5 Things To Observe To Discover What People Think

You may not know, but the 20th Cen­tury had its very own Mer­lin the Wizard.

His name was Mil­ton Erick­son, Dr. Mil­ton Erick­son. Dr. Erick­son was a trained med­ical doc­tor and a hyp­nother­a­pist who had absolutely prodi­gious results with his patients.

The funny thing is: every­one thought that Erick­son was a nice old man who said funny things. He would speak to his clients about toma­toes and their prob­lems would dis­ap­pear! But then video­tapes were invented, and peo­ple started to realise what Dr. Erick­son was doing. There are many things we learned about com­mu­ni­ca­tion from Dr. Erick­son (I will reveal what in sub­se­quent arti­cles), and what I want to focus on today is his most aston­ish­ing obser­va­tion skill.

Not many peo­ple know that but Erick­son had polio when he was young. He spent 1 whole year sit­ting in his mother’s kitchen watch­ing peo­ple go by, and he could not move, the only thing he could do was to watch, and he devel­oped some amaz­ing pow­ers of obser­va­tion. He could see things that other peo­ple could not see. At age 18, he learned how to walk again by watch­ing his baby sis­ter learn­ing to walk.

He would know exactly what was going on in his patients head. There was a par­tic­u­lar woman client who did not show any sign, but when peo­ple asked him how he knew when she was in trance, he said, “Well, I knew because the pulse on her ankle slowed down”.

So what does this mean for us?

Think about it for a minute.

How use­ful would it be if you knew exactly what’s going on in someone’s head? We can use your obser­va­tion skills in all areas of our life, whether you’re a coach or a trainer, a teacher, a doc­tor, a par­ent, a spouse, in busi­ness (with clients, with your boss), in sales, and in ther­apy as well. Using your obser­va­tion skills, you can see whether you are hav­ing the impact you want, and utilise this infor­ma­tion to get the results you desire.

The good news is that we now know exactly how Erick­son did it! We know exactly what he was look­ing at when he observed peo­ple. So here are the 5 things to look at that will make a major dif­fer­ence in your abil­ity to see dif­fer­ence in other people.

The skin colour: That is a shift from light to dark. The best way is to imag­ine that you are see­ing peo­ple in black & white.

Skin tonus: You can look for the shine on the skin. You can notice the dif­fer­ence in light bounc­ing off the face even for ladies wear­ing make up. You can also pay atten­tion to the sym­me­try of the face.

Breath­ing: It can change pace or loca­tion, fast or slow, or high or low in the body. Try it! Your breath­ing can be way right up on your chest, now around your rib cage, or you can be breath­ing way down deep in the belly. Fast to slow, down to low are not always linked but many times they are.

Lower lip size: Many peo­ple do not know that the lower lip changes from moment to moment. What hap­pens is that the blood flows or not to the lower lip. Check the lines and the thick­ness of the lip.

The eyes: Focused or defo­cused and pupil dilation.

So what do you do with this infor­ma­tion? The process is called “Cal­i­bra­tion”, that’s a tech­ni­cal term which means that we com­pare between a base­line pic­ture (i.e. the per­son at rest, i.e. before you have an inter­ac­tion with them) and the change com­pared to that baseline.

Then you can notice the rela­tion­ship between the 2 pic­tures and notice what is going on.

As with every­thing, prac­tice makes per­fect. If you exer­cise your obser­va­tion skills all the time, you will begin to see things that peo­ple have not seen before, like a magi­cian, like Mil­ton Erick­son; and as you prac­tise more and more, you will become a mas­ter at this and you’ll be able to dra­mat­i­cally improve your results!

Want to learn the secrets to Erick­son suc­cess? The NLP Foun­da­tion 1 day intro­duc­tory course (July 11th 2009), and NLP Prac­ti­tioner, Coach­ing & Hyp­no­sis Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Train­ing (Sep­tem­ber 2009)

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