Friendly boss or bossy friend? Finding the balance with NLP
Are you familiar with the battle of finding the balance between being friendly and authoritarian? Are you feeling the wish to be popular and respected at the same time?
Then this article is for you. Whether you are working in the corporate world, running your own business as a freelancer or digital nomad, standing in front of a full class of students every morning or whether you are currently trying to find that balance in your private life, you are one of many warriors!
Finding balance is one of life’s greatest challenges. That also holds for this specific topic. Here are three tips you for you to help achieve the balance with the help of NLP techniques:
- Working with inner belief systems
First, start with yourself. Are you one of the people that truly believe you can either be liked or famous, never both? Are you maybe deep down thinking that you only deserve being loved when agreeing with everyone around you and never standing up for your own beliefs? That likeability depends on harmony? Breaking with beliefs that are in our unconscious is one of the first steps. Creating a new and positive dogma in exchange for the negative one could be the second step. If you have the smallest doubt that there is a way for you to find respect and likeability combined in yourself, you will have to get rid of that first.
- Building rapport
According to the main principles of NLP, everyone makes sense of the world based on his or her own understanding. In NLP terms, this is called “the map is not the territory”, which suggests that one never sees ‘the reality’ since it does not exist. There are just as many realities as there are people looking at it. Whether or not someone respects and likes you highly depends on the individual. You cannot assume that because of your attitude, the person sitting across from you will entirely react to that inner state of yours. Certainly, your inner state is very important. However, connecting with the other person is highly relevant as well. This is what is called building rapport. Create mutual understanding and in best cases trust. This can be achieved by matching and mirroring the other person. We can mirror our physiology like body language, posture and voice – such as pace and pitch – as well as language. Be careful not to take it too far though. You don’t want the other person to feel like you are imitating them and thereby giving them the feeling of not being taken seriously.
- Moment of excellence
You probably remember a moment when you managed finding balance in the past. A moment in which you felt like being authentic, standing up for your principles, being respected and at the same time being liked. What if I told you that there is a NLP technique, which helps you recall that moment so vividly that it influences the current situation positively and thereby makes your success moment more than a one-time experience? The Moment of Excellence is used to create and stabilize desired states so that you can activate it via a kinesthetic anchor when needed. This way you can feel empowered by a positive experience and encouraged since you remember that it once worked well and therefore can work well a second and third time.
A final note: those tips will help you balance being friendly and being authoritarian hopefully. However, remember that it is more important to find that balance inside of you than to prove it to the outer world.
By Florine Allrath, content editor at InKonstellation
