Intelligence Types
There are close to twenty-four known intelligences, with social intelligence and emotional intelligence being the most well known. There’s also musical intelligence, culinary intelligence, spacial intelligence, and many more. One of the lesser-known intelligences is called frame intelligence, which is the capacity to be able to hear the frame running the game.
Frame Intelligence
Frame intelligence is the ability to hear the frames being set by other people, especially the stealth frames. These are frames by implication (FBI Frames) that work into the structure of what is being said. FBI frames are presuppositional, and are set for you all the time by the people around you.
Even eye rolling is a frame.
What’s missing with these type of frames is the relationship. If you pay attention, you may even start to notice a pattern. Perhaps every time you speak up, you get an eye roll. If you do, it’s time to address the frame, point it out, and ask the other person how they feel about you speaking up.
Addressing Frames
It may seem challenging to address frames like this at first, but it’s like any other skill. Frame intelligence takes practice and energy. With time though, you will start to decipher the true meaning of what people are telling you. You’ll have a better understanding of the situation and how your message may be received. This gives you a chance to check in with the other person and ask them if they will take a moment to listen to your perspective. As soon as the other person agrees, they have just given you permission to talk. Now you’re setting the frame of allowing yourself to talk while the other person listens.
What happens when you see a frame is that you interpret it. You are telling yourself what you think it means. This is called mind reading. That is you bring your understanding of what the other person means when they say something or do something. This can lead to frame arguments; “what you were saying was…” The way out of these is to use a communications loop “when you said X, what did you mean?”
Egoic Conditions
With NLP, you can develop your communication and leadership skills. The work is that of clearing, and everybody has something to work on. The work we speak of is clearing out the egoic conditions, or what we call “needs,” that get in the way. Your ego only works in two ways; it is either attaching or resisting. That is to to say it’s about releasing yourself from attachment and resistance.
Developmentally, your ego started forming at about ten months old, so the only things you could do were go with or resist. Attachment is a concept, an idea, a thought, a name, a status, a thing, a value, a belief, or an identity. These attachments create resistance. In leading, while you have these attachments, they are creating biases that mean you are simultaneously resisting. You’re resisting what’s occurring now, which means you’re not leading it, because leadership means you are neither resisting, nor attaching, but inquiring “how did you come to that decision? Tell me about your thinking behind that?”
You need to be able to transcend in order to understand and therefore lead.
Separating from Culture
Most leaders and their companies are run by their culture. A culture is constantly unfolding as a process, a process of validation of mostly unspoken rules and agreements.
Leading is about separating yourself from the culture so you can look at it and identify what needs to change. A leader cannot be subject to the organisation’s culture if she is going to lead it. If she’s subject to the organisation’s culture, the organisation is leading her, not the other way around. The leader needs to be able to separate himself from the culture, point at it, and seek to understand it.
People sometimes don’t want to move past the culture because it means examining their own programs. During this process, you may come face to face with some of the programs you don’t like about yourself. This is what puts people in an emotional “stuckness,” or a place of feeling pain. This is an organic part of the process. It’s a part of the unfolding that as you unfold, you may be uncomfortable with what you find.
The Frames We Hold
This brings us back to the frames that we hold. The ego is eager to move towards or away from certain frames. We don’t always need to let go of our frames. Sometimes what we need is to hold onto them, if they serve us. Everybody’s got their own path that they require.
Self-leadership is about freeing yourself from the conditions that have been placed upon you. It’s freeing ourselves of the conditioning that holds us and keeps us reacting instead of responding to the world. When we respond, we respond from a different place where we know what to do.
The Process of Changing
You know you’ve got important things to contribute and that knowledge is coming from who you are. The conditioning, however, holds you back. The superego (voice of judgement) often takes over, and it wants to run you. It tells you to be quiet because these people can’t handle it, they’re not evolved enough. The superego takes off at a million miles an hour.
While your changing, you need to protect the energy levels that your superego is burning through with its self-talk. You can do this by refusing to listen to it. Remember that everything swirling around in your mind isn’t necessarily about you. You need to sift through it and only pay attention to yourself. You need to acknowledge the frames that don’t serve you and reject them.
The world responds to you, and you get back what you give, so give out energy. Focus on what is right and truly engage with the intention of understanding others, not for your own ego’s sake but because you have the compassion and love; to lead them.
