This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by David H.. Original Post: Pace Yourself – NLP, Agile And Retrospectives Feed Title: David's Agile Juice Blender Feed URL: http://consultingblogs.emc.com/davidhoehn/rss.aspx Feed Description: Agile and Conchango, what a combination. This is my account on how Agile is being used and further developed here at Conchango. What I am learning and how I can give back to the community. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by David H. Latest Posts From David's Agile Juice Blender

Moving from one country to another is never easy. Being confronted with a different lifestyle and different expectations make it hard at first to adapt to the new environment. Maybe that is why I underestimated how much change in my approach would be needed when I moved from Austria to the United Kingdom. Those two countries are not too far apart and in my eyes the United Kingdom is part of Europe, an environment I am very familiar with. To think so was wrong and constant change is now required to tune and match my delivery and my being to what is expected in English society, making it easier for others to interact with me.

Neuro Linguistic Programming, a fairly young branch of psychiatry and psychology, has been building up since the 1970s and describes how humans interact and change over time by better experiencing their world around them. What I described above and much more on the level of personal interaction when I coach and mentor can be described by a term called pacing.

 Modern Literature suggests ⁽¹⁾ to be a successful couch or trainer one needs to learn how to gain rapport with your coachee or trainee.   Rapport is the art of being able to tune yourself into the people around you and pacing is a natural step further by carefully mirroring and reflecting some of their key behaviours to make them feel save. Expected and well known behaviour offers guarantee to the observer thus allowing them to more readily accept change.
While coaching, mentoring or even training a lot of the time will be spent increasing a groups or an individuals potential by allowing them to discover different ways of changing their perception of the world around them, thus allowing them to change and realise potential that has not been touched on yet.

Pacing is the extension of a natural behaviour we all exhibit, especially with those who are close to us, those we share a deep common bond. It is a technique I have learned to treasure when being invited to facilitate retrospectives. Esther Derby and Diana Larsen’s book titled “Agile Retrospectives” devotes a tiny paragraph to it as well. Something I first over read and after revisiting finally realised. There is a simply instruction there, to count silent to a specified number in order to refrain from urging the team on during exercises and to know when it is safe to move from one stage of an exercise into another.

This clever application of pacing allows me as the facilitator to build rapport with the team which is holding their retrospective. Mirroring the teams behaviour, trying to engage in their readiness to move on by pacing myself through counting helps to be a better facilitator and build rapport with the team to ensure they are open to the remaining exercises which need to be facilitated.

Pacing, matching and mirroring can be applied to almost any situation to build rapport, whether that is when speaking with a customer or while having a chat with your best mate. Around 93% of our communication is never vocalised only around 7% are. The majority of those 93% is made up by body language and many courses can be found which teach better awareness of this form of communication. Techniques such as NLP go a step further including a more holistic view on physical and psychological interaction pattern.

Moving from country to another, getting introduced into a new environment or simply being helped in how to better facilitate retrospectives. The ideas described above can be useful in any of the scenarios described.

(1)    Coaching with NLP: How to Be a Master Coach, ISBN: 0007151225; Coaching For Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose, ISBN:  1857883039

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