Neurons

PERSUASION:

THE CHALLENGE OF MODELING

Once you know that your mind moves out in a linear way, thinking one thing, then another, you can learn the basic NLP Strategy Model which is the foundation for NLP Modeling.  In the field of NLP, this has led to modeling a good number of things that we do in the moment— get up in the morning, make a decision, spell accurately, buy a product, develop a strategy for eating healthily and moderately, exercise regularly, etc.  But the Strategy Model does not work well for activities that occur over time or that involve layers of thought.

That’s where knowing and understanding how to work with the other way your mind works becomes important.  What is that other way that your mind works?  We call it self-reflexivity— your mind reflects back on itself.  And when it does, you create states-about-states, thoughts-about-thoughts, feelings-about-feelings, thoughts-about-feelings, feelings-about-thoughts, etc.  This complexity of your mental-emotional functioning describes the systemic nature of consciousness and is modeled by the Meta-States Model.

One consequence that has resulted from the Meta-States Model is that we are now able to model the structure of experiences that are complex, that are layered by multiple frames of mind, that are systemic, and that result in gestalt states.  A “gestalt” state is a state that is “more than and different from the sum of the parts.”  As a systemic state it is an emergent property— one that arises due to the system that’s created by the layered frames or states.  Courage is such a gestalt state which is why the “parts” of courage and the gestalt of “courage” itself is not understood by adding up all of the parts.  It is “more than” and “different from” the parts.

That brings me to persuasion.  The state of being persuasive and being able to effectively influence the minds and hearts of people is not a simple primary state.  Nor is it just one or two meta-states.  It is a gestalt state— more than and different from the sum of the parts.

Given that, when I first began modeling persuasive people like Nelson Mandela, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc., I collected as many of the component “parts” or variables as I could.  I then looked for the relationships between these variables and from there identified the basic strategies that make up the structure of what we call “persuasion.”  This is the basic content of the book, Inside-Out Persuasion, as well as the training by the same title.

And there is more!   There’s a reason for more.  That’s because so much of what is called “persuasion” is actually manipulation.  It is not healthy or respectful persuasion, it is deception, trickery, psychological maneuvers and techniques designed to get you to go along with someone else’s goals without any consideration that it is to your benefit.  And I did not want to model that!  My goal was to model healthy, respectful, win/win, authentic, and ethical persuasion.  I did not want to model “outside in” persuasion —the tricks that manipulators use to get their own way.  I wanted to model “inside-out” persuasion— where the persuasion comes from the character of the person.

No wonder modeling ethical persuasion is so challenging.   It not only involves what you say and do (the external factors), it involves who you are and how you think and feel (the internal factors).  It not only involves your psychology— your understandings about influencing the minds and hearts of people, the value of your product or service, the way to communicate in a way that is winsome.  It also involves your identity and character— your intentions, openness, authenticity, compassion, win/win orientation — in a word, your person.

Why?  Because the most effective persuaders persuade from their person— who they are and the quality of their person.  That’s why merely being in their presence influences.  When they walk into a room, when they interact, when they speak, when they meet you — their very presence carries a force of persuasion.  Sometimes we call that “charisma” which means grace.  Now, how does that work?  What’s the structure of that?

The short answer to that is the persuasion is inside-out, it starts with the person him or herself being persuade and persuade-able.  Ah, we are back to the basic Neuro-Semantic theme — first apply to self.  That is, before you can truly be persuasive with others, you have to achieve self-persuasion.  Check that one out— How skilled are you in persuading yourself about something?  Is there anything that you know would be good for you, useful, effective, that would make your life better— and yet you are not “persuaded” to the point of actually doing it?  If so, that’s the place to start.

Here’s another clue.  What I found in my research and modeling was that “the structure of persuasion is very similar to the structure of high quality coaching.” (Inside-Out Persuasion, p. 35).  The relational and communication skills of coaching are, at the same time, the skills for high quality persuasion.

From: L. Michael Hall

2017 “Neurons” #20

April 31, 2017

The Matrix Model Series #7

THE POWER MATRIX

And the Foundation of all Your Skills

Are you in charge of you? Do you have the power to take charge of your innate powers and of your choices as you move through life? Human beings need power—the power to take control of themselves. The term power literally, and simply, means “the ability to do” something. The word power speaks about both the resources and the ability which is require to do things— to take effective action in the world. So if power literally means, “to do,” then there’s nothing inherently negative about the idea of power even though many have connected negative beliefs to power.

