NLP Patterns and Practices for High-Performance Teams and Achievers
“The winners in life think constantly in terms of I can, I will, and I am. Losers, on the other hand, concentrate their waking thoughts on what they should have or would have done, or what they can’t do.” – Dennis Waitley
One of the ways I set better goals and achieve them at Microsoft is by using well-defined outcomes. It’s a way to begin with the end in mind. An outcome is simply something that follows as a result or consequence.
Maybe the best way to think of an outcome is that it answers the question: “What do you want?”
(If you want to just jump to the recipe and full expanded explanation of how to set better goals, go here: How To Set Better Goals with Well-Defined Outcomes)
Outcomes are the Key to High-Performance and Outstanding Results in Work and Life
NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) has popularized the use of outcomes over the years to help people achieve better results. You can think of NLP as a way to model excellence and replicate it from one person to another. It’s a way to program your mind, body, and emotions using advanced skills for high-performance. (Tip – if you don’t’ program yourself, somebody else will.)
Imagine if you could model what the most successful people think, feel, and do, and get that on your side.
If you like languages or the idea of language to share and express concepts, you’ll especially appreciate the power of NLP. NLP helps you create a lot of precision in how you see things, how you articulate things, how you filter information, and how you distill feedback into actionable insights.
NLP is for Continuous Learning, Agile Personal Development, and Business Results
NLP is like Agile Personal Development where continuous learning is fundamental to its core.
NLP is probably the most powerful set of techniques I’ve ever come across for personal development, personal effectiveness, leadership, and high-performance. The techniques effectively help you find better, faster, easier ways to accomplish outstanding results, while helping you bring out your best. Tony Robbins popularized NLP back in the 80’s, but it’s more mainstream today.
In fact, I know a lot of executives and highly effective Softies that use NLP to get the edge in work and life. I also know a lot of developers that have NLP under their belt and it helps them clarify what they want, set better goals, take more effective action, and communicate more effectively to themselves and others. In fact, some say that NLP is simply a set of advanced communication techniques.
Developers Love NLP When They Stumble Upon It
Developers often find a special place in their hearts for NLP because of its precision and how it helps to “codify” behaviors. Specialists often use NLP to model high-performance behaviors and break them down into a recipe. These recipes for results help guide your thoughts, feelings, and actions in a more powerful way.
Anyway, what makes NLP powerful when you are setting goals is that it helps you really identify the end in mind. It brings your full senses to bear, so instead of imagining a fuzzy scene of what success looks like with loosey-goosey language, it forces you to get specific and use precision, and to really get clarity on what you actually want to achieve.
After all, it’s a lot easier to get to where you are going, if you know what you really want to accomplish.
In addition to helping you create compelling scenes of success, or mental movies of your future victories, NLP also helps you break your goal down into actionable chunks. It also sets you up for success by teaching you to focus on feedback as a way to improve, not a sign of failure. In this way, you keep refining your actions and your outcome until you achieve your goal.
Patterns and Practices for High-Performance and Personal Development
What most people don’t know about NLP is that it’s been an effective tool for years for building a great big body of knowledge around high-performance patterns for individuals, teams, and leaders. The NLP framework provides a way to capture and share very detailed patterns of behavior that help people improve their performance. Whether you want to improve your leadership skills, or your relationship skills, or whatever, there is a bountiful catalog of very specific patterns that help you do that.
And, the beauty of patterns in NLP is that they tend to be very prescriptive, very specific, and easy to follow and try out. This makes it easy to test and adapt until you find what works for you. (I’m a fan of don’t take things at face value – test them for yourself and judge from results. I’m also a fan of Bruce Lee’s timeless wisdom: “Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.")
One of the best books I’ve found is the book, The Big Book of NLP Techniques, by Shlomo Vakni. Surprisingly, it actually delivers what it says on the cover. There’s more than 350 patterns at your fingertips. I wrote about one of the patterns, Well-Defined Outcomes, in my post on How To Set Better Goals with Well-Defined Outcomes. You need to see it to believe it. It really is detailed, so if you’ve ever struggled with setting goals, this might be your big breakthrough.
The Big Breakthrough in Goal Setting
Here’s the real breakthrough though in goal setting. Aside from making sure you have goals that inspire you, and that they are aligned with what you really want, the power of the goal is ultimately in moving you in the right direction. It’s not a perfect or precise path where you can simply do A and get B. In fact, the irony is, that if you really want B, your best strategy is to first act as if you already have B. This will help you think, feel, and act from a more effective perspective so that your actions come from the right place, and help you produce more effective results (or at least guide you in the right direction).
That’s why you often here people say that you have to BE-DO-HAVE, not HAVE-DO-BE. With HAVE-DO-BE, the idea is when you get what you want, then you’ll start doing the things that go with it, and finally you’ll act the part. This is like saying that you won’t show up like a leader or act like a leader until somebody appoints you in a leadership role. This creates a negative loop, since why should anybody put you in a role that you don’t act the part.
The right thought pattern is BE-DO-HAVE because then your thoughts, feelings, and actions support your end results.
Are you acting like what you want?
If you’re not getting what you want, what does your feedback tell you to change?
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