Wyatt Woodsmall a prominent psychologist and NLP practitioner once conducted a six month long research on 50 successful entrepreneurs in the UK on the factors for entrepreneurial success. It turns they could be boiled down to the same four techniques that serve as the cornerstone of Neuro Linguistic Programming or NLP for short.
Incidentally these are also the 4 steps of Anthony Robbins’ ultimate success formula.
Here they are.
1. Know your outcome. A surprising number of people don’t have a clue about what they want. And if they do it is more likely about what they don’t want rather than what they want. Frame your outcome in positive terms and not negatively. Your subconscious mind simply does not do well with goals framed with negative terms.
Wyatt suggests we use evidence procedures to quantify our outcome. In other words be specific. If you don’t know what your outcome is how do you know when you achieve it.
2. Develop sensory acuity to know whether you are getting closer to your outcome or farther away. Wyatt suggests we use short feedback loops. A great story that comes to my mind is Motorola’s Iridium satellite project. 10 years in the making, when the project finally went live, Iridium declared bankruptcy within 2 years. The problem, the business plan was never updated with the changing scenario around the world. Mobile telephony was getting more widespread and cheaper. But the cost of the satellite phone: more than 10 dollars a minute!
3. Be flexible in your behavior. If you are not achieving your outcome then change your behavior not just attempt to work harder. “Change conquers the world not force” Wyatt Woodsmall.
4. Take action. Oh yes, sorry to break the bad news. The final step is to take MASSIVE ACTION. I am not a slacker but have problem getting started.There is an excellent book out there that I recommend if you need to get motivated. It is ‘Advanced Rhinocerology’ by Scott Alexander. I read the first half of this book in one sitting one night. Next day I was so pumped up I got off to a roaring start. I know motivation is not permanent but neither is bathing as Zig Ziglar would say.
So here you go, these are the four essential NLP techniques.
When I first read the excerpt from Geoff Colvin’s book ‘Talent Is Overrated’ in a Fortune issue I was so excited that I could barely sleep that night.
I was excited because it was not your typical self help manual where the author charts out life strategies based solely on his personal experience or worse based on what he claims is the golden bullet while he himself is living a life without results. This was a book excerpted in a most unlikely, place the hard nosed business magazine, Fortune. Further this was based on research, not the kind, where all kinds of crazy conclusions are extrapolated from studies that involve all of a less than a dozen participants. No this book was based on research conducted in the last 30 years in many places such as the INSEAD school of business. Finally the ideas outlined by this apply to every area of life not just the normal haunting spots of talent such as sports, music and so on.
Your thinking style improves when your state of mind improves. Never ever take a decision or act when you are under emotional stress. Maintain a positive attitude to get into a peak state of performance. Research in the field of sports psychology has proved beyond doubt that a positive attitude is not just for dreamy eyed idealists.
2) Focus
You might feel that you are a multi tasking genius. But science has again shown that when it comes to performing demanding tasks multi tasking actually makes you dumber.