Further and most delightfully, you like every other person in the world, come with four innate powers—four responses that you and only you can make. Did you know that? One of the challenges in communicating this is that what follows will sound so simple, so obvious, and so non-consequential, that you will be tempted to dismiss it. Are you ready? The four innate powers that you have are the powers to think, to feel, to speak, and to act. Simple, right?

Yes on the surface, yet there’s a depth to this fact that eludes most people. The depth? These four innate powers establish the foundation for all of your skills, and for that matter, all of the skills that are available on Planet Earth. These four powers describe how you are able to turn a talent into an actual competency. There is not a skill in this world that is not made out of the stuff of these four powers. Both the simplest skills that you can learn in a matter of minutes and the most advanced skills that take decades to develop are comprised of these four innate responses. Isn’t that amazing? Given that, what new skills are you planning to develop this year?

Further, each one of these responses is a rich and complex response. Your mental responses or powers range from representing ideas, framing, believing, understanding, deciding, identifying, imaging, remembering and that’s a short list. Your emotional powers are just as extensive and speak about your ability to translate thought into somatic experiences — otherwise known as emotions. These are your two private or internal responses– powers that are yours and that no one can take from you. They are yours; you generate them.

Your verbal responses or powers are not just that you can speak, but that you can use words in dozens and dozens of ways to achieve a wide range of outcomes. You can assert, you can ask, you can bless, curse, use words to sell, negotiate, connect, disconnect, hypothesize, etc. Your action responses or powers refer to all of the things that you can physically do as you move, act, gesture, etc. to make real your ideas and outcomes.

Given that each person has these four powers and that is it theirs to develop and to use—and that nobody can take these from you—how could any human act like a victim?  How could any person feel powerless, out-of-control, controlled, irresponsible, passive, etc.? The answer is paradoxical. At some level the person has given his powers away by powerfully thinking and emoting and speaking and acting in ways to deny his powers. Every “victim” has exercised his power to give away his power to some trigger. Sometimes being a victim is a very powerful response.

Another reason is that the person probably has failed to recognize and own his powers. That’s why on Day One of APG, the very first pattern that we do is the Power Zone Pattern which is designed to enable a person to begin to recognize her powers and to own them. We first meta-state our everyday states with awareness of the powers. Then we meta-state ownership of that state. And then we often meta-state fallibility to that ownership-of-power state because, contrary to the title of Robin’s book, Unlimited Power, we humans do not have unlimited power. All of our powers are limited, they are fallible, that is, they are “liable to error.”

When it comes to power, Martin Seligman mapped out a critical distinction many years ago in his studies of learned pessimism and learned optimism. He and his research assistants discovered that they could get all sorts of animals, from frogs to dogs, to learn to be a victim— to learn as it were, “I’m the problem, there’s no hope of change, and it will last forever.” They set up experimental situation where the thing learned was that “nothing I can do” can make any difference. The pain, the distress, the undesirable environment will not alter no matter what I do. Once learned, then the animal would just lie down and take it.

Later the research team learned that they could change things for these animals. By dragging the dog off of the electrified grid, the dog could learn “optimism,” that is, “there is something that can change things.” “I can change things.” “I am not a victim.” And what’s even more fascinating is that once the animals had “learned optimism,” they could not be re-taught “learned pessimism.”

This means that once a person learns awareness of her innate powers and that she can always do something, then she makes a meta-level learning. “I am not a victim anymore than I believe I am.” “No one can make me feel anything, whatever I feel is what I generate through my thinking, believing, expecting, etc.”

The Power Matrix also contains all your beliefs (meanings) about what you can and cannot do. Within it are your intentions— what you’re trying to achieve as you take action to do the things you do. Within this matrix also are many other key experiences: self-confidence, self-efficacy, ego-strength, proactivity (taking the initiative), etc.

You are a doer—there’s something within all of us that keeps urging us to be creativity engaged in things— wanting to do our best, wanting to make a difference. This aspect of the self-actualization drive generates our general restlessness and sometimes initiates our dissatisfaction with the way things are. What do you want to achieve? How many things do you want to achieve? How well do you tap into your response-able powers and take the initiative? These questions all relate to the power matrix.

