My journey into corporate psychology and communication theory started in 2008 when I became a Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) Practitioner. In NLP, there are 14 ‘presuppositions’ which are defined as convenient assumptions that guide our understanding of, and interactions with, others. One of the 14 presuppositions is “the map is not the territory’ which I interpret as how one person interprets a comment, behaviour or event can be different to how another person does, because they map what they observed or experienced to a different set of beliefs and values (their territory).
In 2016 one of my banking clients asked me to develop a training to help one of their middle office teams that had to deal with many other parts of the bank. The team often experienced resistance and encountered conflict. I proposed the course title ‘Conflict Management Practises” for the requested training, but my client rejected the name because they believed that the word ‘conflict’ had negative connotations. The client preferred the name ‘Collaborative Communication Techniques’. Another banking client prefers to call the exact same training ‘Conflict Resolution Practises’. One prefers to lead with the word collaboration, the other conflict.
What’s in a name?
The answer is in the association that we hold with that word. This is another way of saying how we map the meaning to our territory. There is no right or wrong association however, it’s important to understand how those you want to influence map their meaning.
To expand on this, let’s take the word ‘weakness’. A few weeks ago, I was attending a ‘coaching café’ in Dubai where a very experienced coach was talking about how we associate the word weakness with not being good enough, underachievement, and a host of other negative behaviours and outcomes. If we change the way we interpret the word ‘weakness’ to the term ‘area of improvement’, our perspective and mindset immediately change for the positive. Instead of focusing on the negative connotations of the word, we focus on improvement, and weakness becomes an enabler for better future results.
To finish with a business relevant example, consider the area of sales. Many people are uncomfortable asking others for money despite the fact they are selling a product or service in return for payment. The ‘sales’ profession is often looked down on as a lower-level discipline. However, we are all in sales irrespective of what our actual profession is. We are trying to communicate with influence to others every day – if that doesn’t fall within the broader definition of sales, then I don’t know what does!
By reassociating the word ‘sales’ with ‘problem solving’, the whole process becomes far more palatable and even honourable! I view my services as solving problems for my clients. They have needs, and I am there to provide a solution for those needs. In this light, the sales process is a necessary value added and there is absolutely no reason to feel uncomfortable when asking someone for payment.
Whether at an individual or organisational level, the association that we allow words to have defines how we respond to them. I deliberately write “that we allow” because this is something under out control. If an existing association isn’t giving the desired results, we can change it.
How we associate words is critically important and can define everything from an individual’s emotional state to company culture. When is the last time you audited the impact of words and their associations??
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