Have you noticed that there are moments in life when something becomes absolutely clear? It might be something you had never thought about before, or something you thought you knew, but suddenly there it is!

We had one of those on the recent ‘How to be a Brilliant Coach’ programme:

On the final day, the participants were experimenting with everything they had learned by coaching each other. By this time, most people had offered up their trivial concerns for practice sessions and were ready to address some more significant situations.

This often raises the level of stress of the coach!

It’s not necessary, because as someone once pointed out to me, ‘big problems have the same structure as small problems’. The only reason we call them big problems is that there’s more emotion attached to them. However, many new coaches find it hard to focus exclusively on the structure and can – understandably – feel a bit apprehensive about tackling major issues.

On this final day, we’d talked a lot about the kind of interventions each person had to offer as a coach. A majority of the group realised that their coaching sessions often included aspects that might be labelled ‘mentoring’ – giving advice and using their own experiences to guide the client.

The moment of truth for one coach came towards the end of the morning. His ‘client’ presented a significant personal problem. A problem of which the coach had no personal experience. He had no advice, no solutions and no confidence that he could ‘help’.

And then the training kicked in…

He realised that he didn’t have to provide a solution. He just needed to provide a process to help his client organise their own thinking and find their own solution. In that moment – to me – he became a Brilliant Coach.

When a person reacts with extreme and debilitating fear to a harmless experience or entity, we say they have a phobia. Common phobias include fear of spiders, heights, lifts, snakes, flying and enclosed spaces.  Less common – but no less real for the sufferers – are the phobias about clowns, buttons, flowers or food.

Neurologically, a phobia is a link between a specific stimulus – usually the sight of the thing that is feared – and the fear response. Psychologically, a phobia is an example of ‘one-trial’ learning.  This means that the phobia sufferer has learned from one significant experience a lesson they have never forgotten and indeed cannot control.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who had phobias and it’s clear that phobias are debilitating to the sufferer in many ways:

• It’s horrible to be afraid of something to such an extent that you can’t move, can’t speak and definitely can’t deal with the problem. For example, the person standing on the sofa for an hour because there’s a spider on the rug.
• It’s embarrassing to have such an extreme response to something you know is not actually harmful. Many people with phobias experience more stress because they feel silly for having the problem. For example, the person who dropped to all fours in front of colleagues in a glass lift, had to crawl out of the lift at the top floor and then attempt to participate in a business meeting.
• The phobic response can be triggered by talking about the thing you fear or seeing a picture of it. Thinking about it can bring on the phobic response and make it hard to concentrate on other things. For example, the person who ran away from a piece of paper on which the word ‘snake’ was written.
• It takes up a lot of mental energy. If you have a phobia you’re constantly on the alert for the thing you fear. It’s like a background programme that runs all the time, checking the environment and future plans. For example the person who had to have the door open and had to sit where they could see out of the room and constantly checked their escape route.
• It takes up physical energy. The fear is connected to the ‘fight or flight’ response and generates adrenaline. Your heart rate goes up, your digestive organs churn and you want to run, but you have to suppress it all and try to act normal. It’s exhausting! This could be the person who has a phobia of flying and has to travel for business – with their boss or senior colleagues.
• It can lead to you avoiding situations where there might be a possibility of your phobia being triggered. This can mean turning down invitations or limiting your social life in order to avoid all possibility of the phobia being triggered.
• In extreme cases it leads to anxiety and depression.

Because phobias are irrational, people are often reluctant to talk about them and therefore don’t get the help and support they need.

Because phobias are irrational, well-meaning friends and family often fall into the trap of thinking that if they keep pointing this out to the sufferer, they will be able to ‘get over it’. This is another reason why people tend not to talk about their phobias – they KNOW they’re being irrational but they can’t control the fear response.

Some decades ago when did my degree in Psychology, the accepted treatment for phobias was Desensitisation Therapy. The theory was that if you exposed the phobic person to the very smallest experience of the thing that triggered their phobia and taught them how to relax around it, you could gradually work up to the full experience and they’d be able to cope. So, for example, someone with a phobia about spiders would perhaps be shown a very small picture of spider a very long way away. When they were able to experience that with no fear, the picture would be brought closer. Eventually, a larger picture might be used and so on until a very tiny actual spider would be introduced.

