending (what we want and value) and attending (focusing on the object of our desire)

1. Convincer Demonstration: Number of times, Length of time
   How long does it take to become convinced (pattern 19)? How many times does someone have to see, hear, do or read something before she is convinced it looks, sounds, feels right or makes sense?
2. Motivation Direction: Toward and Away From
   Moving both toward and away from can increase our choices and motivational power.
3. Operational Style: Options Procedures
   How do we move through life, handle things – organise and orient ourselves?
4. Judging Perceiving
   How do we adapt ourselves to life?
5. Modal operators: Necessity, Possibility, Desire, Impossibility
   What kind of personal world do you live in? Is it one of rules, obligations and prohibitions, or desires and possibilities.
6. Preferences: People, Place, Things, Time, Activity, Information and Systems
   These are our preferences for what we like and want to do. They show up as our peak experiences, primary interests and motivations.
7. Goal striving: Skepticism, Optimisation and Perfectionism
   How do we think about and choose goals?
8. Buying: Cost, Time and Quality
   Our buying strategy typically involves tradeoffs between cost, time and quality.
9. Social Convincer: Distrusting Suspicious and Trusting Naïve
   What are our concepts about trusting people?
10. Interactive: Competitive and Cooperative
    Do you see interactions as win/lose or win/win?
11. Directness: Inferential and Direct
    How much context do you need to understand the meaning of a communication?
12. Management: Control, Delegation and Collaboration
    How do we get something done that involves others?
13. Risk Taking: Fearful and Embracing
    What is your awareness and experience of risk, your response to novelty and potentially dangerous things?
14. Decisions: Cautious and Bold
    How do you make decisions? How much do you weigh the pros and cons?

Semantic or conceptual Meta Programs

These are higher-level Meta programs. They determine how we perceive reality.

1. Self Experience: Mind, Emotion, Will, Body, Role, Spirit, Dis-Identified
   How do you experience or define yourself? What do you identify with?
2. Self Instruction: Compliant and Strong Willed
   How do you respond when someone tells you something, give orders or instructions?
3. Self Confidence: Low and High
   Self-confidence relates to our competence, faith in self, skills, behaviour and actions. See Dragon Slaying
4. Self Esteem: Conditional and Unconditional
   Self-esteem refers to our belief in our sense of worth. It is the appraisal of our value. See Transforming Your Self – Becoming who you want to be
5. Self Integrity: Conflicted and Integrated
   How well do you live up to our ideal self?
6. Responsibility Sort: Over and under responsible
   Responsibility is the ability to respond.
7. Ego Strength: Stable and Unstable
   This involves the strength of our sense of self to face reality and cope with things as they are. It is our inner resources, sense of power and confidence.
8. Morality: Conscientious and Unconscientious
   How do we evaluate behaviours and actions in terms of right and wrong?
9. Self Monitoring: Low external and high internal
   How well do you know yourself? Do you understand your emotions, intentions, needs and wants?
10. Time Zones: Past, Present and Future
    Time is a construct; we represent and then compare events in our mind.
11. Time experience: In-time – Experiencing Life in the Present (random) and Thru-time – learning from experience(sequential)
    How do you code your sense and duration of historical time?
12. Quality of life: Doing, having and being
    Is your life more about doing, having or being?
13. Values – what is significant and meaningful
    What are the ideas we believe in? We appraise things and give them value. Our values underpin our Meta programs and frames. We learn to value the things that give us pleasure and pain.

Intensity

Surgency, thrill seeker / desurgency, conservative

Towards / Away

The motivation direction Meta Program determines the type of consequences that are likely to move us to action. It is an important aspect of how we motivate ourselves. Are you motivated by what you want (pleasure) or by what you want to avoid (pain)? This particular program profoundly affects many aspects of our lives.

At some level, if the reward (or potential pleasure) is big enough or the consequences (or potential pain) are bad enough everyone will move toward or away from.

