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Attention and Performance: How you attend to the world can transform your performance in it

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Attention, State and Performance

In article 4 in the Attention series Jules the relationship between how we use our attention, our state and performance.

States

The set of specific values in a person’s physiology, neurology and biochemistry that gives rise to their behavioural expression and their subjective experience of themselves and the world in any given moment. Some states recur in each culture with sufficient frequency to have acquired labels in the appropriate language. Examples include joy, depression, happiness, angst, and joie de vivre. Naming states implies a commonality of experience, which is not necessarily the case. Naming states does not describe the differences in individual subjective experience which actually exist within any particular named state: I.e. one person’s generation and experience of elation, misery or anxiety will be different from someone else’s and two people deliberately generating the same conditions within their bodies may call the resulting state by different names.

Our states influence the quality and direction of our attention and our attention influences our states. States act as frames for how we use our attention, what we attend to and what we delete from our attention. States influence the perceptual filters we apply and simultaneously our more pervasive perceptual filters influence our access to different states.

“Our states influence the quality and direction of our attention and our attention influences our states.”

States give rise to mood frames such as happy, sad, optimistic and pessimistic. They also influence the likelihood or absence of choice and opinion based responses such as willingness, co-operation, participation and trust.

States are not fixed. They shift continually, sometimes imperceptibly in small increments, yet they can also shift radically. This may be in response to receiving new information or to a sudden recognition of a change of meaning of existing information, though it can also occur when an activity starts or ends. Receiving important exam results, making a large purchase and even having a meal often precipitates a change of state.

Some people experience states which are notably different from most of their other states. Certain frames and information which are normally accessible to them are not found while in these radically different states. If these states also require special circumstances to enter and leave, they are known as Dissociated States. Dissociated states often carry framing and meaning that is only accessible to a person when they are in that state. Examples include the sudden state changes associated with experiencing road accidents and chemically induced altered states such as exposure to mind altering drugs or alcohol. The alcoholic Black out is a case in point, where a person cannot remember what happened at a party until they are that drunk again, when it all comes back to them.

“There is anecdotal evidence that it is very hard to maintain a depressed state while doing a headstand.”

Chronically depressed states often have characteristics of dissociated states. When someone is experiencing depression, they are likely to express a belief that it is pervasive and continuous. In depression, they may not have access to the moments in their day when their attention has elicited a different state. They have difficulty imagining life being more rewarding, and often they cannot access their memories of pre-depression life or the moments, hours and days where their attention is on something other than being depressed.

Where You Place Your Attention Can Affect Your State

What we attend to and how we attend to it can elicit changes in our state. We can learn to enter and leave any state by shifting our attention. If the process we use to shift our attention is sufficiently compelling, even the most subjectively difficult states will shift for long enough to provide a reference experience, unless they are chemically induced. Yet most of us have heard anecdotes relating to people in chemical hazes who seem to snap out of it for a brief period to present a straight or sober countenance to the world.

There is anecdotal evidence that it is very hard to maintain a depressed state while doing a headstand. Certainly this is not a long term option, but giving someone live evidence of a state change, even for a minute or two, can shift a belief that feeling depressed is all-pervasive. If someone can change that belief enough to consider other options, they may be open to learning more user friendly attention shifting skills. Then they can discover, through live experience, that changing state by choice is a skill which they can learn.

John Grinder’s ‘Chain of Excellence’

For our purposes, learning to change state is predicated on a person’s natural and habitual states, more than those involving artificial aids. John Grinder, the co-originator of NLP, proposes a ‘Chain of Excellence’ leading to enhanced performance in any context:

Breathing

Physiology

State

Performance

The Chain of Excellence has three points of leverage to shift attention and create a better quality of action in the world. They are:

  1. Change your breathing pattern and your physiology (posture, movement, carriage) will change.
  2. Change your physiology and your state will change.
  3. Change your state and your performance will change. (Performance includes natural interactions, reading, sleeping and eating as well prepared activities and working).

If you act on any one of the three, the categories below will shift in response. To test this, consider an issue in your life and note your state. Then go for a ten minute brisk walk with an even, balanced posture and your head up comfortably. You will find your breathing will deepen, your physiology will be nicely shaken up and your thinking will become clearer.

You can attend to any matter on your agenda as you walk, or you can think about it before you walk, then shift your attention to enjoy the walk and return to the matter afterwards. Your take on it will be different. This is an example of a model known as ‘Personal Editing’, created by Judith DeLozier and is the simplest and most natural way to do it. You can see it unfolding in daily life if you attend gym, exercise or dance classes. The class members come in after work in a work state. They attend to class, move, exercise and perform routines. Then they leave in a different state.

When you engage the Chain of Excellence, your attention goes to the element you want to shift. When you follow through, your body function supports resourceful states that promote high quality attention. Personal editing can provide you with a generic resource state which you can take anywhere. Then, when you enter a specific context, the state will enable you to access appropriate resources for performing well in that context.