THE SELF MATRIX

And Your Unconditional Value

Do you deserve to be here?  Do you deserve the things you have, your opportunities, your friends, your place in life, your loved ones?  Strange questions.  Yet people commonly ask themselves these questions.  They wonder about whether they have a right to exist, to live, to love, to act on their goals, etc.  These are ontological questions— questions of being.  There are more.  Who am I?  What is my nature?  What is life about?

In terms of meaning-making, the answer to all of these questions build up the construct of your self-image and self-esteem.  Now “normally,” if you had parents who graduated from Parenting 101 and got certified that they were mature enough and skilled enough to parent, then these questions were answered in a healthy and robust way in how you were parented.  That is, as they loved and cared for you, as they nurtured and gratified your needs in an age-appropriate way, you built a healthy mental map about yourself:

“I am loved and valued.  I count.  I am important.  I am respected and have the right to be here, and have the challenge to be my best self.”

You value yourself as a human being because you are a human being.  There are no conditions, no “ifs, but, or whens…”  Youare a human being and that makes you innately significant and important.  Consequently, you don’t have to prove anything.  You don’t have to meet any conditions to be acceptable, loved, respected, etc.  You have already met every condition that’s required— you are human.  We call this “self-esteem.”

Yet many have some very limiting and unuseful beliefs about self-esteem.  Commonly, we talk about one’s self-esteem beinghigh or low.  But either way, that would make it conditional.  And if conditional, then we have to ask— What is your self-esteem conditioned upon?  Do you have to be so smart, so fast, so strong, so pretty, so rich, or what?  “Esteem” speaks about estimating the value of something, rating the worth of something.  And if you rate your human worth on anything external like wealth, position, status, job, etc., then it is conditional and then you ask those ontological questions— “Am I good enough yet?  Do enough people like me so that I’m okay?”

Carl Rogers urged that we treat each other with unconditional positive regard.  No conditions!  You are important because you are human.  The Jewish, Christian, and Islam faiths begin from the idea that we are all “made in the image and likeness of God.”  Again, no conditions.  You are born valuable.  You don’t have to prove anything, reach any conditions.  You are free to become your best self.  You are free to express the potentials and possibilities that are clamoring inside.

Now for those who did not get to construct this kind of healthy self-image and self-esteem from the beginning, the next question is, “How do you esteem yourself as unconditionally valuable as a human being?”  And the answer is?  The answer is that you simply assert it.  You declare just as healthy parenting would declare it and then you act that way.  Act with dignity, respect, and innate worth.  In Neuro-Semantics we have developed a pattern for this as we access three states— acceptance, appreciation, and then awe (unconditional value).  We then apply acceptance and appreciation to our doing selfand then we apply awe to our being self.  This meta-stating process means that we put our being self inside of the frame of “unconditional value” and feel a stat of awe about oneself.

For many, doing that is very weird and strange and uncomfortable.  They are not use to thinking this way or feeling this way about themselves.  That’s okay.  Everything takes some getting used to.  This will require repeating the process until it begins to feel familiar and comfortable.  If there’s objections in the back of someone’s mind and they are asking themselves, “But is it right?”  “Is it okay?”  “Won’t I become selfish or self-centered?”  These are to be expected.  It speaks about the world that they have grown up in —one that did not respect their innate sacredness as a human being.  It speaks about the limiting beliefs that their parents operated from.  Again, repetition is the key.  Keep doing it.  Keep repeating the unconditional value assertion.  Just keep asserting this new frame until it becomes your frame of mind.

Without centering yourself with the dignity assertion that establishes your unconditional self-esteem, your intention in life will always be to proof yourself.  And with that as the purpose in the back of your mind, then whatever you do will have an ulterior motive.  Then you will tend to use situations and people to be okay, to be a somebody.  Conversely, the healthy alternative is to start from the frame that your worth is a given.  Then, having nothing to prove, you are free to express every potential that is within you to express.

This is the foundation for being centered, for taking criticism positively, for treating mistakes as a context for learning, for staying open and defenseless when blackmailed or threaten in some way, and for much more.  And now you know why we start here on Day One of APG (Accessing Personal Genius).

