002 – Cause and Effect

This is Episode 002 of the NLP In Action podcast. I this show I’ll cover the cause and effect principle. A fundamental principle and even life skill. Understanding Cause and effect and knowing where you are can empower you and allow you to achieve what you want to in life.

I remember the first time I heard about cause and effect, and it was at a Chris Howard NLP event in around 2007. Time to admit something here, I arrived at the event about 40 minutes late, to around 2000 people shouting “CAUSE” and then “EFFECT”. At different times while Chris was talking. Naturally, I was curious.

Cause-and-Effect in its very basic form can transform the way you live your life. If you’re a person that lives at the effect end, then you simply go through life just allowing life to happen to you. These people that believe they have no choice in how their life pans out, sometimes you can recognise these people as the victim.

These people believe that there are no other options available to them. Whether it’s a redundancy at work, and illness in the family, being overweight, failed marriages and many more reasons, whatever happens to these people, it’s happening to them without any ability to change or alter the outcome.

There is another way though!

When you decide to live at the cause end of the spectrum, then you are the master of your destiny. Being a course means that you take full ownership and accountability and responsibility for everything that happens in your life.  Did you notice before I said this is a spectrum, and dependent upon the circumstances, people will be in different places on the cause-and-effect spectrum depends on the context and situation?

An individual who is at cause will have an entirely different outlook and belief system within their life. Being at Cause allow that person to feel that they are the primary cause of everything that happens in the life. Almost as if they are manifesting and creating the life they desire.

A person at cause would take a redundancy notice as a sign that perhaps they weren’t pulling their weight, and it was time to move on and retrain to become a better person for another company.

A person at cause when faced with an illness, may decide to do whatever they can to help repair or recover from the disease or illness, perhaps by exercising or diet. And again just for clarity a person who was at the effect end of the spectrum would blame the doctors and the health care system, and carry on eating an inadequate diet without feeling that they could control any part of it.

Milton Model and Meta Model Cause and Effect

There are two more parts to cause-and-effect that show up in NLP.  And again, it’s along with a spectrum of Milton Model versus Meta Model.

The Milton Model variation would be to use cause-and-effect as a way to allow a person to absorb an embedded command. Another example is that cause-and-effect statements are straightforward to agree upon. The fact that you’ve read all this post, the fact that you’ve watched all this video means that you are going to be to grasp NLP very quickly.

Now that statement isn’t true, necessarily. But when a suggestion is put within a cause-and-effect model then it’s effortless for a person to agree.

I’ve learnt many different cause-and-effect models from lots of NLP trainers which is what makes my training so comprehensive!  Again, another cause-and-effect.

The Meta-model variation of cause and effect and how to notice it is just the opposite. It’s beneficial in businesses and with teams. You’ll hear in offices every single day comments like “I was late to work, because of the traffic”  You see that X equals Y pattern again?

When you grasp Cause-and-Effect model, you may be surprised how frequently you hear in people’s language, as a manager, or person in authority. (I hate the word Authority, but you know what a mean). Then you’re able to challenge those people’s cause and effect to hopefully shift them into being at cause.

Listen for patterns like:

Team Member: “My sales have been slow this month it’s because it’s the summer holiday.” 
You: “Is there anyone else in the office it whos sales haven’t slumped this season?”

Team Member: “I’ll never hire the right person for my team because we don’t have enough budget.”
You: “Are you saying you the rest of your team are underpaid?”

When you begin to pay attention to people’s languages, then you’ll notice that it’s littered with excuses and cause-and-effect. Whenever you can, question the cause-effect patterns you hear. Using the Meta Model and see if you can enrichen another person’s world.