A ‘Four Step Change Process’

In the New Code of NLP, John Grinder has developed a ‘Four Step Change Process’. It applies leverage through the Chain of Excellence to create generic, content-free (go anywhere) resource states. Step 3 requires an activity that applies the leverage of the Chain of Excellence. In this case I recommend the Personal Editing brisk walk as you can do this by yourself and I have described it already.

  1. Identify a context where you want to perform with excellence and currently do not.
  2. Step briefly into the context and experience it.
  3. Step out of the context and start a Personal Editing brisk walk immediately, attending only to the sensory experience of walking and seeing and hearing your environment in real time.
  4. At the end of 10-15 minutes brisk walking, step into the context you chose in the state you are in now. Let the state blend into the context and enjoy the result. Now you experience the difference.

By Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE Pty Ltd.

Attention Training Articles

  1. Apply leverage to your attention for productivity by choice
    by Jules Collingwood
  2. 5 elements to enhance the quality of your attention and further your outcomes
    by Jules Collingwood
  3. Creating meaningful change and altering the way you represent the world
    by Jules Collingwood
  4. How you attend to the world can transform your performance in it
    by Jules Collingwood
  5. How using your attention can change the quality of your states (and vice versa)
    by Jules Collingwood

(Note: If you would like to learn more about the New Code of NLP you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

Related articles

Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

If you found this article useful please share it!

Creating meaningful change and altering the way you represent the world

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How The World Is Represented

When we look at the world or at our internal images, we are using the visual system. When we hear sounds in the environment or compose or playback sounds internally, we are using the auditory system and when we feel sensation, touch, our own muscle twitches or emotion related feelings, we are using the kinaesthetic system. We see, hear and feel our surroundings, but if we are attending to an argument we had with someone yesterday, we do not register everything we are exposed to. Our attention is on the recalled images, sounds and sensations associated with the argument.

We can change the meaning we attribute to the argument by exploring the sub components of our representations. These are known as ‘Submodalities’. If the visual system is a Modality then size, location, brightness, hue, motion, focus, and colour saturation are examples of visual submodalities. Auditory submodalities include volume, location, bandwidth, speed, pitch, rhythm and timbre (resonance). Kinaesthetic submodalities include pressure, temperature, volume, area, rhythm, texture and shape.

“We can change the meaning we attribute to the argument by exploring the sub components of our representations. “

The Making of Meaning

People make and code the meaning they attribute to experiences by representing the experience with specific submodalities. The exciting aspect of submodalities is that different people use different submodalities to make meaning. Thus, one person might discover that increasing the size of an image increases the intensity of the sensations they feel while another might find that moving the image to a different location in their visual field has a similar effect.

When we explore our individual application of submodalities in a group, it is fascinating to discover the different submodalities and combinations people use to denote different meanings for their experiences. Belief, alone, can be represented in many forms and some people code limiting beliefs (I wish that were not true) differently from generative beliefs (Of course I can rely on that being true).

Exploring our own submodalities brings this important part of attention to conscious awareness. For practical purposes, we can retain the memory of exploring our submodalities without overloading ourselves by attending to them constantly. When we want to change or enhance the meaning of an experience, we can attend to our submodalities long enough to map the changes. It is a matter of finding which submodalities in what combinations provide us, personally, with the particular meaning we are after.

Altering Meaning

Sometimes changing a submodality in one sensory system will alter a submodality in a different system. This is called a ‘Driver Submodality’ because changing it drives change in another submodality. Even though individuals use different submodalities to make meaning, there are some sufficiently prevalent combinations for advertising agencies to harness them in TV commercials. For example, natural gas used to be advertised on TV in the UK and more recently in Australia, using steel blue lighting to denote freezing cold conditions with people skating on the Thames or Sydney Harbour. When the skaters arrive home, the door opens and the gas fire lights as the lighting switches to golden amber, denoting warmth. If you are someone who creates a subjective temperature change with a change in colour temperature, this will be obvious. If not, what gives you a sense of warmth on a cold day, (other than crouching over a direct heat source)?

“Sometimes changing a submodality in one sensory system will alter a submodality in a different system”

Some people have a similar experience between sensory systems. In this case, they may see something which promotes a sensation or a sound, or feel something which promotes an image or a sound or hear something which promotes an image or a feeling. This is called Synaesthesia. Examples include seeing particular colours with numbers, seeing swirling colours when music is played, feeling a cringe when someone scratches a blackboard or feeling rhythms when looking at abstract or fractal art. A lesser known example is seeing the environment brighten, dim or change hue in response to smelling different substances.

It is worth discovering your own synaesthesias if you have them, as they can change the quality of your attention without your realising if they are running in the background. An administrator used the telephone extensively in her work. In the early 1990s, Australian telephone numbers acquired a nine (9) at the front to make them eight digits instead of seven after the area code. Shortly after this change, the administrator complained of feeling depressed. She and her partner knew about synaeshesias and they gave this one some attention. They discovered that she had fixed colours for numerals and each colour queued a sensation.,  Nine was an unpleasant grey colour with a dragging kinaesthetic and suddenly it prefixed every telephone number she used. They changed the synaesthesia and the depressing experience lifted.

