Читать книгу NLP Workbook: A practical guide to achieving the results you want - Joseph O’Connor - Страница 10

What do you want? This is the definitive question in NLP. An outcome is what you want – a desired state, something you don’t have in your present state. Outcomes ‘come out’ when we achieve them, hence the name, and the first step towards achieving them is to think them through carefully. Why you want your outcome and whether you should want it are questions that need an answer. NLP outcomes are different from targets, goals and objectives because they have been carefully considered and meet certain conditions that make them realistic, motivating and achievable.

By setting an outcome we become aware of the difference between what we have and what we want. This difference is the ‘problem’. When you have set an outcome and are clear about your desired state, then you can plan to make the journey from one to the other. You become proactive, take ownership of the problem and start to move towards a solution. When you do not know what you want, there are many people who are only too delighted to set you to work getting their outcomes.

An outcome is not the same as a task. An outcome is what you want. A task is what you have to do to achieve it. Don’t do tasks until you set your outcomes.

Problems cannot be solved unless you have an outcome.

Change is a journey from an unsatisfactory present state towards a desired state – your outcome. You use various resources to help you make the journey.

NLP basic change

There are four basic questions you need to ask to make this journey successfully:

What am I moving towards? (The desired state or outcome)

Why am I moving? (The values that guide you)

How will I get there? (The strategy for the journey)

What if something goes wrong? (Risk management and contingency planning)

THINKING IN OUTCOMES

There are two aspects to outcomes:

Outcome thinking – deciding what you want in a given situation.

Outcome orientation – consistently thinking in outcomes and having a general direction and purpose in life. Until you know what you want, what you do will be aimless and your results will be random. Outcome orientation gives you control over the direction in which you travel. You need it in your personal life and it is essential in business.

The opposite of outcome thinking is ‘problem thinking’. Problem thinking focuses on what is wrong. Our society is caught up in problem thinking. We notice what is wrong and the next step is allocating blame, as if bad things only happen because people make them happen deliberately. This seems especially true in politics. Many people get lost in a labyrinth of problems, finding out their history, cost and consequences, asking questions like:

‘What’s wrong?’

‘How long has it gone on for?’

‘When did it start?’

‘Whose fault is it?’

‘Why haven’t you solved it yet?’

These questions focus on the past or present. They are also guaranteed to make you feel worse about the problem because they really push your nose in it.

Problems are difficult because the very act of thinking about them makes us feel bad and therefore less resourceful. We do not think as clearly, so it is harder to think of a solution.

Problem thinking makes the problem even harder to solve.

It is much more useful to think about problems in terms of contribution and ask:

‘What was the other person’s contribution towards that problem?’

‘What was my contribution towards the problem?’

‘How did those contributions add up to the problem?’

These questions lead us in a more useful direction: what do we want instead and what are we going to do about it?

HOW TO STRUCTURE OUTCOMES

There are nine questions you need to ask when working with outcomes. These are known as ‘the well-formed conditions’. When you have thought them through, then your outcome will be realistic, achievable and motivating. These conditions apply best to individual outcomes.

1 Positive: What do you want?

Outcomes are expressed in the positive. This is nothing to do with ‘positive thinking’ or ‘positive’ in the sense of being good for you. Positive here means ‘directed towards something you want’ rather than ‘away from something you wish to avoid’.

So, ask, ‘What do I want?’ not, ‘What do I not want, or want to avoid?’

For example, losing weight and giving up smoking are negative outcomes, which may partly explain why they are hard to achieve. Reducing waste, reducing fixed costs and losing fewer key staff are also negative outcomes.

How do you turn a negative into a positive outcome? By asking: ‘What do I want instead?’ and ‘What will this do for me?’

For example, if you want to reduce your debt, you can set the outcome to improve your cash flow.

2 Evidence: How will you know you are succeeding/have succeeded?

It is important to know you are on track for your outcome. You need the right feedback in the right quantity and it needs to be accurate. When you set an outcome you must think how you will measure the progress and with what degree of precision.

