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Ever
been nervous, anxious, or downright fearful when having to speak
to a group?
Try
this: Imagine everyone in the group is looking at you with
smiling adoration. Feel
that they can't wait to hear the next thing you're going to say.
See them nodding approvingly and occasionally glancing at
each other, astonished at the depth and breadth of your wisdom.
If you do, if you tell yourself you are the best speaker
this audience has ever had the good fortune to hear, you will
be. And when you
realize that, your fear and anxiety will – poof!–
disappear.
Didn't know it could be that easy?
Well,
neither did most people, to whom speaking in public is their
Number 1 fear, until NLP came along.
NLP, shorthand for Neuro-Linguistic Programming, is today
a sort of Linux of training beliefs; that is, a freely
conglomerated set of performance improvement processes sold to
corporate training departments based on the basic concept that
if you tell yourself something is true, it is.
NLP
was created by John Grinder and Richard Bandler is the early
1970’s. Grinder was a New Age-type professor at the brand new
University
of
California Santa Cruz
, an "experimental" new campus in the redwoods that
would in a number of years become the heart of
Silicon Valley
. Bandler was his
very bright but somewhat social skills-challenged student.
According
to the website of the firm for which John Grinder, the seemingly
more sane co-founder, now works:
"Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is the process of
creating models of excellence. Modeling is the complex activity
of capturing in a learnable transferable code the differences
that make a difference between an excellent performer and an
average performer, between an excellent work team and an average
one. NLP, then, is the process of identifying, coding and
transferring precisely those differences in a learnable form to
the interested participants and companies to allow significant
upgrading of their performance to levels of excellence."
Not
exactly succinct, but rather verbose enough to pass muster with
corporate HR departments that spend more time developing mission
statements than actually planning and executing the mission.
Basic to this theory is that if you can define the
objective vaguely enough, nobody will know when you fail!
Grinder
and Bandler would soon split for reasons that neither has ever
made public, but not before collaborating on a few books and a
few world tours of speeches and mass-therapy sessions that
quickly captured the imaginations of both the ascendant Human
Potential Movement and Corporate America.
The
Human Potentialists, who were flirting with Transcendental
Meditation, Werner Erhard's est, Scientology, Hare Krishna and a
host of other similar belief sets borrowed from the East, were
attracted to the notion that real change could be achieved
without real work.
Believe this – be this.
If there were a deep-rooted cause for the bad behavior
you were trying to change, fuggitaboudit.
No sense going through the pain of self-examination when
all you needed to become a master of the universe was to tell
yourself you were, and there you are!
Corporate
America
was buying into the process for similar motivations – reward
without risk. In
this case, NLP provided the route to success by simply getting
employees to believe they could [pick one] sell, achieve, excel,
lead, speak well, etc., without companies' having to bother with
all the messy, time-consuming, and often inaccurate work
involved in hiring the best employees.
Everyone could now be the best (or at least everyone
could be above average) simply by training everyone to believe
they were. Why
didn't Human Resources think of this sooner?
To
bring this all back to speaking to groups: many self-anointed
NLP "experts" have successfully intruded the corporate
performance improvement market with promises of
"programming" employees' public speaking fears and
inadequacies down the drain.
There
is, however, a problem with this approach.
It doesn't work.
Although
we can't speak to how well NLP might achieve other performance
goals, one thing we do know a good deal about is what goes in
the minds of people who are facing a audience - the classic
"one-against-many" scenario that always occurs when
the brain senses there are more of them than there are of you.
The physiological processes that this scenario sets in
motion are not something that the common conscious mind can
control (not that you'd even want it to, as the processes exists
for the purpose of keeping you alive).
The
"fear" that so many feel when facing a group is not
the same as one experiences when the tire on one's minivan blows
out at 70mph, but the protective chemicals coursing through the
bloodstream are, and all the mental gymnastics in the world are
not going to slow the heart rate or metabolism or lower the
blood pressure.
"Picturing"
oneself in a calm frame of mind is not
going to calm someone down as long the stronger forces in the
body – the involuntary ones – are presented with specific
pre-programmed stimuli. In
the case of speaking, we were programmed to recognize the threat
of being alone while facing a hostile tribe back in a Few
Million Years BC, and some feel-good theories from the
California
redwoods of the 1970's are not likely to change that overnight.
Or over a couple café-lattes.
The
only way you can change the body's response is to change the
stimuli, something that is easily achievable by changing
specific behaviors in which most speakers engage when thrust in
front of a crowd. In
other words, it's not a matter of changing what you perceive – it's about changing what you do.
Here
is where we really take issue with the NLP religion: people who
are sold on drinking this "change your thinking and you'll
be fine" Kool-Aid are much worse off when they step out in
front of that corporate meeting and find it just doesn't work.
Unarmed against the realities, they fail.
And when they fail, whom do they blame?
They blame themselves.
They chastise themselves for not being strong enough to
really tell themselves they're OK. They must not have tried
hard enough, or practiced
long enough, or believed
deeply enough.
These
exact feelings, by the way, are why by far the largest market
for self-help books is people who bought a self-help book on
the very same topic six months prior. When the last book
didn't produce the desired change, they don't blame the book.
They blame themselves and try (read:buy) again.
If
there is any doubt left about the veracity of the claims of NLP,
we'll leave it to readers to determine for themselves.
But it is helpful to know that from a linguist, someone
who supposedly has a complete understanding of the power of
assembled words, here is how Grinder offers "proof"
that NLP really works:
"The primary criterion for the evaluation of a model
is its effectiveness - that is, either the implementation of the
model (or coded patterns) deliver the benefits proposed or it
does not. Thus, while the processes of actually creating the
model - the codification of the critical difference are wholly
congruent with the general scientific methods of discovery and
testing, models differ from theories by their independence from
such issues as truth, fit with reality,… Models are, of course
as part of the general scientific discourse, subject to criteria
such as intersubjective verification, replicability, internal
consistency,…"
Well,
there you have it – anything that takes that many words to say
must be true, don't you think?
Oh,
an interesting side-note: while firms continue to hire NLP
training companies to achieve painless process improvement,
others feel the jury's still out on its efficacy.
The jury is definitely not
still out on
Rich
ard Bandler. In
1988, two years after the murder and five years after Bandler's
NLP training firm, Not, Inc. filed for bankruptcy, the jury acquitted Bandler of murder
on strict legal grounds.
They
simply couldn't find beyond
a reasonable doubt that it was the NLP guru, and not his
only friend, a major
Santa Cruz
cocaine dealer, who pulled the trigger of Bandler's .357 Magnum
that sent its projectile at very close range up the nostril and
into the brain of the dealer's 35 year-old girlfriend.
No doubt that his NLP training allowed Bandler to believe
he was not guilty, and that at least this
time, that did make it true.
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