NLP for Business: Powerful Techniques for Growth

NLP for Business: Powerful Techniques for Growth

Work performance is a major factor to the growth of a business. This is why it comes as no surprise that improving it is a common goal among many business owners. However, things are always easier said than done. After all, there are a myriad of reasons why employees tend to not perform as well like you expect them to. 

Today, we will take a closer look at how Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) can help you better understand your team, rally them towards excellence, and in turn, grow your business as a whole.

First, What is NLP?

NLP is an approach to behavioral therapy and development that analyzes the way we think and speak in order to determine and change how we behave. To fully understand how NLP works, let’s get into three core concepts:

• Subjectivity 

NLP claims that each individual experiences the world subjectively--how one perceives the world is different to how another one does. Through our five senses, we create subjective representations of our experiences. And according to NLP, these subjective representations have a pattern, and that we can learn to modify our behaviors if we can understand our own subjective experiences.

• Consciousness 

From an NLP perspective, our minds are divided into the “conscious” or “unconscious”.

The conscious mind is what we are aware of and guides us, sets outcomes and  directions.  It is critical of suggestions and therefore it is important your suggestions to someone are taken into account.

The unconscious mind is everything that is not conscious. It holds our thoughts, feelings, emotions, resources and possibilities we are not aware of in any given moment.  When you switch your attention then they become conscious.

It is important to know the difference as you can control your unconscious through your conscious thought processes.  It is important to communicate with both to strive for excellence.

Learning 

Modeling is important when it comes to learning in NLP. An individual can imitate or models someone that is successful in the particular task or field and develop the same or even better skills.  In NLP modeling, what’s being imitated are the strategies someone uses to be successful, including their preferred method of learning and processing information.

In essence, the goal is to understand your perception of the world (what they call an “internal map of the world”) by analyzing your subjective representations of experiences and language. So now that you have a clearer grasp, the question is how can you use it to your advantage? Let’s examine the three ways you can adopt NLP in your day-to-day life. 

NLP Techniques 

In general, NLP techniques can vary widely from simple to more covert techniques with positive impact.  Some techniques that you can utilize for business purposes and for your personal development include: 

Modeling

It’s been mentioned already, modeling is a great way to figure out the strategies of others to succeed. Modeling is replicating the thought processes and habits of successful people and using them to recreate yours. From learning how they manage their time to mimicking their healthy habits can help you and your team develop productive routines that will help generate positive results.

Reframing Thoughts

It’s easy to get caught up in your own negative mindset when you’re overthinking things. By reframing your thoughts, you are shifting your focus. Reframing provides a reasonable context for a person’s thoughts and actions. It helps you assess how your past experiences are also shaping your behaviors. This way, it allows you to see them in a different light.  Thereby, helping you understand your own and other people’s behavior better. 

Understanding Learning Modalities

Learning modalities are an individual’s preferred method of learning based on the five senses. If you’ve ever heard of visual and auditory learners, those are examples of learning modalities. NLP places particular importance on how our senses contribute to our subjective representations of experience. By understanding the different learning modalities of your team members, you can then find ways to help them process information more effectively.

3 NLP Strategies for Growing Your Business

Using NLP to Improve Leadership and Communication Skills

For us to understand the scale of how massive the contribution of leadership is to a growing business, let’s take a look at this report named, "The Cost of Poor Communications'' wherein they have surveyed a total of 400 companies across the UK and the US. 

Based on this study, they uncovered the true cost of miscommunication among large-scale organizations. And you would be surprised to know that apparently, a whopping $62.4 million is lost annually to poor communication. Interestingly, the study also showed that leaders with effective communication skills can certainly improve overall company performance with 47% total returns to shareholders. 

Indeed, the core of any organization is their leaders. Afterall, leaders are left with the crucial role of forming their team members, but also that of ensuring nothing is lost through inadequate communication. To successfully do that, it requires a significant understanding of human psychology to build rapport with both clients and colleagues, and to lead, manage, and communicate more effectively. 

Using NLP to Enhance Employee Performance

The performance of your employees is critical to the success of your business. You could have a brilliant startup idea, and without an efficient team that can execute your vision, it most likely will not happen. Even if you were to recruit the very best people for your team, chances are, there will be miscommunication.  That is where NLP comes in.

NLP can help you understand and communicate with your team better. Because it stresses the idea that our worldview is different from each other, you can use NLP to get to know your team better and understand their style of communication.  By recognizing how they perceive the world and determine patterns in their behavior, you can create strategies that can help them manage their emotions, actions, and reactions in the workplace instead of simply labeling them as ‘difficult’ to work with. You may also use it to take a step back and reassess how to handle situations in an empathy-laden manner (i.e. giving constructive feedback).

Using NLP for Better Communication with Clients

Practicing clear communication is a cornerstone of customer service. However, differing communication styles can be a problem when working to be on the same page as your customers and clients. That said, NLP can be employed to build rapport with them much easier. With NLP, you can observe and analyze a client’s mental map to help you adapt to their ‘preferred language’ and use it to work in harmony with them. This is one way of letting them know that you understand their wants and needs as customers.

Alternatively, you can use the modeling technique to see how successful businesses deal with their clients. You can look at their representatives and discuss their methods, then teach those methods to your own team.

NLP can be massively beneficial to your company. With it, you can improve interaction and communication within your team and with clients. More importantly, it can also help your team lead happier lives by helping them learn new choices and thus new outcomes.  So whether you’re wanting to use simple methods or hiring coaches, definitely take the time to adopt NLP thought process for your business.