Читать книгу The Seven Secrets of Setting Goals With NLP - Damian Boone's Hamill - Страница 4

What I would like you to do to start off is to think about a goal you have in mind – something you want to achieve. This will give us the raw ingredients that we can shape into a Well-formed Outcome together. The goal that you bring to mind may be a major one or it might be something comparatively trivial. It doesn’t really matter. Whatever your goal is just write it down on a piece of paper in the way that you currently express it.

Now, looking at your goal as it is currently expressed I want to ask you this – is it written down in positive terms or stated as a positive? What I mean by this is, is your goal a description of what you do want to achieve, rather than a statement of something that you want to avoid or don’t want to have happen?

Sometimes a person’s goal is that they no longer want to experience something that is currently happening in their life. They have identified their goal as being an absence of something that is currently present. For example, someone might say –

“I don’t want to be overweight any more” or

“I want to stop arguing with my girlfriend” or

“I want to stop being late for work.”

This, of course, leads to difficulty. It is like the scenario in any number of action movies when one of the characters jumps into a taxi in order to escape from some peril and tells the driver to “Just drive!” Such imprecise instructions may actually leave the driver in a state of mental limbo. “Just drive!” may seem like a very simple instruction but without some sort of idea of the destination the driver is likely to go round in circles or end up somewhere else that is even less desirable than the starting point.

In establishing outcomes the same sort of limbo can occur. A goal expressed solely in terms of an absence of something may well create a vacuum and we know that nature abhors a vacuum. Unless a clear alternative is provided there is a real risk that the unwanted behaviour or circumstances will be drawn back into the person’s life in order to fill the vacuum. Brian Cade and Bill O’Hanlon comment on this tendency in their excellent book, A Brief Guide to Brief Therapy, when they observe:

“When people describe the differences in terms of an absence, it is useful to ask them what it is that they will be doing or feeling instead. Ultimately, it is easier to engage in a clearly defined alternative action than it is just to resist doing something without having some other behaviour to take its place... “

There is another reason why it is important to state outcomes positively – in terms of what we do want, rather than in terms of what we don’t. Whenever we create any sort of goal, indeed anytime we make any sort of statement – we create what NLP calls Internal Representations.

Internal Representations are the inner sensory building blocks we use to construct any type of experience. In simple terms they are the mental pictures, sounds, voices and feelings we make in order to be able to think about things. When people use colloquial terms such as seeing things in their ‘mind’s eye’ – they are referring to the same thing. In NLP we call them Internal Representations or ‘IR’s for short. The thing is, our unconscious mind tends to use our IRs as a blueprint for action - instructions for what to seek out and create. If you like, creating an IR is like inputting a destination into our mental ‘Sat Nav’ system. When we state our goal as an absence of something we necessarily have to form Internal Representations of whatever that is. Let me give you an example -

Don’t think of a purple kangaroo!!

What just happened? If you are like many people you may have found that you had to initially think of a purple kangaroo in order to try and dismiss it from your thinking. Perhaps you thought of a kangaroo and then mentally put a big ‘X’ mark across it. Perhaps you thought of it and then pushed it out of the way, or changed its colour, or switched it for an elephant or whatever. The key point is that you almost certainly had to think of the kangaroo in the first place – even if only briefly.

If we look at this phenomenon in terms of the three examples I mentioned earlier of outcomes that weren’t stated in the positive, we can reasonably assume that someone would be creating vivid mental pictures of:

1) looking in the mirror and seeing an overweight reflection staring back,

2) realistic images of the girlfriend’s face during an argument, and

3) scenes of rushing late and disheveled into the office.

This isn’t exactly helpful. If we want to stop doing or experiencing something, do we want to keep reminding ourselves what that thing is and what it looks like? Can our unconscious mind be expected to understand that this is not what you want?

The psychologist, Dr Michael Yapko, has commented that the most important first rule in learning clinical hypnosis is that whatever we give our attention to we magnify in our awareness. This is a modern statement of the old Chinese wisdom that ‘Qi flows where attention goes’.

If we effectively magnify, energise and call into existence, so to speak, whatever it is that we think about, it doesn’t really make much sense to think about what it is that you don’t want!

The solution to this dilemma should be pretty apparent really. Create and focus upon representations of what you do want, whatever it is that you want to be present in your life in place of whatever was there before. By doing that you are giving your unconscious mind a clear message and vision of what it is that you want it to help you achieve. For some people this is actually pretty straightforward and they can get the hang of this readily. For others it is a little bit more complicated.

Some people have experienced the situation that they are seeking to change for so long that they have quite simply never thought what things would be like if the situation changed. Because they have only thought of their outcome as being the absence of one thing, they cannot conceive of what could be present in its place.

Fortunately, there is an interesting technique that can help and it is called ‘The Miracle Question’.

This method was devised by a famous solution-focused therapist, the late Steve de Shazer and his colleagues at the Brief Family Therapy Centre in Milwaukee. This same method is now a key component of both solution-focused coaching and solution-focused consulting in the world of business – and has become widely regarded as an essential tool in the kit bag of any effective change agent.

The Miracle Question is designed to elicit a perception of a world without an existing problem. It was expressed by de Shazer as follows in his book Clues: Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy:

“Suppose that one night, while you were asleep, there was a miracle and this problem was solved. How would you know? What would be different?”

This simple and elegant question focuses attention on a future where the problem does not exist, where other things are occurring that have taken the place of the problem. To answer it properly, you have to create Internal Representations that exclude the current situation and replace it with something different. So, if you’ve been struggling to phrase your goal in a positive manner – to describe what you do want rather than what you don’t - take a moment or two now to ask yourself the Miracle Question. Let me rephrase it for you and ask it in a way that perhaps even more exactly suits what we are doing here:

“Suppose that one night, while you were asleep, a miracle happened and your goal was achieved. When you woke up in the morning how would you know? What specifically would you notice that would let you know this miracle had happened?”

Take a moment or two to reflect upon and answer that question. Write down what you discover.

Hopefully, you now have the ability to phrase your outcome in a positive manner and you understand why it is important for you to do so. Just to really integrate the point with examples, let’s look at how we could positively phrase the three poorly formed outcomes we were using as examples earlier.

1)“I don’t want to be overweight any more” could instead be expressed as:

“I wish to achieve a healthy and comfortable bodyweight.”

2)“I want to stop arguing with my girlfriend” would be better expressed as:

“I wish to have a warm and harmonious relationship with my girlfriend.”

3)“I want to stop being late for work” could be more usefully phrased as:

“My goal is to arrive for work in good time each morning.”

There we are – stating outcomes in the positive – the first part of our Well-formed Outcomes process.