In this blog entry I’m going to explore a concept in NLP that the unconscious mind doesn’t (easily) process negation. A common example of this is as follows:
I’d like you to STOP NOW…….. and read this slowly…… try not to imagine an elephant and don’t notice the long trunk and white tusks or see the grey legs.
What happened? I’m guessing that you may have had some experience of an elephant. The thing is, in order to make sense of that sentence you have to process the word ‘elephant’ on some level. In order to ‘not’ imagine it, a person usually has to imagine it first.
It doesn’t matter whether there’s a NOT in front of it, people have to process the word and represent it to themselves because the word is in the sentence (and potentially they might represent this to themselves on a deep level if the word ‘elephant’ has some emotional connection or is wired into some important experience).
So, why is this useful? Someone once told me that “Everything happens first unconsciously” and when a person imagines something it makes it much more likely to happen. After Greg Louganis hit his head on the diving board during the 1988 Seoul games he shared in an interview that the last thought he had before the dive was of a mistake he’d made previously (yeah ,yeah, I know the last thing that went through his mind was the diving board).
In NLP people often say “You get what you focus on”. In simplistic terms, if you’re driving a car successfully you probably look at the road ahead and not the barrier you don’t want to hit. When you catch a ball in sport it is best to look at the ball and not your own hands.
So, are you communicating the representations you want a person to have.
Are the words you are using what you actually want them to be thinking of or imagining or not?
Teachers tell students “Don’t run in the corridor” and “Don’t talk in lessons” – and guess what the students do. A more effective approach might be to say “Walk in the corridor” or “Listen during lessons” – at least tell them what to do and not what not to do.
You might like to read the following examples carefully from 2 sales pitches.
Person 1:
I’d like to talk to you about X. Now you know about the problems we had with our initial production of X and although not all of the products failed, I’m not going to lie to you and pretend that we didn’t end up with massive losses initially. What I want to say today is that X no longer has the problems and I don’t want you to be worried now about things continuing to go wrong in the future with our company.
Person 2:
I’d like to talk to you about WIDGET X. Now you know we weren’t 100% successful with our initial production of X and, even though many of the products functioned correctly, I want to tell you the truth that we didn’t make a huge profit initially. What I want to say today is that X is functioning perfectly correctly and I want you to be totally confident now that everything will continue to be successful in the future with our company.
Now, the intention of the messages is about the same but which one feels best to you?
As you read them you may notice that the representations in the first are of problems, failure, lying and losses whereas in the second they are of 100% success, functioning correctly, profit, and confidence.
The thing is, people are affected by the representations they have. Telling someone not to think about something usually means that they will.
I’m not suggesting that you can already begin to consider how this might be useful for you personally, for example, in pick up or in the work that you do.
You may not be able to immediately imagine some of the situations where you might use NOT to lead someone or have them think about something even though you’re telling them not to.
For example, don’t consider the following ideas right now:
“Just because we’re chatting and you’re laughing it doesn’t mean we should meet up again”
“Even though you like the product I realise you don’t have to buy today”
“Reading these examples doesn’t mean you might develop an interest in using this stuff for yourself”.
Finally, remember this is just an idea and a way of thinking about things – it doesn’t automatically mean that people will follow through with their behaviour just because they have a representation but as you experiment with this yourself you might like to notice how well it works for you.
You certainly don’t need to let yourself just have fun doing it and enjoy using the ideas for yourself!
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Is really interesting that i was just thinking about th use of NLP, i worked in sales a while ago and the owner of the company used to train us on daily bases, and he was a great NLP junkie, actually a really great sales man as well, however the use of NLP into sales and pickup may have little variations, the main ideas i think can be used in both, the use of “NO” is too interesting, i like the examples that you put here and specially the real life ones, like the one of the teacher in the school telling students to don´t talk in class or to not run in the hall.
One thing here got me thinking… yo said that is better to focus on the road than nthe contention wall, or in the ball you are gonna recive than your hands, i more than agree with this examples, however, then would you say that is more important to focus on the girl, than in your own development as a PUA? I know that is a question that might seem dumb and i think that i know the answer,however id like to know the point of view of a NLP programer.
Good post, take care!
POKER
Im loving these NLP based posts and I’m really interested in the subject and want to hear more about it.
This concept of putting a postive spin on the subject by altering the words is core NLP theory, and it’s a really useful concept to grasp and apply. Not only is it worthwhile applying to everyday lives, like the example of the sales pitches, but I think it’s a worthwhile frame of mind to take on.