Of course, one person’s pain can be another’s pleasure and vice versa. My worst day would consist of bungee jumping, wet water rafting in an icy river, followed by a night of camping in damp muddy clothes. Some might find this exhilarating.

Goal Setting Motivation Theory – Toward Motivation Direction

People who move toward what they want focus on the possibilities and visions of the future.

Theory X Away From Motivation

People who move away from what they don’t want are motivated by problems to solve. Threats of negative consequences and deadlines energize them.

Balanced

The most useful orientation is to be able to do both. See possibilities while dealing with problems while still small and manageable is a powerful pattern.

Theory X and theory Y

There is a current debate in management about whether employees are best motivated by bonuses and rewards (theory Y) or by threats of punishment (theory X). We know this as “Are people motivated by the carrot or the stick?” This meta-program shows that it depends on the employee.

If you try to motivate a toward employee with threats of punishment she will become resentful and resistant. On the other hand trying to motivate an away from employee with bonuses is usually wasted. They are more concerned with things like job security.

Finding someone’s motivation direction

What do you want in (life, a job or a house)?

…The person will tell you either what they want or what they don’t want.

For example, “I want a house overlooking the ocean with huge open rooms and cool breezes.” “I want a house that doesn’t feel cramped or hot and is in an area with no pollution”. This could describe the same house.

Past Assurance / Future Possibility

Past Assurance people prefer the proven route. They are risk averse and are comfortable only with well worn ways, even if it sometimes mean falling into and getting stuck in a rut.

Future Possibilities people prefer exploring the blue sky or blue ocean of possibilities. They are more willing to take risks, and to try out untried paths and less traveled roads.

Options / Procedure

Is this you – or somebody you know?

• You prefer to do things on the spur of the moment – rather than make long term plans?
• You have difficulty in making decisions – preferring to keep your options open?
• You have difficulty in deferring to others’ authority?
• You hate routine – and tend to keep changing the way things are done?

Or how about this one…?

• You know that there’s a right way and there’s a wrong way to do things – it’s that simple
• You like to plan things in detail before you begin a project.
• You need people to quickly get to the point and tell you exactly what they want.
• You like to do things efficiently and finish on time.

The ‘Options and Procedures’ Meta Programme

These two styles of thinking and behaviour are identified in an NLP Meta Programme called “Options & Procedures”.

NLP Meta Programmes describe pairs of behavioural traits or preferences at opposite ends of a continuum.

And in this case the continuum has people who favour Options at one end and those who favour Procedures at the other.

I like to do things the right way!

At one end of the continuum are the people who like Procedures. They value efficiency and productivity.  So they like to do things by the book and follow a course of action with clearly defined steps.

They can become impatient and even irritated if presented with a range of options or choices: ‘Why waste time with options and choices when there is obviously a best practice which can be followed?’

They are great at making decisions – and sticking to them!

Before beginning a project they need to know what the steps are, what is the timetable, and what are the criteria for success.  Once they have this they’ll deliver and on time because they have an almost compulsive need to finish a task.

I like to keep my options open?”

At the other end of this continuum are those with a strong Options preference. They don’t like to follow the crowd; they like to come up with new ideas and new ways of doing things.

Ask them to do something in a particular way and they’ll immediately come back two or three alternative ways of doing it!  And even if they discover that your way works excellently they will want to keep varying the procedure – because for them being creative is more important than getting it right.

They don’t like making decisions since this would tie them down – no more options!

People with a strong Options preference work best in roles allow them to experiment and improvise. Asking them to work in an ordered manner or to stick to a routine is like putting a wild bird in a cage.  They like to be able to change their mind, sometimes frequently and unexpectedly as new ideas occur to them.

For example

How to they like to be managed

Options: Can be very difficult to manage. Will rebel against traditional tell-to-do management.

Procedures: Easy to manage if you give them clear instructions. Like to follow the rules.

