Dolf's Blog
Integral thoughts about development, humanity, spirituality
The NLP Outcome Frame
23
Today, I feel like sharing a tool that I
believe works to create your own future, achieve your goals. It is
far more concrete than things like visualization, the Law of
Attraction or The Secret, which probably have their own values in
certain contexts, but are generally quite far-fetched and presented
in a too New Age way for me…
The Outcome Frame is the ideal tool for e.g.
coaching and is in fact so popular that some books about coaching
actually only deal with creating an outcome, whether they realize it
or not. In coaching, psychotherapy and other psychological
environments, it is important to specify your goals clearly in order
to achieve them. In fact, an outcome is nothing more than a very
much specified way of describing your goal, similar to the SMART
objectives that are popular in the corporate world (where SMART
stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and
Time-bound).
In NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), this
is, however, done in a slightly different way, based on five
criteria to formulate the outcome. The aim of this is, to start in
the current situation and define a new situation that you want to
attain and al the steps to get there. These criteria to define an
outcome are as follows.
1.
The outcome must be stated in positive
terminology. So you need to describe what
it is that you want, not what it is that you want to get rid of.
This is related to the fact that the human brain doesn’t seem to
understand the words “no” and “not” and therefore, when a sentence
contains either of these words, it will process it in the opposite
way. “Don’t go” becomes “go”. “No problem” becomes “problem”.
The following sentence would not be
permitted in an outcome, “I do not want to do this slave-work
anymore”. It should be rephrased as, ”I want to find work in which I
can act independently”.
2.
The outcome must be
within the own sphere of influence. It is great to describe an
objective that involves other people to achieve it for you, but in
daily life, that makes little sense. Other people are not going to
change what they do, just because you are writing that they should.
It must therefore be clear in the outcome that the person who wrote
it is going to do something about it. So the outcome that is like,
“I don’ want to be bullied anymore” should read, “I want to be able
to defend myself against bullies”. You can of course discuss how far
your own sphere of influence is (where we come to my criticism of
methods like What the Bleep or The Secret), but then we are on thin
spiritual ice that is outside the scope of this article.
3.
There must be a
measurable, provable goal of the outcome. So we must be able to use
our senses to determine that the outcome is realized. What is it
that you hear, see, feel at the moment that you achieved the goal of
your outcome? Are other people involved as well? In what context and
in what environment do we want to achieve our goal? When exactly?
This step is used to make the outcome very specific, so that there
can be no doubt anymore what needs to be done to get where we want
to be.
4.
What is the first
concrete step to take to realize the outcome? Once you have defined
this step, you can continue to define the following steps. Possibly,
you will have to write separate outcomes to define the following
steps more concretely. The aim of this part is to identify the path
to the final situation.
5.
Ecology. I have described
the wider definition of Ecology earlier in my blog (see:
http://www.vanderhaven.net/blog/20070114.html). In the context
of NLP, the ecology-check means that we should verify if our outcome
would be harmful for ourselves, the environment or others. What is
the motivation behind wanting to achieve this outcome? Are you and
other helped with it or is anybody harmed in any way? What is the
“outcome sequitor”, the value or set of values that are satisfied by
achieving the outcome?
Using these steps, an outcome can be defined
at various levels. It can be something that is very specific from
the start, like writing a book (I did in fact write an outcome
before starting to write my book). It can also be something much
less concrete, such as learning to deal with an illness. The
abovementioned five criteria can then be used more or less
specifically to formulate the outcome. Once the outcome is clearly
defined and complies with the criteria, you don’t even need to look
at it anymore: inside ourselves, we have done enough work to prepare
ourselves to achieve the outcome and it will turn out that this is
in fact the case. That is no magic, but just mental conditioning to
achieve what we want to achieve in our lives.