There are two kinds of evidence:

1 Feedback as you progress towards the outcome. How will you know you are on track?

2 Evidence for having achieved the outcome. How will you know that you have got it?

Ask:

‘How will I know that I am on course towards my outcome? What am I going to measure?’

‘How will I know when I have achieved this outcome? What will I see, hear or feel?’

3 Specifics: Where, when and with whom?

Where do you want the outcome? Where specifically? There may be places and situations where you do not want it. You may want to increase productivity, but only in certain departments. You may want to buy a house, but not if interest rates rise beyond a certain point.

When do you want it? You may need to meet a deadline or you may not want the outcome before a specific date, because other elements would not be in place to take advantage of it. Ask:

‘Where specifically do I want this?’

‘When specifically do I want this?’

‘In what context do I want this?’

4 Resources: What resources do you have?

List your resources. They will fall into five categories, some more relevant than others, depending on your outcome:

Objects. Examples would be office equipment, buildings and technology. There may be books you can read, television and video programmes you can see, tapes you can listen to.

People. For example, family, friends, acquaintances, your business colleagues, other business contacts.

Role models. Do you know anyone who has already succeeded in getting the outcome? Whom can you talk to? Has someone written about their experience?

Personal qualities. What qualities do you have or need to develop to achieve the outcome? Think of all your personal skills and capabilities.

Money. Do you have enough? Can you raise enough?

5 Control: Can you start and maintain this outcome?

How much is under your direct control? What can you do and what do others have to do to get this outcome? Who will help you? How can you motivate them to actually want to help you rather than feeling they have to help you? Ask:

‘What can I do directly to get this outcome?’

‘How can I persuade others to help me? What can I offer them that will make them want to help?’

6 Ecology: What are the wider consequences?

Here are some wider systemic questions to consider:

What time and effort will this outcome need? Everything has an ‘opportunity cost’. Spending time and effort on one thing leaves others neglected.

Who else is affected and how will they feel? Take different perspectives. In your business life consider your boss, your customers, your suppliers and the people you manage. In your personal life consider your spouse, your friends and your children. When you think about the ecology of the outcome, you may want to change it or think of a different way to get it.

What will you have to give up when you achieve this outcome? It is said that you can have anything you want if you are prepared to pay for it (and not necessarily in money).

What is good about the present situation? What do you want to keep? Losing valuable aspects of the present situation is the greatest cause of resistance to change both for individuals and organizations.

What else could happen when you get your outcome? There are always secondary consequences and sometimes these become more of a problem than the initial situation. (King Midas’s golden touch comes to mind…)

7 Identity: Is this outcome in keeping with who you are?

You can apply this at both the individual and organizational level. First the individual level. Suppose you want to manage a project. Being involved with this project might mean a great deal of time away from home. It might mean dropping other projects. It might take you away from your main career path. Although you would like to be involved, on balance it just does not suit you. You might ask, ‘What does working on this project accomplish for me?’ If the answer is to gain valuable experience, then there may be other projects, or training and consulting might be preferable.

The same is true at the organizational level. Each company has a certain culture and a set of core values that define its identity. Company outcomes need to be aligned with this corporate self. Many companies come unstuck through diversifying into areas in which they are inexperienced and which do not fit their identity.

Many a company has a strong identity that is characteristic of its founder and this can work to its advantage. Richard Branson of Virgin started an airline, which was very different from his original music business, but he and Virgin are identified with innovation, so the move was profitable.

8 How do your outcomes fit together?

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

If the outcome is too large, list all the obstacles that prevent you from getting it and set smaller outcomes to get over these barriers. Ask, ‘What prevents me from achieving this outcome?’

When you are knee deep in crocodiles, it’s hard to remember you went in to drain the swamp.

When the outcome is too small to be motivating and you feel bogged down with details, ask yourself, ‘What does this small outcome get for me?’ Connect the details to the larger, more motivating outcome of which it is part.

