Are You Working At The Right Level?

To increase your effectiveness, you must know how and when to intervene with your clients. What do I mean? I am speaking about logical levels. Think about someone saying, on one level I think this but on another level I think this. What is meant by levels anyway?

What I have learned to do is apply Robert Dilts’s concept of Logical Levels. There are six levels organized in an ascending level of importance and complexity. Here are the levels and a way to think about them and use them.

Natural hierarchies or levels of experience exist in our language, brain structure, and perceptual systems.

The effect of each level is to organize and control the information on the level below it.  Changing something on an upper level necessarily changes things on the lower levels; changing something on a lower level could but would not necessarily affect the upper levels. The table below describes how people process experiences on different levels:

The way I suggest that you use these levels is to understand that a problem or problems will exist at a certain level. To resolve a problem you must intervene at that level or higher. Interventions at a lower level either do not work or rarely last.

So if I have a problem at the environmental level it will be something like I can’t do good work because I am being interrupted by too much noise. So I can eliminate the noise or create a way to increase baffling etc.

So, an intervention at the behavioral level might be helping someone to become more assertive by learning assertiveness training or helping someone to change eating behaviors. If that intervention does not last or work, then I know that the problem likely exists at a higher level.

The 3^rd level capabilities are about our strategies or plans. Plans involve organizing a series of behaviors. As a coach you might be helping someone create a marketing plan. This area involves thinking about strategy.

The 4^th level is often where I start many of my interventions. Working at this level means you are attending to ones values, beliefs and criteria. If a strategy is not working, it may well be because you have conflicting beliefs that make it hard to be congruent in implementing a strategy. If you are implementing a sales plan that requires you to raise your rates you may have a conflicting belief about being too greedy or asking for what you are worth. If so, you will not be able to be consistent and act in alignment until you resolve things at the belief level.

The identity level is about who you are in the world. How you think about yourself. You might find yourself saying “I’m not the kind of person who cheats people” which could be the reason you are not increasing your rates. Here the work might revolve around when you decided this about yourself.

The last level reflects your mission and purpose, who else you think is involved. Something greater than yourself. You might say something like,” I believe in helping young people” or “I believe in making the world a better place.”

Knowing at what level to intervene will make you a more effective coach, but you must also know how, what to do at each level. In general, the higher you go the more you must know about working at deeper levels.