❏ Express what we really want in ways that bring others along
with us.
❏ Increasingly tap into what is important to us and express it
in ways so that others will listen.
❏ Deal with people who we feel are regularly trying to block
our path.
❏ Negotiate a win/win in situations that might otherwise be
blocked or compromised.
❏ Empathise with others and yet not take on the burden of all
their emotions.
❏ Stand back from situations and take learning from every one
of them.
❏ Deal with situations as they arise, manage them in a way
that is in everyone’s best interest, and move on.
❏ Let go of resentment, anger, frustration, and guilt.
❏ Increasingly move through work and life as a learning
journey that becomes increasingly enriching with every step
we take.
It really is quite simple and of course common sense—once we
know how. This chapter presents some of the work done by John
Grinder and Judith DeLozier to provide shortcuts to powerful
techniques such as these. This is an example of what is
sometimes referred to as New Code NLP. The strategy that
John and Judith developed is a way of learning to take different
perceptual positions on a situation in order to find a balance in
how we go forward to a solution. Because of this, the strategy
for negotiation is often called perceptual positions. After all,
the perceptual positions we take in our heads and in our
physiology are all we have to work with in this life.
When John Grinder and Judith Delozier modeled people who
were skilled at negotiating a way forward that was a win for
themselves and also a win for the person or people with whom
they were negotiating, they found that these people were able
to experience a situation from many different perspectives and
that it was this mental agility that enabled them to gain the
NEGOTIATE YOUR WAY THROUGH LIFE: PERCEPTUAL POSITIONS 309