"Thinking out of the box" and the technique of restricting choices

In the earlier post, we talked about gauging a person’s level of self confidence. Here is another story about self confidence, “thinking out of the box” and restricting choices.

When I was in primary school (Sekolah Rendah La Salle Klang), I remembered there was a substitute teacher who came to the class and asked a rather strange question. She would randomly point to a student and asked “Are you a clever student or a stupid student?” I must say that those were the days where people were not so vocal about being political correct or concerned about students having rights. Most of the students answered “Stupid” and those included some of the cleverer ones. I think the students answered “Stupid” because they didn’t want to be seen boastful or being made fun of by their classmates. However, we had a few cocky troublemakers who confidently answered “Clever” which made the whole class roared in laughter. Then, the substitute teacher pointed to a quiet student sitting at one corner. The student quietly stood up and replied, “I am neither stupid nor clever. I am just average” The class went silent for a moment. After that as you can imagined, everyone started answering “I am average” when called upon to give an answer by the teacher.

You see, the quiet student was “thinking out of the box”. He did not fall for the teacher’s restricted choices - ie: either “you are clever or stupid”. The student rose above that and gave his own answer. Neither his teacher or his classmates expected that. The teacher’s technique is a common technique by NLPers. Basically, it is like a manipulative tool that constructively influence a person’s decision making. The theory is that most people prefer to follow rather than to lead. Just imagine if you ask your spouse, “What do you feel like having for lunch?”. Your spouse would most likely answer, “I don’t know. Why don’t you decide” or “I will eat whatever you eat” or the universal answer “Anything will do”. You see, this is not really an answer isn’t it? What the NLPers will do in such circumstances is that they will restrict that answer into what they want by asking, “Do you want to go for Western cuisine or Japanese?” Now the choices have been restricted, it is either Western food or Japanese food. When given such choices, most likely the person will chose one of the two and you don’t need to split hair to make a decision just for lunch!