NLP is one of the most pragmatic models I know of for learning to understand and be effective with people’s minds.  Both your own and when working with others.  But the fun thing about humans is that they are all different.  In many ways of course they are similar but when it comes to how their thoughts are organized we diverge infinitely.  That is why if you study humans you can never be bored.

Recently I was watching a good NLP Trainer do his shtick and admiring how many great tools he was using to help his students gain understanding in this crazy set of distinctions we call Neuro-Linguistic Programming.  He was great at using negative examples and wonderful at evoking learning states in his students.  He got them motivated and kept them on the edge of their seats.  And he reminded me of a lesson I learned many years ago from David Gordon. 

Gordon asked us to, “Consider for a moment, a dog.  Any old dog.”  He then asked us if we had one in mind?  Then he asked us if we all knew what a dog was?  We agreed we did – we all understood what he had asked us to do. 

But then he asked us what sort of dog it was.  People love pets and were enthusiastic to expose their inner pictures.  One was a German Shepherd, another a Pekinese, one was black and white, while another was a red Irish Setter.  Some were playing with a ball, others sleeping on the porch, one was catching a Frisbee and one was even on the kitchen table.  Everyone in the room had a different picture in their mind. 

No big deal, right?

But David Gordon shared with us that this was one secret to great teaching. 

Most of the education we have all been through follows a particular format.  The instructor wants us to gain knowledge so they lecture to us from the front of the room, explain why it is important to learn this next thing, then explain what it is.  Then maybe they give you some exercises to do or some homework problems so you can practice using what you’ve just learned about and begin to drive it deeper into your knowledge base.  You know the routine.  You’ve been through it thousands of times before you got through even with grade school. 

But, as you know, grade school ain’t the real world.  In school they are mostly set up to teach knowledge about things.  But in the real world you need to know “how to DO stuff.”  Knowing about something is not the same as being able to do something effectively. 

NLP can be thought of as a very pragmatic form of human psychology.  We figure out how people do stuff well by exploring the sequence of their internal representations – their cognitive strategies. 

For example, if one person uses one way to wash a car and other uses a different way, it probably doesn’t matter too much.  But if you want to be the best damned car washer on the planet, then we in NLP can help you accelerate your performance and learn what the best of the best do.  We delve deeply into the patterns of thinking that create the results that superior people do, but don’t even know how they do. 

When you’re really great at a skill you’ve learned it so well through trial and error that you can’t really be conscious of what exactly you do or it will mess up your performance.  NLP pulls what is happening out of people’s unconscious minds and turns it into practical skills-based learning.

So in NLP we aren’t so much interested in whether you can talk about things.  We want to observe that you can perform the skills with excellence.  (If you can solve a management problem without consciously being able to tell me how you do it.  That is fine with me.)  You can think of it as you having a great management intuition and never make it conscious, so long as you can do the skill reliably and in the proper context. 

Because we focus on skills acquisition rather than knowledge, David Gordon discovered  there is a better way of getting there than the method invented in the middle of the industrial revolution where you sit in your little rows, listen to lectures, do exercises, and then take tests.  As in telephone numbers and cooking recipes, sequence is incredibly important. 

From modeling the best instructors Dr. Gordon learned that they use a different sequence.

 

 

Traditional Educational Sequence

NLP’s Better Pragmatic Educational Sequence

 

  • Introduction – explaining why this is important to learn.

 

  • Lecture – explaining what you need to know with some models, or math, or diagrams on the board.

 

  • Exercise – practice figuring out how to use what you just learned about.

 

 

 

  • Test – proof that you know it.

 

 

  • Wrap Up – information about how you might apply what you’ve learned in the real world… Imagine what if this happens…?

  • Introduction – why this is important to learn but even more importantly getting your unconscious mind and motivations ready to learn.

  • Demonstration – showing a high quality demonstration as an example of what to do and how to do it, before you talk about it.

 

  • Just Complex Enough Exercise – providing step-by-step instructions of how to do what they just saw demonstrated that allows them to practice, be practiced upon, and watch from an observer perspective so that they get it three ways.

 

 

  • Lecture – detailed explanation of what they just did calling out key points and differentiating distinctions

 

  • Future Pace – mental practice imagining themselves using this skill in their own real world and attaching it to contextual cues that make it clear when to use it.

 

When teaching pragmatic skills this is even more important.  

Why does the second sequence work better?  

Well it goes back to that dog experiment that David Gordon had us do.  We all heard the same words, right?  “Consider a for a moment, a dog.”  But from those words we all made up a different pictures.  When you are teaching if you put the explanation up front as so many lecture formats do, the learners have to make up pictures and words and feelings inside their minds just to understand what you are talking about.  

But the images that they make will never be the same as the ones that are in the instructor’s head as he or she speaks and tries to convey that information to the audience.  So the learner learns the wrong stuff.  Instead, they “make up” pictures and words and meanings in their minds during the lecture that they have to then unlearn when they get to the exercise portion.  

Like dialing a wrong phone number, this sequence gets results that are less than you might desire.

By putting the “demonstration” and a well-structured “exercise” before the explanation, the learners make more mistakes, but they are learning mistakes.  They haven’t already “figured it out” in their minds before they do it, so they have to learn by doing.  And it is this learning by doing that is where all the fine level corrections happen that produce higher quality results.  People are more deeply engaged, and when you discuss the exercises afterwards they have a practical experience to base the fine distinctions you offer to them upon so it tends to refine their learning even more.  

The future pace is also a difference between the old pedagogical model and the NLP one.  But we will leave those distinctions for another blog post.  

In the meantime, don’t you wish you had learned this from me in a class where you could have learned by doing first rather than having to hear about it before getting to apply it.  I really don’t know whether you are smart enough to get past this barrier or not, but one thing I do know is that if you do, it will be because you go do something new in practice rather than just adding it to the heap of old knowledge that you “know” about, but don’t use.  Good luck and God speed.

This is Captain NLP signing off, for NOWwwwww!