When was the last time you had a bad behaviour? Let’s face it, we have them daily. Even a negative thought could be thought of as a negative behaviour. I’ll be honest here – I would love to be an undercover traffic cop sometimes. I’d love to give tickets out to people driving recklessly. Excessive speeding, tailgating, not using turning indicators… I’d be very good at it. And, it would give me a lot of ‘feel good’. My behaviour – judging other people’s behaviour in their cars as right or wrong, is this good behaviour? Not really. In fact, I’d put it down as a ‘bad’ behaviour. It’s not up to me to decide who should get tickets, how people should drive, what driving behaviours people should have.

Key word here: should.

This word tells to me, automatically, that I (or whoever uses it) has expectations. It is normal to have expectations – yet not necessarily always warranted. Our own expectations are based on our own model of the world, and when we are placing our expectations on others we are undoubtedly setting ourselves up for disappointment. While it is not always possible to not have expectations (because after all, not having expectations is having an expectation about not having expectations)… I can use my NLP skills to help me to better understand my bad behaviours and the behaviours of people around me. It doesn’t even need to be “bad” behaviour – that is subjective person to person. We can just call it unresourceful behaviour.

Now, why would I put my desire to be a traffic cop into the category of unresourceful behaviour? Simple – every thought I have, ever behaviour and emotion I have creates a state. When I see someone else’s bad driving behaviour my state changes to the traffic cop – sometimes righteous and somewhat angry (see, I told you – honesty here!). This to me creates an unresourceful state.

So how do I get out of this unresourceful state? Or better yet – how do I stay out of it to begin with? One thing that really helps me personally is to assume positive intention. Both for myself and for the person that I’m judging.

When I get my ‘traffic cop’ hat on I can chunk myself up to my highest positive intention by asking “for what purpose do I want to give them a ticket”. Here’s what I get: I want the roads to be a safe place for people to be. To me, this is a good intention. However, it is not my responsibility or obligation to give tickets or correct behaviour of others.

I can also think from another person’s model of the world (known in NLP as second position) and find some possible positive intentions. These are complete guesses (unless I actually know the person). Here are some of my guesses for why someone is speeding excessively: they are in a hurry to get to someone that is hurt, they have to go to the bathroom very bad, their child just called and needs them urgently, they have to get to somewhere before it closes. Now, even if none of this is true – each of these possible scenarios is played out on the movie screen of my mind and now I see the situation through a new filter. My desire to put on the cop hat starts to diminish. When I practice this enough, the cop hat can just stay put away.

I often share this ‘trick’ with my clients – especially those that tend to judge others, find fault in others behaviour and get angry when things don’t go to their expectations. Let me share an example. One of my clients used to get very upset when people didn’t behave in the way he wanted them to – nicely. Each day he took the train to get to work and most days someone pushed in front of him and rushed ahead to get a seat. His thought “that person is rude! I don’t like that person”. This thought created a feeling of anger which he carried around with him through the day. It happens to people all the time!

We started talking about what some of the intentions could be from the people who pushed in front of him. Here are some he thought of: the person isn’t feeling well and they need a seat, the person is travelling for a long distance and wants to get a good space on the train, the person saw a friend of theirs through the window and wants to catch up to them. Again, none of these may actually be true – however, our unconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between fiction and reality. There is a very different chemical reaction created from “this person needs to get a seat” as opposed to “how rude!”.

Next time you are confronted with an expectation or a bad behaviour from someone else, take a moment and think – what could their positive intention be? Think of at least three possible options. Be creative! And then see what happens to any negative feelings, expectations or judgements you might get. If you want to go one step further – what is your intention for getting upset in the first place?

I encourage you to share some of you findings and learnings here on the blog so we can all learn from each other! I know I for one am much happier when I leave my traffic cop hat at home!!! 🙂



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