The Practice Group
Nigel & Jenny Heath:-
Address: Jinglewood House Ltd, Lyndhurst Road, Landford. Wiltshire
SP5 2AS
All of Nigel’s other reports:
2004 NLP reports
2003 NLP reports
Nigel’s report for the June 2009 meeting. Dianne Lowther
“How to be a better LEADER with NLP”
I hope the image above has loaded itself O.K. on your machine. Normally my cartoon greeting for the presenter is hand drawn. This month I’ve played with clip art. I didn’t manage to change Dianne the piper’s hair from blond to Dianne the trainer’s actual feisty red. Maybe she will consider going blond?
What is a Leader?
Dianne has been to NLP-
EQ stands for Emotional Intelligence,.. but then,.. at some
deeper level,.. you already knew,.. that you knew that,.. in a special connected
way,.. didn’t you?
Focus Vision
Inspiration EQ
Perspiration Passion
Goals Followers
Sets an example
Motivate Delegate
Highest paid
Where you want to go
Directive Selfless
Overview
This wasn’t just a case of Dianne writing up whilst we shouted out. There was lively discussion and erudite debate on the relative merits of some of the answers (though strangely not Perspiration). Geoff summed it up nicely (being a leader himself) by framing the answers into two sections, ‘function’ and ‘qualities’. There is no point in having a leader if there is nothing to do. When there is something to do then the need for a leader emerges and it’s the relative qualities of leaders that makes some people follow and some go in the opposite direction. Dianne shared her experience of working in the voluntary sector where the role of leadership was an annually changing ‘chain of office’ affair. The incumbent who had some of the qualities would have followers (volunteers) to work with. The leader without qualities found themselves alone. (And no best friend to tell them why).
NLP
Taking (modelling) skills you have and applying them elsewhere.
Dianne’s cunning plan for the evening was to have us consider all those times, places
and roles, where we were leaders, and to pick one we would like to improve. Using
other roles, where we excelled at leading, and crossing the skills over to the area
we wanted to improve. So in a nutshell, and without beating about the bush, this
is quite simply, to put it into proper NLP jargon, sorry if you’re just a beginner,
hang on a minute, where am I going with this? Oh yes, an exercise in self-
The opinions of the Head of the household are not necessarily those of the management.
So now in groups of 2 or 3 we spent a few moments exploring those areas we thought we took a leadership role in. For me of course the first place is in my marriage to Jenny. In particular to do with cooking, shopping, hoovering, picking up after the dogs, making cups of tea and other important things. Jenny takes the lead in spending money, buying clothes, furnishing and decorating supervision and usually the TV remote control. This wasn’t the area I wanted to work on. I need to get the Village web site sorted and the village is waiting for me to take the lead. So far I’ve managed to avoid this since March.! Carole helped me to choose this role. Since then I have talked to a couple of people on Saturday at the village fair, and have planned to pick off my prospective helpers one by one. Just as soon as I remember how Wordpress works!!
Having chosen our ‘leadership’ role to work on Dianne instructed us to change to
a new partner, one we hadn’t played with yet. In our new pairs she gave us three
questions to ask each other, and challenged us to keep to just those three. Pah!
Just three questions? Mind you they are pretty good questions. 1) Which role do you
want to focus on? (Hang on I thought I’d already decided that?) 2) Why is it important
to be a better leader? And 3) When you think about being a better leader in that
context what do you notice you want to do differently? Dianne had put up on a flip
chart of the Neuro-
Neuro-
Beyond Identity
Identity
Values and Beliefs
Capability
Behaviour
Environment
After the break Dianne introduced us to the Brilliant Minds Leadership model. Which
you will notice at the bottom is ©copyright Brilliant minds, so no copying it. It’s
only reproduced here because my hand drawn version is almost indecipherable. Dianne
has taken many years to get this to the point where she feels happy enough with it
to commit to getting it printed on a poster. All the time she was hand drawing it
she just knew it still had room for improvement. Now of course it’s perfect, and
we found it a perfect model to understand the intricacies of leadership. (One of
the reasons I keep inviting Dianne to come down to NLP-
Dianne ran through the model and emphasised the need for balance
between the five areas. Thinking about the leadership role we had chosen to work
on Dianne asked us to score ourselves out of ten on each area. Then back with our
last partner to explain why we had scored ourselves in this way and to discover what
we needed to do to get the balance we needed. To make this easy for us Dianne already
had the questions on a flip chart. If you’re playing along at home here they are.
1) What are you doing well that means you score yourself at that level? 2) Realistically,
where do you need to be? 3) What specifically can you (will you) change?
Cassie and
I found these questions really useful and this time I’m sure I stuck with just these
three. They brought a clarity to the fog of avoidance I was in before on this role.
As I’ve already said I started moving on this two days after the session. (That is
quick for me!)
All too soon we were at the end of the evening. With just time for me to tell everyone
about the audio CD’s Dianne had brought along at a ‘special’, ‘only tonight’, ‘get
em quick before I go’, ‘NLP-
Grateful thanks to Dianne Lowther for once again rising to the challenge of keeping us all in some sort of order whilst we played with the exercises she brought us. She tells me we really are ‘the friendliest practice group in the universe’, apart from the one on Mars. (But then they give free chocolate).
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