will I lose if I make this change?’
‘What extra will I have to do?’
‘Is it worth it?’
‘What will I gain if I make this change?’
‘What is the price of making this change and am I willing to pay it?’
‘What are the good aspects of the present state?’
‘How can I keep those good aspects while making the change I want?’
Listen, feel and look carefully for your answers.
A typical incongruent response will be an uneasy feeling, usually in the stomach. A visual incongruence is often a sense of the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle not making sense. The classic incongruent phrase is ‘Yes, but . . .’
Sometimes when you do an ecology check, the unpleasant consequences may be very clear and you may need to rethink your outcome. Other times you may get an intuition that all is not well without being able to say exactly why. This intuition is an unconscious indication that the change is not completely ecological. Always pay attention to your intuitions and feelings of incongruence.
External Ecology
Internal ecology shades into external ecology because we are all part of a wider system of relationships. Internal and external ecology are two different perspectives on the same system. An external ecology check examines how your outcome will affect other significant people in your life.
Make a leap of the imagination and become them.
How will your change affect them?
Does it go against any of their values?
Does this matter?
How will they react?
Ecology checks are part of systemic thinking. Optimizing one part of a system invariably leads to the whole system working less well than it did. For example, suppose a man decides to lose weight and get fit in a moment of madness on New Year’s Eve. He takes up squash and goes to the gym three times a week, thinking that the more he does, the better it will be. Because his body is unused to the effort, he pulls a muscle and becomes tired and lethargic. Then he can’t exercise, becomes depressed, does even less and may end up even less active and even heavier than he was at the year’s end, and with a bill for physiotherapy and a subscription to a gym that he has hardly used as well.
Ecology is important in organizations too. A big sales push may result in a leap in sales that puts pressure on the manufacturers to meet the demand. If they are unable to deliver, this will lead to more dissatisfied customers, a rise in customer complaints and a subsequent loss of business.
| CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS MIND |  |
All change takes place first at the unconscious level.
Then we become aware of it.
NLP has a characteristic approach to the conscious and unconscious that is different from most other systems of psychology. In NLP ‘the conscious’ refers to everything that is in present moment awareness. We can hold about seven separate pieces of information consciously at any time. However, a lot depends on how we organize the information. A telephone number may consist of seven digits. You can memorize that as seven digits, but once you take it as a telephone number and remember it as one whole ‘chunk’, then you can store seven or so telephone numbers in your short-term memory.
‘The unconscious’ is used in NLP to indicate everything that is not conscious. So the unconscious is a ‘container’ for many different thoughts, feelings, emotions, resources and possibilities that you are not paying attention to at any given time. When you switch your attention, they will become conscious.
Some beliefs and values remain unconscious but guide your life without you ever realizing how powerful they are. Some parts of your physiology will always remain unconscious – the carbon dioxide concentration in the blood, how your heart beats, what your liver is doing. The more important and life-sustaining the function, the more likely it is to be unconscious. It would be very awkward if you had to remember consciously to make your heart beat, regulate your digestion or make your bones regenerate.
The conscious mind is like the rider of a horse, steering and guiding, setting outcomes and deciding directions. These then pass into the unconscious and we start to take actions to achieve them. The unconscious is like the horse that actually does the work in getting to where the rider wants. It is not a good idea to let the horse set the direction. Nor is it a good idea for the rider to try to tell the horse exactly where to put its feet at every stage of the journey. At best, conscious and unconscious form a balanced partnership.
Everyone has all the resources they need to change, or they can create them. However, people often think they do not have the resources because they are not conscious of them in the particular context where they need them. But some neurophysiological research suggests that it is possible that every experience we ever have is stored somewhere and can be accessed under the right circumstances. We have all had the experience of long-forgotten events popping into our minds, triggered by some stray thought, and unconscious resources can be utilized by hypnotherapy and trance.
Some systems of psychology (e.g. psychoanalysis) view the unconscious as a repository of repressed, disruptive material. NLP considers the unconscious to be benevolent – as it has all the experiences that we could use to gain wisdom.
NLP has a healthy respect for the unconscious. The easiest place to start, however, is with the conscious – what we are aware of and how we direct our lives, formulating, understanding and achieving our outcomes.
ACTION PLAN
1 Pick one of the NLP presuppositions that appeals to you. Now think of a problem or difficult situation you have with another person. What would you do if you were to act as if that presupposition were true? How would the situation change?
As a simple example, a friend of mine was part of a work project team. One member of the team was driving him crazy by continually voicing objections, getting into details too soon and wasting time (in my friend’s opinion). The presupposition that came to mind was that people work perfectly. His colleague had an excellent strategy for sorting and making sense of information, but he was applying it in the wrong place. Keeping the presupposition in mind helped my friend understand his colleague, be patient with him, keep rapport and help him to ask his questions in a different way at a different time, when they were extremely valuable.
2 Now pick the presupposition that you have the greatest doubts about. Take another difficult situation in your life. What would you do if you acted as if that presupposition were true? How would the situation change?
3 Watch the film The Matrix on video. If you have already seen it, watch it again. If you were the protagonist in the film, would you have taken the blue or the red pill? And how do you know you are not in a Matrix ‘for real’?
