CREATIVELY EXPERIMENTING

Earlier this year I write a dozen posts on basic NLP concepts. While that series covered most, it did not include every concept. So, here’s another basic NLP concept. It is not one of the formal NLP Presuppositions, yet it is one of the common statements that NLP Practitioners use in their work. And it is one that offers a basic guideline or heuristic for being more effective in communicating and being productive. Here it is: If what you are doing is not working—do something different.

Now while it is a great idea and probably seems obvious, the fact is that most of us do not actually operate by this basic concept. Test yourself.

• “How often do you keep repeating some action or way of talking or way of thinking especially when it is not working and has not worked? Do you ever do that?”

• “How many times should I attempt to do something when it does not work before moving on and trying something else?”

Good questions. Obviously, if you think that you know something to do that has a good chance of working, you will want to give it a good try. You will want to do it from your best state when you are feeling good and persist over a period of time in a realistic way. After that, if you are still not getting the results you want and realistically expect— then try something else.

This is really crucial in communication. If you want a different response from another person, and the things you are doing are not getting the responses you want— do something different. The idea is that after you have demonstrated that something is not working, stop doing it. What many in NLP then quote is the Einstein quote: “Insanity is keep doing the same thing and hoping for a different result.” Another great quote of immense wisdom!

So what’s the problem? Ah, a cognitive bias and a thinking fallacy that gets us all— investment. Once you have invested in something— it becomes harder and harder to give it up. Even investing in a way of thinking, way of feeling, way of talking, way of acting, way of relating— in each you are investing your mental and emotional energies, you are investing in what you think will work. So quitting, giving up, stopping — that’s hard. Yet if something is not working and you keep doing it— you are now engaging in self-defeating behavior.

Another basic communication concept at work here is this: You are always getting a response. So look at it! Recognizing that you are always getting a response, and always will, then if it is not the desired response that you are hoping for, the most effective thing to do is something different. Say what you are saying in a different way, use your non-verbal expressions differently, use some different words, change the context, etc. If you want the same response, just repeat what you did.

Applying this to communication leads us to realize this: You always succeed when you communicate because you always get a response. How about that? You always succeed! The question now is— what are you successfully generating? Is that response which you are getting, the response you want? You never fail, and cannot fail simply because you always succeed in getting some response even if it is not a response that you want. This frame takes your communications and actions out of the realm of success or failure. It puts it into the realm of quality — is the response you are successfully getting the quality of response that you want? If not, change your response. When the response isn’t the response you aimed for, take that situation as an opportunity to experiment. Try different things to find out what other responses you will receive.

And all of this takes us to the subject of creativity— creating a new a different response. After all, this is what creative people do— they experiment. They keep checking the results that they are getting and if it is not succeeding in getting the desired results, they experiment with what else they could do. How about you? Is that how you operate?