Chapter 12: Driving Habits: Uncovering Your Secret Programs 205
In NLP, calibration is the process by which you read another person’s
response to your communication. A slap in the face is a pretty overt response
and, we hope, you never repeat the words or behaviour that earned the slap.
Most responses are much more subtle: a scowl, a puzzled look, flushed
cheeks, a clenched jaw. A master communicator needs to be able to assess
these reactions, particularly when the signals are mixed; for example, a smile
with a puzzled look may indicate that the person doesn’t get what you’re
saying but is too polite to say so.
Nothing succeeds like positive feedback in achieving your own strategy, so
let other people know when they hit the mark, especially if you’re aware of
your beloved’s deep love strategy.Romilla knows a couple who’ve been very happily married for 27 years. The
wife needs to have her face stroked in a specific way, with a particular look
in her husband’s eyes, for her to feel as if she’s the centre of her husband’s
world; you can almost hear her purr!Infl uencing people with strategies
By using your knowledge of strategies you can make yourself an irresistible
communicator. When you discover people’s strategies, you can use them as
a framework to feed information back to people, using the steps of their own
strategy. For example, suppose that you want to use a teenager’s strategy to
help them do their homework.In order to feed information back using the teen’s own strategy, you first
need to determine what that strategy is. So you ask a question such as ‘How
do you motivate yourself to play football?’ and watch the teen’s eye move-
ments as they answer your question. Suppose that your question elicited the
following verbal response with the accompanying eye movements shown in
Figure 12-4 in the preceding section:I see myself in my kit, with the rest of the team [eyes move to their top left –
Vr] and I hear everyone talking excitedly [eyes move their left, horizontally –
Ar]. I say to myself ‘we’re going to win’ [eyes move to their bottom left –
Ad] and I feel really good [eyes move to their bottom right – K].Based on the teen’s answer and their eye movements you can craft your
response accordingly. You know that to motivate themselves, they remember
a picture (Vr), and then they remember the excited chatter of the team (Ar).
They then talk to themselves (Ad) before, finally, feeling (K) good. Based on
this information you can use the following approach: