Does NLP allow you to read people's minds?

I am in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) for quite a while now. My passion started of in 2004 with a 2-day course and I never looked back. It is an amazing tool to understand myself and others.

After completing my all the different courses related to NLP (e.g.; Hypnosis, Timeline Therapy(TM) Techniques and others), I am now training these different disciplines to those interested.

I am sure that those of you who read this and have done their NLP Practitioner or gone beyond it have encountered the most famous question everyone in NLP once encounters - "Can you read my mind? What am I thinking right now?"

Those that ask me look at me with eyes wide open. A curious expression on the face. May be a slight smile.

I don't know where this idea comes from. Is it propagated by Darren Brown or did it come about because of the most famous application - the Eye Accessing Cues?

You see, people move their eyes in all directions, all the time. Even so it its validity is questions every now and then, NLPlers state that when people experience, create or recall a certain event, they move their eyes into certain directions.

You move your eyes up when you create or recall a picture, to the side when you create or recall sounds and down when you either get in touch with your feelings or check on your self-talk (a short crash course in NLP).

It might be because of this that NLPlers are said to be mind readers. But actually, it is more complicated than this.

Reading minds has something to do with a variety of things, of which only one are the Eye Accessing Cues.

Other factors that play a role are the ability to build deep rapport, watching body movements and body language (hey - it is a sure give away), the tonality of people and listening, listening, listening to what people have to say.

Most importantly, however, are the way people express their values and beliefs in their actions, the behavioural traits expressed in their "normal" language (look for the Language and Behaviour Profile to know more about it), and a lot of cold reading.

Wikipedia describes Cold Reading as follows:

"Cold reading is a technique used by mentalists and is claimed to be used by fortune tellers, psychics, and mediums to determine details about another person in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than he or she actually does. Even without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by carefully analyzing the person's body language, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses."

I am not claiming to be able to read people's mind. That's way too hard. The mind is too fast for me. But I learned through my own training that it is possible to be pretty accurate about a person's attitude to life, their way of approaching things, what they value and what is important to them. I am often correct in knowing their style of dressing when I talked to them on the phone.

People are like open books. Open books when you know what to look out and listen for. Of course, this is not something that is easily learned in just 10 days. It takes practice, patience and time. It is lots of fun, nevertheless.

Imagine, just for a moment, you simply know what is important to a person by looking at them, and then you make a respective compliment. The door to rapport and trust is wide open. It allows for deep conversations. No more pretending, and an open and mutually enhancing conversation based on win-win.

The result? You are perceived to be a great coach, a better parent, a more empathetic colleague, a super boss an understanding HR person, a wonderful salesperson, THE great listener and more.

Add on to the list....... by yourself. What do you want to be?

That is the power of NLP. The pleasure to speed up relationships. The ability to understand yourself to shut up your own inner voice. The wonderful feeling to just be there for the other person, when they truly need it.

And then, if required, to initiate change. To widen the other person's perspective. To let them have insights into their problem, and develop their own solution.

I say that this is the WoW Factor of NLP.

Isn't this wonderful?

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