Submodalites, synaesthesias and sequences of sensory representations all contribute to the quality of attention we bring to experience. They are also elements of how we use our attention.

By Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE Pty Ltd.

Attention Training Articles

  1. Apply leverage to your attention for productivity by choice
    by Jules Collingwood
  2. 5 elements to enhance the quality of your attention and further your outcomes
    by Jules Collingwood
  3. Creating meaningful change and altering the way you represent the world
    by Jules Collingwood
  4. How you attend to the world can transform your performance in it
    by Jules Collingwood
  5. How using your attention can change the quality of your states (and vice versa)
    by Jules Collingwood

(Note: If you would like to learn more about the New Code of NLP you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

Related articles

Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

If you found this article useful share it with your network.

5 elements to enhance the quality of your attention and further your outcomes

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The quality of attention we apply and the selection of filters we use to limit it can be enhanced with exposure to different frames of reference and more effective classification patterns.

Before we can enhance the quality of our attention deliberately, we need to become aware of how we are filtering and applying our attention currently. For most people, attending is something we do with reference to content; that is what we are attending to.

“We need to become aware of how we are filtering and applying our attention currently.”

Discovering Our Attention

If we want to identify and track how we attend at any time, a simple method uses common content as our medium. To give you a taste of this, take a composite memory of driving your regular vehicle, as if you are driving now, in the present. Driving your car is the frame for this experience and it queues your driving perceptual filters. Now consider the following questions:

  • As you are driving, are you aware of looking at the road ahead?
  • How far ahead do you look, normally?
  • Do you notice the presence of other vehicles?
  • Do you notice anything about the cars in front of you?
  • Are you aware of movement in your peripheral vision?
  • Are you aware of the sound of your engine routinely?
  • Are you aware of the sound of your engine when it sounds different?
  • If you have music playing, do you notice it?
  • Do you register the speed you are doing?
  • Are you aware of selecting the distance you drive behind other vehicles
  • in slow traffic?
  • in medium fast traffic?
  • when you stop at traffic lights?
  • Are you talking to yourself?
  • Are you seeing through internal images?
  • Do you feel speed, torque, acceleration?
  • Do you feel emotional responses to your thoughts?
  • Are you aware of the speed limit?
  • Are you aware of the sequence of traffic lights?
  • Are you aware of when to signal at a roundabout?
  • Are you aware of the route you are taking to your destination?
  • Are you aware of finding the appropriate pedal with the appropriate pressure?
  • Are you aware of steering the car?

Your answers will provide you with valuable insight into your process for attending while driving. The next question in response to each answer you gave is:

How do you know that?

The elements of attention can be classified and punctuated in different ways. The driving questions invite answers related to use of our senses and internal representations of remembered and imagined sensory experience. We use our senses and internal representations to think and attend. The quality of any experience we have is related to the combination of senses and representations we select to process it. Most selection occurs outside conscious awareness. So another classification for attention is what are we aware of consciously and what are we responding to outside conscious awareness? We took a common scenario like driving and asked the questions above to bring some of our process to conscious awareness.

“The elements of attention can be classified and punctuated in different ways.”

Now you have more conscious awareness of what you do while driving, you can enhance your experience and possibly your skill as well. For example, the further ahead you look, the more time you have to respond to changes on the road in front of you. If you detect and respond to movement in your peripheral vision, you can avoid potential obstacles more smoothly. If your attention is on the road instead of on your internal experience, (be it dialogue, images, sounds or sensation), you are likely to detect and respond to more external activity and drive more safely. If the rearview mirror is in your peripheral vision, you will detect flashing blue lights at the earliest opportunity. Once you have updated any parts of your driving experience, you can allow the changes to automate once more, so they function seamlessly while your conscious attention is where you want it.

This exercise can be applied to any activity, experience or context you choose. It is a useful method for refining skill development, enabling us to identify the elements of a skill set that could benefit from enhancement. We can pick and apply the enhancements, practice them deliberately and allow them to integrate into automation.

Using attention includes (but is not limited to) the following components:

  • The frame, context or situation for attending.
  • The combination of senses and representations used in attending.
  • Conscious awareness of parts or elements of the experience.
  • Conscious awareness of prior knowledge and related future outcomes.
  • Unconscious awareness of prior knowledge and related future outcomes.
  • Unconsciously included parts of the experience.
  • Unconsciously applied frames and perceptual filters surrounding the experience.

Another aspect of attention is how we apply each of our senses to the content we are seeing, hearing or feeling, be it internally represented or externally sensed.

By Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE Pty Ltd.

