While getting good with NLP involves learning many skills, there is one communication skill you must master.

It is called “Response Attentiveness”…

Its something that every good story teller, hypnotist, trainer and communicator can do with ease.

Can you?

Before I get into that, answer me a question, what time is it there where you are?

Response attentiveness means you get a response when you ask for someones attention. The two questions above, and the second being a specific “do something” action are both examples of asking and hopefully getting for your attention. Did you answer “yes” to my first question or go “don’t know, you haven’t told me yet what response attentiveness is!” and did you check the clock on your computer, watch or phone or find yourself wondering .. “why is Tom asking me this?”.

You see when you are asking and getting someone’s attention, when you do it intentionally and with a more useful purpose than than the basic example above, you get to effect what a person will experience and feel.

And if you want to be a great story teller, change agent, coach or hypnotist then getting and keeping peoples attention and having them follow your suggestion/invitations/instructions is essential.

Think about it ..Having your listener follow along and DO what you are asking of them is important to doing effective change, coaching, hypnosis and persuasion work.

Yet this is something I’ve noted many NLPers seem to rush through in the process of “applying a technique”. There is no point starting your conversation, doing a “deepener”, running someone through a fast phobia technique or decision destroyer IF you don’t have their attention and if they are not doing what you are asking of them.

So if you find you are telling a narrative or giving an instruction but the person is not following along then DON’T proceed and just continue on, STOP, loop back and get their attention. Do whatever you need to, to have them sync up with your request.Have you ever heard a trainer at start of a talk ask the audience “how many people here are x?” and if they get little response they will rebuke the audience and say “People, this is yes … (head nodding up and down) .. and this is no (head moving side to side) .. so let’s try that again, how many people here are X?”, and then the audience responds actively.

That is an example of response attentiveness at work.

Many times something which you think “didn’t work”, was as a result of you not having your listener’s attention rather than the NLP technique etc was ineffective. You can do as many fast phobia routines as you want or have someone change the way they look at a specific memory but if they fail to follow along and do what you say as you guide them through it then it can easily appear that it “didn’t work.”

So what do you do? Simply test and find out if they have been following along ..

Check this out for yourself. Next time you don’t get the result you expected for some use of the technology .. test to see if the person you were relating/working with was following along or were you racing several steps beyond where they were? And so they never went through the change/instruction process with you?