Unique Personal Characteristic

Unique Personal Characteristic

          We were talking about inner world in the previous session. The role of inner world in making or breaking one’s life is very important. The Inner world is the design and engineering office of a person’s life. Life is not an accident but it is a well planned project of God or the Nature.  The mankind is the super creation of God and they’re the head of all creations. The most distinct feature of human being is the unique properties of their brain especially the power of thinking, the feature which enables them to head and control the entire world on behalf of God.

         

          When a person is in consciousness all his sensory organs activated and perceive information from the ‘external world’ through ‘human experience’. Along with the processes of deletion, distortion and generalization new data files will be created and old files corrected and upgraded. The entire data files will be organized systematically. What is the thinking process? The thinking process is the analytical coherent function of brain controlled and executed by the conscious mind making use of new data of current experiences and recorded data of the past experiences. During this thinking process, stored memories updated and the data utilizes to make one’s life.

          Making a human’s life is an intellectual work where the role of thinking process is evident.  We’ve seen that the basis of thinking process is the internal world of that person. If the internal world is a hell, the person’s life will be a hell! However many people disagree with this. For them others are hell! In fact that’s not true. Once again recall the phrase ‘You are what you think you are’. It means you are not what others think’.  However many of us are the ‘unconscious slaves’ of our negative thoughts. One of the major reasons for our setbacks in life is these negative thoughts. Whether it negative or positive every behaviours as part of personality is set for a person and he will continue it until he initiate for a change. 

           

          We have discussed earlier about three personalities based on their preferred system of internal representation. NLP researchers found that the Visual, Audiory and Kinesthetic personality have unique and distinct characteristics. Their interests, capabilities and life styles are unique. They think and behave in a particular way and we can identify them from their specific characteristics. However be cautious that these indications of characteristics are cues to gain rapport (mutual acceptance and concern – rapport building will be discussed in another session) with a person. Once you succeeded in building rapport it is easy to communicate with and change a person.

Visual Personality

-         Visual persons see pictures through inner eyes

-         They use predicates like see, clear, looks etc

-         Visual persons are tidy and hygienic

-         Their narrations always project visuals

-         They like visually attractive gifts

-         Normally they have high voice

-         They understand things easily by reading

-         Visual people remember first what they see

-         They like visual presentations

-         They less distracted by noise and sound

-         A visual person is a good speller of English words

-         They can learn English spelling very fast and recall it so easily

Body: Sit straight, eye balls move up, small muscle movements, thin body and dry skin . . .

Hobbies: Art work collection, painting, photography, computer graphics . . .

Gestures: Pointing fingers or arm, Facial colour changes . . .

Communication: Breathe high from chest when access visuals, hold breath for powerful visuals, tones high pitched and nasal . . .

Carrier Preferences: Engineering, drafting, interior design, architect, fashion design, studio . . .

Auditory Personality

-         Auditory person’s eye balls move side wise

-         They often use words like sounds, loud, echoes etc

-         They learn spoken language very fast

-         They learn by listening and repeating

-         They speak fluently

-         They talk themselves  

-         Auditory people can perform mimicry well

-         They easily distracted by noises and sounds

-         They remember verbal instruction easily

-         They like to enjoy music

-         They are untidy and not health conscious

-         They have dirty habits

-         They easily remember what he heard or discussed

-         They prefer gift resemble music and voice

-         They like new words and discussions

-         They read loudly to understand

-         They can easily write what they hear

Body: Head tilted slightly to one side, shoulders tend to slouch, lean forward for external sound and backward for internal sounds . . .

Hobbies: Listening music and radio talks, singing, playing musical instruments, arguments . . .

Gestures: Folded or cross arm, head tilts, count their fingers, keep palm on chin while thinking . . .

Communication: Breath with full chest while talk, prolonged and controlled exhalation, resonant tonality, talk rhythmically, listening auditory rhythmic body part movements . . .

Carrier Preferences: Music studio, announcer, telephone operator, layers, counsellors etc.

