Personal Development NLP Singapore

Ah, the wonders of the internet. After getting some mails, I find that many are concerned with the issue of social interaction, so I decided to discuss confidence in a social setting.

According to Carl Jung, we have two sides of our character – the introvert and the extravert. If you take this knowledge into account, you will begin to understand how social confidence is built.

Introversion-oriented people tend to stay in smaller groups, often speaking one-on-one with others and focusing a lot on their work related topics because that is what preoccupies them the most. Extraversion-oriented people will tend to speak randomly about a good number of things and often end up covering a broad number of topic areas in a social interaction.

If you are generally introversion oriented, it will mean you carry off a deeper conversation over a longer period of time in greater depth. However, it does not mean that you will be able to do this across all social situations, only people whom you are able to have some kind of connection with. Most introverts don’t feel comfortable in situations that dictate a broad number of discussion topics.

Generally, extraverts have a better capacity for socializing across different contexts. However, what’s the difference that makes the difference for them?

1. Talking to think. Most of the time, extraverts say what is on their mind, and if they have a well-developed set of social skills, they will know what not to say so that they don’t just blather off everything they feel. This gives an illusion of spontaneity, but in reality, introverts are often not sure of the consequences when they share their inner thoughts.
   
2. Connection with the outside world. Have you ever noticed that people who are introverts seldom, if ever, talk about their environment or the things that happen around them? To mimic what extraverts can do, you need to connect with the outside world and read broadly about things. When initiating contact with people, it’s easier to then pick a recent topic you’ve seen or read about that can create a shift in interest around you.
3. Social awareness. This is a skill I picked up in my training as an NLP Trainer. If you are aware of what people need, who has been speaking or what has been of interest to others, you can start connecting other people and be the nexus of the party where people know you for knowing others. It’s not difficult to maintain awareness of others, as long as you are attentive to them, and truly interested in what they want to share (or at least, don’t ask about things you are not interested in listening to in the first place). If you need, you can even learn some memory skills to master the ability to remember people’s names  over the long term (which, I have mastered only to a certain level, I must admit).
4. Emotional state flexibility. Ah, what would confidence be if it weren’t an emotional state you can control? Change the way you speak and carry yourself and you might find yourself being much better able to speak and interact with appropriate emotion. After all, you want to blend in with the emotion at hand. If people are all serious and you’re clowning away, you’ll be as out of place as a person in a situation that is humorous and you’re just serious.

Ok! There I have it – my top 4, from a very much psychological perspective. If there are further questions, let me know and I’ll furnish you with more answers where possible.

Just recently, a fairly senior manager of a local company approached me and asked me a very surprising question. He asked how he could become more confident in front of his customers.

Now, mind you, this is a manager who has had over 12 years’ experience in the same industry. You would have thought he had the capability to achieve this by now! However, confidence is not just about a skill – it’s a state or a feeling that you need to experience.

So, what really goes on when you are not feeling confident? There’s a certain sense of uncertainty. You’re fearful that something might go wrong. Or, you start thinking of expectations that you can’t fulfill. Ultimately, it leads to a louder and louder nagging self-doubt which often messes up performance.

The simplest way to get rid of a confidence problem is to look beyond the problem. If you’re fearful of something, you’re likely to be afraid of the consequences and the embarrassment it might cause. What if it no longer caused you embarrassment but instead a way to learn from your experience in a fun and memorable manner?

Being in the public speaking industry, I’ve found quite a lot of opportunities to completely embarrass myself. You know, things that detract from the regular training style. You’re all well dressed, then you open up a marker that stains your clothes. Falling on stage! (luckily I haven’t actually done that yet) Or, you drop the marker cap, which jumps like a grasshopper across the room under your participants’ seats while you stoop down to grab it. Or perhaps you want to play a particular piece of music but the MP3 player was damaged… and the list goes on.

So, you’re afraid of approaching new people and speaking to them. Then, the best way to eradicate that fear is to do it, and find out the worst that could happen. Usually, nothing much does happen. The only thing then is to figure out what skill you’re missing. Can’t do the small talk? Can’t seem to fit the group? Well, it’s all about strategy, and you’ll have to open up yourself to more research.

What else might you know where people feel a lack of confidence? Post them here, maybe I could address them.

People learn to make choices in life, but we don’t always know what kinds of choices to make. We know that in order to achieve results, we need to spring into action – one of the fundamental choices we can make (choosing to act).

I believe the next choice we need to make is to see from all angles. If something is perceived only from one angle (usually the one we favor) then it may not always be the clearest picture.

In attending a motivational program, many people forget that the choices they make are the choices they have to own. If you discovered that you have to change your job, then make sure you do it out of clarity rather than impulse (which many people do).

Impulsive change is not what you want. You want massive action based on clarity of awareness.

I believe the second choice we have to make is the choice of sustaining a reaction. Sure, we learn that we can react to negative things, but we also seldom learn to look out for and react to positive events in our lives. We say that we can treat a negative issue in a positive light. But even if you had a good day, do you know how to keep that positive reaction? How do you respond to that? Do you sometimes let that fade? Perhaps, you could

• be grateful
• strive for an even better outcome
• appreciate those who were involved in that event

Sustaining change is just as important as initiating change.

One other choice I believe we need to learn to make is the choice of course correction. Not everything in our lives goes smoothly all the time. In fact many of the things we decide to do will never go smoothly or perfectly. Instead, we need to learn how to go with the flow and be able to change the course that we are on. This is important because we need to also remember that there should be flexibility in the application of the method. Too many times, people give up and don’t move toward their goals and end up changing their goals.

