Where’s your future?

Where’s your past?

Puzzled?

Let me re-phrase that.

Think of something mundane that is going to happen tomorrow – perhaps brushing your teeth in the morning. Notice where you represent that idea, in the space around or inside you. Think now of something a little further into the future – next week perhaps – and notice where that is.

Repeat for a couple of other things, perhaps your next birthday or Christmas.

Now think about the past – an event yesterday, last week, last year, earlier in your life. Notice where in the space around or inside you that you think of those things.

Imagine now a line that joins up all of those points – from your furthest past memory through the current moment and on into the future. In NLP that imaginary line is called your time line, a metaphor that is used in a great many forms of powerful personal changework. For the moment just notice where the current moment is – specifically is it inside or outside your body?

Metaphors of Time

All languages use space or position as a metaphor for time. The idea that the metaphors we use are closely bound to the way we structure our thoughts was first expressed a quarter of a century ago by Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. Inspired by Lakoff and Johnson the early developers of NLP began to create the time line model.

Many processes have been developed that use the metaphor of Time As A Line to change the way people think about the past, the present and the future. Metaphor is a meta-stating process (i.e. a thought about a thought) so immediately adds a level of [bliki]disassociation[/bliki], a powerful tool to allow people to think about challenging events in their lives without being swamped in feelings.

As a coach I find that talking people through an exploration of how they think about life using the metaphor of a time line to guide reflection, re-consider past events or rehearse alternative futures is a very powerful conversational intervention.

In-Time and Through-Time

Remember I asked you to pay particular attention to where you represented your sense of the current moment? Lakoff and Johnson observed that in Indo-European language-speakers there is approximately a 50-50 split between people who think of the current moment as being inside their body and people who think of the current moment as being outside their body, usually just in front of them. NLP labels these two most common representations of the passage of time as [bliki]In Time[/bliki] and [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] respectively.

A lot of changework processes use manipulation of these mental models as a way of accessing new ways of thinking. For example how good are you at future planning? If you feel that you could do better then try imagining future events in a more [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] way i.e. mapped out in front of you as if on a wallchart or planner and see what difference that makes. Many people find a positive difference from this sort of work, but nearly everyone expresses some inner tension or discomfort when they first try to think of time in a different way – these models go right to the core of our way of being in the world and change can have significant effects on the way we perceive things.

The Connection Between Language and Thought

Further work by Lakoff and Johnson, and many others in the field of cognitive linguistics, has extended the thinking – for example this study.

New research shows that the metaphor which is used could depend on the native language of the person concerned. Laura Spinney, in the Guardian article How Time Flies [via Tom Coates] reports on research by Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser with the Aymara people from the Chilean Andes. There’s more detail in this presentation from Vyv Evans at the University of Sussex which summarises the field and has a long list of references to follow.

The Aymara study is the first documented research finding evidence of a group of people with a reversed sense of time. When talking about long time spans the Aymara seem to have a [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] model, when talking about shorter periods (up to several generations) they seem to exhibit a reversed [bliki]In Time[/bliki] model, with the past in front and the future behind:

When they talked about very wide time spans, their gestures indicated that they conceived of it spanning from left to right, excluding themselves. But when they talked about shorter spans, several generations say, the axis was front-back, with them at point zero. The gestures of the old man and the woman discussing their grandparents confirmed that they really did think of the past as in front of them.

This particular and (so far) unique way of modelling time seems intimately associated with the Aymara language:

In 1975, Andrew Miracle and Juan de Dios Yapita Moya, both at the University of Florida, observed that q”ipüru , the Aymara word for tomorrow, combines q”ipa and uru , the word for day, to produce a literal meaning of “some day behind one’s back

[...]

Aymara marks whether the speaker saw the action happen or not: “Yesterday my mother cooked potatoes (but I did not see her do it).”

If these markers are left out, the speaker is regarded as boastful or a liar. Thirty years ago, Miracle and Yapita pointed to the often incredulous responses of Aymara to some written texts: “‘Columbus discovered America’ – was the author actually there?” In a language so reliant on the eyewitness, it is not surprising that the speaker metaphorically faces what has already been seen: the past.

From an NLP approach we might predict some consequences from this model – in particular we might speculate that the Aymara would not have a well-developed sense of future planning because the future is literally behind them – this seems to be born out by Miracle and Yapita’s observation of the “great patience” of the Aymara. (The Aymara Language and Its Social and Cultural Context)

Making Time Work For You

So how do you think about time?

What happens if you move those representations around?

Play with your timeline and see what happens…

This reminded me strongly of the concept of well-formed outcomes – one of the foundation stones of NLP. I find that often one of the most powerful coaching interventions is simply helping someone gain a clear view of what they want to happen and the nature of the first few steps. Something very powerful gets triggered in the unconscious mind by a clear view of what you want and many people report that change begins to happen shortly afterwards.

