Well, right in the beginning of this write-up, let me clarify something. The title of the write-up may be about Leaders and Teams and by that you probably have started thinking about a professional back-drop. The ideas, methods and techniques mentioned here are perfectly applicable at home as well, or any other area of your personal life. It is rightly said, “A parent cannot be a good one unless s/he is a good leader and the vice-versa”. So, if you are more of a home-maker, a parent etc. read the title as ‘How Parents can motivate their children/spouses using NLP’. In this write-up, I will be using the terminologies such as Leaders, teams, employees etc. just to make life simpler for me as a writer.

We all are working with Goals, aren’t we? So many goals in so many areas of life. We have organizational goals, team goals (which should be aligned to organizational goals anyway), personal goals, family goals etc. Let’s say, we are talking about the team or organizational goals and obviously, we need to achieve them without a doubt. How are they going to be achieved? Of course, through people. And let’s say, you are leading a group of people who have this task of achieving the goals and some of the goals might be a little overwhelming. You are working with your team and the expectation is, they comply and do what is expected of them. The question is why should they? Because you are paying for them? That is just one of the reasons and if other reasons fall flat, then the employees will find another pay-master to pay them, this time someone who also dreams for them. That means, there has to be a motivating and aligning process behind getting work done by people. Motivating someone is an art and the concepts we would be discussing here are based on Human Psychology. To be more specific, we would be looking at concepts from NLP which is an acronym for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. That makes it Science as well. The NLP concepts in this write-up are relevant to Human Motivation. You can read all about What is NLP in my previous blog.

When was the last time someone motivated you to do something? Was it a stranger or was it someone you already knew? In most of the cases, you are motivated to do something by someone you know, someone with whom you have Rapport. Take smoking for example. I haven’t heard of anyone who started smoking because some stranger offered a cigarette and the person took it. It is always some friend. When you say ‘friend’, there is Rapport. So, let us just park what we have just established. In order to motivate someone to do something, Rapport is the key ingredient. But yes, haven’t we heard of people being motivated to do Yoga everyday by Ramdev Baba? Most of these people have not met Ramdev Baba, so Rapport is out of question. Then how are they motivated? The magic word is Credibility. Credibility has 4 components and if you are holding a high position in the other person’s mind as far as these 4 components are concerned, they will take you to be a credible person and will follow what you say. The 4 components are Integrity, Intent, Capability and Results.

• Integrity – ‘Walk the Talk’
• Intent – The good intention behind any action
• Capability – Your skillset which should be viewed as impeccable
• Results – What results have you shown in the past? What have you delivered?

Your people are going to follow you blindly if you are held highly in their minds on these 4 components. That means you are a Credible Leader. But before you can present yourself as a credible person, you first need to be in Rapport with the Team Members. After all, there are credible people on the road and in your domain as well, which you may not know. But we don’t pay attention to them until we are introduced to them, know them and get into a Rapport with them. Hence, Rapport is the first step towards motivating the teams. So, how do you build Rapport? Is there a technique? Yes, there is.

There was a time when I used to sell Financial Products. Financial Products are meant to ensure that life in the future will become easy either through some cash-back policies or saving schemes or may be Mutual funds. One day, I was sitting in front of a business man and I was hoping to get him to invest in one of the Mutual fund schemes. In the first 5 minutes, I realised the guy was a ‘crib-master’ cribbing about all aspects of life. Most of that cribbing was related to money of course. Apparently, I had similar financial problems during the time and I went on to agree with him on various fronts. We both agreed how inflation is bad and how the government is useless. We also agreed that marrying was a wrong decision because of the expense part of it. We went on to agree how otherwise, the money could have been used, for example, going on a solo trip. Within no time, something magical happened. We both felt like drinking because of the ‘pain’ we were going through and the fact that it was 7.30 PM. That is a magical time for someone who loves scotch. Turned out, we both had similar tastes as far as whisky brand is concerned. VAT69! Very scenic! We had become friends. We are friends even today. Do you know why? The similarities between us got us going. By the way, he invested in 3 Mutual fund schemes which helped me achieve me monthly target.

If you notice 2 people in your life who are best friends, or at least good friends, you will realize that they both are quite similar to each other. In my college, we had all fat people forming a group, all back-benchers in one group, all spectacle guys in one group. We also had a group consisting of all beautiful girls, as if to make a statement, “We are in one group and do not enter”. We had all black guys in one group, one brown guys in one and all white guys in one. I know, this might sound racist, but I am not one. It is probably the similarities that got them to be with each other. You will always find a smoker finding another one and, in most cases, they don’t even say to each other that they smoke. There is some power of the unconscious that helps them click with each other. I know, you will occasionally find people who seem to be poles apart and yet they are friends. But the point is, it seems that way and the reality might be that they connect on some common ground. Here is another example. I used to work with this IT company, heading L & D team. I was reporting to the HR Manager who I used to hate to the core. Abraham Lincoln once said, “I don’t like that person, I must get to know him better”. Well, I got to know the HR Manager better and realised that she is a foodie just like me. Kabab was a common ground. At least that got us to talk to each other.