The challenge with this approach is that it takes a long time. It could mean up to two years of weekly appointments.

Lots of people have heard of this process and the very idea of the treatment involving the thing they’re afraid of put them off seeking help. In fact, it’s a mark of the irrational nature of phobias that most people prefer to live with their phobia than get help for it. The ‘reason’ being that they’re so afraid of the thing they’re afraid of, they’re also afraid that if they weren’t afraid of it any more they’d get hurt.

I said it was irrational!

So what can we do about phobias? There is an NLP approach to phobias that starts from the position that the phobia is a demonstration of your brain’s extraordinary ability to learn.

As a result of one experience, you have learned that this thing is to be feared. You react accordingly, without any effort or prompting. You always react this way. You never forget to do it. What an amazing ability you have.

Then, we move on to acknowledge that the thing you have learned is not actually useful. The fact that you can learn so well is great, this particular lesson is not. Fortunately, it can be unlearned. It’s a simple (when you know how) matter of breaking the neurological connection between the trigger and the response.

It doesn’t require the presence of the thing you fear. It doesn’t even require you think about it for more than a few moments.

The whole process takes – on average – about 40 minutes. I think this represents a giant leap forward in Psychology. It certainly has been for the many people who have taken the NLP approach to phobias.

I’m not going to explain the whole process here. It’s available on-line, but I wouldn’t recommend attempting it unless you’re a Practitioner of NLP. Please encourage people you know to seek help for their phobias. It’s very clear to me that getting rid of a phobia response can be truly life-enhancing. Even if you have to travel to see an NLP Practitioner, it’s probably not going to be more than a day out of your life, but it will make the rest of your life much less stressful.

Finally, if you’re wondering why I’ve chosen this topic for my mainly business-oriented readership, it’s simple. There are more people than you realise who have phobias. I have a client who moved their offices from a three-storey building to three floors near the top of a thirty-story building. HR was overwhelmed with people who were scared to go in the lifts, sit by the windows or even admire the view. If they hadn’t been able to offer appropriate help to all these people, they probably would have lost valuable employees. Don’t let something similar happen to you.

I have never been interested in Football. In the first 50 years of my life I watched – maybe -three or four games with my Dad – one of them live at Villa Park. I don’t remember the score.

Then I met Phil, a lifelong supporter of Aston Villa and total football enthusiast. A man who can turn out match statistics going back decades and player information to rival Wikipedia. It was inevitable, I suppose.  I started watching football. Not with any great enthusiasm or interest, but because it was on the TV and I was in the room. And because Phil was commenting on aspects of the game and that seemed to me to merit a response. (I’ve since realised that I don’t need to respond and he’s not expecting me to, but this was early on when we didn’t know each other so well) Anyway, I started to pay a bit more attention. When he exclaimed, “What a great pass!” I started to ask, “Why was it a great pass. What made it better than the previous one?” I know, it was probably more irritating than me sighing and rolling my eyes but when I start paying attention that’s what happens.

I realised something. I used to think I didn’t like football because nothing seemed to be happening most of the time. I like my sports more Procedural, like Tennis. In Tennis, there is a Procedure, someone wins a point at the end of every section of play. It’s easy to follow what’s going on and, to me, it feels like something is happening all the time.

Not so in Football. The ball moves around the pitch in a seemingly random pattern. Players move in equally unpredictable lines up and down the pitch. Sometimes the game moves slowly, sometimes it goes at a frantic pace. It’s definitely an Options sport. It looks random to the untrained eye.

Of course, that’s the big difference – the untrained eye. When I watch football, I don’t know what I’m seeing. So it isn’t very interesting. I can’t spot the detail of how a player plays the ball or where he positions himself in relation to other players, the goal, the penalty spot or anything else. I now understand that these are the things that make the game interesting to the trained eye, but I still have an untrained eye.

So, to use the words of my friend Shelle Rose Charvet, I ‘zoomed out’. Here I found more to engage me. I discovered that I could ‘see’ whether the players were working as a team, how confident they looked and which team had control of the game at a given moment. Still not enough to keep it interesting for 90 minutes or more, but at least I have something sensible to say at half-time.

And now England are playing the World Cup and actually winning games. Making us proud of them, rather than embarrassed by their performance. That in itself makes Football more interesting. But there’s more.