Kinesthetic Personality

-         Their eye balls move down.

-         Kinesthetic person understand subjects by feeling

-         Dress comfortable rather fashionably.

-         They use words like feels, heartfelt, concrete, tough etc.

-         Enjoy physical works

-         They learns by personal experience

-         They feel climate change faster

-         They produce emotional sounds too express their feelings

-         They enjoy physical rewards such as touch, embrace, shake-hand etc

-         They use kinesthetic gestures while reading say for example fisting

-         They try to ensure that spelling and grammar are correct

-         They emotionally enjoy reading, singing, eating, doing works etc 

Body: head sit solidly in shoulders, well centered, broad shoulder, soft body, athletic and sometimes overweight . . .

Hobbies: cooking, smoking, swimming, sunbathing, massaging, athletic, eating

Gestures: hands on heart or chest, rub palms, keep hands on midline of body, make gestures while talking . . .

Communication: breathe fully from abdomen, sudden and deep breath sometimes, deep and low tone, tone change to express emotion, stand close to the other person, talk slowly, takes time to reply, try to touch while talking . . .

Carrier Preferences: massage therapy, construction, sculpting, dancing, spa . . .

The Inner World Format

The Inner World Format

We experience the world around us through our five senses of seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting and record the experiences in the brain. These senses are the input channels to access the experiences around. We create an internal representation of what we experience and that creates our inner world. Given below is an overview of the five senses.

V - Visual Sense – to see visuals (picture, scene, image) using eyes

A - Auditory Sense – to hear sounds (tone, noise, voice) using ears

K - Kinesthetic Sense – to feel sensations (temperature, touch) using skin

O - Olfactory Sense – to smell odours/aromas using nostrils

G - Gustatory Sense – to taste flavours/ chemicals using tongue

In NLP we call these sensory input channels as modalities. Our brain uses these modalities to build our internal representation or model of the world around us.  Therefore these sensory modalities are known as Systems of Representation. Our sensory input channels receive information from our ecology or the external world. Then we process thinking using what we see, hear, feel, smell and taste, then filter it and form a representation of what we have seen, heard, felt, smelt and tasted. Our brain uses its micro senses to form its modes of awareness or consciousness. Without these sensory modes we can’t make our internal world.

Though every person uses systems of representation (senses) to perceive the world, they don’t utilize all systems equally. Among the five senses visual, auditory and kinesthetic are most important for a person. If you listen carefully to a person’s language, words and sentences he uses, you understand which system of representation he utilizes more within the three. In NLP with the help of predicates we are able to identify which sensory data a person utilizes to represent his internal experience externally.

Predicates are verbs, adverbs and adjectives a person utilize to express his perceived cognitive information verbally. Say for example a person tells ‘that was a wonderful scene’ which means he has in mind a visual (visual sense) of what he has experienced. Whereas another person with the same experience may express as ‘I was so excited with that experience’. Here the person feels (kinesthetic sense) something. Another person may say ‘that inspiring voice still echoes in my ear drums”. Such a person concentrates on sounds (auditory). There may be non-sensory based predicates also. Say for example ‘it was a wonderful experience!’

The system of representation a person utilizes to perceive information from the world around is known as dominant system of representation. It is not necessary for a person to use the same dominant system of representation to open the mental file of stored experiences from the memory. The system of representation a person utilizes to open the mental file to retrieve information from memory is called lead system of representation. Primary and lead representational systems of a person can be the same sometimes.

Based on the dominant system of representation we name a person the visual, auditory or kinesthetic.  Visual persons understand subjects by making pictures in their mind using their inner eyes. When they read something they make a visual sense of it and store such information as pictures or images. Their dominant sensory organ is their eyes. Auditory persons learn a subject using words, phrases and sounds and they store information back in memory in a similar manner which means their dominant sense is the hearing sense. Kinesthetic persons want to feel the experience to perceive and record it correctly. Their skin dominates eyes and ears.

