The Most Dangerous Coaching Question

The entire self-help industry is based on a simple question: "What do you want?"

With this one question, coaches and life transformation gurus conjure up your wildest dreams, innermost desires and best laid plans.

And what you don't realise is that this one question is precisely what prevents you from achieving those dreams.

In fact, the self-help industry is designed to create one result: Addiction.

Here's why.

The question "What do you want?" contains a presupposition, something which must already be true for the speaker in order for the question to be understood. Whilst all statements contain presuppositions, the important one here is 'want'. To want something presupposes that you do not have it.

'Want' is also an 'unspecified verb', meaning that it is an action with something missing. The missing part is 'to have', so if we expanded a 'want' statement to be fully grammatically correct, the result would be "I want to have..."

Have is not an action, it is a statement of possession. However, the word 'have' shows up in language in the same place as a verb, and it is therefore an unspecified verb, and also a 'lost performative' meaning that the direct action has been lost, muddled up and hidden.

Here's an example: "My boss criticises me". Criticising is not an action, it is not a performative verb. It is a judgement on a series of experiences, edited together in a generalisation, like the trailer for a movie. Similarly, we could summarise the movie Star Wars into the statement "Boy becomes hero". It's true, but it's missing a few details. Maybe sometimes your boss does give you feedback which you don't like, and at other times that's not the case, and at other times you are not interacting with your boss at all. Your assertion is a misleading generalisation which omits the action that you are commenting on.

If I use 'have' in present tense, I might say, "I have a pen". That doesn't tell you anything about how I got the pen. Did I buy it? Steal it? Borrow it? 'Have' is a snapshot in time, and your brain will create a story to explain that snapshot. My mother developed dementia later in life and would create stories to explain unfamiliar items around her. When I bought her a clock, she said, "Oh, where did that clock come from? Oh yes, the neighbour brought it in for me". Five minutes later, my sister had brought it. Five minutes later, another story. None of them were true, from my point of view, but all of them were true for her, at least for a moment. Our brains create stories to explain the world that we see around us, like a prequel for a movie to explain the backstory to a character.

When you use 'have' in place of a verb in future tense, you miss out the steps that you'll take to get you to where you intend to be. Anything in the future is imaginary, yet we act as if it's real. We say, "This time next year I will have a new job". And what are you doing, today, right now, this minute to get a new job? Nothing.

The question "What do you want?" provokes the response "I want to have..." which means that you don't have it now, and you have no idea how to get it. You're not focusing on the first, direct action that you can take, you're focusing on the end result. You're picturing the cake, but you don't have any of the ingredients. And you don't know how to bake a cake. When I say that you have no idea how to get it, that’s based on a very simple observation. If you knew how to bake a cake, and you had the ingredients to hand, you wouldn’t want a cake, you would be baking a cake.

'Want' literally means 'lack', as in this ancient rhyme and proverb:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Focusing on what you want without considering how you'll get it amplifies your sense of dissatisfaction with where you are right now, with what you have in your life right now.

With that amplified sense of dissatisfaction, where do you go? Straight back to your guru for some more daydreaming.

We're so used to thinking in terms of goals, objectives and targets that we have largely forgotten that goals are impossible to achieve, because by the time we start taking action, the landscape has changed and the goal has changed.

Research shows that the only reliable way of making changes in your life is to DO something. NOW.

Move. Get going. Start. Begin.

Goals exist only for a far more important reason - to set a direction of travel. Focus on that instead, and see where it takes you.

As a coach, perhaps a more useful question is therefore, “Where are you going?”

Take a look at my upcoming NLP training dates here for Practitioner, Master Practitioner and Trainer

Meta Model - Going Beyond the Superficial

When many NLP students first learn Meta Model in NLP training, they become insufferable by questioning all of their friends, all the time. ALL of their friends????? They say, with a crazed expression on their faces. ALL the time????

Yes. Stop it right now.

This shows a significant and fundamental misunderstanding of Meta Model on the part of their trainers. The problem is this; most trainers don't understand Meta Model so they don't teach it properly. Some I've seen don't even teach it at all, which is very very bad. Mainly because NLP is Meta Model. I even read a review of my book The NLP Practitioner Manual, where the reviewer said it was very good, except I had spent far too long talking about Meta Model and it only needed a couple of pages.