9 Action plan: What to do next?

Once you have put your plan through these questions, then you are ready to act, or perhaps delegate. When delegating in a business project, give your people the wider picture, so they can connect their tasks with the larger project. Make sure they know how to think outcomes through for themselves. This will ensure that their tasks are aligned with yours.

Remember the story of the two builders? Both were asked what they were doing. The first said, ‘I’m laying bricks.’ The second said, ‘I’m building a wonderful building.’

Guess which builder was more motivated and worked better?

HUGGS

Some outcomes are more important than others. I like to call the most important ones HUGGs (Huge, Unbelievably Great Goals). Not all the outcome conditions apply to HUGGs. They are large-scale outcomes and cannot be specified exactly.

HUGGs have the following qualities:

They are long term (5–30 years).

They are clear, compelling and easy to grasp.

They connect with your identity and core values.

You feel strongly about them. They engage your emotions – you feel good when you think about them.

When you first set them, they seem impossible. As time goes on, they start to manifest more and more.

They do not involve you sacrificing the present moment for a possible future, however good.

HUGGs can shape your life. Because they are long term and aligned with your core values, you will often achieve them in unpredictable, even paradoxical ways, or they will almost seem to ‘fall into’ your life like magic.

HUGGs often have an ‘away from’ element. If you do not achieve them, it hurts. This makes them more motivating. They often have an edge to them, too, like a deadline or set of conditions. For example, one friend of mine left his job to start a company of his own. He gave himself five years to make it a success. If it did not work out, he would find another job in his old profession.

The most powerful HUGGs often involve removing elements from your life. Sometimes the biggest leverage comes not from doing things to achieve them, but from stopping doing things that are in your way.

Examples of HUGGs:

become a published author

establish your own successful company

start a charitable foundation

move to another country

win a gold medal at the Olympic Games

become a millionaire

HUGGs are creative. They produce ongoing effects and they express your values. You create them, they are personal, you do not copy them from other people.

Keep track of your goals and review them regularly. Reward yourself when you get them and enjoy those times. They are what you have worked for and you deserve them. Enjoy the achievement and enjoy the journey. Collect those moments like beautiful pictures for a photograph album or press cuttings in a scrapbook. Go back to them. Use them to motivate yourself in the future. Let them be a source of inspiration, learning and pleasure. Never be in a position to think, ‘I’ve worked hard to get where I am … Where am I?’

BELIEFS

Beliefs are the rules we live by. They are our best guesses at reality and form our mental models – the principles of how the world seems to work, based on our experience. Beliefs are not facts, although we often mistake them for facts. We have beliefs about other people, about ourselves and about our relationships, about what is possible and about what we are capable of. We have a personal investment in our beliefs. ‘I told you so’ is a satisfying phrase because it means our beliefs were proved right. It gives us confidence in our ideas.

Some things are not influenced by our belief in them – the law of gravity, for example, will not change whether we believe in it or not. Sometimes we treat other beliefs – about our relationships, abilities and possibilities – as if they were as fixed and as immutable as gravity, and they are not. Beliefs actively shape our social world.

Beliefs act as self-fulfilling prophecies. They act as permissions as well as blocks to what we can do. If you believe you are not very likeable, it will make you act towards others in a way that may put them off and so confirm your belief, even though you do not want it to be true. If you believe you are likeable, then you will approach people more openly and they are more likely to confirm your belief.

NLP treats beliefs as presuppositions, not as truth or facts.

Beliefs create our social world.

Treating beliefs as presuppositions means NLP treats beliefs as principles of conduct. You act as if they are true and if you like the results, then you continue to act as if they are true. If your beliefs do not bring good results, you change them. You have choice about what you believe – though the belief that beliefs are changeable is in itself a challenging belief to many people!

Beliefs have to be acted on if they are to mean anything, therefore beliefs are principles of action, not empty ideals.