If we were to look at our approaches that we blew as ‘failures’ then it would put us off approaching again. Instead if we were to look at those blow outs as ’successes’ (even if only mild successes) it helps to re-frame our mind, or re-program our thinking. So this post sort of leads on to postive thinking and how it works for others when we choose our words carefully, but also how it can work for us specifically by re-framing our thought process.
Fantastic!
Once in a while I cover “positive use of language” and “negating positives” instead of using negative words. I also wondered if it would be possible to re-write a very negative news story and have people read it and feel good.
Now this post teaches all that I teach and a little more.
Everyone should be using this and seeing how much more people like them when they use language carefully.
Thanks man
I’ve been worried that when I’ve been in an interaction with women in a negative frame of mind, like they’ve just failed a job interview or whatever, I’ve not known where to go with the conversation. I’ve wanted to change it to something positive, but not been able to when she is focussing on the negative of what if I never get my dream job, what if is because my english isn’t good enough etc. So I can really see how negating positives instead of use of negative language will be useful in these situations. But ideally you want to cut negative threads and talk about positives only, if she allows it!
Poker,
Great comments and I like your question. In fact, I like it so much I’m going to write a whole post on it. So hang on, and I’ll get back to you with my ideas. Once I’ve written it maybe you’d like to share you own answer to the question.
Hey PhilipC,
You’ve made a couple of good points here and identified something that I may not have been clear about.
I’m not actually suggesting that it is always useful to use positive language and what I want to highlight is the importance of being deliberate with your language.
Maybe ‘negative’ words are useful sometimes and you want a person to have that representation. If I was telling a child not to touch an oven I might say “If you touch the oven it will hurt, it’s best to keep your hands away from it”. I’m being very deliberate with my language and the representation of touching it is linked to hurt and the better option is ‘keeping hands away from it’. What do many parents say? “Don’t touch the oven” – and which creates only 1 representation and it’s the unwanted one.
So, when your chatting to a girl it’s about being deliberate with your language to communicate the representations you want.
Great Ben! Consider that a Deal! I´ll be waiting that post and well… let´s see how close i am to your answer, great minds think alike, but bigger minds propose new ways… man… that was deep… and i wasn´t even trying LOL
See you around then!
POKER
It’s a really nice post!! I’m into self-improvement long before I found out about the ‘community’ (although I consider this to be a part of self-improvement..) and I really remember something I heard in a seminar I’ve been:
‘Your subconscious mind doesn’t know what’s right or wrong, it can’t distinguish between those two and it doesn’t have a sense of humour’
They were trying to tell us how we should use positive language in conversations and how to set our goals properly. This is similar to this post. Instead of talking about something that you don’t want to lose, talk about it’s opposite that you want to have. I don’t want to sound too romantic or whatever but we are creating our realities. Yes, you can talk about your vulnerable sides with a woman you have an amount of comfort with but try and keep it positive! And when she’s being negative, re-frame that. Give her value. But if she’s one of those who are so negative that have to take positive energy from others to survive, open a different set! Honestly, use with caution!!!
[...] recent post“Using ‘NOT’ Part 1 – What You Focus On Increases“ explained the concept that in communication, “What you focus on Increases”. Poker made [...]
After reading what Gambler said about this in a recent email, I’ve been experimenting with the use of positive and negative language to influence people’s internal representations of what I’ve been saying. The effects have been quite profound!
Here’s a simple example: A girlfriend had been texting me asking what I’d been up to, and how I was feeling. I replied that I had just got home from work. I was just about to say “I had a pretty crappy day”, and I stopped myself, realising the effect this was likely to have on the next few text messages.
If I’d really wanted to talk about it, and go into what could have been a negative and boring conversational thread, I could have just continued. Instead, by changing my wording to the more positive “My day wasn’t 100% amazing”, the conversation completely avoided the old pattern of “Aww, what’s wrong?”, or similar!
I love this stuff and something I’ve told some time ago was the use of sentences like:
“You can choose to do X or you can choose to don’t do X”
That way, your subject’s unconscious mind has to represent “DO X” twice and if you continue the sentence with:
“…but be careful because if you choose to don’t do X, you run certain bla bla bla”
Then “DO X” appears three times…interesting stuff!!
Thank you very much for your post
Marcos