*Exasperated*

I would therefore like to take this opportunity to show you why Meta Model is the single most important thing that you will ever learn in your whole entire wild life, whether you are NLP person, or coach, trainer, teacher, mother, lover, babysitter and so on and so forth etcetera etcetera.

Comparative Deletions

If you've studied NLP then you will have seen Meta Model, the questioning structure that enables us to uncover information hidden in a client's words.

One of the first Meta Model patterns is the Comparative Deletion - words such as more, better, easier, less, faster, slower and so on. Here's an example:

"This is better"

If you've attended NLP training, you were probably taught to respond with,

"Better than what?"

If this is familiar to you, then your trainer was one of the great majority who simply don't understand Meta Model. To ask, "Better than what?" is a trivial use of Meta Model.

Asking, "Better than what?" will essentially get the same level of response as the question, "Why?" in that the speaker will give a reply which sounds like a reason but is in fact a justification or proof of their world view.

This more analytical approach to Meta Model is much better.

What did you just say to yourself when you read that last sentence? Did you think, "Hmmm, yes", or "Better than what???!!!", or "Better for me...", or, "Better than that rubbish trainer who ran my Practitioner course", or, "No it's not!"

The point is this: Information was missing, and you filled in the gaps from your own experience. Hence, used as an instruction, the Comparative Deletion is a Milton pattern. It's better to relax. It's easier to ease yourself into the chair. You might find it more valuable after you've read this article.

Let's consider three levels of Meta Model analysis.

Level 1, the trivial, we can ignore. It's clumsy, it doesn't flow in the natural conversation and it doesn't tell us much.

Level 2 takes us to the two missing pieces of information.

In order for the word "better" to be grammatically correct within the sentence, we need to insert the missing reference, for example, "This is better than watching paint dry". So the point of reference is the first missing piece of the puzzle. The reference is not an 'it', it can also be a 'where', a 'whom' and, most importantly, a 'when'.

The second piece of the puzzle is the criteria for the reference. Take a moment right now to look at your hands. What differences do you see? Which hand is better?

Immediately, a question comes in to your mind: "Better for what? Better at what?"

Noticing a difference only requires perception. Giving that difference a bias requires judgement, a cognitive process. What is the judgement based on? An unpleasant previous experience? A preference for chocolate? A desire to get home early? An intention to save money? When we ask about the criteria, we discover the very narrow set of features which are being compared, and the judgements used to make those comparisons. We can explore those judgements further.

So level 2 takes us to the deleted reference and the deleted criteria which makes one of the elements being compared preferable to the other.

That sounds pretty good, yes? That's certainly a lot of information to explore. So what is level 3? What more could there be?

Level 3 is about time. Take a moment to look at your hands again. Compare them. Notice some details or sensations and compare them. Do you find yourself looking from one hand to the other? Of course, you must do, because your focus of visual perception is extremely narrow. You can't read these words out of the corner of your eye, you must look straight at them. The cells on your retina are not uniformly distributed. Outside of your focal area, the cells and their neural connections are optimised for detecting movement, which is change over time. In the focal area, the cells and their neural connections are optimised for picking out real time details.

You can't look at both hands at the same time, so your eyes move from one to the other. Which means that when you look at 'this' hand, you are not comparing it to 'that' hand, you are comparing it to your memory of 'that' hand, and one thing that we know for certain about our memories is that they are faulty. In fact, they're dreadful. It's amazing that we remember our own names.

We know that, in order to cope with the volume of sensory data available, we delete, distort and generalise, before we become consciously aware of what we are noticing. By the time we know that we've encountered something, we're already experiencing a distorted version of it.

Right, so what does this tell us about Comparative Deletions?

When a person says, "This is better", they are comparing an extremely narrow facet of their current sensory experience to a past experience, and that past experience will be distorted. It's not distorted randomly, it's distorted to prove their current judgement.

