Strategies to Promote Conscious and Unconscious Understanding

One of the highest priorities while training any material is to present material to both the conscious mind, and the unconscious mind.  All such strategies I know for doing this, begin from a place of working at the process level, while I deliver information & stories at the content level.  Content is "what we say," whereas Process is "how we say it."   Said most simply, Content is the What, Process is the How.

Here are some great NLP methods to "Package Information."

Want to be able to move people from 'stuck-states', to a mindset filled with active, positive, fun, pleasurable, motivated, and effective visualizations? Try these approaches:

• Move people from modal operators of negative possibility (might not, may not, could not) or negative necessity (won't, will not, must not, should not) into positive possibility (could, might, may) and (in certain cases) positive necessity (must, should, have to, need to, will!).
• Move people from descriptions of vague and static representations into clear, sensory-specific, & active representations.
• Move people from terse descriptions of problem states into WOW descriptions and representations of solution states.
• Use your rate and pacing to increase the rate of breathing in the audience if you're trying to elicit excitement. Use these to slow the audience's breathing down, if you're trying to elicit relaxation.
• Use dynamic tonality shifts to elicit higher & higher response potential in your audiences. Using my dual-tone vocal technique or my sine-wave tonal process (for example, from my Irresistible Voice CD-set) can induce very deep trance in an audience while they think they're just listening to content.

What if you need to present a high quantity of important details an audience needs to remember?

Begin by intending to package the information from the frame of where/when they're going to need to remember all that information. Ask yourself when/how will people need to recall all that information... and the answer(s) you receive will need to be the opening frame for each big chunk of information. That way, audience members learn to encode/store that information within the frame(s) where they'll need it. If you frame it based on topic, or from an outline structure that makes sense on paper but isn't connected to when they'll need the information, they'll never have high recall when they need it most.

The next important bit is to always use 5 or less chunks at any level. We know people can store 7, plus or minus 2, pieces of information within any given frame, so make sure you limit your chunking threshold to 5. That way *everyone* in the room can maximize their likelihood of total recall.

You may also want to design your presentations using Knowledge Engineering -- specifically the backward chaining process. Ask youself... "What needs to be there at the end of the training, for the trainer to have been highly successful at maximizing every student's achievement and development?" "What do they need to be able to know and/or demonstrate?" Work backward from there. And if you know how long it takes you to functionally train each chunk, then you know if you can successfully deliver (or exceed) a training promise within a specified time-frame.

One thing you may face is when people try to tell you how *they* think they best learn. The problem with this is... most people who do this with you ... are usually in incredibly deep denial (conditioned from years of compensating from exposure to teachers who just don't understand how the human mind best acquires new information and/or skills) and to make matters worse, they've paired that with impatience for anything that doesn't fit their expectations and pattern-matching. In other words, they think they've learned better learning methods, because they had to develop compensatory learning patterns to actually learn something from otherwise poor-quality teachers in the past. And then when in the presence of a highly skilled trainer, they're actually blocked from learning something effectively from a great communicator!!!

Now there are some people who are intimately aware of their own optimal learning strategies. E.g., If a highly trained NLP'er tells me they've got a particular learning strategy preference, I'll usually honor and use their suggestions about how they best learn. But outside of NLP circles? Nope! Instead, I do what I can to convince them I know what I'm doing when it comes to extremely effective training/educating and accelerated learning methods.

Why? Because I'm not willing to train anything badly.

I've given you some ideas above to pursue, so -- go explore & use the above & report back sometime!

These are just some of the examples of how people train to the unconscious mind, and if any of you want to learn more nuances for achieving the above, I train many of the above and lots more at my Speaking Ingeniously course.