I’ve started collecting links on different knowledge models at CoachingKnowledgeResearch

MT macro for Wiki name obviously not working yet!

I wondered if it was useful to think of the coaching process as a form of mutual learning – or indeed as a form of mutual knowledge creation…

continued on the wiki

* Harry Enfield, Hamlet and the Solutions Focus

* A Comparison of Appreciative Inquiry and Solutions Focus

* The Solutions Focus: Keeping It SIMPLE In The Learning Organisation

* Solution focused Corporate Coaching _[HTML converson from Word via Google]_

* Classic Models – Solution-Focused Coaching

* “Solutions-focus and the five messages of the Schnäpper” by Peter Szabo _[no online version found]_

Also Mark McKergow, author of several of the articles listed above commented on my earlier entry flagging up his web site and book The Solutions Focus: The SIMPLE Way To Positive Change (haven’t read the book yet so can’t comment on it…)

Solution-focused Coaching is the application of the Solution-focused Brief Therapy approach to coaching. In outline the approach seems to be:

* Elicit client’s “best hopes” for the meeting
* Elicit client’s ideal future
* Identify signs that progress has been made already
* Calibrate where the client thinks he/she is and what would be needed to make an incremental improvement

the whole thing infused with lots of positive feedback about what is working, a constant drawing-out of sensory descriptions of the desired state, an exploration of different perceptual positions and an underlying assumption that the client will develop his/her own detailed action plans…

One of the key differences from other approaches seems to be the future bias – in NLP terms a lot of focus on helping the client build a really strong representation of the “Desired State” (DS), combined with “ecology” checks, exploration of different perceptual positions and lots of reinforcement of the client’s resources.

I would tend to do most of that in my normal coaching approach but I would also spend time exploring the current state (CS) and why it was persistent – looking for ways to loosen the “stuckness”. When another participant asked about this Harvey’s response was that from a solution-focused point of view any time spent talking about “now” rather than “then” tended to strengthen the hold of the past/present…

During the seminar we did a couple of exercises, one of which was related to the “calibration” stage – a very simple question “thinking about your job, and your ideal situation, where would you say you had got to on a scale of 0 – 10″ [...] “and what tells you that you are that point and not a 0?” [...] “and what do others see you doing that contributes to you being at that point?” (of course the skill is in the way the questioner asks the questions and especially in the way they keep going to elicit more and more…)

Being on the receiving end of that questioning (even though I “knew” it was “just” an exercise) I was surprised by the sense of momentum and energy that was created in me by an in-depth appraisal of all the good things I have already achieved.

I can see how that energy focuses the mind so that the “and what would you have to do to just add one point on the scale?” questions trigger “it’s obvious…” answers from the client, perhaps also how that energy combined with the “pull” of a clear desired future would be enough to unstick from the power of the past. I’m very tempted to take a training in the approach, certainly I shall spend some time reflecting how I can usefully strengthen my coaching with what I’ve learned.

Whilst musing about that sudden rush of energy I was also reminded of the Appreciative Inquiry approach to organisational change – again that focuses on what already works with a team, in an organisation, as a prelude to moving on to even better things – on the surface the parallels seem obvious, but I need to think a bit more about whether there might be an underlying model that could explain both…

In Lean Production there exists the concept of the “visual workplace”, commonly expressed through the 5S model. Hal points out that projects may not always involve material products and resources but always involve people and conversations; it therefore makes sense to translate the 5S model into what he calls the 5R Protocol for a Listening Workplace:

1. Roles
2. Rules
3. Reflection
4. Relationships
5. Routines

What’s interesting is the way his own thinking is developing as he reflects on this model and the conditions that need to be in place for real changes to happen – critically the need for having the right mental distinctions to notice what is really important and then taking action based on those distinctions:

What we notice has to do with the distinctions we can make and the routines that we follow. Both our noticing and effectiveness in action increase as we take action. If we want to work in a lean way we need the distinctions of lean and we need to take action. [...] Learning to operate in a lean way happens by doing projects in a lean way.

For me this sits well with the model of cognition used by NLP:

Our habitual perceptual filters control what we actually notice in our surroundings – an engineer will notice different things from an HR expert. The mental programs we use (or habitual ways of thinking) will then influence what meaning we ascribe to those things and therefore influence our conscious intent about what to do. Those same mental programs will distort our conscious intent into our everyday strategies, which in turn result in actions and words that fit with our perceptual filters. The whole system is both recursive and self-reinforcing – the success of actions we take in the world tends to strengthen the perceptual filters and mental programs that led to us choosing those actions.

In such a model changing behaviour often needs the conscious adoption of new filters and disctinctions re-inforced by action until new unconscious mental programs take hold. This is where coaching is especially useful to remind the person who is changing what they should be paying attention to.

What Hal is doing with his 5R model is start to express the things that make a difference in order to get “Lean Projects” right – it will be interesting to see how he develops this into practical tools that can not only be applied but through their application embed new ways of thinking.

