smell, process, wilt, moist, assortment, mix, bloom, shrivel, light, fertile, sort, blossom, rot, petal, fresh, transplant, arrange, fade, root, firm, grow, stem, fragrant, arrangement, texture, budding, branch, bouquet, nip in the bud
Specialized vocabularies like this, that provide overlap into everyday speech, are available in most businesses and fields and can provide extremely useful and powerful advantages in communication.
4.423 Recruiting and Selection.
Neurolinguistic programming is a valuable and practical asset to those involved in the recruiting, selection or training of personnel. It should be obvious intuitively that the strategies that make a good sales executive will be different from those which make a good personnel manager or engineer. For anyone involved in the recruiting or selection process there are basically two choices available:
1) If you already have within your organization a person who is naturally skilled at the job you are recruiting for (that is, if the person already has the necessary strategies) and you want find someone else to recapitulate this person's behavior, elicit the strategies of the person who is naturally good at the job and record them. Once you have recorded the person's strategies for decision making, motivation, learning, creativity, etc., conduct a series of interviews in which you elicit the natural strategies of the applicants. You will want to choose, of course, the applicant whose natural strategies most closely match those of the employee you have chosen to model.
2) After you have elicited and recorded the strategies of the person who is naturally skilled at the job you are recruiting for, you can choose to install those strategies in an existing employee or applicant (installation will be discussed in detail in the last section of this book).
You can also recruit an individual with three out of four of the necessary strategies and then install the fourth. Depending on the nature of the task, and your available time, you may find it more profitable to opt for one or the other of these choices. If the task is not highly technical and doesn't involve a great number of sophisticated strategies, it will be easier to recruit people. If the task is technical and sophisticated, there will be less likelihood that you will find someone who already has the necessary strategies, and it will be easier to install the strategies in someone who most closely approximates the job requirements.
If you don't already have a highly qualified person in your organization who can be modeled for your selection process, you can always locate someone who is skilled in another company or organization and model their strategies. Rather than trying to "steal" or "buy" that employee, you can take him out to lunch or engage him in a social setting to covertly elicit their strategies and record them for later installation in somebody else.
You may choose to implement career development or employee development programs designed to develop representational systems or strategies in existing employees. We have successfully implemented several human resource development packages designed around this simple principle. Such programs help to encourage and fortify natural abilities in employees and to develop those who are deficient.
4.43 Medical and Health Professions.
Many studies in recent years have shown that a suprisingly high percentage of modern illnesses have stress related causes. A significant percentage of heart and circulatory problems, ulcers, arthritis, migrane headaches, eye problems and other physical symptoms have been shown to be directly related to stress, a natural outcome of many people's existing strategies. Stress can be very functional (it is not inherently "bad") as a motivator and as a test mechanism.
For us "mind" (neurological processes) and "body" (the machinery governed by these neurological processes) are an interconnected part of the same biological system. Strategies are not merely cognitive activities within our representational systems. Our representational systems interface with other neural systems such that the neurological outcomes of our strategies affect our motor responses, respiration, autonomic control of glandular secretions, body chemistry, heart and blood pressure, metabolism and even the immunity system. The neural activity in one part of our biological system can't not have some effect on the rest of the system.
Neurolinguistic programming is a powerful resource for preventive medicine and in the treatment of psychosomatic illness. Psychosomatic illnesses are, by definition, not "all in the mind," but are the result of real interactions between biological systems.
By changing the way people guide and organize their behavior neurologically, through their strategies, (which involves changes in accessing cues and outcomes) people reorganize themselves physiologically. In our therapeutic work we have encountered instances, time and again, in which people we have been working with have had physical symptoms improve, clear up or go into remission when they have changed an old strategy, installed a new one, or utilized a forgotten resource strategy. Symptoms have ranged from minor colds, coughs, infections and warts to arthritis, nearsightedness, tumors and cancer.
Psychological attitude has long been recognized in the medical and health professions as a contributor to the ease and speed with which someone is able to recover. With NLP we are dealing with processes more encompassing and profound than simply attitude. Using NLP we have helped people to interrupt strategies that were contributing to the ailment and to design and implement strategies used to control and regulate major aspects of their physiological ailments. We have found (not surprisingly) that people who have similar strategies are prone to similar illnesses, and that one can predict the kinds of sicknesses a person with a certain set of strategies is most likely to get.
One effective tactic is to find an individual who has been able to recover easily and rapidly from a particular illness and model his strategies (for motivation, self feedback, etc.) Then teach these strategies or install them in others with the same sickness. In our workshops we sometimes conduct an exercise in which people who have completely recovered from former chronic ailments such as allergies or poor eyesight are paired up with individuals confronted with the same problem the others used to have. The task for the person who would like to get over his allergies, headaches, nearsightedness, etc., is to elicit the strategy that his partner has used. Once this is accomplished, it is his partner's task to help him install the strategy he have just elicited. (Installation procedures will be discussed fully in the final chapter of this book.) We have had many startling successes with this exercise.
We are in no way, of course, trying to discourage people from seeking proper medical assistance for physical ailments. What we are trying to communicate is that surgery, medication and other forms of chemotherapy, treat physiology directly and may fail to utilize fully the potential effectiveness of self regulation or control, or other avenues of symptom treatment. The cause for many physical symptoms can be traced to behavioral patterns and can be alleviated through alterations in behavior. The advent of biofeedback has produced abundant evidence that people can control autonomic physiological processes to a much greater degree than was believed possible a few years ago. There are many areas where culturally and institutionally accepted limitations can be successfully and usefully challenged. The primary goal of NLP is, as we stated in the introduction, to continue the evolutionary process of challenging limitations and to move more and more parameters of our experience from environmental variables (those outside our control) to decision variables (those within our personal control). When given the choice we would always opt for the avenue of treatment emphasizing internal personal control over those involving external factors outside of our control.