Attention Training Articles

  1. Apply leverage to your attention for productivity by choice
    by Jules Collingwood
  2. 5 elements to enhance the quality of your attention and further your outcomes
    by Jules Collingwood
  3. Creating meaningful change and altering the way you represent the world
    by Jules Collingwood
  4. How you attend to the world can transform your performance in it
    by Jules Collingwood
  5. How using your attention can change the quality of your states (and vice versa)
    by Jules Collingwood

(Note: If you would like to learn more about the New Code of NLP you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

Related articles

Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

Apply leverage to your attention for productivity by choice

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‘Pay attention. You won’t find the answer on the ceiling’

‘Pay attention. You won’t find the answer on the ceiling’. The teacher’s admonition cut across a child visualising the answer to a maths problem. The child was attending, working out the problem using implicitly learned rules and making mental images in the most natural place. The teacher expected the students to be bent over their desks, calculating into an exercise book or a screen. Unfortunately, relatively few people appreciate that visualisation is most accessible when looking upwards and teachers want to see recognisable evidence of compliance.

Visualising to do calculations is a very effective way of using our attention for calculating. It is faster than using writing and saves paper. Most people rarely notice how they use their attention, so there is little awareness in the general population that attention can be subject to deliberate application.

“There is little awareness in the general population that attention can be subject to deliberate application.”

Consider the child in the example. She had no idea that she was making calculations using rules and images outside conscious awareness, only that they worked. Her teacher had no knowledge of how the child did it, only that she wanted to see the child’s workings written on a page. The child could not present her workings and eventually stopped presenting answers. No-one thought to give the child an explicit description of the rules she had discovered implicitly and subsequently stopped applying. If they taught these, she and others would be able to derive the workings for any problem in the set governed by those rules. Then they could generalise and use their attention to discover the principles governing other sets of facts and figures.

If people learned to attend to the process of how something works, they would be able to produce multiple examples from first principles. Currently, most formal learning at school level focuses on knowing facts and figures. Only a few students manage to infer the underlying principles from exposure to a collection of related facts and figures. Yet many of the facts and figures can be inferred from the principles. They make sense in light of the principles, thereby becoming inherently more memorable.

What is attention?

Attention is awareness of activity occurring in the world around us and or in our internal experience. We use our senses to detect movement in the world and then process what we detect via neural pathways. This experience is as if we have direct contact with the world. This is sensory input and is our first access to incoming data. It is a common experience for small children and a rare experience for most adults.

The author, Carlos Castaneda alluded to first access experiences when referring to a ‘Stop the World State’ as part of shamanic training. You can have a similar experience by extending your peripheral vision to its extremes on both sides and up and down, while focusing on the far distance. This will reduce your internal dialogue (verbal thoughts) and allow you to experience the world with minimal categorical filtering. It is a delightful and absorbing experience. If you go for a walk in a Stop the World state, take someone with you, so you do not have to attend to safety and traffic while in the state.

We filter incoming data routinely, to avoid overloading our attention and to reduce mental effort. For example, we expect a chair to take our weight when we sit on it and we know to sit on it because it is ‘chair’. Linguistic filters name and categorise everything we have encountered before, that otherwise would have been experienced at first access. Our knowledge, beliefs and values frame what we attend to and how much attention is given to any concept or object. The generic name for the filters we use to order our world is: ‘Perceptual Filters’. They are used to classify the raw, incoming data, to attribute meaning, relationships and other groupings of inclusion, exclusion and value.

Any form of perceptual filtering reduces the amount of information we accept into our systems and its function is to protect us from too much simultaneous input and enable efficient mental processing. When it is done automatically, using low grade classification systems and without deliberate periodic review, we can become inflexible or at worst, stereotyped utterers of platitude. At its best, perceptual filtering allows us to learn new and interesting material, classify existing knowledge in flexible and accessible sets (including sets of sets) and to use patterns of excellence as the frames in which we operate.

The quality of attention we apply and the selection of filters we use to limit it can be enhanced with exposure to different frames of reference and more effective classification patterns.

By Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE Pty Ltd.

Attention Training Articles

  1. Apply leverage to your attention for productivity by choice
    by Jules Collingwood
  2. 5 elements to enhance the quality of your attention and further your outcomes
    by Jules Collingwood
  3. Creating meaningful change and altering the way you represent the world
    by Jules Collingwood
  4. How you attend to the world can transform your performance in it
    by Jules Collingwood
  5. How using your attention can change the quality of your states (and vice versa)
    by Jules Collingwood

(Note: If you would like to learn more about the New Code of NLP you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

Related articles

Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

If you found this article useful share it with your network.

Effective Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

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Daniel Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence in Business

from NYT Education Life (7th April 2015)

Today we are considering the last, of Goleman’s recommendations for effective leadership in business. Along with self awareness, self management and empathy (without joining others in lack of resources), there are:

Relationship Skills:

  1. “Compelling communication: You put your points in persuasive, clear, ways so that people are motivated as well as clear about expectations.
  2. Team playing: People feel relaxed working with you. One sign: They laugh, easily around you” Goleman (2015).