If there is a constant in the field of persuasion, it is searching for the latest persuasion technique.  Having read dozens and dozens of books on persuasion in research and preparation for the book I wrote, Inside-Out Persuasion, I came upon that drive again and again.  And when I have talked about persuasion in some Introductions and with people individually, persuasion techniques seemed to always come up.

“What can I do to be even more persuasive?  What technique can I use?”  “What the one technique that will guarantee winning someone to my point of view?”

Now without doubt, there are many.  There are books that focus exclusively on techniques.  These are the how to books that skip the whole question of ethics and goes right to how to persuade someone to buy your product or agree with your conclusions.  Why do they skip ethics?  Simple.  It’s too difficult.  It sounds too moralistic.  There’s no immediate payoff for it, in fact, it may cost you sales.

Not only is there this hunger for fool-proof techniques that will magically get the results you want, but there also seems to be a hunger for the newest and most subtle technique, especially secret techniques.  And it would be untrue for me to say that there aren’t any.  There are.

But that is going about healthy, authentic, and inside-out persuasion the wrong way.  In fact, I believe that the most powerful “techniques” for influencing another person’s mind and heart are processes that we can hardly call a “technique” at all.  And as a Meta-Coach, you already know them.  You were trained in them.  What you may not know is how to use them effectively or how to recognize them as persuasion techniques.

First is the incredible influential technique of attentive and caring listening.  If you take the time to be with someone and listen empathically to them with full presence and care, doing that will enable a person to feel really heard, validated, and valued.  It will also deeply influence that person.  Obviously you are earning the right to be heard.  Less obviously, you are influencing what that person focuses on, where he goes in his conversation, the solutions he finds, etc.  Now imagine that!  Listening persuades.  You can persuade by attending to someone so that the person comes to value and care about your attention.  It becomes a reward, an interpersonal reward that she seeks out.

Doesn’t attentive listening influence you?  Do you not warm up to the person and want to return the favor?  Do you not begin to like the person more and feel safe with that person?  Are you not more willing to give that person a hearing?

Then there is questioning.  On the surface it seems that questioning is about obtaining information and finding out things, yet it is about so much more.  By your questions, you direct a person’s attention and invite him to go off in a certain line of thought.  By questioning, you raise awarenesses or resources that she may never have thought of.  By asking questions, you can draw people out so that they attain a new and larger perspective about something.

To ask a question is to frame a direction for the conversation.  Not only that, but by questioning you can also set frames, pull frames apart, and outframe.  Pretty powerful things— questions.  The Meta-Model questions is described as a “precision model” because by the questions, you enable the person to think and speak more clearly.  Think about that.  Isn’t that amazing?  No wonder questioning is a central persuasion skill and a technique for influencing minds and hearts.

You can see this in mind-lines, that is, the questions that facilitate reframing.  In the book Mind-Lines: Lines for Changing Minds, we put together a formula for 26 ways to frame and reframe something, especially complaints, objections, excuses, limiting beliefs, etc.  And they are formulated mostly as questions— questions that get a person to think about things from another point of view— another frame.

This is especially true of meta-questions.  How much more persuasive do you think you’d be if you regularly asked some meta-questions— those higher level questions that orient a person in a direction that they really want to go?  Would you enjoy doing that?  Would that enrich your sense of yourself, your identity, and your skills as a coach?

Attentive listening with care and asking carefully designed questions are actually some of the unrecognized and hidden persuaders that are all around us.  We swim in this environment without even recognizing the power or influence of these processes.  The bottom line is that you do not have to go off and find some esoteric secret technique for persuasion— you have some very powerful tools in your hands already.  Here are two of them.  There are more.

From: L. Michael Hall

2017 “Neurons” #14

March 27, 2017

The Matrix Model Series #2

THE HOLOGRAM OF THE

MATRIX MODEL

The whole of your inner world, the inner construct of your Matrix, where you play your unique inner game is contained in the State Matrix.  It is all there, but you do have to have trained eyes and ears to see and hear it.  Otherwise it is invisible to you and you will see nothing.  Like a hologram, if you know how to “read” it, the state matrix not only grounds it in reality, but it also has within it the whole—the whole of the Matrix.  For this reason, we begin with the state matrix.