Personality and Life Change

Personality and Family Life

            As we have discussed earlier under session ‘NLP concept of personality’, personality is not the external outlook of a person but it is mostly internal. It is the sum of attitude, behaviour and habits. These attributes are internally developed. A person acquires the required perceptual inputs for personality development from his ecology where the person is born and brought up. Remember once again that the family, relatives, peer groups, educational institutes, social organizations and the society are part of the ecology. Of course the foundation laid by a good set of genes have wonderful roles in building personality especially in contributing a ‘fit for purpose’ physiology! 

    

                A lot of elements in the ecology influence the developments of attitude, behaviour and habits, the building blocks of personality. Values, believes and customs within the ecology have major roles. For example there is a phrase in English ‘the mom’s God’ which means a child believes in the God of its mom and the child also believes in the religion of its mom. How the child talks, walks, eats, acts and reacts mostly depends on what it learns from the ecology.  The child’s life values, skills and customs are mostly adopted and learned from its ecology.

          The ecology of a person is different from that of another person in one way or another. Even for twins some of their ecological elements may differ such as friends and teachers. The books they read and the subjects they study also may differ. All these elements have roles in making their personality unique.

          Different personality creates different interests and approaches. Thinking process of one person is different from other. One may think positively and the other negatively. One may be more patient than the other! One may be short tempered. Because one is born and brought with lions and the other with cattle and one with a horse and the other with a donkey! A vulture brought up with chicken’s never fly high!

         

          Only by keeping these facts in mind we can discuss about family life. Marriage is the diffusion of two cultures. Many couples forget this and lead a miserable marriage life. They may have everything that can be acquired by money. They have wealth but no health because of mental stress, tension and anxiety cause physical illness. Psychosomatic diseases are the result of mental disorder, ‘soma’ means the body and ‘psych’ means the mind. Mental illness causes physical ailment also.

         

          Different attitudes and interests of partners will possibly clash. If one partner has a positive attitude towards a particular thing and the other a negative, there will definitely be a clash unless both or at least one partner manages to scarify the self interest. Say for example one partner is a vegetarian and the other non-vegetarian, there may be a chance of clash about the menu. If one prefers different romantic life than the other probably their bedroom will be a hell. One may like picnic and the other movies, one likes reading books and the other prefer to sleep, one loves the parents and relatives the other think the parents are problem, one want children soon and the other consider children as a nuisance. These clashes will continue until they manage to do some adjustments and sacrifices in their personal interests.

         

          Different attitude and interest cause different behaviours and habits. If a partner doesn’t like involvement of parents that partner prefers to send the parents especially in-laws to an old age home. The one who loves children always likes to deal with kids and the other person stay away from children. In many families especially in the Indian Subcontinent the female partner sacrifices her interest when there are clashes. Such family seems to be strong from an external point of view but the grievances and mental stress experienced by these brides are being disregarded.

          Then, how to make the family a heaven when a lion weds an elephant or a wolf weds a fox! It is a million dollar question! We have to introduce the term Emotional Intelligence (EI or EQ) here. It’s not at all a new term now a days and it has great importance in personality development training programs. EI is the capacity of a person to be aware of, control and express emotions and to manage interpersonal relationships intelligently and empathetically. The term EI is created by Peter Salavoy and John Mayer and popularized by Dan Goleman in his book ‘Emotional Intelligence’.

         

          Experiencing emotion is the fundamental nature of human being. Animals also have emotions however one of the basic differences between a human and an animal is that human being can control their emotions but animal can’t much of it. We can’t blame animals as a whole, there is a proverb in south India says ‘donkey cease sexual urge by crying loudly’. Isn’t that an intelligent behaviour?!  I mean to control the emotion is a skilled cognitive exercise.

          Couples must be aware that emotions can drive one’s behavior and impact the other partner positively or negatively.  Therefore it is necessary to learn how to recognize, understand and manage emotions both our own and others especially when we are under stress. One partner should try to understand the personal interest, values and customs of the other with due respect and empathy. Partners should accept the fact that both are human beings with emotions and feelings at the same time different personality. Both have unique personality and have self esteem. Husband and wife are equal shareholders of a joint venture partnership!

          Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) can help people in identifying their interests and habits by studying their representational system, the way by which they perceive experiences and how they process it. This is included in the subsequent sessions of this NLP online training program. I don’t want to list out Top Ten points or something similar to it to make your family life wonderful. You can’t make your life wonderful with such bullet points because most of the problems in life are magnification of emotions. Hence I want you to learn NLP to understand, control and manage emotions and make your family a heaven.  

NLP Concept of Personality

NLP Concept of Personality

           Many people think that personality is something that can be made by a couple of days training session. I know a number of personality development experts who charges hundreds of dollars per training session. They provide certain tips on how to talk, how to walk, how to dress, how to deal etc. Many people believe that dressing well and talking nicely are the symbols of a good personality. As part of our personality development struggle, we wear tie and shoes even without considering the climate!

         

          According to the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung personality comes from the word ‘Persona’ meaning of which is a ‘mask’ used in dramas to create different characters on stage, designed on one hand to make a definite impression upon others and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual. That means the personality which we develop in a training session is just a physical adjustment for an immediate requirement, say for example to get over an interview.

          The personality of a person represents his character which stands out from that of others or it is the behaviour that makes the difference for the person from others. Personality should include physical, mental, emotional and social characteristic of an individual. Therefore you cannot develop it in a mere training program. Of course you can help a person to build a ‘mask’ for him.

          A ‘pleasing personality’ doesn’t represent the ‘real person’. The real person is beyond his present pleasing persona. Here, the question is how the ‘real person’ gets formed or what is the process of building the ‘personality’? Elizabeth B. Hurlock in her famous book “Developmental Psychology - a lifespan approach” written for the medical students explains how the personality is developed throughout the life from babyhood to old age stage. According to her a person acquires every attributes and almost all talents through perceptual experience from the ecology where he has born and brought up. Family, relatives, peer groups, educational institutes, social organizations and the society are part of the ecology.

          The mind (central nervous system) filters the sensory input (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory) that we have received from our ecology as mentioned above and allows only a limited amount of information into the conscious mind. What are these filters? There are no physical filters. We are talking about the unconscious mental filters. Actually the Filters are perceptions processed and stored in the unconscious mind till the present moment. When we perceive new realities the filters influence it during the cognitive process. Hence the reality is not being recorded in the brain as it is.

         

          What are the filters? Our memories, experiences, values, believes, thinking pattern, attitude developed, knowledge of language,  common sense, time awareness, space concerns etc are unconscious filters. They are unconscious filters because they are not part of our conscious awareness. They will either come out along with the new sensory inputs or during the thinking process.

As we have already discussed the filters are mostly created by the ecology and hence the personality of a person is the result of a continuous process starting from babyhood stage to the old age stage. However most of the personal attributes are developed by the end of adolescence or during the beginning of adulthood.

          How the filters affect our perception or what is happening during filtration? Say for example Sally is a village girl. Sally’s perception is in such a way that she believes all mother-in-laws does not treat daughter-in-laws well. She marries a village boy. During one of her honeymoon days unusually Sally’s mother-in-law asks her to wash her cloth because she is not well? But Sally thinks that her mother in law is lying, ‘all mother-in-laws are devils, and how dare she asked me to wash her dirty cloth.’ Whereas if Sally has a different perception that most of the mother in laws are cool and may be some of them are not good, her approach will be entirely different. Figure 2 below shows how the internal representation or internal map formed after the filtration process.

This kind of filtration process is called generalization. Sally generalizes that all mother-in-laws are devils! The child bitten by a dog generalizes that all dogs are dangerous. Generalization happens when a person categorizes his experiences to a group based on the meanings he has given to it and afterwards he includes a new experience that would have a different meaning into the same group.

