The phantom cartoonist strikes again!

Tim took a few moments to set the ‘frame’ for the evening. Working as a consultant to Government he has noticed how some people ‘hate’ their work and others ‘love’ it. As a committed NLPer he couldn’t help himself from modelling those who appeared to ‘love’ being at work. First though he told us some stories about the ‘haters’ and the strategies they employed, rather unsuccessfully, to get through the working week. Generally these involved counting down the days and hours to the weekend, their holiday or retirement! One lady had a reframe for every day in the week except Tuesday, so Tuesdays were hell, the rest of the week bearable.
Then there are those other people. The ones who seem to enjoy working. What Tim wondered do they do differently in their minds? He would ask them the ‘Lottery’ question. If money was no longer needed would you still come to work? Those who enjoyed work could easily answer yes as they had already gone beyond just ‘money’ as a motivator for their job. So what were the key elements of their ‘strategy’ and how could we apply them for ourselves?

 Know who your ‘customers’ are:-
Who benefits?    How do they benefit?

This took us to the 1st exercise, in three’s. Discussing who are our customers and just how do they benefit? Tim had thoughtfully provided a ‘crib’ sheet on how to do this exercise and I think one or two people even thought of using it! The rest of us made it up as we went along as usual.
When we reconvened and shared our findings we had some interesting examples. When looking at specific jobs e.g. filling out VAT returns, is it Gordon Brown who benefits? The customs and excise man? The whole country? Probably a task best handled by finding a positive motivation for having done it! Then there’s the computer programme writer, whose immediate customer has another customer with a series of end users who use the programme for the benefit of their customers, who at any one time could be me, you or the programmer in question! Come back! When you get really good at this a long chain like this presents no problem to enjoying the ‘benefits’ of customers as you do the work.
Tim took up the time before the break to tell us more about the strategies of ‘Happy at work’ people and their beliefs around their work, its value and its benefit to others.
The ‘Happies’ also felt they had a degree of control over their work. The ‘unhappies’ felt they had no control.
The ‘Happies’ made a point of getting along with their colleagues at all levels and their boss in particular.
The ‘Happies’ found ways to enjoy what they were doing. We joined in here and debated the value of doing what you enjoy versus the ability to enjoy whatever you are doing. All this took us swiftly to the break.

After the break we launched very quickly into the 2nd exercise Tim had designed for us. He needed to give us ‘health & safety’ warnings as this involved returning to a stressful situation. (Is there a Doctor in the house?) Tim took us through the setup for this exercise and had another ‘crib’ sheet for us to ensure we knew what was happening. We split into pairs this time and were ‘coached’ by our partner to recall a previous stressful time. The coach to encourage the stressed person to verbalise and live out what had happened and to notice (using sensory acuity) the body posture, voice tonality, speed, & pitch, skin colour, breathing rate, pupil dilation, direction of gaze, internal dialogue, pulse rate and anything else they had space for! Then after a ‘break state’ shake down, time to recall a positive memory of being ‘in the flow’, a time of resourcefulness, a good memory. Once again the coach was there to amplify all those good feelings, and notice the differences in body posture, voice etc, etc, etc. Then staying in the ‘positive’ space the ‘client’ was asked to recall the previous negative state. (We may even have asked them to TRY really hard). In the ‘wash up’ afterwards many reported that this event no longer had such negative effects on them. Indeed there were those who found that they had moved from ‘associated’ to ‘disassociated’ and were now just relaying a story, quite dispassionately.
All this took us close to the end and only left time for Tim to recap on what we had learnt about being ‘Happy @ Work’.

Thank you Tim for bringing us the results of your modelling. As NLPers we need to be finding opportunities every day to model others and improve our understanding of how to be the best NLPers we can!
Tim runs an NLP training and consultancy company and you can contact him direct via his site http://nlpdiscovery.com