As a holistic term the word “state” refers to the human system, that is, to the mind-body-emotion system.  It refers to a person’s state of mind as well as one’s state of body and state of emotion.  In everyday talk we separate these terms as if they refer to different things while in truth they refer to a singular system, the human system which is made up of mind, body, and emotion.  Separating them occurs in language, not in reality.  That’s because where there is mind there is body and emotion.  Where there is emotion there is mind and body.  Where there is body there is mind and emotion.

This gives you three ways into the human system.  You can use the royal road of mind, body, and/or emotion to get into a person’s inner world.  Actually this offers you a very wide-range of questions and areas for exploring if you want to understand a person on that person’s terms.  Consider.

The State of Mind.  What are you thinking about right now?  What stream of thoughts are coming by your awareness?  What are you attending to?  And if you are selecting X to focus on, how are you representing that?  If I were to peak into the theater of your mind and see what you are seeing, what’s playing on the screen?  Are you representing it as close or far, bright or dim, big or small, etc.?  what are the cinematic features that you are using as you process that information?

All of those questions are primary state questions.  We can now step back one level and ask many, many more questions to find out what’s in the back of the mind.  Given that you are thinking about X, what do you believe about that?  What is the evidence that leads you to believe that?  What is your understanding about that?  What memories come to mind?  What can you anticipate as you imagine taking that idea into your future?  These are first-level meta-questions and only begin to explore this area.  In the book, Neuro-Semantics, there is a list of 102 meta-questions at multiple levels.

The State of Body.  What you might not immediately think of your head and brain as part of your body, they certainly are.  They are made up of cells and nerve pathways and the neuro-chemistry that determines which of many areas of the brain are processing information at multiple levels.  And from there, messages are sent to the rest of your body influencing all of the various nervous systems — autonomic nervous system, immune nervous system, sympathetic nervous system, etc.  The state of your body is highly influenced by what you eat and drink, your sleep, your exercise, your health, etc.  It is within your body— your neurology, your physiology— that you think and feel.  A simple head cold can at times drastically affect the quality of your thinking and emoting.

Further, how you use your body will influence both thinking and emoting.  Your gestures, your movements, your posture, how you hold yourself, and much more.  All of these facets of your body can powerfully affect your human system.

The State of Emotion.  Then there are your kinesthetic sensations, both internal and external, which give you the ability to “feel” (sense) things and when you add a cognition to them, you have an “emotion.”  These energy impulses move you, create motion within you, motion to move out from where you are, hence e-motion (originally spelled, ex-motion).  An emotion is an urge to move, to act, to do something.  In the so-called “positive” emotions we move out to keep doing what we are doing, it is the “go” system.  In the so-called “negative” emotions, we move out to stop— to “Stop, Look, Listen, and Change” because something is not working and/or because something is dangerous before us.

This is NLP 101.  It is one of the really valuable aspects of the NLP Communication Model because with this we can now do what is popularly known as Emotional Intelligence.  Long before that became the popular term for it, we called it State Management.

• State Awareness (emotional awareness) is the beginning place.  What state are you in?  How much of that state are you experiencing?  After all, it is an energy field driven by your metabolism.   How pure or mixed is that state?
• State or Emotional Monitoring. When does it go up or down?  With whom?  What triggers it?  Is the trigger an external stimulus or an internal one?  When is your state at its best?  When is it at its worse.  How do you influence it?  How do you generate this state via your thoughts and beliefs?
• State or Emotional Regulation. Now that you know what it is and a little bit about how it works, what can you do to turn it up or turn it down at will?  What factors gives you more management over the state?  What beliefs, understandings, decisions, permissions, etc. empower you to regulate it to serve your well-being?  What state interrupts (pattern interrupts) do you prefer to use so that you can manage your states better?
• State or Emotional Relating. With whom do you want to access a particular state and offer that to the person?  How easily can you access care, compassion, love, patience, thoughtfulness, calmness, etc.?  What are your best states for rapport building, connecting, communicating, relating, negotiating, etc.?

From: L. Michael Hall

2017 “Neurons” #17

April 17, 2017

The Matrix Model Series #5

SELF

AND THE MATRIX MODEL

Given the de-emphasis on content in NLP and the focus on structure and process, if I had designed the Matrix Model abstractly or conceptually, I would never have even thought about including the five content matrices within the model.  It would never have occurred to me to do that.  Yet I did.  And I did so because there is one content which is extremely close to how you process information and create meaning.  There is also one content that “you never leave home without.”  You take that content everywhere you go and, in fact, you see the world through that content.

