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Super models

By Dr Mike Clayton (March 2008 Issue)
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Building emotional intelligence has become a significant focus for trainers and coaches in recent years. Our challenge is to find powerful and simple tools to help learners – and ourselves – do this.

John Grinder and Judith DeLozier offered just this in their 1987 book Turtles all the Way Down. Their work started from an examination of how skilled negotiators think. What they observed was an ability to see a situation from multiple points of view, which they labelled Perceptual Positions.

The First Position is how ‘I’ see the world, through my own eyes. This is how we spend most of our lives. It allows us to put our own point of view and assert our own needs and desires.

In the Second Position, we see the world through the other person’s eyes. This allows ‘me’ to understand how ‘you’ think and feel about a situation. This radically different perspective helps build empathy and understanding. It helps us realise that, no matter how unreasonable, disruptive or even strange your behaviour may seem to me, to you it makes perfect sense.

The Third Position likewise offers a powerful perspective. Here, we see the interaction from a fly-on-the-wall point of view. It is an objective, non-judgemental perspective that helps me evaluate what is going on and create options for how I can proceed. It offers you a resourceful view of how you and the other person are acting.

While each of these positions is of value, there are also costs in overusing them. Too much time spent in the first position leads to a solipsistic view of the world in which your needs override everyone else’s. Over-focus on the second position leads to a subordination of your legitimate needs and desires, resulting in inappropriately passive behaviour. Finally, if you get locked into the third position, you come across as detached, unemotional and cold.

Of course, we inhabit all of these positions naturally. However, by cultivating our ability to shift between them consciously, we can create a more reliable insight into how we operate, giving greater control of our behaviour and hence outcomes.

This was not new, even in 1987. DeLozier and Grinder drew on the work of a range of thinkers in the neuro-linguistic programming tradition who, in turn, drew on earlier thinking from therapeutic disciplines, such as Gestalt. Indeed, the roots of this approach may go back into the mists of time, with the use of storytelling and sayings like the traditional Cheyenne injunction: “Do not judge your neighbour until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.”

Their work gives us a structured way to apply this principle. By inviting coachees or trainees to actively consider their interactions from each perspective, you can help them find solutions to a range of interpersonal challenges, like ineffective communication, motivation or dealing with conflict. This often works best, as Gestalt counsellors have found, when participants physically adopt different positions to accompany the three perspectives.

References:

  1. Turtles all the Way Down, John Grinder and Judith DeLozier, Metamorphous Press, new edition 1995
  2. NLP at Work, Sue Knight, Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd, second edition 2002

Dr Mike Clayton founded Thoughtscape to offer coaching, training and facilitation, with a focus on managing and leading in the context of change. He can be contacted at mike@thoughtscape.net.

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