The other day a client asked me about “Reframing”. He said, “It can help me get unstuck, right?”
Reframing is another one of NLP’s jargon words which means “Answering Objections”. Now, when I was in one of my first jobs after graduating university, I was selling radio advertising. The sales manager gave me a list of the 10 most frequent objections to buying radio advertising and the answers to those 10 objections. We memorized those answers to the objections and parroted them back to the potential customer. Sometimes the answers worked. Sometimes the answers did not work. Even worse if we gave an answer and they didn’t respond, I didn’t know where to go with it.
When you are in the business of making change occur, as our NLP Coaches are, you probably aren’t going to get agreement the very first time you propose something different. (In fact, if you get agreement right away maybe you should have proposed something that required more from the client.) When you propose something to the client that requires change, then probably the first time you will get an objection – and that objection needs to be answered.
You see, when I was doing Coaching before NLP, I realized that we knew what we needed to do to make a client successful. But the client had a 50-50% chance of not listening to what we said. So half of our clients did not do what we suggested. That means that they would pay us a rather large retainer and then not listen to our advice. Later in talking to other business coaches, I found that they had experienced similar things in their consulting and coaching. Weird? Yes! That people would pay for advice that they wouldn’t use. It’s basic human nature.
So what was the solution? Well, today we teach 4 levels of NLP Trainings – NLP Practitioner, NLP Master Practitioner and NLP Trainer’s Training. We also have an on-going NLP Master Trainer’s development program. In every training, there is a section on how to answer objections, which means that by the time you become an NLP Trainer you will be a master of cutting through the superfluous and moving to agreement with your clients.
If a client is stuck or if your family member is tied up because of a lack of choices – this is how to get him unstuck.
Answering objections is about separating the behavior the client is producing from the client’s intention for producing that behavior. If you separate the intention from the behavior and find out what the client wants you can often convince him to stop the behavior and fulfill the intention.
Let’s look at just two of the patterns. Each of these patterns comes from the NLP Coaching Practitioner Training:
- The first pattern is a Context Reframe. In a Context Reframe, you change the context and keep the same behavior, but the behavior means something different because the context, the domain or the environment has changed. For example, have you ever noticed that maybe a 3-star hotel in Sydney, Australia will rank as a 5-star hotel in a very poor country?
- The second pattern is a Content Reframe. You keep the context the same but you ask the client to notice something about the content that he has not noticed before, a detail that was missed, or something he had not thought about before. For example, once I was at the Hilton Greenpark Hotel in London, UK. There were fleas in my room. Not good. I went to the front desk and was informed, “Sir, the Queen has stayed here.” (True story) Although the reframe did not work, it was a content reframe.
If you are stuck or if you are tied up because of a lack of choices this is how to get unstuck. Ask yourself, “What would happen if I were in a different context with this problem, how would that change things?” When you have thought the answer through, then ask yourself, “What is it in this situation that I haven’t noticed that when I do, will get me unstuck?”
We hope this helps and if you are not unstuck you can always call us for some NLP Coaching.
Want to learn more reframes? Join us at the next NLP Coaching Practitioner Training or the next NLP Coaching Master Practitioner Training.
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