What is that content?  It is the content of your self.  Developmentally, the first thing you invent and the first meanings that you construct involve you as a person— Who am I?  What is my value?  Am I valued?  Am I loveable?  Do I have worth?  What can I do?  Who will be my friend?  Do I count?  As you and I enter the world, these are the first questions we seek to answer.  And fortunately, Developmental Psychology has a lot to say about this as does Phenomenology.  Accordingly, in the Matrix Model we have five aspects of self —aspects that function very much the way any perceptual filter or meta-program functions, we interpret the world through the content of the meanings, intentions, and states that we have created about Self.

For short memorable terms, we have designated The Content Matrices in terms of five key aspects of the self—

• Self is you as a person, as a living human being, your being— your worth, value, significance, loveability, etc.  In terms of being human, Self is your construct of your self-esteem.
• Power is you in terms of what you do, your behavior, your skills, competencies, talents, and achievements.  Normally we speak about this as your self-confidence— your trust in yourself that you can do something.  Here also is self-efficacy, your sense of responsibility, taking initiative, and being proactive.
• Others is you in terms of your relationships, your social self— who you are as you connect, relate, and get along with others.  This is you as a friend, lover, parent, student, teacher, and other key social roles in life.  It shows up as your social panorama.
• Time is you as a temporal being.  You live in time and time defines your sense of mortality.  Once you construct this aspect of life, you begin to live in the three time zones and to spend thought and energy to each.  As a temporal self you have a relationship to time and define yourself in terms of your age and your stage of life.
• World is you in all of the roles that you play in the many domains or dimensions of life.  In any domain or world where you spend much time, you also tend to play various roles which define who you are in that area.  Your role self entails your status, position, titles, etc.  And just as others see you in terms of that role, you also define yourself in terms of it.

All of this describes you— you in five dimensions, experiences, or aspects which, in turn, provides a rich description (and definition) of who you are.  Who are you?  To answer, you will talk about these five aspects of your life.   Who you are also determines what you perceive in the world and how you interpret things (the meaning matrix).  That’s because as it has often been said— You see the world, not as it is, but through who you are.

To be more specific, you see the world through the lens of your personal sense of worth and value (Self, self-esteem), the more conditional and lower your self-esteem, the more you see the world as threatening and overwhelming.  You see the world through the lens of your personal powers as you wonder about whether you can handle various tasks or roles or challenges.  The weaker your sense of your fundamental powers, the more you see the world as threatening and over-powering.  The less your sense of control over yourself and in owning your powers, the more you feel a victim in the world rather than a victor.

You see the world through the lens of your social self— your social skills, your ability to connect, your sense of being valuable to others, your social emotions, and your competencies to handle a wide range of social experiences from gaining rapport, sharing humor, conversing, negotiating, selling, to supporting, inspiring, etc.  The weaker or less enhancing your social self, the more frightening the social world will seem and the less able to handle the things required to make friends.

You see the world through the lens of your temporal self— your sense of your own beginnings, current experiences, and anticipated experiences.  As a temporal self you can hold in mind events that have happened and use them to define yourself and operate from the states that you once experienced just as you can anticipate future events that will happened and use them to determine what and how you think and feel today.  As a temporal self you can live in the past or in the future.

Finally, you can see the world through the lens of your role self— the roles that you have learned to play, the titles or statuses that you have attained, and you can so identify yourself in terms of those roles that to lose a role could trigger an “identity” crisis.  Your role self may over-lap with some of your social self, or not.  Over-identifying with any role tends to make you as a person less flexible, less able to adjust to new situations, and less authentic since your role tends to become your persona.

You, who you are, and how you understand your person, what you can do, your relationships, your experience with events over time, and the roles that you play in life, operate as a very powerful and determining meaning-making lens.  This is why there are times that you cannot understand something until you change.  This is also why that sometimes when you change, the whole world that you know changes.

 INTENTIONALITY AND THE MATRIX MODEL

If meaning is what you and I construct as we process information and “hold an idea” in mind, one of the additional mysteries and wonders of human meaning-making is that behind every meaning is an intention.  Intending to do something is both another aspect of meaning as well as another hidden aspect of consciousness.  In fact, we often use these two words, meaning and intention, as synonyms.  We say, “What do you mean by doing that?” when we are actually asking, “What’s yourintention in doing that?”