I may know very little about Football but I know a lot about Psychology, Leadership and Teamwork. What I’m seeing is that what goes on off the pitch is having a big impact on the performance on the pitch. I’m enjoying hearing how Gareth Southgate is managing this – as everyone keeps reminding us – inexperienced team. Every interview I hear, there’s further evidence that he’s approaching this the way I’d encourage any manager to set up a team to succeed. The players are quietly confident – not necessarily about winning, but that they know what’s expected of them. The little things, like staying off social media, are making a difference to their calmness and focus. I’m enjoying seeing Harry Kane lead by example, keeping his head and doing his job. I can see them working together as team – my eyes are trained to that!

So I’m finding I really care about the results England get in this World Cup. Not because I care about Football, but because I care about great leadership and teamwork and the intelligent use of psychology. Every victory for this team is a victory for that approach and it’s also a demonstration that a great team truly is greater than the sum of its parts.

My personal football pundit gasps in frustration at the ‘lack of quality’ of some of the individual players, but we can both admire the synergy of this team and the unexpected results they have achieved.

Finally, I’m also enjoying seeing Gareth Southgate standing with his team, following his players with an eagle eye…

…because I really do know what I’m looking at when it comes to men’s clothing, and it’s great to see a properly dressed English gentleman managing the English team.

“Try to see it my way”:  a line from an old Beatles song.  I’m not keen on the use of ‘try’ but I like the sentiment.  In a world where everyone is encouraged to develop their own point of view and to be confident in their opinions, seeing a situation someone else’s way is a valuable skill.

In my early career in service industries, I often heard managers encouraging staff to ‘put yourself in the customer’s shoes’.  Well-intentioned advice.  And a good starting place for developing empathy.

(Can you feel a ‘but’ coming on?)

Yes, well, the problem with putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes is that it’s still you.  When you imagine how you would feel in a similar situation, you’re still thinking about yourself.  And the other person isn’t you.

From NLP we get the concept of Perceptual Positions.  First, Second and Third, each giving a different perspective on a situation.

First Position

This means seeing the world with reference to yourself.  Being totally aware of your own presence, your feelings, your agenda, your ideas, opinions and arguments.

Second Position

This means taking the viewpoint of another person.  Seeing the world (to the best of your ability) as they see it and being aware of their feelings, their opinions, their agenda, opinions and arguments.  Notice there is a big difference here between imagining what it would be like for you to be in someone else’s situation and imagining what it’s like for them in that situation.

Third Position

This means stepping outside of the interaction between you and another person and seeing it from an objective standpoint, as a bystander or casual observer with no personal involvement.

Most people have an instinctive ability to switch between first and second position.  Some of us prefer one to the other, some of us find one of them hard to get into, but we can all do both First and Second Positions to some extent.

Third position is less instinctive.  Not many people do this naturally, but having once been introduced to the idea, many people find it very useful.

Here’s an example of how you can use the idea of Perceptual Positions to resolve a problem in a relationship:

First of all, think of a time when you were in an argument with another person and you KNEW you were right.  Replay the memory of the argument as if you were there, seeing it through your own eyes and feeling all the emotions that went with it.  (This is First Position) Feel the sense of being right and knowing the other person is wrong.

Stop.  Take a deep breath, walk around a bit or take a drink of water.

Now, replay that memory again and this time, do it as if you were the other person (this is Second Position).   See it through their eyes.  Take your time.  See you, standing there defending your point of view.  Notice how it feels on the receiving end.

When you’ve taken it all in, stop.  Take a deep breath, walk around a bit or take a drink of water.

Replay the memory again, this time seeing both you and the other person from the perspective of an uninvolved observer.  (This is Third Position)  There is no emotion here; it’s nothing to do with you.  What else do you notice, as you watch these two people arguing?

When you’re ready, stop. Bring your attention back to the here-and-now.

Now, what do think about that old argument?  If you’ve really done all the steps, it will seem different.  You may not be so sure you were right.

How many people can you think of right now who could benefit from being able to see another point of view?

The reality is, we all can benefit from seeing situations from multiple perspectives.  It helps us to be more flexible in our thinking and more creative in our problem-solving.  And less likely to argue with our colleagues.

At least, that’s what I think.  You may see it a different way…