August 21, 2008
NLP-teaching people how to read "body language"
Adina Barbulescu & Mihaela Chraif
Psychology Student EJOP Editor
Sid Jacobson, Ph.D. was one of the early Certified Trainers by the Society of NLP. Early on he carved out his specialties in the areas of education, training, and writing, in addition to psychotherapy applications, using the latest technology from the rapidly advancing field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He has worked as a researcher, trainer, and consultant to professionals, hospitals, schools, clinics, businesses, and professional athletes. As well as serving on several local boards of directors he served as the 1995-1996 Director of the Neuro-Linguistics Forum in the American Society of Training & Development, internationally.
Dr. Jacobson is the author of four books and the co-author of another, as well as many papers & articles on NLP. He is just finishing a sixth book, as well. Sid is considered to be an expert in the application of NLP to education and training, psychotherapy and communication skills. He has been training professionals for over 20 years.
He holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from The Professional School of Psychological Studies, as well as a Masters in Social Work from Tulane University, where he also did his undergraduate work in psychology.
Dr. Jacobson currently consults and trains throughout the U.S., South America, Canada, Europe and Asia. He has worked extensively in Singapore and Malaysia, where he has been conducting a wide variety of training, design and consulting services for over six years. These include in-house NLP training programs for major corporations like Singapore Airlines, Western Digital and Yokogawa Electric in addition to government agencies like the National Computer Board, Housing Development Board, Trade Development Board, Service Quality Centre, Land Transport Authority and the Ministry of Health. He has also worked with many local schools in Singapore, Polytechnics and Universities, banks, hospitals and social service agencies. He has also worked extensively in Canada, the UK and South America as well as throughout the United States. In the U.S. he has worked with many small businesses and organizations and large ones including Jackson National Life Insurance, DuPont Pharmaceuticals, Habitat for Humanity, Shell, Maersk Sealand and Case New Holland in addition to schools, government bodies,universities, banks, hospitals and social service agencies.
He is a training consultant with JSR International, ISVOR Dilts, NLP University and NLP Institutes all over the world.
NLP - Neuro-Linguistic Programming is the practical science of detecting, evolving and using the conscious and unconscious thinking and behavioral patterns that we are constantly experiencing.
Thus NLP is the cutting-edge communications field that enhances professional development and personal performance. NLP is about how people learn, communicate, change, and evolve themselves. It was originally developed by studying patterns of communicating and thinking used by highly successful people.
NLP provides specific "how to" skills to create change in one's self and assist others in becoming more resourcefull and effective. NLP is a set of processes that can greatly improve your communication skills in any situation.
While it is difficult to find a consistent description of NLP among those who claim to be experts at it, one metaphor keeps recurring. NLP claims to help people change by teaching them to program their brains. We were given brains, we are told, but no instruction manual. NLP is said to be the study of the structure of subjective experience, but a great deal of attention seems to be paid to observing behavior and teaching people how to read "body language." But there is no common structure to non-verbal communication, any more than there is a common structure to dream symbolism.
EJOP: Dr. Jacobson, is this your first time in Romania?
Dr. Jacobson: No, this is my second time here in Romania. I was here last year, around Easter time.
EJOP: So, do you think that the culture has a great influence in learning NLP? Are there differences between countries?
Dr. Jacobson: The differences that I have seen are not so much between countries as they are between individuals or the companies that hired me or the organizations that I worked for as a trainer. Yes, because what happens is if a company’s culture is one of learning and the people are oriented towards learning, they are used to training, they are interested and they are supported by their managements to be oriented that way, then, they are very opened and very easy to work with. If that is not the case, it is simply a little bit more work, because once people experience NLP, they take to it very, very quickly, they find that is very useful, very practical, very interesting all by themselves. But, it is obviously easier if you walk into a place where people are more open. I would say the same goes in education or psychology universities that I have consulted. If the culture that institutions promote is one where people support this new learning, they are very opened to training. Country to country is not as relevant in terms of differences as far as I can tell.
EJOP: Tell us about your activity program, about your domain of work.
Dr. Jacobson : Neuro-linguistic programming has 4 major areas of concentration. The first one, historically and still active all over the world, is psychotherapy, because it grew out of some research of psychotherapists. It wasn’t really about psychotherapy practice, but psychotherapists were the focus of their first studies. So, that was a natural application. From there, it also became obvious that education was another easy application of NLP and something that was direct and obvious right away. The next application, which was soon after that, was to business. And business, in a couple of primary ways, primarily sales, because NLP has lots to do with how people influence one another and there are a lot to say about how that works. Also, managements and managers have to influence the people that work for them. And, also there’s a good bit of application in HR and OD (Organizational Development) in resources, because, again, there are elements that have to do with how people operate so this is very popular there. The forth area of application of NLP is in medicine. We actually have a number of ideas and procedures that are useful at helping people to be healthier as well as more fit, but, actually, healthier in terms of their life style. And, also, there is this whole area of psycho-neuro-immunology which is about how people can strengthen their immune systems by altering their believes and their attitudes. NLP is sort of one of the main approaches that many people in that field take, along with aero sonic hypnosis techniques and a few other fields as well. I have a great deal of experience in all 4 of those. My primary area of work right now, in the last few years, it has been in business, because that’s simply where most of the demand has been for my work. But, I also do a lots of talks for educators and trainers, which are similar because education in business is an area that NLP has a lot of impact on over the years. I still do some work with psychotherapists as well, that is my background. I have background as a therapist, I was a social worker and a private practician in psychotherapy and I had experience in psychiatric hospitals, at prisons, at Community Mental Health, at a family service agency. I still dabble in that field and still train lots of therapists as well. And, then, occasionally, I’ll get to do something in the area of health care, but I just don’t have the occasion to do that very often.