I was in Dubai last week. I first went to Dubai in June last year. Last year I hated Dubai. It was a big, expensive, hot, dusty building site. I hated it. I regretted going there.

Last week, the weather was much more pleasant, I saw different parts of Dubai, and most importantly, I wasn't feeling ill.

Dubai had not changed in those few months. Well, they built a dozen more skyscrapers, and opened some new shopping malls. But apart from that it was exactly the same. What had changed was my experience of Dubai.

It wasn't Dubai that had changed. It was me.

What the Comparative Deletion tells us is that the person has distorted an experience in order to fit their expectation, or to explain an exception to their expectation, so that they can be right, then that experience has become a reference so that they can maintain their rightness in the future.

"My way is better"

How do you know? You haven't tried any other ways!

"I just know"

So what you really mean is that you deviated from your routine once in the past and had a bad experience, and now you're afraid to try again? And because of that, you're missing out on opportunities to improve, and you're giving control to your fears, and you know where that road leads to, don't you?

(Sound of cogs whirring)

When we understand what the Comparative Deletion tells us about the client's inner world, their experiences, their distortions of those experiences and their future expectations, we can explore those reference points with far greater tact and dexterity, and what's even more important, instead of a Meta Model interrogation, we can actually have a normal conversation with them.

Time Management

OK, here's another analysis, a simpler one this time.

You'll recognise the phrase 'time management' as a common course title, and often a course that people are sent on when they're struggling with their workload.

What can we derive from this simple statement?

Time

This is ambiguous, there are two ways that we can use this word in a sentence. Firstly, as an absolute reference, the time is 08:48. Secondly as a period of activity, I just have time to write this post before my next coaching call.

Either way, the word 'time' indicates a deletion, the ambiguity means that we can't be sure what's been deleted. Here are some possibilities.

(It's) time (for) management
(I just have) time (for) management
(I don't have) time (for) management

Management

A lovely nominalisation. If we turn it back into its verb, to manage, then we recover the missing subject and object, who is managing what or whom?

Left as a noun, we would generally use the word management as a collective noun meaning "those idiots upstairs".

(It's) time management (did something about my workload)

When someone asks for better time management, what do they really mean?

To manage time, but we can't do that, because time will pass regardless of whether we manage it or not.

To manage the time (at which I do certain things)?
To manage the period of time (which I devote to certain things)?

So by denominalising, we go from 'time management' to 'manage the time I spend on things' which reveals probably the simplest and most fundamental thing you'll learn on any good time management course - to plan not just start times, but end times too. Generally people will write start times, deadlines in their diaries, but fail to plan for how long something will take. People will also assume that small tasks take zero time, instead of allocating their true time requirement of, say, 10 minutes or 2 minutes.

That activity was turned into a thing in order to create a course title, or a skill, or a deficit in a person's skill. Isn't it interesting that by meta modelling just two words, we reveal the solution to the problem?

Get Your Meta Model Here!

My post on the analysis of the phrase "limiting beliefs" is my most viewed and commented ever on LinkedIn, do you think I should post more analyses of popular coaching nonsense?

(http://www.nenlp.com/2015/09/limiting-beliefs-and-why-you-have-none.html)

So I'm thinking - what if I start a Q&A service, whereby you send in a statement, maybe something you've said, something you've read, something you've received in an email, and I'll show you the Meta Model analysis and reveal the true, hidden meaning within?

Answers on a postcard...

Limiting Beliefs - And Why You Have None

(There's now a Facebook Q&A group at www.facebook.com/groups/nlpmetamodel)

I often read comments and posts and blogs from people on the subject of limiting beliefs, and in particular, how you can overcome your own.

Nonsense, I'm afraid. You don't have any limiting beliefs.

This topic is very popular amongst coaches and NLP Practitioners, so I'm going to turn to NLP's Meta Model of language to show you why you don't have any limiting beliefs:

(You can click on the image to make it bigger)

Does that all make sense?

Don't worry if it doesn't, it's quite technical. Here are the highlights.

It's impossible for you to have limiting beliefs because logically, a belief cannot do anything. Can a belief run? Can it play the piano? Of course not, only a person or animal, a living entity, can do such things. Only a living creature can act, and if we talk just about people, then only a person can believe. A chair can not believe.

