E140 | How NLP Can Help Us Get Back To Normal with Daryll Scott
Today we’re in conversation with Daryll Scott, author, speaker, consultant and performance coach, and boy did we have a wide ranging conversation covering a number of disparate topics.
Daryll’s unifying theory of everything, which is leadership and culture are responsible for all of the performance gain inside an organisation. And also they’re the reason why every company that he’s ever worked with, which was broken and in need of fixing, that was where the problem lay.
He also talks about his behavioural economics meets neuroscience theory of Monkey Lion Dog, and how rational based buying marketing personas are pointless.
“You learn that the less controlling you are, and the more respectful and mindful you are of the ecology of the other person, and what’s best for them, that the better, the more effective and influencing you become.”
And finally, he talks about how you can apply his Monkey Lion Dog theory to COVID, because the last year has taken spontaneity out of the UK population and left us in a state of learned helplessness.
“We’ve got out of the habit of bustling interactions. I used to get to London, on autopilot to my office. And now going to London would seem like a big day out.”
This truly is an enlightening conversation, varied, yes, but illuminating. We go all over the place, we have great fun, we’re sure you’ll enjoy it. But if you only take away one thing, let it be this:
“If you want to remember something really well, make sure that the conditions you do the remembering in are as similar as possible to the conditions where you’re going to need to remember.”
On today’s podcast:
- What is a performance coach
- Curing phobias in half hour
- Monkey Lion Dog
- IQ EQ CQ
- Learned helplessness during COVID
- Using NLP in business
Links:
- Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Daryll-Scott/e/B00HR6KD2A
- Book – Can We Start Again
- Book – Feedback Or Criticism?
Daryll Scott is an author, speaker, consultant and performance coach. He helps organisations, teams and individuals with their culture, performance, and mental health.
“I’m an expert in NLP and lots of psychometrics. And I’m also a business consultant, and an entrepreneur, I’ve started five businesses that are all still trading today. Business is really about people – all customers are people, all employees are people. Culture is people and mindset and attitude and vibe.”
It’s with that framework that he approaches everything. From organisational culture to team performance to individuals. Whatever anyone has an issue with or is trying to overcome, he takes a psychological approach to provoke a change in performance.
Overcoming phobia
One of the most frustrating things about getting people to overcome their phobias, says Daryll, is that most people don’t realise they can get treated in less than half an hour.
“One of the biggest barriers I find to what I do is that people are fairly unaware of what can be achieved. That you can overcome a phobia in half an hour, or that you can become competent on stage very quickly, or that you can sort out that imposter syndrome. People are unaware of just how dramatically they can change and how easily they can change.”
There’s a difference between changing behaviour through coaching and discipline and clarity and awareness, says Daryll, and phobias. Phobias are very much unconscious reactions such as a fear of getting up on stage. And these aren’t things you can simply change through reasoning or thinking differently.
They’re irrational, if you could change the way you feel about these things through thinking and reasoning, you would have done so already.
CQ – Curiosity Quotient
So much of what interests Daryll, whether neuroscience, psychology or philosophy, all of these disciplines split the human being into three parts. And three parts, says Daryll, is an incredibly common way of viewing us. From Freud’s id, ego and superego, to Harvard’s current research on IQ, EQ and CQ.
“For hundreds of years, we’ve been in love with the idea of IQ as a measure of intelligence, then in the 60s and 70s, the idea of EQ comes along, and suddenly we can be emotionally intelligent. The CQ is your Curiosity Quotient.”
If IQ is your rational mind and EQ is your emotional empathy and connection mind, then CQ is the contextual mind, says Daryll.
Why is the CQ important? Because, if you study something you’re genuinely interested in, you’ll learn 10X faster and 10X better than if it were something you’re doing just to tick a box.
“If you want to remember something really well, make sure that the conditions you do the remembering in are as similar as possible to the conditions where you’re going to need to remember.”
Monkey dog lion and lockdown
Daryll believes that our minds have three parts – monkey, dog and lion. Monkey is our contextual mind. Our rational mind is the lion, because lions are hierarchical and in control. And our emotional mind is the dog. Dogs are very loving and devoted.
Over the last year, we’ve been deprived of interpersonal contact in a heavy way. And contextually, says Daryll, we’ve lost our lightness and spontaneity.
“We’ve got out of the habit of bustling interactions. I used to get to London, on autopilot to my office. And now going to London would seem like a big day out.”
The other issue, says Daryll, is that we’ve been controlled for the last year. We’ve been told what to do, so our levels of self determination are really low. We’ve created a degree of learned helplessness. And the consequences of that are ‘let’s wait and see what happens, there’s no point in planning.’
If it takes 100 days to make a habit, what does a year of doing this create?
Learned helplessness
Thirdly, says Daryll, the dog dimension is the most violated. The way of the world as it is, means we aren’t allowed to touch anyone. And we get oxytocin from physical touch. We’re troop animals, we’re supposed to shake hands and slap one another on the back.
When things return ‘to normal’ and we’re told to go back to normal, the problem is that we’ve been living under our habit forming, and these new lack of interpersonal interactions are our new abnormal.
It’s going to take a while for us to revert.
NLP
So just what is NLP? It’s a way of working out how people get extraordinary results by learning how to emulate the results.
“It doesn’t have a theory and it doesn’t have a model and it doesn’t have a structure. It’s just a load of techniques.”
It’s a way of teaching you how to communicate subconsciously with someone. But isn’t that manipulative, you might wonder.
“You learn that the less controlling you are, and the more respectful and mindful you are of the ecology of the other person, and what’s best for them, that the better, the more effective and influencing you become.”
Why might CEOs and business leaders care about NLP? Because essentially it boils down to communication. If you want to learn how to communicate better, NLP can help you get there.
“If you manage to communicate, you have managed to shift the thinking of the other person. And if you don’t manage to shift the other person’s thinking, then you’ve failed to communicate.”