‘Are you some kind of mind reader?’ is a question Eric Robbie is often asked. His answer may be a real eye-opener. That would be an appropriate response to the man who discovered ‘sub-modality eye accessing cues’ (SMEACs), one of the key concepts of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), back in 1987. Seven years previously, Richard Bandler and John Grinder had first reported that movements of a person’s eyes indicate their internal representational system being used. Robbie went a step further and observed patterns of eye movements associated with sub-modalities – the smaller elements within a person’s inner representational system; the way, for instance, we might move our eyes up or down, left or right, when creating a visual image in our brains which is bright, dim, fuzzy, clear, colour, monochrome, big, small and so on. Observing a person’s eye movements to interpret these sub-modalities is a very powerful tool for the NLP practitioner.

How do you get to be an original thinker in the training world? Robbie puts it down to boundless curiosity. ‘I can’t help wondering – “What if …?” and “Why is it like that?”’ he says with almost childlike enthusiasm. He believes that trainers can do more than interpret and present other people’s ideas. ‘It’s about asking lots of questions,’ he says. ‘More often than not, they are very simple ones like: “When is it not like that?” or “Is that true in every case? What are the exceptions?” The creative trainer becomes almost obsessed with wanting to know the unknown; he or she can’t resist wanting to know the bits that others have never explored.’

When it comes to creativity, Robbie has had a head start. His working career includes a period as a journalist with the BBC and Sunday Times. He also worked as an advertising copywriter, making a name in the industry as the originator of the ‘fox and bear’ characters in the TV adverts for Fox’s Glacier Mints. After that, he spent several years as a teacher of magazine design for the computer world. This work took him to the USA in the early 1980s and that’s where he became interested in aspects of therapy. ‘Then I read Frogs into Princes, Bandler and Grinder’s seminal book on NLP.¹ It was an amazing discovery for me – a book about science, language and people. I thought: “These guys are really on to something.” I met and got to know Richard Bandler. Then, in 1988, he asked me to start teaching with him and I spent three years “on the road” with him.’

Robbie’s insight into SMEAC came out of what he calls a ‘creative use of boredom’. He ran a weekly NLP group in London and found that he could predict exactly which colour people were ‘seeing’ in their mind’s eye. But he also made a further astonishing discovery: people are like chameleons! ‘Through very careful and precise observation, I learnt how to detect minute changes in skin colour which reflect the colours people are seeing at the sub-modality level.’ Prompted by his class, he worked on other precise physical signals we give as we ‘hear’ or ‘feel’ experiences in our thoughts.

This work led Robbie to turn his restless gaze on the power of intuition. ‘I want to know if we can analyse intuition without killing it off,’ he says. What makes a good detective or customs officer? How do they ‘know’ when a person is hiding a guilty secret? Robbie also wants to know if the winning ways of sports champions can be replicated in others. ‘If we know that the Open Golf Champion has the ability to stay icily calm as he makes that final putt, what has enabled him to do that and can NLP help others to emulate the behaviour? Can we make a working copy?’

Robbie is also very interested in how we make (and lose) business deals. ‘I am currently researching into the art of negotiation – something people do every day with very little, if any, formal training. I am interested in the non-verbal communication going on between negotiators. How do we signal when an offer is to be made, accepted or rejected? I think this is a pretty new area of research,’ he says with great enthusiasm.

As he thinks these thoughts, his eyes light up, he looks dreamily upwards and his head tilts slightly to the side. To know exactly what he is seeing, hearing or feeling you would have to be a mind reader. And that’s not possible. Or is it?

Reference
1. Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Frogs into Princes, Real People Press, 1987.

Being the first: Eric Robbie’s recipe for original work in the training (or any other) world
1. Keep asking the simple questions: what else is there?
2. Love your mistakes; welcome them and study them positively for what you can learn.
3. Move away from boredom to fascination – motivation is all.
4. Be patient. It takes me two years to create ideas I can teach in two days.
5. Don’t believe that ‘creative people are born not made’ stuff.
6. Be prepared to play and to get egg on your face – feedback and trial and error is all in our world.
7. Work towards precision; your theories must work every time.
8. Ask the key question: ‘Can I teach this?’
9. Be prepared for some criticism from the ‘hard’ science world. NLP was dismissed by much of the orthodox psychology profession until it embraced these concepts – then renamed them.
10. Rediscover the kick you get from designing a new course.

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