NLP | Matt Wingett

Power to Persuade: the techniques used by Paul McKenna for Brexit.

By Matt on Saturday, July 2, 2016

paul “Whoever is orchestrating the Leave campaign, I have to admit, they’re brilliant,” I said to a friend a few days before the referendum vote. “They understand exactly the rules of persuasion.”

On the side I favoured, the Remain camp was floundering in very much the way the same crew had floundered in the final days of the Scottish Independence referendum before that final intervention – The Vow. They had fallen into the same mistakes: relying on warnings, and apparently plucking apocalyptic figures out of the air.

The Leave camp was also making unfounded promises, lying and misrepresenting the facts. But there was something qualitatively different between the two campaigns, and that was in the structure of the information they imparted.

“The Leave campaign,” I said to my friend, “is in a different league.”

Years before, I had studied persuasion while attending trainings with hypnotist Paul McKenna and his mentor, Dr Richard Bandler, in a widely misunderstood field called NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

NLP is a fascinating subject. It studies the structures of human thinking, in order to guide the flow of behavioural responses. It does this through linguistic and non-linguistic communication which may be delivered at an unconscious or semi-conscious level. It therefore bypasses reason.

It has its critics, which divide roughly into two camps. There are those who say it is manipulative and unethical, and the others who say it doesn’t work and is snake oil. As Dr Bandler often points out in interview, both cannot be true. NLP is not unethical in itself, but like any tool, it can be used unethically.

Central to the training we received was the observation that decisions, thoughts and behaviour are dependent on emotional state. Hence, if you are angry with someone, it is very difficult to remember that you love them. If you are in love with someone, it is easier to forgive them; if you like someone, you are more likely to be relaxed with them and trust them, and so on. Reasoning is continually influenced by emotions; not to recognise that is to lay yourself open to all sorts of errors of judgement through other people’s influence.

Understanding how emotion works enables you to get different outcomes from your interactions. For example, after an argument, it is probably a mistake to immediately seek forgiveness. The rage is still too high in the person from whom you are seeking forgiveness. First you must change their state, or wait for their state to change. Then you can get a better result from your appeal.

Understanding the structure of emotions and how they are inter-related is central to one of the key uses of NLP: persuasion. That is why in the hands of a skilled practitioner, NLP is an extremely effective tool when it comes to sales.

This should not come as a surprise. Dr Richard Bandler, the inventor of the term NLP spent years studying and modelling the ways that persuasive salespeople operate. He didn’t invent good sales techniques – he codified them. Through his observations, he came to understand that a salesperson first of all builds a rapport with his audience so they in some way identify with the saleperson. This makes the customer less critical and more trusting of what the salesperson says.

That’s step 1: the gaining of trust through rapport.

Next comes the creation of a “propulsion system” – meaning a way to get someone to take an action, or to change their thinking.

In Richard’s terms, propulsion systems operate quite simply. Firstly you generate a picture or idea of the current situation that’s so awful the subject wants to move away from it. Having built up an emotion of revulsion or disgust, you then simply create its antithesis, a scenario or situation that the subject wants to move towards. Moving towards this happier scenario or idea relieves the revulsion previously built up. It therefore feels like it’s the answer to the problem presented.

This technique can be used for all sorts of things, not just sales. For example, Richard observed that those who kicked an addiction often reported that life had to get so bad for them that they were desperate to change. There it is again: moving away from – moving towards.

Recreating this pattern of thinking deliberately for his clients, Richard laid out the negatives of current behaviour and the extraordinary positives of a new behaviour. Crucially, this was not done as an intellectual exercise. It required the firing up of the emotions to make the change, because psychologists have long known that the will is the least effective part of the psyche to employ if you want to make a change.

In many cases, it works. Bandler found that addicts then committed themselves to new behaviours willingly and with their whole being, rather than making an intellectual decision which they easily broke when they were overwhelmed by an emotion.

Exactly this model was used by the Leave camp. First rapport building, then creating, or describing or presenting a bad situation that was apparently unsolvable was followed by what appeared to be the only solution that would alleviate the bad feeling: leaving the EU. It was, in NLP terms, technically brilliant.

I looked on, thinking that surely our side, the Remain side, must have their own advisers. Cameron, having been involved in political strategy for years, must also have someone who understood the structure of persuasion in the way the Leavers did.

Quite the opposite appeared to be the case.

The Remain camp appeared to have no concept of rapport building. They wheeled out economists and experts who essentially spoke down to the public, alienating those who were of a different class or background.

Then there was Eddie Izzard. If anyone could have been better chosen to alienate conservative-minded voters concerned at the way society had changed over the last few decades, a man in a dress with a pink beret could not have been better chosen. For Leave voters, he represented exactly the sort of moral decay that a friend’s Aunt Beryl summed up in her reasons for leaving: “I just want Britain to be like it was.”

The timbre of the Remain discussion was also very limited, and boiled down to basically half a persuasion strategy.

They repeatedly told people how bad things would be in the future outside of the EU – a good moving away from strategy. But they didn’t tie it together directly with a positive message. Like, for example, the fact that the economy was doing very well and we were about to overtake Germany and become the largest economy in the bloc in the next few years. Those different sides were mentioned, but were not tied together in a persuasive whole. The simple message of wanting to move away from one dark future towards another brighter one was not explicitly presented. Instead, only the down side was emphasised.

The problem with repeating the same strategy over and over again is that it begins to wear thin. Nor is it good enough to say, “to avoid that awful future, you must accept a continuation of this dull present.” It just doesn’t work that way, especially when the other side is offering jam tomorrow, if only you will be brave enough to make that change.