How to motivate them

Options: Ask them what they see as the advantages and disadvantages

Procedures: Give them list of advantages and disadvantages

How they like to work

Options: Like the freedom to do it their way and to be ‘creative’ in following instructions

Procedures: Like the security of a detailed plan and someone to refer to when in doubt

How they like to cook:

Options: Have great difficulty in following recipes. Likely to have a compulsion to make at least a few changes in the ingredients or the quantities. Their meals can be great or disastrous.

Procedures: Likely to have a digital scales and a digital timer – because recipes must be followed very strictly indeed. Their meals will be reliably wonderful.

How they see one another

People who operate at one extreme of the NLP Meta Programme continuum will usually find those who operate at the other extreme difficult, strange, or even exasperating! And those on the Options-Procedures continuum do tend to find each other difficult to understand.

The Options specialist will see Procedure people as boring, rigid, and unadventurous.  And the Procedure specialist is likely to find their opposite number somewhat unreliable, not a ‘team player’, or even a bit flaky.

‘We’re going on holiday tomorrow…’

Options specialist:

“Why don’t we leave a bit earlier and we can explore the countryside en route to the airport!  Make it an adventure! And maybe stop off at a country inn for a bite to eat. Oh, don’t worry about the plane times – we’ll be okay – no point in spoiling the first day of our holidays by getting uptight about times…”

Procedures specialist:

“Now according to the web the journey will take 3 hours and 26 minutes.  We’ll allow 60 minutes for parking and getting back to the airport plus 45 minutes for getting through security.  And we’d better add an extra hour just in case. So we leave at 7:35 AM. Oh, and I’ll check the traffic reports first thing in the morning just in case we need to leave earlier.  Now let’s each put our own passport and other documents into these new polythene pockets so we have everything ready for the journey.”

So what? How can I use this?

There are many applications for NLP Meta Programmes including

• Identify the ideal personal profile for a particular job at
• Ensuring a work team has a good balance of personalities
• Coach people according to their personal style
• Design a training programme that will appeal to wide range of preferences.

That said, the most immediate value of this NLP Meta Programme is the insight it gives you into a person’s preferences and why they may be different from you.

When you recognise they’re not ‘wrong’ – just different from you – you can better understand and elate with them.

NB: People are not their NLP Meta Programmes

The Meta Programmes identify habitual patterns of thinking and behaviour rather than personalities. Very few people operate exclusively at one end of a continuum except, perhaps, when under stress – most of us will tend to be towards one end or the other.

Our preferences may change with the situation, too. We may need to be procedural in getting the children ready for school and then become quite Options oriented when we arrive at work.

Judging / Perceiving

Myers and Briggs added another dimension to Jung’s typological model by identifying that people also have a preference for using either the judging function (thinking or feeling) or their perceiving function (sensing or intuition) when relating to the outside world (extraversion).

Myers and Briggs held that types with a preference for judging show the world their preferred judging function (thinking or feeling). So TJ types tend to appear to the world as logical and FJ types as empathetic. According to Myers, judging types like to “have matters settled”.

Those types who prefer perception show the world their preferred perceiving function (sensing or intuition). So SP types tend to appear to the world as concrete and NP types as abstract. According to Myers, perceptive types prefer to “keep decisions open”.

For extraverts, the J or P indicates their dominant function; for introverts, the J or P indicates their auxiliary function. Introverts tend to show their dominant function outwardly only in matters “important to their inner worlds”. For example:

Because the ENTJ type is extraverted, the J indicates that the dominant function is the preferred judging function (extraverted thinking). The ENTJ type introverts the auxiliary perceiving function (introverted intuition). The tertiary function is sensing and the inferior function is introverted feeling.

Because the INTJ type is introverted, however, the J instead indicates that the auxiliary function is the preferred judging function (extraverted thinking). The INTJ type introverts the dominant perceiving function (introverted intuition). The tertiary function is feeling and the inferior function is extraverted sensing.