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Communication is More Than Words

WRITINGSRELATIONSHIPS

Deborah Colleen Rose

1/15/20253 min read

a woman standing on a beach holding a seashell
a woman standing on a beach holding a seashell

This may be the first time you are being exposed to some of these ideas. Or maybe you’ve heard them before but just stated in a different way. The ideas we are about to discuss are NLP Strategies and are an excellent philosophy for inspirational relationships, both professionally and personally.

NLP – Neuro Linguistic Programming explores the relationships between how we think (neuro), how we communicate (linguistic) and our patterns of behavior and emotion (programs). Richard Bandler is accredited for devising these ideas and techniques and are based upon the study of excellence and how to reproduce it, time and time again.

And even though some of them may at first be challenging to take on board, when you begin by just acting ‘as if’ they’re true the magic occurs in your relationships at work and also at home!

The map is not the territory

Because we all have different internal sensory preferences, (some prefer seeing, some hearing, others feeling), values, beliefs, personality types, we each filter the information coming to us from the territory - everything outside our heads - in our personally individual ways. These become our own unique ‘maps’ of the world, and none therefore is, or can be, the territory.

Everyone responds to their own maps of reality: by pacing each of them in their own ‘language’ - i.e. ‘listening’ to their spoken AND UNSPOKEN communications, using NLP techniques, we are honoring their map, so that we can then help them to stretch its boundaries and their views of the world.

Behind every behavior is a positive intention

People sometimes express themselves in unexpected, even unacceptable, behaviors: but we have to recognize that each behavior is the result of them making the best choice they perceive to be available to them at the time. Their behavior always has a reason or purpose driving it, although the positive intention of it, for them, isn’t always positive for us!

Taking the time to elicit, with NLP’s beautifully effective techniques, knowing what others positive intention is, you can then guide them to alternative ideas and concepts which, while still honoring their positive purpose, are also more acceptable to the people around them.

There is no failure, only feedback

Every experience can be used. However, so-called ‘failure’ - often described as ‘success that just stopped too soon!’ - can be re-framed as an opportunity to discover something new, to encourage in yourself and others in a sense, not of failing, but of positive curiosity and wonder

You cannot NOT communicate

The meaning of our communications is the response we get. And the words we use, while obviously vitally important, are only a small part of how we communicate. Vocal quality, tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures, breathing, how we use our bodies, are all elements of non-verbal communication. Even silence is a powerful communication tool. We are born experts at picking up tacit communications - if your voice and body don’t match your words, people will generally not believe the words, but your unspoken message.

We are always communicating at conscious AND UNCONSCIOUS levels: resistance in a person is a sign of lack of rapport; there are no resistant people, only inflexible communicators.

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got; so do something different!

People can often get stuck in repeated patterns of responses, behaviors, even beliefs, which may once have served them well, but are now redundant. Encouraging them to do something different to break up the old limiting pattern when something isn’t working must result in a different outcome.

Modeling excellence can lead to excellence

If one person can do something it is possible to model it and teach it to others, learn it oneself, or help that person use it in another area of their life: because thought, experience, and excellence all have structure.

Modeling applies to anything, large or small, that anyone does well. So we can use this presupposition to help ourselves and our team. NLP has wonderful techniques to elicit someone’s internal strategy for HOW they do WHAT they do - and you will learn these on our Inspired Team Building course, and can then pass them on to, and encourage, your team, employees and associates to use them as well.

We already have all the resources we need to succeed!

When we broaden our definition of ‘resources’ we realize that, people around us have innate characteristics, values, beliefs, and latent abilities, all of which can be re-usable resources for them.

Some of our most profound resources, our ‘sunbeams’, sometimes start out as ‘raindrops’……. for example, many of those we now call geniuses - Picasso, Einstein, da Vinci - all had learning differences as children, and grew to genius levels by USING them, to learn and achieve; re-framing their meaning so they became perceived as resources for success.

Our teams also, of course, have us, proactive members, as possibly their greatest potential resource when we acknowledge and develop our own! Especially our desire and ability to love them, and to help them to access and use all of those resources which make them the uniquely special individuals they are.