And there is the next part of the NLP persuasion strategy. Reframing objections. The Leavers cleverly reframed the notion of recklessness to bravery. Hence, Leavers weren’t foolhardy, they were intrepid. Once again, a negative was replaced with a positive. In contrast, Remainers were craven cowards afraid to “Take Back Control”. This slogan was thus attached to a positive self image, and became a simple way to encapsulate that feelgood factor in one simple slogan.

In NLP training, you are taught that the unconscious vibrates to such messages and feels better about itself again. This emotional orientation feeds on itself. Unconsciously, you have accepted that this course of action is right. It feels right, after all. Your unconscious can’t help itself. It wants to move towards a happier self image (at least in most cases) and a future associated with good feelings.

The power of the reframe was not understood by the Remain camp. The best David Cameron could do was to present his message in negative terms, saying, “I don’t believe we are quitters.” Really? Well, if you don’t believe that’s what we are, what do you think we actually are? People don’t like being called names. They like to have their egos massaged. Once again, only half the persuasion strategy was employed. No wonder the Leavers started to make real changes in people’s attitudes – not through reason, but through feeling.

Another strategy in persuasion techniques is that of inoculation. This is a technique which pre-empts objections to an argument, and seeks to neutralise it beforehand. This is exactly what happened whenever the Remain camp delivered their warnings for the future. For an NLP-savvy debater, this is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. Tie a negative connotation to this warning behaviour and you invalidate it, especially if you have followers already keen to hear your argument, and already beginning to be sold on it.

Hence the repeated use of the terms “Project Fear” (borrowed from the Scottish referendum) and “scaremongering”. Soon, everything the Remainers said was scaremongering. The word was repeated by the Leavers over and over again, until it became anchored in the minds of its audience. It was brilliant. They played on emotions superbly. And even when they themselves stated stupid observations, like the one that said 80 million Turks would be able to move to the UK, the Leavers managed to drown out the counterargument from the Remainers that this too was scaremongering. They’d got there first with that one.

Much has been made of Michael Gove’s dismissive comment that we’ve all heard enough from experts. This, too, was brilliant inoculation and rapport building at the same time. It made Gove look as if he, too, were someone with no respect for education and was a common man. If you think about it, it is quite an extraordinary claim from a man who had been trying for years (by his own definition) to bring value back to education as Education Secretary. It was an extraordinarily dishonest line to take. Yet it worked. It spoke to the masses. “If he says we can ignore experts, well, we bloody well can!”

This is why this debate was so extraordinarily light on facts. The Leave campaign’s manifesto ran to a mere 1293 words, which is less than this article. Leave didn’t need facts. They needed anger and hope harnessed together to make the changes they needed.
So, it was brilliant NLP. I watched the campaign through the gaps in my fingers over my eyes. It was a slowmo car crash. I could see mistake on mistake being made by Remain, and no-one seemed to understand what was going wrong.

After the stomach churning result was delivered, it began to make sense. After the dust settled it became clear that at least one seriously heavy duty NLPer was on the Leave side. Paul McKenna, the Guardian reveals, is a friend of Arron Banks, who bankrolled the Leave.EU campaign. How far he was involved in the campaign is uncertain, though Paul will have at least cast his eye over the campaign material and advised on giving it tweaks.

Some people will complain that the Leave campaign was dishonest by doing this. There is no doubt at all that they were dishonest in many of their claims, but I suspect it wasn’t their specific claims where Paul’s real power came through.

What Leave wanted, and what they achieved, was an emotionally charged debate within which they could covertly make changes in attitudes in some of those who were undecided. As a supreme technician, this is Paul McKenna’s genius. He is just very, very good at what he does.

Whether it was ethical for the Leave camp to employ such tactics over a matter so vital to the future of the country, as opposed to selling someone a pair of shoes, is another matter. I know what I think about it, but this is not a discussion on that aspect of Paul’s brilliance.

The reality of the situation is, however, that the Remain side were out of date. They were using reason against emotion, the equivalent of using old field Howitzers against a side armed with cruise missiles.

And that is why we lost. We were outclassed at every move. Whoever made the decision not to take advice from people who understood the language and structure of persuasion was, in the end, the cause of our downfall.

I suspect that was Cameron, judging by his poor grasp of strategy.

A final thought: one of the major elements taught by Paul and by Richard in their NLP trainings is that such powerful techniques must be applied ethically. There is a practical reason for this advice. An ethical strategy prevents buyer’s remorse. A buyer who genuinely has their needs met doesn’t look up a few months later and think: hey, I was duped!

Whether this applies to this decision over the coming months, remains to be seen. I’m sure there will be much reinforcement of the message going on right now. That, too, is an NLP technique.

So what is the lesson? In the past, ancient kings consulted stargazers and mystics before battle and had spells cast for them. The modern politician must learn to do the same, otherwise he will enter the field at a massive disadvantage. Because people reason on the back of feelings, it’s vital to get their emotions right first, so they are receptive to your message. Once the mood is right, then it is also vital that you understand exactly how you are going to structure and deliver your message. It’s not just a question of getting up and treating it like an amateur schoolboy at an Eton debating society.

The Arcane Arts, then, are back in fashion.

Events and Products

The Great NLP Extravaganza!

By Matt on Wednesday, February 2, 2011

The Great NLP Extravaganza on February 26 at the Ibis Hotel, London, is the perfect launch pad for those interested in finding out more about the fascinating applied study of human interaction, NLP.

