Participants from the workshop 'Imrove your debating skills'

NLP in Palestine, Bethlehem

Working together to promote just peace by setting Quaker values in action

NLP workshop in Bethlehem for the Arab Educational Institute Mai 2018:

Improve your debating skills

Beautiful Good and New were shared in pairs and later in the group.

To improve your debating skills it is important to know how different you are from the audience and co-debaters.

TheNLP communication model helps you to become conscious how your internal representation is made and what makes that we think differently from others. So we did this exercise:

Most participants think 1, 2 or 3 words are written by everybody. But as they compare their words with others they discover that there is not one word which is written by everybody. We are much more different than we are conscious about.

Then we taught about the structures of language:

Explaining what the importance of speaking positive language: Instead of: 'No smoking' it is more effective to say: 'Think of your health, we are smoke-free' .
Next structure is: 'What do you choose? Demanding or invitation, if you want your public to agree with you?'

Demands create more resistance.

Clearly an invitation is more effective.

Chunking

If you are making a speech or an explanation of an opinion, how do you structure your story?
Do you speak more general, more abstract?

Or do you mention more details more close to the reality?

Or do you mention more examples of what you mean?

The principle of 'chunking' from NLP may be very useful to be more effective in your use of language. What is 'chunking' ?
We have three forms of chunking: Up, Down and Lateral chunking

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This is the exercise we did outside: B gave instruction, A tells a story following chunking-up, down or lateral and C guesses what A does

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After this exercise in two's or threes we invited some of the group to give a presentation of one minute about Bethlehem or any other subject.
As the last exercise we invited some of the group to give a presentation of one minute about Bethlehem or any other subject.

Every participant gave feedback following the sandwichfeedback system:

At the end of the workshop participants evaluated the workshop.
They said that they were enthusiastic about the tools they learned specially about how to apply chunking in their debating skills.