How To Be More Insightful

Being insightful has very little with being SMART. There are just a few key skil [If you would like to learn more about how to generate insights and solve problems personally and professionally, let me know here.]( --------------------------------------------------------------- If there’s one skill that many students of NLP would love to have, it is: How to be more insightful. How to ask those killer questions that open up and completely transform an issue such that the answer about what to do - become obvious. That’s what we are going to talk about today. How to be insightful. How to ask better questions. Where insights are found. Being insightful isn’t about fancy NLP language patterns … it’s all about teaching our brains to be more resourceful on command. If you missed my email from last Friday, you may want to check that out now. (Search for ‘filter hacking’ in your email client). One of the concepts I talked about in that email is figuring out how people have ‘frozen reality’ so we can identify where to change it. The process of freezing things that are dynamic (aka processes) is called nominalisation. And everyone does it. It’s how we take complex activities and simplify them so we can talk about them like they were things. Anytime you hear people say things like ‘life’, ‘relationships’, ‘the universe’ you are hearing about where they have frozen complex processes. When it comes to generating insights and asking better questions, the first thing to get is that humans don’t deal with the world directly, we interact with the world through our maps and models and those maps and models never reflect reality (in its entirety). However, people do treat their maps and models as reality. Most people happily accept the world as it appears to them without question. They assume that what they perceive is reality. (And the only reality.) When it comes to overcoming problems or coming up with new solutions, human beings rely on the stories we have constructed (or adopted) about ‘reality’ to tell us what is possible. To inform us what we should even try. So how does knowing this help us be more insightful? To answer that, we need to briefly explore another foundational concept in NLP. What is inside someone’s map or model and what is outside someone’s map or model. If you’ve studied The Meta Model with us, then you know about a class of distinctions called ‘Inside vs Outside’. Inside someone’s map or model are all those things that are explicitly expressed or can be directly inferred from the words someone says. Outside of someone's map or model are all the elements and possibilities that are not represented or can't be inferred directly from what someone says. For example: Bob has a British Shorthair cat. He knows he has a cat. That’s explicit. He doesn’t know British Shorthair cats were once bred as hunting cats to bring food to their owners. That’s outside his map of knowledge of his cat (and might explain why she keeps bringing him mice!) When we want to help someone discover a new insight on a situation - where we will find (or create) one is from OUTSIDE their map/model. We literally look beyond where they have thought to introduce or make a new connection for them. By learning to use the [Meta Model and Framing Tool]( not as a linguistic tool to challenge what someone says but as a THINKING TOOL to model how a person thinks… …and what a person is attending to (and not attending to), we can generate new insights on issues or challenges a person has struggled with for a long time. (Even when we ourselves may know very little about the subject in question.) This is a super useful skill that anyone can develop with the right training and practice. ::: Practical Application::: For now, anytime you hear someone express a blanket statement of reality (also known as a generalisation) ask yourself: - What’s missing? - What’s being assumed? - What philosophy has the person bought into and does it apply in this specific case? Look to examine the underlying assumptions in their thinking, the elements that they have made equivalent and frozen. These questions (and many more questions like them) get your brain to begin to consider what is OUTSIDE their frame-of-reference and can quickly lead to ‘killer questions’ and key insights that make your listener stop and go: “Wow, that’s a really good question. I’ve never thought about it like that before.” And that is the beginning of how you create insights for someone else. Practice using these 3 questions in your conversations. You’ll be amazed at how much smarter and more insightful others will begin to consider you. To your success, Tom P.S. If you found this article useful and [would like to learn more about how to generate insights and solve problems personally and professionally, let me know here.]( NLP Times, Real NLP Skills For The Real World --------------------------------------------------------------- Note: If you no longer wish to receive these emails about "Foundational NLP Skills", [just click here]( and you’ll be REMOVED from this email campaign. I want to make sure I deliver resources on topics you want in your inbox ;-) --------------------------------------------------------------- Sent to you by: NLP TIMES, web property of D&T New Media Ltd. This email has been sent as you have previously consented to receive communications from us. 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