Dianne Lowther. (Brilliant Minds)
Enhancing Relationships with NLP

She set us to work almost at once discussing in small groups when Communicating becomes Relating.
We pulled together our thoughts and decided that a relationship grew out of communication when some form of connection was made. When there was a sharing of experience, when emotions and feelings became involved.
We discussed how our emotions are indicators of our values. When we touch on values we begin to relate to others.
Dianne shared with us her metaphor of the conscious and unconscious mind. The unconscious is like the Albert Hall, but with the lights off and plunged in darkness. The conscious mind is a pencil torch exploring the vastness, highlighting only a small part at a time. Showing up what we think rather than the way we think.
She shared her expanded model of how we make sense of the world and transfer it via our filters into our own internal representations (our map). Explaining the difference between visual as seen and visual as interpreted. Visceral feelings of heat, cold etc versus kinesthetic inner feelings. Hearing of sounds and translation into meaning in our heads. This led on to exploring the sub modalities of relationships and in particular where we locate people we know in our mind. My notes tell me this was the Location game! If you missed this session now is your chance to play along at home. You will need two pieces of A4 paper and a pen or pencil.
On the first piece of paper write down the names of 20 or more people you know. Some you communicate well with - some you relate to - some you don’t get on with at all! Keep going until you have 20 or more. Then on the 2nd piece of paper draw two eyes. you can use the ones below if you like. As you look at them they may seem to look back, and even follow you around the room. Don’t worry about this they’re not really watching you.(much). Then see if you can turn the image in your head so instead of looking out at you, you are inside the head looking out through the eyes. What you see below is the view from inside your head. Its a bit like those pictures covered in dots, with relaxation you’ll soon get the hang of it! For extra fun print it out and make a small hole in each eye and the mouth, then you can place it in front of your face and look through it for real.

So as you look outwards imagine the people on your list, (bet you’d forgotten all about them in the effort to look through the eyes!) and notice whereabouts out in front of you each of them is located. Here’s another diagram to explain what I mean.

Once you’ve got the hang of this and have arranged your list, notice any groupings that have occurred and check how much you value those people in each cluster, or maybe compare what values you have in common with them.
How do you make ‘sense’ of the people around you?
We took the break here and also the opportunity to have a good old chin wag.

After the break Dianne had us quickly into another exercise called the Meta-Mirror, a useful technique for improving relationships. Working in pairs we helped one another ‘deal’ with someone who was causing us difficulty or with whom we would like to have a better relationship. Using 4 different perceptual positions we were 1) ‘ourself’, 2) ‘them’, 3) ‘observer’ and 4) ‘meta-observer’.
Many useful aha’s were had around the room and several tricky relationships are clearly due for improvement.
All too soon we passed the end time of the evening and Dianne had excelled herself by actually doing almost nothing! What a great facilitator! Thank you Dianne for another really useful evening, bringing NLP into the real world of relationships.
We nearly got locked in such was the reluctance of many to leave, but fortunately the steward waited for us to clear the room before closing the doors on us.
Dianne runs NLP trainings in Leamington Spa and for more details about her courses go to www.brilliantminds.net