How to enable others?

Reza Hossein Borr, London, 29.8.08

Give people a positive reputation and expect them to achieve it. And they will achieve it. Give them a negative reputation and they will live up to it. When you call a child repeatedly stupid surely that suggestion will be accepted by his brain and trains him to become stupid. People can gradually believe what they are called. Whatever you call them they will become.

The important point is how your suggestion is believable? The other side may believe what you say or may challenge your suggestion. If he accepts your suggestions and believes in it he will become it. If he rejects your suggestion he would not become it. The children are not in a position to realise what is true and what is not true. Whatever you call them they may believe in it and they may become it. Even the adults can become what they are called. You expect a kind of behaviour from somebody to happen and then you wait until it happens and confirms your suggestion.

To enable others, you have to look very carefully in their thought process and patterns of behaviours. You can plant a positive purpose and a constructive quality in their thought process and you will see gradually it will appear in their behaviours. The system of plantation of a positive thought or behaviour is very sophisticated and therefore, it should be done very skilfully. Not everybody is able to do so. We can see this from the majority of the parents who tried to train their children to become great people and the absolute majority of them failed. It is not because that the parents did not want their children to be empowered and enabled but it is the lack of skills that makes the children opposite of what they want them to become.

People have different personalities. Each personality is to be dealt separately. Each person must be dealt separately because no two persons are completely like each other. But there are some common factors that could be learnt and skilfully instilled in others. The first and the most important thing is your own ability to make yourself a believable authority, and an affectionate source that has the competence of inspiring. This is extremely vital as those who are supposed to be enabled and empowered definitely need to believe in what you say. At the same time we have to understand that everybody passes advice all the time and nobody listens to them. We therefore must realise that giving advice is very different from coaching and training process of taking somebody to the phase of empowered.

It is even possible that people react adversely if you do not know how to engage in this delicate coaching process. If you turn it into advice you are likely to get an opposite reaction. If your own behaviours in the past have shown that you are not a reliable person, what you say will not have an impact. If your tone of voice does not appeal to the person, his emotions will not be aroused to accept that idea.

If you know how to enable others and they learn how to enable others we will have a society of enabled people who can transform their society. If you enable others you get enabled yourself in the process.

Reza Hossein Borr is an NLP Master Trainer and a leadership consultant and the creator of 150 CDs and 14 Change management models. He is also the author of Manual Success, Manual of Coaching and Mentoring, Motivational Stories that Can Change Your Life, and a New Vision for the Islamic World. He can be contacted by email: www.sarawani@aol.com www.rezaaa.com