NLP is strongly focused on how we use language – for example, how the asking of particular questions lead to very specific types of answer. Meaning that you can set the agenda to an interview or a discussion without expressly saying so.
NLP enables you to change the interactions that you are having with others, so that you can be aware of and guide other people’s emotions.
It enables you to get control of your own emotional state so that you are able to give the very best that you can in the most trying of circumstances.
It also trains you in the art of “reading” people more closely, so that you are able to draw more information from discussions and interviews than their words alone tell you
It teaches you how to build strong and positive relationships, and how to get yourself and your staff more positive, and with increased morale.
It teaches an attitude to life which enhances business and personal relationships and is the breeding ground of success.

NLP is used by such diverse figures as Oprah Winfrey, Paul McKenna and mentalist Derren Brown to enable them to be more clear and focussed at work and at home, and to allow them to achieve more.

The NLP Extravaganza will be a well-priced day that allow you to find out more about the skills on offer, and to take away practical tools that you can apply for yourself. It will show you how to apply NLP to business, medicine, negotiation, public speaking, presentation skills and sport.

To find out more about the Great NLP Extravaganza, just click through on this link https://theukcompany.infusionsoft.com/go/nlaew/m068w/

Inspirations

A Mashed Potato Race

By Matt on Sunday, January 2, 2011

The minute we sat at the dining table, six-year-old Charlie and I started having fun. The truth is, I love sitting with kids at dinner tables. They are so much more enjoyable than the adults.

Within a few minutes, we had discussed the lobsters that live on the ceiling, and sometimes lose their grips and fall on the heads of the diners, and we talked about how the dwarf fireman comes in with a high power hose to wash the lobsters away, and the little-known fact that the hotel we were eating in every night put out trampolines for the lobsters to exercise on, and cleared them away in the morning before the diners came to eat. And we talked about the bizarre nature of monsters.

I carry a notebook around with me most of the time, and Charlie and I started drawing monsters. He started first with a velociraptor, which was an okay kind of a monster, with big teeth and big eyes, and a pointy tale. But I wanted to show him one of the ways his imagination might work, and how he could get to make up the rules – so we drew monsters with all sorts of extra bits: one with wheels on the ends of his 6 legs so that if he got too scary, when he fell asleep we could push him off a cliff. Another with a fierce looking hook for one hand, and a rather civilised salad server for the other, a snake for a leg, and a hedgehog for the other leg that made him go “owww!” when he walked. Another that rushed at you shouting “I will eat me!” and then did exactly that when it attacked you, so that there was nothing left, except yourself, blinking at how a monster could turn into nothing in such short time. Soon Charlie was howling with laughter and started adding bizarrenesses of his own to his monsters. A roller-skate monster with the weirdest face and a leg growing out of its back was the starting point. He was alight, and I was loving it.

When it came to ordering our food, I decided that we were going to get along famously, so when he ordered sausage and mashed potato, I did the same. This made us little conspirators at the end of the table, while the grown-ups talked about all the things that grown-ups talk about at their end of the table. Our mood was so much better then theirs, I thought, and we laughed even more, and had to quieten down a little because we were getting a bit raucous.

Then the food came, and the thing happened that I remembered had happened to me when I was a boy. When Charlie started eating the sausage, a change came over him. His eyes puffed up, he pulled a face and looked longingly down the table at the burger and chips someone else had ordered. “I should have ordered the burger,” he said, sadly, and his throat tightened as a lump formed in it, that was made of all the grizzles and struggles he’d had with food he didn’t like at other dinner tables on other days.

Oh, I remembered all that from when I was a kid. Not liking the taste of a partcicular food, and being told to eat it, I had turned the food into an instrument of torture with which I had made dinner times a living hell – not only for me but for my parents, too. I saw Charlie pick up the sausage and start trying to pull out the bits of herb that he took exception to, and realised that if I didn’t act quickly, we might have a bit of local difficulty. I smiled at him and gave him a wink.

“What do you think of it?” he asked me.

I prodded a piece of sausage on to the end of a fork and put it in my mouth, chewing theatrically. “Scrummy, yummy, scrummy,” I said. It was the first moment at which our rapport had been dented, and I saw him internalising a struggle. I imagined it as follows: Everything I had said up to that point had been reliable and fun, now he was a little sad that he was on his own. I jumped in quickly as he put his head on his hand and looked at the bowl of sausage and mash as if he were gazing down a mineshaft at an afterlife of eternal damnation and proddings with tridents. And I said, really quickly:

“Remember when you had really good times and laughed?”

He looked up at me. “When? I can’t think of any…”

“What about when monsters have salad servers for hands and lobsters live on the ceiling?”

He brightened up and smiled at me.

“That’s amazing, isn’t it? The fun of it. And then there were all the times you’ve played and had a really good time. And when you put that piece of sausage in your mouth, you’ll remember them. I don’t know if you know it, but if you taste a food you thought you didn’t like 11 times, your body starts liking the taste. It’s like magic. And when that sausage goes in your mouth, you’ll remember sunshine, and play and laughter, and all the fun you’ve ever had will explode across your mouth, and it will be amazing!”

He had gone quite quiet as he thought about what I had just told him. He tried the sausage again, with a little bit of uncertainty. He didn’t like it so much, but he was fascinated by the future pace of 11 tastes and the possibility that things might change. It just needed one more element to shift it all the way. And it was further down the table: a little pot of ketchup. I grabbed it. “Dip it in there, first!”

