HOW DO YOU THINK = PEOPLE ASK WHAT DO YOU THINK; NOBODY ASKS HOW

HOW DO YOU THINK = PEOPLE ASK WHAT DO YOU THINK; NOBODY ASKS HOW

How do facilitators or leaders influence his or her own or someone else’s thinking?  Before this question can be answered, we need a model of how people think.  We will use a model of human information processing to explain how to understand and influence your own and others’ thinking processes.  We call this the How People.

We all take in information through our senses (INPUT) and this information is PROCESSED by our brains resulting in behavior (OUTPUT), our response to the situation.  We all have the same brain circuits and sensory systems, yet we may respond very differently to same input information.  We have all experienced situations where people have very different reactions to same situations.  How do we explain these differences?  The model indicates this is due to different internal processing.  Different processing can result from people accessing different reference experiences from their personal history memory and/or utilizing different processing patterns.

How then do leaders or facilitators get someone to look at things differently?  Since no one can really change an individual’s personal history, this implies that the facilitator can impact a person’s thinking by influencing his or her internal processing patterns.  How People Think uses three major internal processing patterns: framing, emotions, and perceptual