Solution States: A Course in Solving Problems in Business with the Power of NLP - Softcover

In business, and most of life, people still work from a problem orientation. That is certainly how America generally operates. In fact, there may be a built in problem in expecting people to simply adopt a growth, excellence or quality orientation in place of their already existing problem orientation. It has to do with, of all things, states of consciousness, a major part of this book. When someone is experiencing difficulty, or a problem of some sort, he or she is not in a state of growth or excellence, or even thinking about those things. More likely is a state of confusion, pain, anger, or some other unpleasant emotion. That is part of the goal of this book: to help you get out of these self-defeating, problem perpetuating states, and into more useful ones.

A second problem is also built into this sense we have of our problems. Most of us are trained from an early age to respond to problems, barriers, and blocks with an avoidance reaction. We've learned to move away from problems or pain. This is very different from moving toward goals or pleasure. It requires looking and listening for different things in our environment and in the world as a whole. In this sense, it is dependent on different "perceptual filters."

This concept of perceptual filters is a way of talking about our individual ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, interpreting and understanding the world around us. We build filters based on our experiences, perceived successes and failures (and traumas). Most of us have forgotten where, and when, we learned to use the particular filters we do. This makes us slaves to them, until we re-discover our own processing styles and preferences.

In addition, these filters come in a variety of flavors we'll be discussing throughout this book. One major set of filters is called Meta-programs (programs that run other programs, i.e. our behavior). Meta-programs are used to describe a basic orientation people take, almost an attitude, in certain contexts or situations. These Meta-programs determine what we look and listen for even what kind of information we're able to process. In a state of avoidance, or pain for that matter, your attention is, out of necessity, focused on the discomfort or whatever is causing it, often to the exclusion of anything else ("When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's difficult to remember that the original goal was to drain the swamp"). We all, at one time or another, have treated potential solutions as annoyances or distractions, because we were so focused on our bad feelings.

Making the transition from an orientation of avoiding pain, to one of seeking pleasure, is not really what this book is about. It is, however, about the transition from problem orientation to solution orientation. Rather than fight against the natural tendencies that we have all learned so well, we can acknowledge those tendencies and use them to our best advantage. I've built a model, based on tried and true NLP technology, that does this. That's what we'll be focusing on and learning. My intention is to guide you, step by step, through the change in orientation, while simultaneously helping you solve problems. Learning this will help you make that important transition automatically, from now on. In that sense, what you have here will be generative. That means it will work for you more and more in the future, like a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering size, substance, and momentum. What you have thought of as problems, up to now, may very soon seem like something else entirely.