He dipped with some pleasure, and when he put the sausage in his mouth I pulled a funny face and said crazy things, and he laughed as loud as he could. Then he ate some more, and every time he did, I told him what a great guy he was, and gave him a big “well done” in a light and friendly way.

Later on, his mum asked him to eat the mashed potato, and I could see that it wasn’t that he didn’t like it, but just that he was full of sausage. I had paced him, and had left my mashed potato, too. And so, we just needed to do one more thing to make sure that he had eaten enough food to get him through to the evening meal:

“On your marks, get set… go!”

Yes, we had a mashed potato race, as the invisible trampolining lobsters and the roller-skate monsters and the self-devouring beasts looked on, shouting for one of us, or the other, to win.

And Charlie was obviously very good at mashed potato snaffling, because, when I looked at his empty bowl, it was clear he had beaten me. Hands down. And all around us, staring from the little nooks and crannies of the ceiling, and beneath tables, and from behind chairs, the monsters and lobsters were cheering!

Pleasures

NLP Follow Up – Laughing Out Loud In The Pouring Rain

By Matt on Thursday, November 11, 2010

After the NLP session I did yesterday with a client, today I had the following text from a very much more smiley individual than the one whom I met before the session began. Bear in mind it was tipping down with rain when I received the text, which explains the rather cryptic first line:

I’m wet and fabulous! Spent most of yesterday laughing just because I can. Saw two friends last night. One kept touching my knee constantly to make me laugh! And there is something delightfully wicked about laughing out loud in the pouring rain. 🙂 Got the pic back briefly, but quickly shrunk it and moved it to the side then thought about something else!

This is what makes doing hypnosis such fun. I think of the client now, her hand suspended in mid-air as she sat in the cafe, internalising the learnings I had given her. It was like a textbook session. I will report back over time to let you know how she does.

Pleasures

Moderate Depression, Wiped Out With NLP (And Hot Chocolate)…

By Matt on Wednesday, November 10, 2010

I had a lovely result today. On a sparkling day in Southsea, I met a client in a cafe, over a cup of hot chocolate.

She was a young woman with a slightly lost expression, looking pained and a bit confused. Upstairs in the cafe, in the bright light of the Autumn sun, she sat across a table from me, telling me how she couldn’t get over a break up with a guy who was, essentially, one great big waste of space.

I have been so busy lately doing other things than hypnosis, and this was a great opportunity to dust off the NLP skills and give her a blast of reprogramming.

It was a lovely environment to do it in. Soft chairs, silence, clear light – oh – and the hot chocolate.

How did we make the change? First: I ran a series of metaphors about how we use technology to find places so much more easily these days. The email I sent her had a link to the cafe so she could immediately find out where it was, rather than have me take loads of time talking to her and giving her boring directions. Instead of blindly groping around searching for answers, we find what we are looking for with the help of novel ideas for more quickly… such a change in the speed with which we get to where we really want to be would have seemed impossible just a few years ago…

And then, on to the reprogramming. A simple disconnection of the current feelings from the memory, then moving swiftly on, finding positive emotions and getting her to journey with them into her future.

I kept looking over my shoulder as I put her into a trance and lifted her hand, doing good old-fashioned arm levitation to get her to reprocess the information I programmed in. I thought how strange it would seem if a member of the public walked in to the room, seeing her in a relaxed state, eyes closed, giggling as I tapped the anchor on her leg. She was an amazingly responsive client.

After this, when I asked her about how she felt about the break-up, she looked at me blankly and said: “What break-up?” before struggling to recover the memory. Then she added: “It’s weird… I feel lighter…” and she smiled a broad, happy smile.

We walked out into the sunlight, with her still wearing that broad, sunny smile. I will keep my eye on her, but I’m pretty positive we’ve nailed the depression.

Thank you Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna. You showed me how to knock out another little patch of unhappiness in the world, and plant a garden there, all in about 45 minutes!

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 10: Take-Off

By Matt on Tuesday, November 9, 2010

On the very first day of the NLP Practitioner course, Hazel had gone up on stage with Richard Bandler, and had her bad memory removed. We had spoken about it later. She could still remember the bad memory, but the strong emotions that had been attached to it were no longer present. She had been freed from the horrendous emotions that were the result of a highly manipulative and abusive relationship.

That first day, her eyes had changed colour. From a dull grey to a light, bright blue. Her skin tone, the way she held herself – everything about her had changed. The effect had been so strong that I had even asked her if she had put in blue contact lenses in the break after she had been on stage. It was a spectacular change. The fear had gone, and the confidence had come in its place.

Nevertheless, there were other things that she wanted to deal with. Getting rid of the bad memory was only part of the equation.

In my interview with her in preparation for the constellation hypnosis, Hazel had said that she wanted to become a successful NLP Trainer and teach so many others the things that would empower them and give them a better life. But there were things that stood in her way. A non-supportive family and an ex-partner who was still trying to make her life hell. Even though she now knew he was powerless, he still cast a shadow over her life – and she would be required to have some connection with him because she’d had a daughter by him.

She saw her resources as her personality, her determination and the skills she had learned to take control of herself through NLP. It was a fairly straightforward combination of factors.

As she sat infront of me now, with James sitting off to one side, I began the hypnotic induction on her, all the while my mind racing with ideas. And as she relaxed and I saw her move deeper down, into trance, I felt myself dropping down, too, joining her in that swirling half-conscious state.

117319main_jsc2000e10522_cockpit_strip — A Cockpit, Surrounded By Machinery

It was then that I began to have an auditory hallucination.