EJOP: Is it difficult to work with people in prison?
Dr. Jacobson: Well, the difficulty in prison isn’t the prisoners, the difficulty in prison is the culture like in many organizations. If the organizational culture allows you to do something that’s useful with people, it’s not that difficult. If it fights with you, then it is very difficult. Actually, when I was working in prison was back when I first was learning about NLP and other approaches close to it and I was able to do a lot of direct work with the prisoners. But, it is a challenged work and difficult to work inside of those systems. Working with the prisoners themselves is not as difficult as working with the structures themselves, the security people and that sort of things, it is not for the faint of heart.
EJOP: How do you explain NLP as ‘the study of the structures of subjective experience’?
Dr. Jacobson: It’s simple. NLP, to translate that phrase ‘the study of the structures of subjective experience’, appealed the study that examines how people think and learn to process information and communicate. We pay attention to how people actually experience the world as opposed to how the world actually is. All of us perceive things to our own mental models and our own perceptional filters and that’s what we study, how people construct those, how they use them and how they affect people in their lives. So, NLP grew out of a bunch of research and how people influence one another by understanding how individuals think and process information. Once you apply what you know to an individual that you are talking to, you adapt your communication. And you are thinking what that person needs and then they understand you better and then they are more likely to go along with what you have to say, especially if you try to influence the moral of someone.
EJOP: Do you need native skills when working with NLP?
Dr. Jacobson: In other words, if is there something that you need to know ahead of time? If there’s some learning, if there is a special skill that is involved in learning NLP? Not really. As long as somebody is really interested in learning about people, that will take to the technology very quickly. It’s something that I’ve actually done in many other NLP sessions even with children. Children can learn these skills very, very quickly. And, in fact, many of them practice it without knowing it already. So, it’s more a matter of your willingness to learn as it would be in any other area, because the skills themselves are all natural, there’s nothing in NLP that was invented by us. These are all things that we discovered in people. What we do is we make conscious what people do that they are not aware of, that they are unconscious about and simply find the patterns to how to do that so the people can learn to do those things in more structured and more precise ways.
EJOP: What new things does NLP bring in communication?
Dr. Jacobson: In relationship to the things that I was just talking about in terms of natural abilities that people have to pay attention to each other, to use body language, the things that people aren’t aware of, in NLP, what we do is make those things obvious and explicit so that we can understand how they work. If somebody understands how people think and how they communicate, they are able to adjust or adapt their language, their body language, their facial expressions, voice tone, all the other communication skills, even their attitudes towards the content that they would talk about to whatever the other person may be interested in. The problem with most people in communication is that they spend so much time paying attention to what they are trying to get across, they don’t pay attention to the person who’s perceiving that communication or listening or that they are trying to influence. And, because of that, they tend to do the same things over and over again with everyone and not everyone responds the same way. That’s what NLP brings to communication. Now, the set of skills with the set of technologies are really quite fast and take people usually by surprise when they find out just how much we really do know about how relationships work, about how people communicate and about how understanding is built between people.
EJOP: Tell us more about NLP.
Dr. Jacobson : NLP was directly applicable in education, even in its very early days, because educators were already beginning to understand that human beings don’t just learn all the same way. Human beings learn through their 5 senses, some see, some hear and some feel and we actually process information in terms of those 5 senses as well. Some people think in picture, think in sounds or think in feels also. So, since educators were already beginning to understand that learning is century learning, that you have to understand how to communicate through the 5 senses, this was a taken over by NLP with teachers. We also know an awful lot about how states of mind are created and everyone knows in education that, if a child or an adult for that matter isn’t in a best state to learn, they are not going to learn very well. And, if they are in a really good state for learning they can learn dramatically in ways that surprise almost everyone. So, in NLP those are the 2 main ways that we’ve applied our hard work to education. To begin with, helping people control their states so they can get the optimal states for learning and understanding how to produce information, produce materials or even speech in the classroom is essential. Beyond that, we found that we understood a lot about how people’s learning problems work. A lot of them were problems for the children as well, for example, they might have emotional blocks or they might have some particular internal strategy that doesn’t work for them. We have procedures to take care of all those things and help people both learn quicker or, if there’s a problem, figure out what that is.
EJOP: About training NLP in Romania, how do you see the people you work with, you train? Do they love NLP?
Dr. Jacobson: People in Romania, like most people, find NLP to be extremely useful as soon as they encounter it. We have been fortunate in finding some people who really wanted to learn NLP and I’ve just finished 2 workshops, a 2-day workshop and a 4-day intensive training for practitioners of NLP, people who are really interested in NLP and they love it! There have been 6 absolutely wonderful days, very interested, very attentive, very eager, very supportive and they are kind and wonderful people as well. It’s been an absolute joy training Romanians.