Relationship skills is a shorthand name for the skills that facilitate useful initial interactions and enable them to develop into freely chosen, functional, mutually satisfying ongoing relationships. Just because you are assigned to work with someone does not preclude the possibility of choosing their company and vice versa.

If you are going to develop a relationship with someone in any context, first you have to make their acquaintance and engage and hold their unconscious attention. This is called establishing rapport with someone. Rapport is not just for first time encounters. Each time you interact with someone, including loved ones, friends and long time colleagues, you need to engage and hold their unconscious attention, preferably willingly on their part.

“To engage and hold someone’s, unconscious attention. This is called establishing rapport.”

Rapport, like empathy, is subject to widespread misunderstanding. It is defined in the previous paragraph, yet many people think rapport is liking and being liked by someone, getting on well with someone, reducing perceptible differences between people, being like (similar to) someone and sharing similar views on important subjects.,  These experiences may follow from engaging and holding someone’s unconscious attention, but not necessarily.

You can observe rapport in action if you watch people when they are engaged with each other. You will see entrainment of the parties’ rhythms with each other. These include movement, posture, gestures, breathing, voice patterns, rate of speech and sometimes rate of blinking. Certainly, rapport is often taught at this level, but this makes it harder work to learn than necessary and too specific to keep enough attention free for the matter under discussion. Does this sound familiar?

The common feature when people are engaged with each other is interest. This can be interest in the individual, interest in the conversation and/or interest in the topic of conversation. The greater the interest, the quicker and smoother the development of rapport., Thus one person can initiate rapport with someone by showing interest and engagement in their behaviour. Most of the time it will be reciprocated. Demonstration of interest is worth learning. The result may not be instant, but perseverance for a few minutes should free up the interaction making it more comfortable for both parties so interest becomes more natural.

You can create a frame for yourself to facilitate interest for the sake of developing rapport. If you are discussing a boring topic, for example, make a point of discovering your intention for having the conversation. When you find an intention frame that you find worthwhile, that can spark a genuine interest.

A bright but bored medical student started earning unacceptable grades one year. He was told to shape up or be sent down from university. He wanted to join a particular speciality in medicine, but found the course content irrelevant. He loved history and anthropology, so he created a frame for 20th century medical training that said: This is what they used to believe, now. With awareness of his intention and a frame that invited interest in the work, his grades improved markedly. In the fullness of time he became a specialist in his chosen field where he made radical and far reaching contributions.

When you establish rapport with topics and subjects as well as individual people and groups, learning flows with less effort and greater retention. Work becomes more interesting and less of a chore and colleagues can be friends. This is quality of life at work. Rapport enhances the quality of your attention and the quality of your attention enhances rapport.

In the longer term as interactions develop into relationships, rapport continues to be necessary and with application, becomes habitual. This is the underpinning relationship skill. If you go back and review Goleman’s evidence for relationship skills, you will find that he is describing evidence of rapport.

Emotional Intelligence And The Quality Of your Life

To close the series, here is another frame on rapport and by extension, on self awareness, self management and empathy. All of these qualities, skills and attributes, when practiced and in use can contribute to our own sense of wellbeing. When we feel welcome with the people in our lives, we have a better experience with them than if we are on guard or expect unhelpful consequences. This does not detract from our varying needs for time alone, be it five minutes or most of life. When we deal with people, if they are well disposed towards us, we tend to have a better time. This is my frame for agreeing with Goleman’s recommendations. It is not a homily about what should be done. It is a recommendation for increasing your own quality of life.

At my own happiest workplace as an employee, I stayed longer than in any other job I have had because of the people. I started as a casual and had amazingly welcoming experiences on my first two days. By the end of three weeks I had a permanent position, expedited by my manager. I continued to feel welcome and appreciated for the whole time I was there. I only left because Inspiritive was granted RTO status and needed more of my attention.

By Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE.

Daniel Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence in Business Articles Series

  1. Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence – Introduction
  2. Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
  3. Self awareness and Emotional Intelligence
  4. Self Management and Emotional Intelligence; Three attributes
  5. Effective Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

(Note: If you would like to learn more about Emotional Intelligence and NLP you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

Related articles

Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

If you found this article useful, share it!

Empathy and Emotional Intelligence

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Empathy, Goleman’s 4th Component for Emotional Intelligence in Business

from NYT Education Life (7th April 2015)

In the previous articles in this series, we have considered the first two of Goleman’s recommendations for applying elements of emotional intelligence in business and possibly in other contexts. Initially, I proposed that however worthy the frames and assumptions surrounding any recommendations might be, it is still useful to identify them and choose for yourself which, if any, fit for you. The following two articles discussed self awareness, and self management.