What about 'limiting'? A limit is a point on a scale, so for there to be a limit, or for a person to limit something, it must be possible to have more and less of that thing. For you to limit your spending, it must be possible for you to spend more or less. The word 'limit' therefore implies a hidden scale, where both more and less of something is possible for you.

The phrase 'limiting belief' takes two verbs and freezes them in time, turning them into nouns, and that is called a nominalisation. Here are some examples, form a mental picture for each one:

I went for a run

I had a meeting

I made a decision

Now let's turn those back into verbs and see what happens - form a mental picture for each one:

I ran (somewhere)

I met (someone)

I decided (something)

What was the difference between the two sets of mental images? Do it again if you need to - I'm guessing that the first set of images were still and the second set were moving.

At a superficial level, the few NLP Practitioners who properly understand the Meta Model will say that this freezes the action in time, and makes it 'stuck' and difficult to change. However, something far more important is happening.

Every language spoken by every person on this planet conforms to one of two basic structures:

Subject Verb Object (The cat sat on the mat)

Subject Object Verb (The cat on the mat sat)

In other words, every sentence, when grammatically complete, has a person or a thing acting upon a person or a thing.

When we turn a verb (to believe) into a noun (a belief) it moves from the Verb position to either the Subject or Object position, which is logically incorrect. However, humans are adept at twisting logic to fit the story.

A chair cannot be happy, but a person can be happy with the new chair they just picked up at a local market. To attribute an action or quality to something which it cannot have is called a Selectional Restriction Violation. A belief cannot limit, but a person can limit, and a person can believe.

When the nominalisation 'belief' becomes active, the person, the speaker, becomes passive and gives up control and responsibility for their actions.

I said that freezing the verb in time is a superficial interpretation, so here is a more profound one. By taking the verb, the action, out of time and turning it into a thing, it loses its action, its event because it is taken out of time. Instead of starting and ending, the belief applies now, which also means forever, because it's always now. So by nominalising a verb, I don't just make it apply now, I make it apply forever, and that's what makes it stuck, because a chair will always be a chair (until someone acts upon it with an axe) and a belief will always be a belief.

To believe something is temporary. It has a start and an end. You can think of your beliefs, when you learned them and you can imagine changing them.

Why, then, do you have no limiting beliefs?

You believe in certain facts. You believe in your abilities to do certain things. You believe that the sun will come up tomorrow. You believe that you're a good person, a hard worker, someone who always tries their best.

You also limit. You limit your spending. You limit your ice cream consumption. You limit your choices, in order to make it easier to make decisions.

What you believe does not limit you.

You choose, freely and responsibly, to limit what you believe, or to believe that you can limit yourself. And as soon as you realise that it's you doing the believing and you doing the limiting, then no belief can ever hold power over you again.

Wanting and Needing

You've heard people say that they want something, and also that they need something.

What do these different words mean, and why are they important?

These words crop up in all kinds of topics; pay rises, consumer products, even relationships.

"I want you"

"I need you"

What's the difference?

Do you feel differently when someone says these two different statements to you?

Of course you do, and this is why.

To want something means that you don't already have it.

To need something means that you already have it and you don't want to give it up.

I don't want air; I need it.

I don't need a new car, but I want one.

But here's the paradox. In a relationship, someone tells you that they need you. It's a paradox because they don't have you. You're not a commodity to be possessed. You're not a quality of that other person. Logically, you can't be needed, because it's not up to the other person to give you up. You can do whatever you like, any time you like.

So, thinking about your relationships, which do you say about your partner? And what does that mean for you?

Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?

I've seen a lot of talk recently about the use of NLP language in advertising and marketing. Personally, I find it awkward and embarrassing. What works in conversation just seems silly on paper. And yet, 'hypnotic marketing gurus' still maintain that they know the secrets of unconscious influence that will have customers beating a path to your door.

I've felt for many years that hypnotic language such as Milton Model patterns or Sleight of Mouth patterns may work in a therapeutic conversation, but they don't necessarily work on paper, for many reasons. But it was just the other day, in a conversation about cultural alignment, that I realised what the root cause of the problem might be.