As I began my tale… once there was a little witch… a white witch… who found herself trapped in the dungeon of an evil magician, staring out from the bars of a cage and only able sometimes to see the stars and the skies… something strange began to happen in my head.

The work that Paul had done with me: “Turn it up, double it, turn it up again” had at the time presented itself to me in my mind’s eye as a bank of lights in some kind of sci-fi machine – as if a 1970s airing of the cult tv series Doctor Who was being run in my head.

There was machinery in there, in my head.

I could hear the low hum of energy running through a grid in my mind, and then I had the fleeting image of a control room, filled with banks of switches. It was as if I was in a power station somewhere, or bizarrely, in the cockpit of an extraordinarily powerful aircraft. I could hear the click of hundreds of tiny relay switches being flicked over in my head, and I seemed to get the image of hands flicking more and more switches and someone saying “check” as those hands moved.

The low hum grew stronger, until it finally sounded as if the whole of that strange room, that powerplant and cockpit, had been flooded with power and white light. A deep, low, earthy hum that seemed to vibrate the core of my being, and which at the same time seemed endlessly and ultimately powerful. It was as if I had discovered a massive spaceship that had been mothballed for a long time, and now was at last being dusted off to work again. I eyed the banks of lights and switches with wonder. Had they always been here, and I just hadn’t noticed?

All the while, on the outside, I continued to talk – a stream of metaphors about a little white witch who one day recovered the book of spells that the evil magician had taken from her – she was handed it through the bars of her prison by a wise old wizard. And so she went about secretly collecting the things that she needed, using her magic arts to gather them to her. A pole of hazel wood, and the twigs to make a broom. A wand that she learned from the book how to wield with a power that made her invincible. And all the while she would stare up at the stars and at the moon. One day, she uttered a single spell and broke down the walls of her prison, and found that it was nothing at all, except a pile of words, and that squirming in the pile of words was a sickly, squirming weak old frog who she trapped in a box and cast in the sea, forever.

On her broom, she took to the sky, and flew upwards and upwards towards the light of the full moon, and she became a star, hanging there, the brightest in the sky – and acted always to shine her benign light, this Witch Hazel, to guide those who were lost and take them to safety. Because she was the brightest light in the sky, whom the lost blessed and loved.

And as I told this tale which was, after all, a simple but beautiful tale, I felt a tear drop from my eye and run down my face. All around me I could feel and hear the power surging, I could see the night sky from the windows of my ship, and knew that I was about to launch on to my own journey.

Then the room of the hotel came back into being. I looked at James. He was sitting looking at me with his mouth wide open, as I guided Hazel back from trance.

“Wow,” he said. “I don’t know what just happened. But wow.”

Back in the room, I felt suddenly deeply excited. “It’s about using archetypes,” I told him. “It’s about just plugging into the archetypes and using them exactly how you want to use them. You are completely free to do it. And – God! – it’s so easy. It’s so goddamned easy!”

Hazel, out of her trance was smiling at me with the most radiant smile.

It worked. The ability to just think on the hoof and tell a story from nothing. It was mine again!

Inspirations

Barb Stepp – NLP’s Fairy Godmother

By Matt on Friday, November 5, 2010

Yesterday I was lucky enough to interview Barbara Stepp, the world’s oldest NLP Master Trainer and DHE Master Trainer. For those who don’t know about NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), it’s a system of personal improvement which basically teaches you to think more clearly and effectively by bringing your emotions under control and deliberately using them to inform your decisions.

It presupposes the existence of an “unconscious” in all humans, but not in the old-fashioned Freudian sense of being a mystic land of uncontrolled primal drives which are transformed into neuroses and psychoses as they come to the surface. In NLP, the unconscious is conceived more as an amazingly effective mechanism which regulates inputs to the conscious mind.

The point with NLP is that because the unconscious is by definition outside of our consciousness, we have never really been consciously taught to get the best out of it. That’s why so many people end up victims of their emotional states without even realising it. Undirected, the mechanism of the unconscious can send up undermining and disempowering emotions, just as much as affirmational and empowering ones. These emotions shape our expectations. NLP enables us to become masters of those emotions and hence of the decisions and actions we make and take in our lives. It teaches you to think on purpose.

There’s more to it than that. For example, those who do NLP, being concerned with emotional states, are interested in finding a

barbara_stepp — Barbara Stepp, NLP's Fairy Godmother

gateway between the conscious and unconscious mind. Such a state is hypnosis, that half-dreamlike state that enables the land of dreams and the waking mind to meet. Thanks to countless movies and tv shows, it sounds more mysterious than it is. The state of hypnosis is really very much like the state one moves through as one falls asleep, or that is achieved in meditations – or more prosaically, when someone really boring talks to you for too long. The eyes glaze over and you become absorbed in your own thoughts.

Barb’s story is often mentioned by Richard Bandler, the man who invented the term “NLP”. It is worth retelling briefly here. In the 1980s Barb attended a seminar being run by Richard in which he selected her from the audience as part of a demonstration of hypnotic age regression. He took her back to a younger time, and asked her unconscious to reset her body to that younger self. It was part of what Richard called his “Hypnotic Beauty Treatment”.

I have listened to the recording of that session, and it is a highly effective trance which left me feeling really “zingy” afterwards. With Barb it did far more.

What Richard didn’t know is that Barb had been told by her doctor to get her affairs in order. She had terminal cancer and was given 6 months to live.

Within weeks of the seminar, Barb returned to the hospital to have more tests done. The startled doctors now informed her that there was no cancer in her body at all. In those intervening weeks, she had got hold of a tape of the trance Richard had done on her, and had repeatedly used it on herself. At this time she had also undergone spontaneous remission.

