Swift Changes PGPE - Making sense of our Unconscious Social Landscape

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The Social Panorama

The Structure of our Social Intelligence

Making sense of our Unconscious Social Landscape

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Making sense of our Unconscious Social Landscape

We define a person’s 'Social Panorama' as the full array of social representations they unconsciously locate about them. While some people carry around them wide spaces filled with social images, others somehow manage to ‘fit all mankind within their body limits’. We locate people around us like a solar system: the very location and format of their representations has meaning for us. They affect the way we interact with them for the better or, more commonly, for the worse.

For example, discovering the location of some authority figures with respect to your own position enables you to do something, such as relocating them or change their format. Being yourself the product of the mental environment that you have constructed on your own, just doing so enables your own social role to change and evolve. When you change your “sociosphere”, you change yourself.

“You may, for example, have a general sense of ‘my brother' that is not bound to place and time: you could call this a broad generalization about who he is as a person. This representation you have of your brother is centred round this general idea of him. So if you want to work with your relationship with your brother you need to locate this general concept in the visual field of your mind, and change the way you represent him in your Social Panorama.”

More often than not, a Social Panorama session begins with a client who is uncertain about what they see or feel about themselves and/or other people. But it nearly always ends with them knowing exactly where significant others are located and, in many cases, relocated. Such general information may initially have occurred wholly outside conscious awareness. Making this conscious gives you full awareness and, therefore, control of it.

It enables you to begin to change social representations, even when on your own and thereby to change and improve relationships. As soon as you identify the location and format of a person’s representation in your Social Panorama, you instantly know what it means in relationship terms, because you will experience a specific emotional response towards this person. Although it does not automatically imply that you can express this in words, a Social Panorama location does have an immediate emotional meaning for you. Social Panorama work often seems to go `beyond words' and the spatial aspects of social representations are fundamental across all cultures. This makes it easy to learn and universally applicable in all contexts.

Lucas Derks combines 20 years’ experience as an NLP trainer with a background as social psychology researcher. For over a decade he has been studying the spatial aspects of social cognition and exploring the patterns in Social Panoramas within the context of psychotherapy and coaching. Lucas’ initial aim was to improve his clients’ social life and functioning. His systematic enquiry has resulted in a great number of patterns; universal, cultural and personal ways in which people give shape to their own Social Panoramas. He is the author of best-selling book SOCIAL PANORAMAS, Crown House Publishing, 2004.

http://www.socialpanorama.com/international/

In this training Lucas will share his enthusiasm with you. This will enable you to recognise universal and cultural similarities in the way people structure their image of the social world, and to act upon it to become even better agents of social change, both at individual, group and community level.

The Structure of our Social Intelligence

Making sense of our Unconscious Social Landscape