Today’s topic is called, Empathy

  1. “Cognitive and emotional empathy: Because you understand other perspectives, you can put things in ways colleagues comprehend. And you welcome their questions, just to be sure. Cognitive empathy, along with reading another person’s feelings accurately, makes for effective communication.
  2. Good listening: You pay full attention to the other person and take time to understand what they are saying, without talking over them or hijacking the agenda”.,  Goleman 2015

Goleman has answered the question; “How would you know if you are demonstrating empathy?” As before, the demonstrable acts are too specific to use for learning to do it comfortably, but they provide a clear idea of how empathy is supposed to operate. This description is different from the way many people, including some coaches and therapists, understand empathy. In my opinion, Goleman’s frame is much more robust as it is predicated on observation, listening, information gathering and external attention rather than interpretation of someone else’s behaviour.

The trap for new therapists is an understanding of empathy as ‘A Therapeutic Activity’ predicated on joining the client in their (unresourceful) experience so you can ‘share the pain’ and understand their predicament. This is not useful. If you join someone in their unresourceful state for more than 30 seconds without shaking it off cleanly and then returning to your own self, the chances are your state will become similarly limited. Then you will lose access to the resources you had in your working state. Now you have two people who cannot solve problems instead of one leading the other to a functional state.

“Joining the client in their (unresourceful) experience is not useful.”

Yet the skills for enabling the behaviour Goleman recommends are very similar, with important distinctions that ensure you stay resourceful and you only bring information back to your own state; not residue of other people’s states.

Consider three different points of view or perceptual positions:

One position is me in my own skin, aware of myself, my values, my outcomes and intentions, my posture and breathing and how I am using my attention.

Another position is me as observer. In the observer position I take my attention out of my skin, to somewhere I can observe an actor who looks like me in conversation with one or more other people. My brief is to gather information about the quality of the interaction between the parties and whether the actor who looks like me is engaging the attention of the other people. I notice if there is anything my actor could do differently to facilitate the outcome of the conversation.

From the observer position, I can move my attention to step into the shoes of the other person in the conversation. I match their posture, movement and breathing and after a few seconds, I begin to experience the conversation from their perspective. As soon as I have enough exposure to their take on the matter, I leave the other and return to the observer, with my information.

The observer is not engaged in the conversation, but is interested in each party’s take on it. The observer also acts as a way station or a metaphoric shower to remove all residue of the other person before returning to my own skin. In my own skin I only want myself and information I gathered when in the other positions. The only exception to this is when the other person has skills I want to experience for myself. Then I can take relevant elements of my experience in their shoes into my own position, but this is rare and requires special framing to preserve my integrity.

Use Your Imagination

The act of shifting perceptual positions uses the imagination. When I teach it, I do not expect students to be able to do it seamlessly in a live conversation until they have had some practice. There are exercises for learning the skills by replaying recent memories of conversations as if they were happening in real time. This way the skill is learned off line and can then be applied in real life without compromising the quality of your attention and without anyone else being the wiser.

It is important only to go to another person’s shoes via the observer. If you go straight from self to other, it is too easy to operate for an extended period partly from their position. If you do this you will probably become less resourceful and less clear about your own outcomes in the short term and you may experience burn out if you do it habitually. Many people think empathy is a self to other direct step. Goleman’s description, on the other hand, reflects the evidence you can experience only if you keep self and other cleanly separated by moving between them via the observer. The observer is valuable in its own right as a source of a different quality of information.

By Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE.

Daniel Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence in Business Articles Series

  1. Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence – Introduction
  2. Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
  3. Self awareness and Emotional Intelligence
  4. Self Management and Emotional Intelligence; Three attributes
  5. Effective Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

(Note: If you would like to learn more about the New Code of NLP you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

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Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

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Self Management and Emotional Intelligence; Three attributes

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Daniel Goleman’s, Components for Emotional Intelligence in Business

from NYT Education Life (7th April 2015)

Self management is the second of Goleman’s four recommendations for applying emotional intelligence in the workplace. To recap, he has identified self awareness, self management, empathy and relationship skills as qualities of leadership and attributes that lead to advancement in the workplace.

In the previous article, we considered the development of greater self-awareness and evidence to determine that or when it is present. Today, the topic is self management:

Goleman’s Synopsis of Self Management.

  1. Resilience: You stay calm under pressure and recover quickly from upsets., You don’t brood or panic. In a crisis, people look to the leader for reassurance; if, the leader is calm, they can be, too.
  2. Emotional balance: You keep any distressful feelings in check instead, of blowing up at people, you let them know what’s wrong and what the solution is.
  3. Self-motivation: You keep moving toward distant goals despite setbacks.

As with self-awareness, Goleman has provided a synopsis of what to look for as evidence that self management is in place and working. The function of evidence is to provide feedback about the quality of your self management strategy. If you try to learn directly how to do the characteristics of evidence, it will be hard work and take up all your conscious attention. This leaves a shortage of attention available for performing in your chosen context. If you are intending to demonstrate leadership, it will flat if you are trying to manage individual examples of behaviour.