It is always difficult in these cases to claim that such an event caused such a response. The scientists among your will by now be starting to hit the ceiling, and so I am making no claims here whatsoever. But what I can say is that Barb is certain that Richard’s intervention was key to her survival.

Barb is now nearly 72 years old, and is a wonderful presence to be with. Having been around for so long, and being so full of light and laughter, she has been given the title: NLP’s Fairy Godmother. The thing that really struck me about her is that she is continually looking to learn new things, and to have fun in life. Doctors have often said that survival rates among cancer patients for those with a positive attitude are much higher than those without it. Barb’s attitude to life is not only positive, it is pro-active in the extreme. She is a scuba diver, a mountaineer and a pilot. She got her pilot’s licence at the age of 65. She has a sparkle in her eye and is just a joy to be with because she is looking for fun in every single moment of her life.

If there is one thing that I took away from the interview to learn from, it was Barb’s attitude to life: “When I stop learning, then I will stop living”.

She assures me, she has no intention of doing either.

Inspirations

Stevie Kidd: An Exemplary Man

By Matt on Sunday, October 31, 2010

In the last few years I’ve had the privilege of meeting some extraordinarily gifted and brilliant individuals. From millionaires, to artists and singers, through to individuals who are just kind and wholesome, the mix has been inspiring, bewildering, challenging and uplifting. Some of these people I have come to admire, learn from and marvel at. Such a man is Stevie Kidd.

Stevie Kidd, CEO of the KDS Group — Stevie Kidd, an examplary man.

Picture him now. A towering figure with a bald head, keen eyes and a mind that moves as fast as light and has been formed from hard experience, pure determination and powerful emotions. He has in his eyes a hint of genius and maybe a look that some who don’t “get” him might call madness, but which I know is pure inspiration. When Stevie is in the room, you know about it. And when Stevie is in the room, he knows you know.

I cannot go into the details of everything that he does, nor the incredible and confident way that he generates a new idea and then puts his heart and soul into pursuing it. Suffice to say that in 6 short years he has turned a £500 loan from his mother and a burning idea into a multi-million pound business, with divisions in training, distribution, care and personal development. By the time I have written this piece, I am sure he will have added yet more elements to his business, and will have made further friends at high levels. Stevie is the original unstoppable force who is making changes in people all around him. One of his businesses gets the long-term unemployed back to work. For him and his dedicated staff, this isn’t about figures, numbers or statistics. In every case, and in every business interaction he has, it is the people that he cares about, and the people that he will push and challenge to make their lives better.

So let me give you three snapshots of the man.

Snapshot 1:

Midnight on a street in Earl’s Court, standing outside a Thai restaurant. I have just noticed Stevie respond to some gossip around the table by standing up and walking out for a cigarette. I read it straight away in his eyes: he wasn’t going to get drawn into showing anyone any disrespect. So, instead, he walked out the door, his phone in his hand, and started to think about his next business venture. This is Stevie all over: he never stops or rests to bask in the glory of a moment, or to fritter a moment unproductively.

I join him on the sodium-light-flooded pavement, and we stand and talk a moment while he lights a cigarette. He is thinking about the new things he has to do, about the new projects he is going to get involved in. He tells me about the things that motivate him – about his role models – about his drive to want to help others.

And then, as we talk, two lads come down the road, one with a bicycle, the other on foot. The smaller of the two is a skinny black kid of 14 or so, with thick NHS glasses on, all scratched up. He squints through them at Stevie, and tries to get a cigarette off him, and then to get money from him to buy some cola. He doesn’t appear to hold his attention on anything for any amount of time, staring around him, and not listening when Stevie talks – but still hovers and flits around, somehow pulled in by Stevie’s manner. The other kid is a taller, heavier white guy with freckles – about 15 years old, with a quiet inward-looking presence, and looking a little lost, too.

Stevie holds firm about giving the pair of them money. And then he starts on something that I begin to realise he does all the time. He launches in at the two of them, engaging them in conversation, finding out what makes them tick, what floats their boats. He drops ideas into their heads when one of them tells him he likes cars. There are training courses for mechanics that young people can get on to, there are great things that he could do with his life. But he does it in a roundabout way – holding their interest at the same time as putting ideas into their minds. They talk together, these three, in a low-key way for 15 minutes, and then he lets them go.

He didn’t have to do it, but when they leave he turns to me and says: “I got the white kid thinking. Out here, now, that’s all you can do. Plant a seed. The other one, well, he had a lot of problems, I could see that. I hope something has got through.”

Snapshot 2:

Standing in the training room of the KDS Group, Glasgow, where Stevie Kidd has helped hundreds of long-term unemployed get back to work by putting them through his training programme, he is showing a group of us his offices. We are standing around him as he goes through the photos on the wall of the different academies his company has trained.

He points out individuals one by one in the groups, relating their unique stories to us: “This one, he had a really shitty childhood, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. This one, she just had no self confidence. This one, he was a kid without a sense of direction, and I shook him up big time. All of these people are in work, thanks to us.”

He pauses a moment as his finger hovers over another photograph. “This one, she…” he trails off and his story break offs. I can hear his voice breaking, and I see him bend his head, inhaling through his nose and then his mouth, to calm himself. The emotion in him is so strong, and he takes a full minute to master his emotions, running techniques of self-composure on himself to stop being overwhelmed by his feelings.

