I’ve seen many angry people use simple emotional states like compassion, gratitude and humor to mute out anger, and it has been a walk in the park for them ever since. I believe that the applications of NLP and emotional management are going to be easier if you actually get some practice with someone who is trained to show you how to develop competence in NLP.

Some of the core skills you will need include:

- anchoring
- reframing
- using reframing in your Milton Model language patterns
- establishing solution states that synthesize with your future goals and directions
- path of least resistance change approaches

Well, it’s odd I never really paid attention to this category, but of course we can use it in the family. Remember that family relationships are based on the quality of your communication.

In this fictitious family example, you can see the dotted lines indicating a strained relationship and the bolded lines expressing a positive relationship. In most cases, the communication patterns of strained relationships are, in my opinion, based on the following strategies.

First, there is the element of belief and perception. We perceive certain things as either helpful or threatening. When dad asks Son1 “Where are you going” and son1 replies “out”, it’s because both are starting to perceive their interaction as “threatening”. In order to shift the perception from “threat” to “positive”, all it takes is to understand intention, and develop a stronger resourceful state around each individual’s emotional state. Sometimes, the process known as ‘reframing’ can help a lot.

I believe that a strong family relationship is based on the fact that communication is open. If it is deemed as threatening, it’s only because there are uncommunicated needs and expectations which seem to impede another’s values.

In order to develop a more successful family relationship, it is extremely important to take on a different perceptual position to see how relationships have been formed. I had a mother who came into a counseling session with her daughter. She was complaining about her daughter so much, that I could see the little girl getting embarrassed. I put myself in the shoes of the daughter and the mother, and I felt different things. My gut told me that the mother was definitely caring, but in a way that a child couldn’t appreciate. It gave me an indication that there was something in her past that she learnt from that has become so unconscious, she knows how to ‘nag’ at her daughter in this way. I asked the daughter if she liked what she heard, and I saw a sheepish “no” on her face.

Feedback needs to be established. I find myself often like a bridge, and working this way has helped me to help families understand each other better. Family therapy itself is a very large field and sometimes I forget how complex it can be. Whatever the case, a family therapist or a family coach can actually enable a family to become closer and to learn more about each other in a positive and enlightening manner.

First of all, motivation is really about finding ways to reach the same outcome using multiple routes. If you are only able to motivate yourself using one way, you will need additional strategies to become motivated, and surround yourself with overwhelming motivation.

If you are triggered only by music, then what’s the use? You can’t be blaring music all day long. You need more than that - the environment. Whatever you see, smell and feel from that environment must trigger off undisputed motivation.

The only way to do this effectively and powerfully is to generate multiple anchors and build heightened states for each trigger. The more powerful the emotional state, the better the anchor, especially a contextual, environmental visual anchor.

Ever remember a time where someone flashed a photograph of something that reminded you of your favorite food, and suddenly, you felt hungry? It’s the same thing - just that this time, you want to deliberately be in control.

Steps:

1. Get into the place where you need to work. find some quiet time.
2. If you need to build motivation to get things done, use that space to generate tons of emotionally charged sensations. You will find that if you turn this into routine, you will contextually make your work place motivating over time.
3. Add more stuff - posters, notes, reminders all over your walls. These should also help to trigger off feelings of power and enthusiasm.
4. Always make your positive emotions stronger than any negative emotions.

more to come…

Anchoring is really the process of conditioning a stimulus-response pattern. You want to re-connect with positive emotions more, and anchoring is one way to get it done. However, couple it with future pacing, and you end up with a technique that basically puts people in the right resource state to accomplish something in their life, and see themselves reaching it.

Take for instance the need to deliver a presentation. Why is it that people in the Patterns of Excellence program have no public speaking training but go up on stage and speak like pros (well, some of them)? It’s because they have in them an anchored sensation of safety and comfort. As a result, speaking is natural and comfortable. So, to consistently do this, all you really have to do is to bring yourself into the future with this feeling. Use the anchor to connect with the achievement of doing what you need to do and visualize that happening.

Right now, get yourself into any resourceful state that could be useful for you. Think also of something you need to accomplish that will need this state. Once you are in that state, step into the future and imagine yourself accomplishing it.

That’s the first step. Now, what you will have to do is to think of a myriad of different things that you can accomplish with the resource state that you presently have. This basically connects you with a feeling of achievement for the outcome. Fire off the anchor and you might find yourself having a lot more drive to accomplish the things you need.

The key difference is the submodalities you have. You’ll need to convert submodalities from “not yet accomplished” to “already accomplished” and detect the differences there. When you come back into the real world, make sure your submodalities are of “not yet accomplished” so you will work towards “already accomplished”.

Regardless, the technique is useful also to help people who have lost confidence in themselves and engage them in a more compelling future.

There are a number of things you can do to even prevent yourself from falling ill in the first place. For instance, instead of focusing on the sickness, you start focusing on the parts of you that are feeling good, and magnify that feeling.

Using submodalities, you can do this already. Self-healing is simple - it has already been documented that relaxation actually helps you to heal faster and better. If you are keen on developing better healing patterns, all you need to do is build submodalities that help you to look at the feeling of well-being. Relaxation itself can be done by managing and regulating your breathing patterns. Imagine a nice, warm wave of relaxation and really let go, relaxing every muscle in your body.

You can also anchor this feeling of relaxation (if you know how to do it - I’ll put up a post later to help you do this pretty much on your own). Then, all you have to do is to trigger off the feeling of relaxation with an anchor and you can let your body handle the rest.

If you already are ill, it is all the more important to focus on magnifying great feelings. Make your feelings bigger, brighter, happier, etc.

Some people may think this approach is simplistic, but I think simplicity can be divine! If you turn this into a habit, you’ll develop great health, instead of being bogged down with negativity!