Starbucks’ “The Way I See It” campaign has been one of the best examples of “influence” I’ve seen. It’s another way for Starbucks to add to the experience and give someone one more thing to look forward to when they get their cup of coffee.

What are you doing to subtly influence others?

Sam Harrison tells the story:

An old man witnessed a traffic accident, and in court the defense attorney tried to discredit his testimony.

“Mr. Johnson, I see you are wearing thick glasses,” said the lawyer.

“Yes sir, I do.”

“And you’re up in age, aren’t you?

“Yes sir, proudly, I’m 84 in May.”

“So exactly how far can you see, Mr. Smith?”

The old guy thought for a minute, “Well, sir, I can see the moon. How far is that?”

Don’t ever underestimate observation’s reach. What are you [not] noticing? What are you focused on, habitually when watching people? Honing your NLP skills starts with noticing more, focusing on what others aren’t and paying attention to people’s behaviors, patterns, and beliefs.

The short answer is yes. Watching (and learning from) this video below, you will quickly see why he’s one of the most successful actors of our times. I invite all NLPer’s to listen to his language patterns, where his focus is, notice his physiology, and perhaps the most important thing to model is his attitude.

I state frequently in my blog, the gift that Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) gives us, is the skills to model successful people and their patterns. That is where NLP got it’s roots. Too many people think NLP is just about using the techniques and forget that it’s more than that. It’s an attitude towards discovering and learning how to achieve excellence. From that will come the methods, the techniques.

While most people know that movies such as “I am Legend”, “Ali”, “Hancock”, “The Pursuit of Happyness”, and “Hitch” helped make him one of the highest movie grossing actors, Entertainment Weekly recently named him one of the “Top 15 Entertainers of the Decade.”

While the concept of change blindness suggests we can’t pay attention to everything and all details, we can pay attention to more.

More meaning, what’s in front of you that means something of value in interpreting, understanding, and reading them.

NLP encourages us to pay attention to more and form (calibrate) meaning from what we hear, see and feel when communicating with each other. In all of my client training’s, the most popular topic is developing sensory acuity and developing our ability to notice things we may not have consciously or deliberately paid attention to before.

This video really gets interesting 1 min 30 seconds into it.  Would you notice if someone changed their shirt in the middle of a conversation with you? Would you notice if someone changed into another person, in the middle of a conversation with you? Are you sure? Enjoy, Joe

One of the foundational skills of NLP that you begin to hone in NLP Practitioner training (and beyond) is that of pattern detection. Once your sensory acuity sharpens, you can start to apply your new pattern detection skills in a variety of ways.

One of them is in identifying when someone is lying.

A person’s mouth is just one thing to watch when someone might be lying. Whether it’s a subtle covering of the mouth while making a statement, swallowing or gulping at a seemingly inappropriate time, or an inappropriate smile or facial express, all are used to calibrate against a lie.

These tiny physiological signals involving the mouth, often unperceived because they occur so quickly and seem natural, are at times what can be called unconscious “micro-signals.”

Throat clearing in response to a question or statement usually signified disagreement to something that is said or asked, or an uncomfortableness with an unprepared answer to follow.

Gulping is usually a sign of nervousness, which should lead you to question the reason or source for that nervousness.

One of the more obvious signals (but most often overlooked) is when someone tries to cover up their words. Literally. A person will cover their mouth with his or her hand as if scratching or yawning. If someone finds an excuse to rub their lips, scratch their mouth or nose, run an index finger under their nose, or in some other way cause their hand to come between lips and face, it’s typically an outright lie being spoken.

Do you like card tricks? Are you good at figuring out card tricks? This NLP Blog is intended primarily for those wanting to expand their NLP skills and particularly in the areas of business management and sales. The most important foundational skill I will refer back to is paying attention (developing sensory acuity).  Why? Because it’s usually the one people take for granted.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder, when they were first modeling people like Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson, were exceptional at looking for the non-obvious. They were able to track patterns, detect what worked and what didn’t work. They were able to decipher often times the most obvious things that other “observers” and “listeners” missed. They were truly “modelers.”

Watch this video -- follow along every second and see if you can figure out this card trick. It’s one of the best Card Tricks I’ve seen and VERY HARD to figure out. Whether you are a fan of card tricks or not, you’ll love this.

How did you do? The phenomenon of change blindless is very interesting. It’s proof we don’t (and can’t) pay attention to everythng -- but we can learn to pay attention to more. That’s the point.

We all have a certain degree of sensory awareness and we all use some of it to gain information about others.  Through experience you develop the skill to predict, often with great accuracy, how people will respond to certain communications.  

You can be more acutely aware of sensory feedback by increasing the number of perceptual doors that you open.  Becoming conscious of a whole new class of data is the result of paying attention to your least used sense (visual, auditory, or kinesthetic). Interrupt your habitual way of gathering information. This is the most overlooked skill when studying NLP.

Keep in mind, nonverbal changes are responses.  ANY change in a person during the communication process is important to notice.  Our internal response is reflected, systematically, in our external behavior.  Our thought patterns, our neurons and dendrites firing off, cause consistent responses in our faces and bodies.  Internal thoughts (and emotions) show up in external expressions and body postures.   

How aware are you? What are you doing to sharpen your senses and make the most of your sensory acuity?