The riots — an NLP Perspective
by Sue Knight

I thought it was early in the day to be showing a film as we sat in the airport awaiting our flight to the US. Then I realised it was not a film but coverage of the rioting that had taken place in the night while we had been travelling quietly from France to the UK. I felt as if we were in a different world and in that moment we effectively were. I read the subsequent reporting from the other side of the Atlantic — a dissociated stance. Interesting how easy it can be to dissociate despite all the philosophy regarding our interconnectedness. As we went through Dublin customs (we travelled Aer Lingus) the security man commented “You’ve got a bit of a problem in the UK then!!” I recall one of my clients whose likened the disconnected stance being taken by the creative studio in respect of the sales team to someone at at the back of a ship smirking and hand over mouth sniggering, “they’ve got a hole in the front of the boat”!!

There have been so many different debates and theories on the why’s and wherefores of what happened. I hesitated before choosing to include it in this newsletter for that very reason. Our Pakistani taxi driver thought they should be shot in the knees. Some American travellers in the airport commented that if it had been Chicago the rioters would indeed have been shot. Not too much understanding and leniency there then.

I was intrigued by the proposal that the rioters should be questioned to find out ‘Why’ they had acted in the way that they did. I for one have no interest whatsovever in the answer to that question. Surely there is enough intellectualising about the situation and certainly a lot of emphatic suggestions as to what the ‘punishment’ should be.

So what does an NLP perspective bring to all of this? First a reminder of what NLP is all about. It is a process of modelling the structure of our thinking and actions in order primarily (but not only and I will come to that) to reproduce excellence. What does that mean? It means with NLP we can find out the programme that we or others are ‘running’ in our thinking and our behaviour that results in our actions. So if we want to reproduce the experience of a time when we acted with confidence or with ease or with fluency or power for example we can. (It is not a way of giving up smoking, dieting, building a loving relationship, thinking positively although it can contribute to all these things – BIG MISCONCEPTION!) And we can learn about the structure of unhealthy or unproductive or criminal patterns of behaviour. Once we understand the structure of someone’s experience we can begin to find ways to redirect the talent behind the behaviour (and you might not like to think of it this way but there was a talent behind that rioting behaviour!). Or we can interrupt the patterns - but we have to know the structure first. Knowing the reasons why does not provide the same opportunities. We would learn more about what is happening if we were to get the answer to one of the classic clean questions ‘What happened just before … (you decided to riot) ’

Back to the talent for a moment. How many of us would love to know how to motivate and organise a large group of people to work co-operatively towards an end result? Some of these rioters knew exactly how to do that.

The quote from Einstein comes to mind “We will not change the issues in the world with the thinking that generated the issues in the first place”. We have to think differently. And for me there is no doubt that with the awareness we can get with NLP we can indeed learn to think differently. After all if we keep on thinking in the same old traditional ways about causes and punishments we will keep on getting the same old results .. and they are not what it seems most people want.

We returned from the US one week later to a smashed window in our home. My first reaction was to think of all the ‘things’ that could have been taken. My husband on the other hand seemed hardly disturbed by this at all – he has very few ‘things’ and personally lives in a very frugal way. We see all too often images of people and places in the world where there is nothing to loot. So if we take one of the NLP Beliefs of Excellence that ‘there is an unconscious positive intention behind people’s behaviour towards us’ then we can take the recent actions as message about the way that we need to begin to live our lives … Maybe this is a wake up call for us to discard those commodities that put temptation in peoples paths and live our lives in the way that I experience our neighbours in India living theirs with very few possessions .. and very little luxury. There would be no flat screen TV’s to loot in that neighbourhood.

And who can advise us all now. Well not some academic who has never experienced the feelings that these rioters feel. But people who have lived with the frustrations, the temptations and the rage and who have come to think differently and act differently. They are the people we can look to now.. and learn from them. They are our models of excellence.

And another way of thinking differently perhaps – choosing to believe that – ‘What we recognise in others mirrors a structure that we have within ourselves’. What was it about the riots and the rioters that affected you? And how is what you recognise in them true about you? Have you ever taken something that did not belong to you? Have you trespassed on others property or caused damage to others belongings – I certainly have … I am just as guilty as many of those now serving prison sentences for their parts in the riots. It is only in my own heart that I can change .. how about you?

The thoughts in this article are based largely on the thinking behind Beliefs of Excellence one of the chapters in my book NLP at Work.