After a while he says: “She had so much go wrong.” He won’t reveal any more than that, merely telling us: “It was a terrible story. But she is in work now. She is working. She’s okay. And she’s happy, at last.”

And as he says this, a renewed note of hope enters his voice and he wipes a tear from his eyes with the back of his hand.

Snapshot 3:

Interviewing Stevie Kidd in a London hotel for an article I am writing, and hearing him talk about his day. The passion with which he starts to talk about the lives he has touched that day, beginning at 5 a.m. by sitting with the staff in the hotel he is staying at and helping them to sort out the newspapers for the guests. Heading out and inspiring his driver to do more with his life – even stopping at a bookshop to buy him the books he needs to take his career further. In between meetings with politicians and businessmen, stopping at a newsagent and just getting the shopkeeper to smile. In the evening, heading out for dinner and getting the staff in the Chinese restaurant to have fun and laugh.

And then, he leans closer to me as he grows more intense and his face and voice become more passionate now, he tells me of seeking out the homeless in parks in London, helping them to find a place to stay, before getting back to the hotel at 3 a.m.

It almost seems too much to believe, until I log in to his facebook account and see photos of each of the stories he has told me about. I think about the sheer energy and passion in this man, and marvel at it…

Above are three snapshots, all tied together by a single theme. Some people might call it philanthropy, some might call it care and respect. But the theme is more neatly summed up in another way: People.

Whenever Stevie Kidd engages with a person, he expects them to engage back with a thousand per cent of their being. He is a man driven by passion, and by extraordinarily strong emotions which flow through a body that has to be strong enough and powerful enough to contain them.

Some have described him as a “force of nature”. I don’t think that. I think he is an extraordinary individual, who cares about others from the bottom of his heart – and understands that business, like the rest of life – is made up of relationships.

And I believe that if you choose to learn that lesson, which lives at the heart of it all, it will make you not just rich – but also wealthy in the true sense of the word.

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 9: Constellation

By Matt on Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The day went a darn sight better after that encounter with Roy. But I still felt as if I wasn’t quite in my body. Later in the day, I was sitting in the audience when Paul was discussing a particular NLP technique, and he came over to me and asked how I felt.

“I feel like my head is fucked,” I commented in front of the 400 or so people on the course, into his microphone.

He looked at me with a steady gaze, and then instead of interviewing me began to basically future pace me: that is to set out how it was going to be for me over the next few days. How I was going to learn this and do this, how I was going to feel better. He only pointed the microphone in my direction in order for me to agree with him… which was a good idea because I didn’t have anything coherent to say.

We pushed on, through the day. I was in this little whirl, inside myself – doing the NLP exercises, calmer now than I was before, but still confused, and still with that strange sense of not really knowing where I was or who I was. It was extraordinary.

Then, later on in the day, something unusual happened.

Michael Neill was on stage in the morning, teaching us about a type of hypnotic metaphoric approach called “constellation hypnosis”.

The constellation. — Constellation hypnosis: how to create a new picture of the future by joining the configuration of situations, events and desires in the client's life in a different way...

Essentially, in constellation hypnosis, the hypnotist finds out what the client’s current situation is, and then what result the client wants. Then he asks what things are getting in the way of the client getting those things and are preventing them from achieving their wishes, and finally asks what resources the client might have to help them get to what they want. This is the constellation of the client’s life – the inter-relationship between the different elements of their personal story. It is the hypnotist’s job to take this information and distill these various elements down and convert them into a fairytale. The purpose of the fairytale is to help the client realise that by drawing the relationships between the different elements in the story in a different way to the one currently experienced, that the client will begin to see a different picture – one of overcoming and empowerment, rather than helplessness. Thus the power of the story.

It was the strangest thing. As we were told what we were to do, I began to feel a sudden sense of panic rising inside me. Here I was, on this course, on which I had hoped to rediscover my writing ability, my sense of play in creativity – and now my bluff was being called.

I interviewed the woman I was working with, and then completely lost my nerve. We were working in threes, and when we sent Hazel out of the room to discuss what we were going to do next, I said the guy that I was going to work the ideas of the story out with: “James, I’m sorry, you do it. I just don’t think I can do this.”

James looked at me in surprise, and then began to sketch out some ideas. But even as he did so, I began to feel a sort of spin of excitement in my body. A completely new feeling, as something light began to move in my head. Hazel walked back into the room, and sat down. And then James moved to do the hypnotic induction.

I couldn’t help myself.

“James,” I said. “Let me do this…”

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 8: The Filters of Perception

By Matt on Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The confusion I felt on that day continued into the evening. The night floated by like a dream, and I felt a sense of dislocation from my body, as if I was newly fitted into this flesh, and didn’t quite know how it worked yet.

And so it was, in this little dream that I found myself meeting up with friends in a little restaurant in Chinatown, and sitting having a meal. I was off my head, it seems. The evening floated by and I struggled to engage with my pals. It was as if, as the old phrase goes, the lights were on but noone was home. The thing is, it was as if I wasn’t even in my own home. I felt as if I had woken up and I was in a house that someone else had been living in for a long time. I wandered around, wondering who had moved the furniture round, who had been using the place for so long. The sense of alienation was quite strange. Metaphorically, it felt like my body was heavier than I remembered it when I last used it, and whoever had been in here had not really looked after it. I had muscles that I hadn’t used for ages, that I didn’t even know how to work any more. Potential lurking. A swirl of uncertainties, as the old story I had told about myself for so long had gone.