“The state you are in at any time frames the quality of your behaviour, interactions and thinking capacity.”

Your state is the emotional, biochemical, physiological gestalt within which you function and contrary to popular belief, you can learn to change it quickly and smoothly. This is the basis of effective self management.

Self Management In Action

Applying self management strategically requires a modicum of self-awareness. This will give you information about your current state and context as well as direction for choosing what you want instead. When you discover that you can choose and change your state, you can learn to maintain a set of resourceful, responsive states that allow you to set an example, think on your feet and have access to all your competences. This is possible instead of being stuck in a low level state with inadequate resources and no patience with others.

People change their states naturally without necessarily being aware that it is happening. You can harness natural state change processes when you are aware of the way they work. If you could be a fly on the wall at an exercise class at the end of the workday, you would observe participants coming in talking about their day, still in work-related states and thinking about work. By the end of the class, they are more relaxed, animated, spontaneous and looking forward to the rest of their free time. Their bodies are more symmetrical and their movement flows.

Physical activity is one of nature’s state changers. The same thing happens with choristers who practice at the end of the workday. Singing requires a lot of breath and deliberate breathing is another natural state changing activity. If you want to change state by changing your breathing or moving your body with intent, a short, brisk walk around the block will be sufficient for most purposes.

As you review your context, with its people and tasks, your intention of being resourcefully functional and preferably able to enjoy the experience provides framing and search criteria for your unconscious resources to develop options for you. This allows you to engage a set of suitable states which probably include competence, resilience, creative problem solving and relationship skills all at the same time.

The advantage of managing yourself through your state is that a single process provides the capacity to demonstrate a whole collection of resourceful behaviour, naturally and spontaneously. Then your attention is free to concentrate on the matter at hand and your quality of experience will be enhanced.

Daniel Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence in Business Articles Series

  1. Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence – Introduction
  2. Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
  3. Self awareness and Emotional Intelligence
  4. Self Management and Emotional Intelligence; Three attributes
  5. Effective Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

(Note: If you would like to learn more about the New Code of NLP you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

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Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

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Self Awareness and Emotional Intelligence

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Daniel Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence in Business

If you read the, first article in this series, you may be attending to the assumptions that frame written and spoken communications and beginning to come to your own conclusions about their validity for you.,  In Daniel Goleman’s article in the New Yorker on 7th April, previously introduced, he identifies four qualities which he believes assist people in business.

The first recommended attribute is Self Awareness. Goleman describes the qualities of this as:

  1. “Realistic self-confidence: You understand your own strengths and, limitations; you operate from competence and know when to rely on someone, else on the team.
  2. Emotional insight: You understand your feelings. Being aware of what, makes you angry, for instance, can help you manage that anger”.

Self awareness means different things to different people and so do the associated ideas proposed by Goleman. He describes the results of realistic self-confidence above, but how do you know when you are doing that?

Gathering Information

You can compare your own knowledge and intentions with what is taking place in your environment. Then you can gather additional information and take action to support or change the situation.

Is competence a feeling of knowing what you are doing and if so, is that sufficient? If you are competent at doing something or taking charge of something, there will be evidence in the world that you can see and hear and point out to anyone who asks.

That is one component of self-awareness.

There is another aspect to knowing when you are competent. Are you relying on external validation from other people or the credentials you hold? These have their uses; minimally, they allow you to perform your function with enough latitude to become good at it.

Optimally, if you have the endorsement of a discerning expert in your field, you may be able to incorporate some of their standards in your yardstick for competence.

“The most reliable standard for competence is the product of your own research and experience.”

When you discover what you require of yourself when performing competently, with reference to your own values as well as criteria for competence that you have identified, you can answer fluently and confidently if asked ‘What are you doing that for?’

Clear Values And Self-awareness

To back up further, self-awareness is supported by knowing your own values. Most people run values at the back of their minds and have difficulty articulating what prompted them to take a particular course of action. When you interact with members of different cultures, either through travel or living in a multi-cultural context, different assumptions about proper behaviour bring some of your own assumptions to awareness.

You can identify values you hold by asking yourself what keeps you in your present job/home/car or other ongoing context. This applies whether your initial response is satisfaction or dislike. Another clue is accessible when you think you should do or not do something, but your inclination is the opposite.

If you explore your inclination, there is probably a value supporting it which is more important to you and further from your awareness than the value associated with the should.

And backing up even further, if you become aware of how you are using your attention in the moment, whether it is all or partly on your internal experience or the outside world at any you can alter the direction and quality to facilitate your thinking and interactions. Awareness of how your attention functions, allows you to access your presupposed values via your low level internal responses to others’ actions and your own and others’ expectations.

When you have these resources readily available to you, Goleman’s criteria for self-awareness will be a natural part of your repertoire.

The next article in this series is on Self Management.

By Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE.

