The guest post below was written by Mr. Deji Akinade. He is a Project Development Consultant. His special focus is New Product Development (NPD) and also New Project Development. He has worked in many Multinationals in Europe and he is currently the Project Director of Exodus LSD LIMITED, a Management Consultancy and Project Management Consortium.
BACKGROUND
‘Everything in the body is communicating with everything else and its all happening unconsciously. No matter what you think you are, you are more than that.’ – Overdurf and Silverton
Silent movie actors like Charlie Chaplin were the pioneers of body language skills, as this was the only means of communication available on the screen. Then each actor’s skill was classed as good or bad by the extent to which he could use gestures and body signals to communicate to the audience. However when talking films became popular and less emphasis was placed on the non-verbal aspects of acting, many silent movie actors faded into obscurity and only those with good verbal and non-verbal skills survived.
Albert Mehrabian, a pioneer researcher of body language in the 1950s, found that the total impact of a message is 7% verbal (words only) and 38% vocal (including tone of voice, inflection and other sounds) and 55% non verbal.
Anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell pioneered the original study of non-verbal communication – what he called ‘kinesics’. Birdwhistell made similar estimates of the amount of non – verbal communication that takes place between humans. He estimated that the average person actually speaks words for a total of about ten or eleven minutes a day and that the average sentence takes about 2.5 seconds. Birdwhistell also estimated we can make and recognize about 250,000 facial expressions. Like Mehrabian, he found that the verbal component of a face to face conversation is less than 35% and that over 65% of communication is done non- verbally.
DEFINITION
Neuro Linguistic Programming was founded in the 1970s by Richard Bundler, a computer scientist and John Grinder, a professor in linguistics. They teamed up and set out to identify the patterns used by three outstanding therapists, all of whom excelled in their professions. It therefore can be said to have evolved from what people do naturally, identifying what they are doing and the processes through which they do it as a way of having increased choices in their lives.
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) therefore evolved to answer the following questions:
a) What is it that differentiates somebody who is merely competent at a given skill from another person who excels at the same skills?
b) What processes do individuals who are consistently outstanding go through to achieve the results that make them so?
It is therefore essential to attempt an