[...] I always asked couples when their difficulties started, mainly to identify the classic life changes that put relationships at risk [...] However, on analysing the responses, these rarely came up. In fact, most couples did not even agree on the timing of their negative tipping point – the point at which the relationship went from satisfactory to unhappy. Yet if I asked why previous major relationships had failed, the majority did refer to these substantial life changes. Could it be that we retrospectively attach big issues to a relationship breakdown because it makes sense of the big changes in our lives? [...] The Tipping Point theory, however, would suggest that a build-up of what my clients call ‘stupid things’ are the real causes of marital breakdown. The key idea is that little things can make a big difference. At first sight this was profoundly depressing: my clients seemed trapped in a downward spiral where ‘forgetting to defrost the fridge’ could seed a divorce. So instead of concentrating on major issues, I decided to focus on the little things.

He goes on to give an example of a couple whose relationship seemed to be breaking down over the issue of cleaning the children’s shoes. The more she nagged about it the less he could understand what all the fuss was about. On probing their backgrounds Marshall discovered the deeper structure that lay behind this surface behaviour

Julia’s father had always cleaned her shoes and therefore she believed that good fathers did the same. However, Graham had been brought up to be self-reliant and clean his own shoes

and probing further

the shoes represented their attitudes to bringing up their children. She wanted to nurture them, while he wanted to make them self-sufficient

Looking at this through a n NLP and Neuro Semantics framework this argument over apparently trivial behaviour seems firmly rooted in the value structures of the two people. For Julia the behaviour “Graham doesn’t clean the children’s shoes” was criterially equivalent to “Graham is not a good father”, a criterion that had been set up by the example of her own father.

This sort of confusion based on the meanings assigned to behaviour seems to be (IMHO) one of the most common causes of difficulties in any relationship – professional as well as personal. If you assume that all behaviour somehow “makes sense” in the moment according to the mind frames of the person doing it then by wondering “so what do they have to believe that makes this logical” you can begin to map out the frames that are driving them.

In the example given it seems likely (admittedly a “mindread”) that both partners shared a frame of “be a good parent” – their differences arose because Julia had a lower level frame of “nurture your children” whereas Graham’s intermediate frame was “teach your children to be self-sufficient” – both perfectly good examples of how to “be a good parent”, but also inevitably leading to the sort of conflict Marshall describes.

A powerful approach to any sort of negotiation (and I view coaching a couple in this sort of situation as fundamentally about facilitating a negotiation between them about their values) is to help the parties find their common ground. Asking meta-stating questions such as “why is this important to you?” or “what does that mean?” helps each party map out the levels of their frames of meaning – and in my experience there is almost always significant common ground within three or four “layers”…

When it comes to making the necessary changes, Marshall again refers back to Gladwell:

The two key elements identified by Gladwell for reaching a positive tipping point are the ‘law of the few’ and the ‘stickiness factor’. The first undermines an old myth about relationships: that both halves of the couple have to want to change [...] Often a couple arrives in counselling because one half, who used to be responsible for the relationship glue, has given up. Paula, a 37-year-old recruitment consultant, was typical. ‘Why should I make all the effort? Jake made no effort to fulfil my needs, so I just withdrew.’ I sympathised with both Paula and Jake: in their different ways, they both felt unappreciated. After several weeks, I threw my hands up and asked: ‘Do you want to be right or happy?’ The next week they came back smiling. Paula had been less critical of Jake, and he had been more willing to talk and listen. They had achieved a positive tipping point, but it had been up to Paula to take the initiative. However, she was so pleased, it ceased to matter that she had made 80 per cent of the initial effort, because both were now contributing equally.

This result should be no suprise if you think of a relationship as a system.

Any cultural artefact (such as a relationship) is the result of systems of shared meaning between two or more people. If either person changes the way in which they look at the relationship it will inevitably affect their behavior – this changed behaviour will be interpreted by the other in the context of their frames and thus change their behaviour, which feeds back to the first person … and so on…

This is why the concept of being “at cause” is so powerful – once you acknowledge that you can control your own behaviour then you can change the system of shared meaning that is the relationship.

Why are some messages heard, while others fall on deaf ears? The second law, which Gladwell identifies as the ‘stickiness factor’, might explain it. Sometimes, tinkering with the way a message is delivered can make it stick. If someone is not listening to us, we find more dramatic ways to get their attention: shouting, tantrums, threats, walking out. However, small changes are often more effective. Since discovering The Tipping Point , I have spent more time getting clients to ‘reframe’ their messages to each other, rather than forever upping the same ineffective stakes.

This is a classic example of working with the feedback forces in the relationship system rather than against them.

When we escalate our communications in the ways Marshall describes then it often triggers the very opposite of the desired response, a shortcut to a downward spiral. Again, reflecting the principle of being at cause – if what you are doing doesn’t work, try something else!