In Neuro-Semantics, one of the ways that we work with intention is to contrast it to attention.  That’s because these are two aspects of consciousness.  To be consciously aware is to have something on your mind (your attentions) and to have something in the back of your mind about it (your intentions).  One is what you are mostly aware of.  It is your focus.  Your attention goes out to some object in the world and that’s what you focus on.  When you do that, we say that you are concentrating.  You are centering your attention on one thing.  How are your concentration powers?  Your ability to focus your attention?

To bring this up is to bring up a subject that is mis-named, Attention Deficit.  Typically, when a child or adult is diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD, or ADHD, the H for hyperactive), the suggestion is that the person cannot focus or concentrate.  In the few cases where this is actually true (only about 4% of those diagnosed) there is a leison in the brain or a disturbance of brain chemistry.  The great majority of the time, the deficit is caused by the person not caring about the object of attention that he needs to attend to.  He doesn’t want to do mathematics.  She doesn’t care about the grammar lesson.

Most of the time the problem is not at the level of attention.  In fact, when you talk with the person the problem is that there are too many attentions.  He doesn’t focus because his attention keeps shifting and changing from all of the things distracting him.  He doesn’t have a deficit of attention, but an over-abundance of attentions.  The real problem is at the level of intention— he does not want to focus on that particular item.  She doesn’t care about it.  Neither of them have any intention, interest, purpose, or motive to do so.  The problem is actually Intention Deficit Disorder.

Your intention is that area of your mind where you set the meaning of your purpose.  Start with a wish, “I wish I could…” then develop it into a want, “I want to be able to…”  From there cultivate a greater understanding about it so that you really, reallywant it.   Now you are setting an intention, a goal, a purpose, a direction, a focus.   “I want to become a tennis pro.”   “I want to get to the Olypmics in 2020.”  “I intend to start my own Coaching business.”

Now in NLP we often say that “energy goes where attention goes.”  In Neuro-Semantics our focus on intentionality has led us to add another line.  “Energy goes where attention goes as directed by intention.”  That’s because there is greater power in intention than in attention.   Accordingly, we developed the Intentionality Pattern as a way to find, discover, and/or create higher and higher intentions.  By doing that, you can then take an intentional stance in life about what you value and consider highly significant.  From there, you can begin to align your attentions to your higher intentions.  Do that and you will become a man or woman on purpose.

Now you are not merely creating accurate and precise meanings, you are developing a much higher level—meaningfulness. This enriches your meanings so that they are rich, exciting, and inspirational.

Intentionality is also one of the key ingredients in the flow state.  In Neuro-Semantics we call the flow experience “the genius state” and see intentionality as one of the prerequisites for being able to access that state.  With a focused intentionality, you can now turn that flow experience on and off at your will.  Ah, “will” that’s the old word for what we’re talking about.  Rollo May noted this in his book, Love and Will (1969).  So today, when we align attention to intention, that generates a gestalt state that we call “will” or “will power.”   After all, what is will power but the ability to get yourself to do what you say you want to do and do it when you want to do it?

That’s it, isn’t it?  And how valuable is that?  This is not the old Victorian “will power” of forcing or making yourself do what you don’t want to do.  That’s no fun.  And, you don’t have to develop “will power” in that way.  Rather, by establishing your intentions, and then your intentions-of-your-intentions by meta-stating yourself up through the levels of intentions, you can step into some of your higher states (meta-states) and then align your attentions to your intentions.  Do that and then you can get yourself to do what you want to do—you’ll establish a never-ending motivation.

You will then have a vision that will drive you forward and create a robust motivation.  Ah, “motivation,” another big bugaboo in today’s world.  People are always complaining about this, “I just don’t have any motivation.”  “He has a motivation problem, he just doesn’t feel like doing that.”  “We have a motivation problem in that department.”  The good news is that all of that is non-sense, unuseful framing, and a cognitive fallacy.  With us humans there is no such thing as lack of motivation, what we have is a lack of intentionality.  We lack vision, direction, and purpose—the key aspects of intention.

There is much, much more to say about the Intention matrix, and I have said much more in various places.  See The Matrix Model (2016) or see chapter 12, “Unleashing Your Intentional Self” in Get Real (2016).