Doctors sometime consider only the external symptoms and prescribe medicines thus ignore the root causes. Destructive criticizers always see negatives in a person and they never appreciate the positives. This type of filtration is termed as deletion. Deletion is a process by which we selectively pay attention to certain aspects of our experience and exclude others.

Some managers without any proper enquiry arrive at an opinion about subordinates based on negative comments from others. Some people never accept criticism and are never ready to change and think that they are perfect. This type of filtration is called distortion. Distortion is the process which allows us to make shifts in the way we experience the sensory data.

We can conclude that no event has meaning on its own, we give meaning to it during the process of thinking using our internal cognitive input that we already have. This kind of generalization, deletion and distortion will take place when a person receives sensory inputs. The end result of perception after filtration is termed as Internal Representation or Internal Map.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)

          If I am not telling you at this stage what NLP is, you may lose your patience and probably leave my blog! Have you ever heard the phrase “You are what you think you are”? Please read it twice or thrice, slowly. What do you understand from it? It means your personality (The YOU) is the product of what you are thinking! A thinking process is going on in every moment of your life that produces emotions (feelings) and moods (states) and accordingly you act and react. Your actions and reactions can be verbal or non-verbal.

          Say for example a dog is barking and running towards you. Suddenly your Neuro system (brain/nerve/mind/body) acts and a rapid thinking process (analysis of cause and effect, precautions, protection etc.) will take place in your brain. The result of such thinking tells you that the dog may be mad and it will bite and hence to take appropriate actions to protect yourself. As a result an emotion of fear will be created in you and your mood will be totally changed. Your face becomes pale. This verbal and non-verbal expression of emotion represents the Linguistic part. It includes words, gestures, postures, facial expressions, sounds etc.

          The thinking process organized by the neuro system and the emotions created by it together carry out a Programming in your brain. The objective of this program is to take a decision and prioritize how to protect you, what precautions to take, what help to seek etc. All of a sudden your reticular activating system get triggered and first of all you will run, then you loudly call for help and meanwhile you will search for stones to hit the dog and also look out for a higher location to jump over. Everything will happen in a matter of seconds.

          At every moment of time programming and reprogramming is happening in your brain. Your life is the result of these programs! Conscious and unconscious minds cooperate and work together to set the program and therefore to make your life. All that you are doing in your life, whether good or bad for you are according to these programs. Your attitude, behaviour and habit are generated and controlled by these programs.

          All your reflex actions are programs of your brain. How do you behave is a program. Your attitude is a program. All your habits are programs. The way you talk is a program. The way you eat is also a program. The way you behave is a program. These programs will be repeated until and unless you make changes in that particular program. And yes, it is possible to change a program. How? Say for example. You have a good friend in your office. When you meet this friend every morning you say ‘good morning’ and shake his hand and he replays ‘good morning’. Then you ask ‘how’re you?’ He replies ‘I’m fine and what about you?’ so you tells ‘I’m ok’.  This is the usual practice and almost a habit. This habit is already programmed in your brain hence it will be repeated when you see your friend everyday first time in the front office.

         

          Now suppose, you are losing a promotion because of your friend and somehow he has managed to get a promotion. Now a change program has already started in your brain! A thinking process takes place. You think that actually you are eligible for the promotion and he has cheated you! Now, you definitely feel angry towards him.  ‘No need to say good morning and shake that prick’s hand’ you have decided. And next morning, you meet him as usual at the front office. What will happen now? Your face automatically turns reddish to show your anger and hatred. You turn your face away from him and move fast through the corridor. See here, how easily your brain gets reprogrammed and your behaviour get changed. Now, what happened to the old program? It is overwritten by the new! This is what is happening in every relationship.

          If you can program your brain in such a way, you can get up very early in every morning on a specific time. That’s how your mom gets up to make Tiffin for you! That’s how a Hindu priest gets up without any alarm early morning to practice rituals daily.  

          Your daily life is run by the programs in your brain. There may be good programs and bad. You have to program your brain using your mind.  As I said earlier if you don’t program your brain, it will run on its own way and execute what they were circumstantially programmed to do.