Daniel Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence in Business Articles Series

  1. Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence – Introduction
  2. Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
  3. Self awareness and Emotional Intelligence
  4. Self Management and Emotional Intelligence; Three attributes
  5. Effective Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

(Note: If you would like to learn more about  NLP and Emotional Intelligence you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

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Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

If you found this article useful, share it!, 

Becoming emotionally intelligent In business

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Daniel Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence in Business

from NYT Education Life (7th April 2015)

On 7th April 2015 you could have read a short piece about Daniel Goleman’s criteria for emotional intelligence applied to business or the work environment. It gives a list of four recommended attributes for attending and behaving while at work.

In the article, these attributes are described briefly and attributed to those people in leadership positions who are thought to be particularly able. As is often the case with short pieces taken out of context on what you ‘should’ develop to enhance your success in something, there is no clear instruction given, though Goleman’s definitions are sufficiently descriptive to allow you to draw on your own experience to make meaning.

The four attributes are, and I quote:

  1. “Self awareness
  2. Self management
  3. Empathy
  4. Relationship skills”.

“The, four, attributes of Emotional Intelligence: Self awareness, Self management, Empathy, Relationship skills.”

Before we consider what these concepts mean and how to acquire or enhance them, there are questions worth raising.

The original article is based on the assumption that you want to demonstrate qualities associated with leadership, progress, success and by extension, reap social approval. You probably do, but not necessarily, so these are questions to bring you awareness of exercising your choice and agency.

Does the idea of embodying this class of quality appeal to you, personally? Does it fit and enhance your own concept of who you are and who you want to become? Might you have been subscribing to assumed ideas about what is appropriate and useful in society and business without noticing? Would you like to be more aware of frames offered to you by others so you can choose the ones you want, knowingly?

Whatever your answers, you might want to read on in case some of the qualities themselves appeal to you. They could assist your endeavours in contexts outside work, too.

What We Have In Store For You

Over the coming days we shall explore each of the four attributes with reference to the frames and assumptions that promote them. Then, for the ones you choose, you can learn how to acquire, enhance and personalise them in keeping with your own values and preferences. If you find some of them worthwhile, you will derive far more utility from them when you know what you are choosing them for and how you anticipate their functioning in your own life.

Bringing new qualities to life and giving existing but previously unnoticed qualities some discerning attention, provides you with your own frames for applying them in the world and the capacity to notice what frames are being offered to you by others.

We live in a world of frames ranging from That is OK, that is not OK to This is how we behave and think at work to This is how we behave at a weddings to This is how we think about other people to This is how we are supposed to think about other people.

Start to notice what is being assumed in pieces of writing and in familiar contexts and what is being assumed in different places in your world will begin to become more noticeable. How much of it can you influence with your choices when you have that awareness?

In the next article, we shall consider Self Awareness as described by Goleman, what else it could be and how to develop and apply all or parts of it.

By Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE.

Daniel Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence in Business Articles Series

  1. Goleman’s Four Components for Emotional Intelligence – Introduction
  2. Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
  3. Self awareness and Emotional Intelligence
  4. Self Management and Emotional Intelligence; Three attributes
  5. Effective Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

(Note: If you would like to learn more about NLP and Emotional Intelligence you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

Related articles

Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

If you found this article useful, share it!

If you want to prioritise work more effectively, do this

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Knowing What (Really) Matters

Having the ability to differentiate what is important from what is subject to awareness. Being aware that you live in a dynamic work where the only constant is change and that you need to bare this in mind at the moment engaging in any activity.

Having a plan and sticking to it regardless of how much the context that you are in changes may quite possibly not make you the most effective performer.

On the other hand, having a clear outcome backed up by an even clearer intention can provide a more useful frame at the time of organising and prioritising your work.

Here Is An Example

Imagine you are at work and have planned for the day ahead. You have filled out all the time slots in your diary so you can make the most out of your day and be as productive as humanly possible.

At around two o’clock, when you are in the middle of a major task that is extremely important to the project at hand, your boss calls you in to help him sort out an issue with a project he is handling himself. You like your boss and you know he will be fine with you declining his request, especially if you have an important task at hand.

There has been a sudden change in the environment that can potentially affect how you have planned your day whether it is positively of negatively will depend on how clear your intentions are.

Do you stop and help him or do you continue with the task at hand?

The answer to this will be easier if you have clear intentions for being at work.

Let us say that your intention for being productive is to cause a great impression on your boss so he starts noticing how good your skills are and possibly considers you for promotion. Then this is a good opportunity to meet your intentions.

On the other hand, if your intention for being productive is to finish work in time so you can go home and spend some quality time with your family, partner, friends, or whatever it is that you do after work, then your decision may be equally obvious and different.

Please note that this is just a quick example to illustrate how this pattern can help you prioritise at work to become more effective. There obviously are thousands of ways in which this could go, but the scope of this article is to simply provide you with an idea of how to use it.

So having intentions clear intentions can help you prioritise your work in order to manage your time and resources more effectively and achieve exceptional results.

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Edited by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE

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