Again, I felt how I imagine a prisoner might feel when released on to the streets after a long stretch inside. The hometown is the same, but that house has been knocked down, this one has been extended, another one has a tree in the garden that has grown and grown. It was familiar territory, but all new at the same time.

And the same was true of my friends. For a while I felt as if I wasn’t really connecting with them. My mind was filled with the trainings I had had with Paul, Richard and Michael – and I seemed to not really “get” what these guys were telling me. We sat and had our food, and the evening drifted by before I said goodbye to these dear friends and made my way home. It was my first journey out in public after the hypnosis, and it felt weird.

I slept at Nicola’s house that night, who had been acting as my host for the week. And I slept lightly, with my mind overwhelmed. And I woke up troubled and highly sensitive and went back into the training across London, bemused. Moving in a dream. Confused.

Back in the training room on the Thursday morning, people came up to me and asked how I was doing. I felt shaky and uneasy. People speaking to me was a kind of a pain, and I told them in no uncertain terms that I needed to be left alone. Someone even, bizarrely, asked me for an autograph, saying that their kids loved “The Bill” and they wanted to give them a little keepsake.

I slipped out of the room and disappeared into the streets of Earl’s Court, down through the market on a bright sunny spring day, the air bright and fresh and cold around me. The sounds on the streets, the rumble of the buses, the squeak of the taxis’ brakes, the press of people with their beating hearts and the patt-patter of their feet on the concrete, the reflection of early morning sunlight off the deep red edifices of London buses, swinging by in a golden arc on the walls, the cracks in the paving slabs, the succulent flesh of brightly glowing oranges like balls of flame on the market stalls, the soft yellow of bananas, the mangos with rich and sweet pungent smells, the people all around me: Lebanese, English, Arab, African, European – moving like ants, like the swirl of water, like air, touched with fire, alive, shining, bright. I was overwhelmed with a torrent of impressions and sensations, as if someone had torn off the filters of perception into my mind and the whole, rich world was pouring in one single, sensuous, crazy hit. I was going mad. The world was brighter, and brighter still, and the sharp edges of buildings, of cars, of people’s faces seemed to have been drawn with the finest pen, or engraved in the air – hard – sharp – clear – more real than I had ever experienced before. The world was pushing in on my senses, moving closer and closer, and I felt myself struggling to breathe.

I pushed on down the streets, my movements jerky as if I was a machine. The soft machine, the blood-filled, heartbeating, airbreathing, lifetasting machine with a driver at its top. It was a dream and hyper-real. It was everywhere and nowhere.

I walked the streets a while longer and then returned to the Ibis Hotel. I remembered that I had tried to write a letter to Paul McKenna that morning, telling him that something had gone wrong with what he had done. Telling him that I felt weepy and weird. But I had not been able to string a sentence together. I was sure, so sure, that something had gone terribly wrong.

I was pale and drawn in the mirror as I got back into the hotel. I then went and spoke to one of the assistants – a guy called Roy.

“Something’s gone wrong,” I told him as I sat in a chair and snivelled. “It’s gone wrong. I feel weird. Really weird.”

Roy looked at me with kindly eyes, but maintaining a calm sense of detachment. “Nothing’s gone wrong,” he said. “You were on stage yesterday with two of the greatest hypnotists in the world. These things don’t happen for no reason.”

“But my head. My head. I can hardly think.”

Roy blinked at me from behind his glasses. He wasn’t warm or overly kind, but just straightforward matter-of-fact. “This happens with clients from time to time,” he said. “I get people call me up after they have seen me. They tell me their life is all messed up and they’ve been hit really hard. Then it all calms down after a day or two and they are so much better. You need to understand that your unconscious mind has been given a task to do by Paul. It’s telling your conscious mind to shut the fuck up while it gets on with it.”

Somehow, that helped. He looked at me with intention as he said it, and somehow it helped. My mind quietened down a little, and I felt myself submitting to the process going on inside me. It was strange. A little piece of reassurance was growing, right there in the heart of me. Like a little star coming out at night.

The first one. One to wish on.

A friend in the room, George, came and sat next to me. He looked at me in concern and I answered his questions in a desultory and staccato manner. After a few minutes, as the lesson started, I realised that I couldn’t go on. I slipped out of the room and disappeared into the streets of Earl’s Court, down through the market on a bright sunny spring day, the air bright and fresh and cold around me. The sounds on the streets, the rumble of the buses, the squeak of the taxis’ brakes, the press of people with their beating hearts and the patt-patter of their feet on the concrete, the reflection of early morning sunlight off the deep red edifices of London buses, swinging buy in a golden arc on the walls, the cracks in the paving slabs, the succulent flesh of brightly glowing oranges like balls of flame on the market stalls, the soft yellow of bananas, the mangos with rich and sweet pungent smells, the people all around me: Lebanese, English, Arab, African, European – moving like ants, like the swirl of water, like air, touched with fire, alive, shining, bright. I was overwhelmed with a torrent of impressions and sensations, as if someone had torn of the filters of perception into my mind and the whole, rich world was pouring in in a single hit. I was going mad. The world was brighter, and brighter still, and the sharp edges of buildings, of cars, of people’s faces seemed to have been drawn with the finest pen. The world was pushing in on my senses, moving closer and closer, and I felt myself struggling to breathe.

I was pale and drawn in the mirror as I got back into the hotel. I then went and spoke to one of the assistants – a guy called Roy.

“Something’s gone wrong,” I told him as I sat in a chair and snivelled. “It’s gone wrong. I feel weird. Really weird.”

“But my head. My head. I can hardly think.”

The first one. One to wish on.

Tag Archives: NLP