242 Part IV: Using Words to Entrance
Your central nervous system is being fed millions of pieces of information
every second. If you needed consciously to evaluate every bit of this informa-
tion, imagine the time and energy you’d need; it would be an impossible task
with full information overload!
To help you operate at peak efficiency, deletion delivers a valuable critical
screening mechanism. Deletion is selective attention. Deletions in your lan-
guage encourage you to fill in the gaps – to imagine information to complete
what’s missing. If someone says to you ‘I bought a new car,’ you then begin
to guess more information. If that person doesn’t tell you what type of car,
you then create your own ideas about the make, colour, and age, based on
what you’ve already decided about its use and the person’s preferences. So
if you think that the person’s a lively, fun-loving character, you may decide
that they bought a sports car. If you think they’re safe and cautious, you may
decide that they bought a conventional and practical car.
The downside of deletion is that it can restrict and limit your thinking and
understanding. For example – you can develop the habit of deleting certain
information and signals from others. Compliments and criticism are the clas-
sic example. Some people are experts at deleting compliments they receive
and noticing only the criticism. So, too, they ignore success and notice only
failure. If this habit rings a bell for you, set about breaking it now.
In a coaching session, Meera confessed to her coach that ‘I’m extremely lazy.’
This statement intrigued her coach who had heard about Meera’s exhausting
workload as a partner in a City law firm. Her coach asked her to keep a diary
of ‘how specifically she was lazy’ for a whole week. At the end of the week,
when they evaluated the diary together, Meera spotted that the expectations
she placed on herself were sky high and leading to almost certain burn-out.
What she saw as ‘laziness’ was in fact the essential recovery time that she
gave herself, and she needed to reframe her limited perception to recognise
its value, just as a high-performing athlete needs time off the sports track to
boost energy.
To gather deleted information, you can ask these useful questions:
✓ Who? What? When? Where? How?
✓ What precisely?
✓ What exactly?
Notice that ‘why?’ doesn’t figure in this list of questions. That’s because ‘why’
forces people to question their personal judgement and purpose rather than
recover lost information.