When Bandler and Grinder modelled therapeutic language patterns to create the Milton Model and Meta Model, they modelled therapists.

Now, would you hire a therapist to sell a car?

Maybe if you were giving free phobia cures as an incentive. But generally, no, you wouldn't. Their goals and beliefs are different to those of car sales people. Not better or worse, just different.

Would you go to a car salesman for relationship therapy?

So if you wouldn't buy a car from a therapist, why would you copy a therapist's language patterns to sell a car?

Wouldn't you model successful sales people?

This is the fundamental problem with NLP when used outside of a therapeutic context. NLP, as you'll see in my books Genius at Work and The NLP Master Practitioner Handbook, is the modelling toolkit from which we define and code excellence. When that was used to code the work of therapists, the set of scripts that we know as 'NLP Practitioner techniques' were created. But most people stopped their NLP studies there and went out swishing and squashing and modal operating on their customers.

Even those that went on to study Master Practitioner were mostly given a dreadful mis-service by their trainers who just taught them more techniques. What a waste of time. At Master Practitioner level you're supposed to be learning how to create custom techniques of your own, not just learning more scripts.

When you learn modelling, and I mean real modelling, not just strategy elicitation and TOTE, you can model great sales people, or doctors, or project managers, or drivers, or musicians, or therapists, and you can create unique, custom techniques that are specifically aligned with that cultural environment.







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The Importance of Structure

Coaching is a very organised, structured interaction. If not, then it's just a conversation. The same goes for a sales meeting, a consultation with a doctor, a training course or any other professional interaction. Without structure, it's a conversation.

Here's an example of why structure is important. What is missing from this diagram?

The answer is of course the same thing that is missing when you go to the supermarket without a shopping list, and when you get home, you realise that the one thing you forgot to buy was the one thing that you actually went in there for.

What happens if we look at the same components in a different way?

Meta Model of Language

One of the most important ways to apply NLP in a therapeutic or coaching situation is to help a client form a more complete and accurate map of the world. There are a number of NLP techniques for doing this, and perhaps the most powerful, flexible and misunderstood is the Meta Model.

Meta just means 'above' or 'encompassing', so the Meta Model is simply a collection of other linguistic models.

From role models such as Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson, the Meta Model was created. Simply, we construct sentences which are grammatically correct yet which delete, distort or generalise information. For example, if I tell you that you shouldn't eat chocolate, it's bad for you, you might believe me. If I tell you that you shouldn't trust salespeople then you might believe me too.

Are those beliefs useful? Is it more useful that you also know how I know that, so that you can decide for yourself? Parents pass on beliefs to their children, and some are useful, some are not. The Meta Model therefore allows you to explore and unpick beliefs, assumptions and rules that have become accepted as facts.

The Meta Model is based on linguistic structures which are not specific to NLP, you'll find them in everything from books on transformational grammar to school books. However, what is relevant to NLP is the way that those rules are connected to a person's experiences and behaviour.

According to the theory of 'universal grammar', we are born with the 'hardware' for language, which results in all languages in the world, even those found in remote valleys that had no contact with other cultures, following the same basic structure with a gramtically correct sentence following either a Subject Verb Object (SVO) or Subject Object Verb (SOV) word order.

The theory perhaps began with Roger Bacon, a 13th century English philosopher, who noted that all languages are built upon a common grammar. The idea was popularised more recently by people like Noam Chomsky, Richard Montague and Stephen Pinker, from the 1950s onwards.

We often communicate so lazily, relying on other people to fill in the gaps. Sometimes, when they can't, we get frustrated, perhaps saying, "You know what I mean!" Do you know someone who often says, "Can you pass me the thing?" or "What's going on with that project?"

In NLP, we use the Meta Model to help clients to be very specific about their intentions, needs and experiences. This puts them more in touch with the outside world, and that helps them to make more useful and valuable decisions.

Therefore, becoming familiar with the Meta Model patterns and listening out for them in people's language is a good way to train yourself to notice the way that people structure their experiences, and that is vital in developing your ability to help people change those experiences and then their behaviour.