Finally, I believe the choice for us to stop and look at ourselves and reflect on our behaviors is also important for personal development. Without doing this, our life goes on by without us having the time to think about what we do in the first place, and then to ask ourselves if this is a meaningful behavior. A lot of the time, meaning is lost in our action, because we know how to sustain it but we don’t know how to enrich our behavior with meaning. Meaningfulness, I believe will be the ultimate reason why we grow.

It’s been said that you need to have lots of passion for entrepreneurship. Recently in the Money section in The Straits Times, I read Michael Ma, the owner of IndoChine restaurants in Singapore, that you have to have passion or else “you might as well retire”.

I think that’s fine and dandy for someone to say that. It gives a lot of hope and forward promise. Unfortunately, that’s not really a solution. Let’s back up a bit and talk a little about passion and where it comes from.

In my line of work, I see people who have passion and those who have none. It is my job to bring out the passion in these people. It’s a tiring job sometimes, but it also brings out the best in me. Now, I see a pattern here not just in the line of work that I do. There are others who focus on giving and contributing and therefore end up feeling passionate about what they do.

In one of my trainings of teachers, I asked a group of highly enthusiastic and participative primary school teachers why they joined. Most of them said that they had the passion for it except for two teachers. The first was a mild mannered senior teacher, about 60, and another was a younger physical education teacher, who slouched to a 45-degree incline on his chair and quite honestly would have beat any child at lousy attitude and poor behavior.

I asked the PE teacher why he joined the teaching profession if he was so lackadaisical why did he join? Basically, he said he joined because he was unable to find any other job, and the room was silently disappointed.

I turned my attention to the senior teacher, and asked why he became a teacher. He said he lost his job in his late twenties, and had no choice but to find a teaching career. He was an engineer, and was pretty well suited to teach mathematics. However, because he was new to teaching, he was apprehensive about his anticipated experience.

Soon, however, he discovered an amazing thing – that by helping his students, his students provided him the one thing that he was missing in his previous job – recognition. This fueled the passion that gave him a reason to do more than was expected of him in his job. And now, almost 30 years later, he would walk past students on the streets and they would still remember him.

One by one, some of the younger teachers stood up and acknowledged him as an inspiration and a mentor, much to the surprise of that gentleman, who was close to tears when his younger wards told him how much his mentorship and sharing had enabled them in their darkest moments.

I think the essence of passion does not come from being paranoid or being a high achiever. I believe that it is the way in which you affect people. I believe it is the way in which you believe so much in what you do, that you know that others will see you as a role model, that your purpose goes far beyond just the immediate gains of money and wealth.

Entrepreneurs will need to be clear about their purpose and passion. Being passionate also means they have to have dedication and commitment to what they do, but more importantly it is about the dedication and commitment to something that they stand for. Most people spend a lifetime finding their purpose, but that is mainly because they don’t have a properly established method of understanding themselves and reflecting on what they have done and discovering who they are.

The elusive ingredient of passion needs a few things.

• Meaning. Without having some meaning, dedication and desire is nothing more than an agreement.
• Depth. If the meaning doesn’t touch you emotionally in some way, then it won’t translate into actions that are congruent with those emotions. A lot  of people are missing this depth of meaning because they don’t know why they do what they do.
• Impact. I think it follows that when people affect other people positively, there is an experience that resonates beyond the current act. You remember someone who went out of their way to do something for you not for any gain or “key performance indicator”, but because it was intrinsically a win-win

What are you passionate about? Does it have Meaning? Does it have Depth of emotion? Does it Impact others? These questions not only verify the passion you have for what you do, it also reminds those of us who have a waning passion to focus on the reasons why we did what we did in the first place. So, whatever your job is, seek passion. Find in it a reason to love and continue to grow yourself so that your impact can be far greater than where it is, every time.

I’m actually in the middle of training leaders, and an interesting question popped up: when people are being leaders, are they demonstrating what to be, or what others want to see?

It’s quite a tricky  question because on one hand, leaders do things that make them leaders but nobody really calls into question whether they are “faking” it. Sometimes, it’s people who “display” leadership at the right time that become leaders, get praised or promoted as a result of it.

At the same time, people who have leadership skills but do not display or communicate this may end up sidelined, simply because there is a perception of this lack of leadership ability.

In evaluations and assessments, we propagate that people are leaders because they exhibit certain behaviors. But there are some people who do not exhibit such behaviors that people still want to follow. Could it merely be a perception? And are we barking up the wrong tree when we call for behavioral assessments? Is leadership more of an “intangible” quality?

I would like to believe that such an assessment is useful to a certain extent, and that “x-factor” will require a bit more than just a behavioral assessment in a moment of time. After all, we also need to assess if person A has “more” of the x-factor than person B a lot of the time.

It even appears that there are some people who step up to leadership only after they are pushed into it. I’ve heard from someone that good leaders are often reluctant ones.

Some of us are great leaders in one context, but flop in another. Perhaps then, leadership is nothing more than a projection of people’s expectations. Perhaps there’s something more to that. And often, it takes an extraordinary situation before an ordinary person can be recognized as being a leader.

Perhaps, if someone isn’t deemed a leader, that person hasn’t met with an extraordinary situation they can step up to… yet.

Hi everyone,

I’m just starting to rebuild the site, so pardon me while the renovations take place. Meanwhile, if you want to pick up information about NLP, please go to http://WorldOfNLP.com – this site is purely for personal purposes.

Also, http://Stuart-Tan.com is no longer hosting my website.

As I take the next few weeks to re-populate my content here, do drop me a hello anytime.

warmly,

Stuart