The Importance of Acuity
One of the wonderful observations of the founders of NLP is that people calibrate other people all of the time. To calibrate is to discover the relationship between someone’s external behavior and their internal state or feelings.
When we were children, for example, we often calibrated whether our parents were in a good mood – in which case we could perhaps ask for a cookie or to sleep later than usual – or not.
As grown ups, we calibrate our supervisors so we could look for the proper time to break a piece of bad news. We calibrate whether our guests are enjoying a party we’re hosting. Or teachers calibrate their students for whether they are interested or bored (or so we hope!)
We calibrate so naturally, we’re not even aware we’re doing it.
NLP allows us to be more deliberate, though, with our calibrating skills. NLP hones our ability to observe people’s behavior – even down to the little twitches of the corners of the mouth, or the crinkling of the eyes, the stoop of the shoulders, or the raising of an eyebrow. We pick up on these automatically, but NLP gives us the skills we need to train and sharpen our senses and to test our hunches.
In some cases, calibrating could even save and change lives. I love the following story as told by Carla Camou of NLP Marin when I took their intensive training core.
One of the teaching assistants of NLP Marin was a detective for the University of Washington Police. When the detective, Connie, signed up for NLP Marin’s core competencies of NLP class, she asked “If I take this class will I be able to tell if someone is telling the truth or lying?” She was told “If you practice this, yes, you’ll be able to.”
Connie practiced calibration so well, she got really good at detecting whether someone is telling a truth or a lie. She even taught calibration to her colleagues at the Washington Police.
The University of Washington Police worked in a very, very limited territory, and one time, they had a string of electronic robberies in the area. All indication pointed to a 15-year old guy. He was arrested and brought in.
He confessed, and Connie wrote up a confession. They released him on bail.
Connie was doing the last little bit of paperwork around the confession and something in her just went “This is not right.” She called the patrol car and asked to pick him up and bring him back in.
He came in and he sat down, and she held up his confession.
She said “This is your confession?” And she said “I don’t believe you,” and she tore it up.
The kid started crying. He hadn’t done it; he just had a record, and he was hopeless to fight it.
A week later, they found the person who’d actually done the robberies.
Pause for a moment to think what must have changed in that young man’s life to have a police detective say “I don’t believe you did this”, and for her to be that sure about her calibration, and to get the truth out of him. He had a record, he had no alibi, and was hopeless. This can change so much so fast in some of those moments.
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