How using Lucas Derks’ Social Panorama helps us to resolve people’s readiness to be mobbed.
BY ADRIAN SCHWEIZER
When one is mobbed the others are obviously to blame: the fellow-workers, who can’t stand you, the boss, who doesn’t like you. What if it is a case of us giving them the opportunity to vex us by means of our mental maps on which we unconsciously arrange them. Indeed, life might just be a self-fulfilling prophecy. That this might be so, I would like to show by means of some real-life cases I have come across over the last few years. In that way I will demonstrate that Lucas Derks’ Social Panorama is a super tool to stop mobbing or even to prevent it from originating.
I am unable to help
A few years ago a manager, let’s call him Doctor de Quervain, asked me if I could help him. He said something like:
‘I have a new colleague, who, like me, is a department manager. Instead of working with me, he hatches plots against me. Moreover, he maligned my secretary a few days ago. It seems to me that he is doing all this just to become the successor to our boss. A job that is, of course, mine by rights.’ We agreed on a coaching session of one day, which I usually don’t do. His budget didn’t allow for more, and as we hadn’t met before for coaching I couldn’t, as I normally do in similar cases, propose re-imprinting either. Therefore I decided to work out his and his opponent’s interests, to develop their common vision and mission, and to support him in his endeavour to supply himself and his opponent with suitable resources in order that mission, vision and mutual interests could be accomplished in a better fashion than their current behaviour reveals.
Directly after that we discussed new behavioural strategies and developed plans to that effect. Unfortunately, and I must confess this to my disgrace, the intervention proved to be no use at all. My
cliënt felt just as mobbed as before. About a year later I got acquainted with Lucas Derks’ Social Panorama and had myself trained in it by Lucas. Lucas’ basic idea is that after some time of growing familiarity we construct a personification of our counterpart and that with such a ‘materialization’ we no longer react to the person as he ‘really’ is but largely to his subjective personification in our map. These personifications come into being because we mentally put people around us in a three-dimensional space, and they are mainly defined by their position, size and the direction they look (see figure 1).
Lucas’ view on this, simplified, runs as follows: When we succeed in modifying the submodalities of these personifications — e.g. by moving their position further away from us or by influencing their direction of view — our social interaction with the real persons in the real world can change fundamentally.
The subjective perspectives drawing by Lucas Derks
Adrian Schweizer wrote an article about mental space, which was published in the last issue of the German magazine “Praxis Kommunikation”. Adrian Schweizer works as a lawyer, mediator and executive coach in Germany and Switserland, and we thank him for sharing this article with us.
Adrian Schweizer, Executive coach
Articol in Revista “Praxis Kommunikation”
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