‘Similarity’ is the backbone of Rapport. Find a common ground with your team members. Something that helps you connect with everyone. That something might be different for a different person. It might be cricket for someone, football for the other. You just might connect on common music taste with someone. I know I’m talking non-work stuff in a professional environment but guess what! People are ready to connect. They want to connect. They will do so with whatever common ground they find irrespective of the environment or the context. So, you may connect with people on informal stuff, even if the context is a formal one. That makes you approachable as well. Approachability is the second key next to Similarities for building Rapport. If your team member perceives, you are an ‘all areas of life’ leader for him/her, they will take suggestions from you without resistance. NLP talks of various techniques of building Rapport in the first level (Practitioner) itself, out of which matching and mirroring of similarities is one.

Once you are in Rapport with your team members, what do you do next? How is that Rapport going to help you motivate someone to do something? You now have a chance to exhibit your Credibility because they are now ready to consider you, hear you, see you do things. Basically, Rapport enables the team member to have an open mind. If I told you not to wear the t-shirt/top you are wearing because you look like a joker in it, how would you feel? What would you do? You would do one of these two things. If we were in Rapport, you would listen to what I am saying without getting angry and probably follow my advice. But if I am not in Rapport with you, we would have a little bit of a nasty exchange down the street, forget following my advice.

Now, let us assume you are in good Rapport with your team members and to the point where you understand the pulse of your team. You understand their thinking patterns. What they want, what they fear. Exactly that! What do they want from the job? What they don’t want to happen in their job.

Hard-wiring of the Brain: Towards & Away-from Motivation

Here is where I introduce you to the concept of ‘Towards’ and ‘Away-from’ motivation. Let me ask you a question, so that you can understand these two terms. When you are crossing a road, what are you aiming to do? Let me list various answers:

• To go to the other side of the road (Towards)
• Not to get hit by a vehicle (Away-from)
• Reach the other side safely (Towards with a little Away-from)
• Be careful and reach the other side (Away-from with a little Towards)

We all had a person in college who always aimed at being the topper (Towards) and someone who aimed at ‘not failing’ (Away-from). Let us come back to office now. Here is another question (which you probably can ask during interviews I guess). Why are you doing what you are doing (work)?

• To grow, to become rich, to become self-sufficient (Towards)
• I have seen lot of poverty in my life, I don’t want to be poor (Away-from)
• To grow without being stagnant (Towards with a little Away-from)
• To be able to deal with inflation and also own a house (Away-from with a little Towards)

I am sure, you have understood the concept of ‘Towards’ and ‘Away-from’ motivation. All of us are governed by both, more by one of them due to the hard-wiring of the brain. So, we might be more Towards or more Away-from oriented but we will never be totally 100% Towards or 100% Away-from. The simple reason, we would be dead if that was the case. 100% Towards would mean no fear of losing or dying. 100% Away-from would mean no motivation even to get up from the bed in the morning. Do you know the ‘hard-wiring’ of your team-members as far as this Meta-Program goes? If you do, motivating them becomes very easy. The rule is very simple. Motivate the ‘Towards’ guys by positive reinforcement and ‘Away-from’ guys by highlighting what they stand to lose. Here is an example. I had a couple of lazy team members in my team who never submitted their reports on time. I knew they were actually Away-from motivated individuals. So, one day when we all were in the cafeteria having lunch, I just made a statement, “Management has decided, punctuality and related escalations are going to be a part of appraisals from now. Heavy rating has been allocated to this point in the appraisal sheet which directly affects the increments”. I never looked back after that statement because all reports, in fact all work was getting completed ahead of schedule. You must have realized, the statement which I made had both ‘Towards and Away-from’ components. The two lazy Away-from guys took the message in the Away-from perspective and the Towards guys took it from the incremental growth perspective. But never do it the other way. Never threaten the Towards guys with negative consequences because they turn into rebels. And a positive reinforcement for Away-from guys also doesn’t work because they don’t care too much about growth, they just want to stick around.

It is fairly a simple concept to understand but I’ve always seen that it is the least implemented one. Simply because it involves two steps. Building Rapport and being Approachable and understanding the hardwiring of the brain for Towards and Away-from motivation. By the way, how do you identify the hardwiring of the brain? By observing everything the person does and hearing everything the person says. Cautious people are mostly the away-from guys and the ones who take chances, risks or try out new stuff are mostly the Towards ones. People who use the language, ‘I choose to’, ‘I want to’, ‘let’s do it’, are mostly the Towards ones. The equivalent Away-from language is, ‘I’m not sure’, ‘Maybe’, ‘It is risky’ etc.

You may have realized; various jobs demand certain hardwiring of the brain. Take Marketing or Sales for instance, that requires a go-getter attitude which is Towards. Legal, Accounts or Quality Analyst jobs are mostly consisting of people who are checking for what might be going wrong. If you don’t recruit correctly, it is quite possible you might have a hard time motivating your people. Even after the right recruitment, you would need to build Rapport, build Credibility and gauge the hardwiring for appropriate motivation strategy. Majorly, these are the 3 aspects when it comes to motivating Teams and, in the order, specified in the blog. But there are various ways of Influencing and Persuading as well, which I will mention in my upcoming blogs.

There is nothing positive or negative in Towards or Away-from motivations. To conclude, I would say, “The person with Towards motivation built an airplane; the one with Away-from motivation built a Parachute”.