Objective: to create a higher level of resourcefulness and confidence

Step 1: Stand Up. Close your eyes and think of a time when you experienced confidence.

Step 2: Scale up the intensity of your feeling from 1 (not very intense) to 10 (very intense). Increase the intensity of the colors, brightness and size of [...]]]> photo credit: clevercupcakes

Objective: to create a higher level of resourcefulness and confidence

Step 1: Stand Up. Close your eyes and think of a time when you experienced confidence.

Step 2: Scale up the intensity of your feeling from 1 (not very intense) to 10 (very intense). Increase the intensity of the colors, brightness and size of the mental image.

Step 3: Imagine yourself transferring the feeling into an empty spot in front of you, and notice this empty spot taking on the energy patterns of your confident state.

Step 4: Break state.

Step 5: Now, think of a problem that you have that you would like to have more confidence in, anchor this problem using a kinesthetic anchor.

Step 6: While holding the kinesthetic anchor, step into this Circle of Confidence and notice the difference. Allow the intensity of the feeling of confidence to flow back into you while you face your problematic situation.

Usually by this time, the feeling of confidence would be more powerful and allow you to be more empowered in the face of problems.

In testing this, of course, the effectiveness of NLP methods will vary from person to person. If the technique doesn’t work, it’s likely that it’s due to the fact that you are a unique individual who needs unique solutions. To find out how you can get customized coaching for confidence, click here.

photo credit: laverrue

Many NLP practitioners only do [...]]]> I was just doing a little bit of reflection on the use of NLP skills. Many people who complete an NLP Practitioner certification don’t use the skills beyond their current presentation. A number of them also stop using NLP. I thought about it and I think I know why.

photo credit: laverrue

Many NLP practitioners only do what they are shown. They don’t have the capacity to go beyond that, because there’s little continuous training for them. For instance, submodalities is deemed as too technical to use. Also, the Meta Model is taught in, often, a very structured way that prevents learning by exploration. And a lot of people still think the Meta Model is just about asking questions, but seldom know what is the purpose behind it. That’s a little sad because I can say that a lot of my learning and achievement comes from knowing the Meta Model inside out.

The Meta Model is an approach that allows for greater clarity and precision in communication. Without the ability to be precise in our communication, there is a great tendency to assume that we know what someone else is thinking. Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls were powerful users of questions such that it created incisive insight for their clients. Likewise, the Meta Model can help you to become more precise and allow you to fully understand another person’s model of the world. This basically means that I can learn what’s going on in a person’s head by asking those questions to such detail that I can replicate that experience myself.

That’s “modelling”!

Purpose of Meta Model

The Meta Model comprises several challenge questions, which come in the form of a set of questions that you will find in a typical NLP practitioner certification training.

Generally, Meta Modelling is highly misunderstood. Remember that the Meta Model is not meant to persuade. Rather, it is meant to explore. Many practitioners, upon learning the Meta Model, unintentionally, end up interrogating their clients.

Problem Meta Modeling – you want clarity of the problem to make a decision or to come up with an intervention.

1. Information gathering
2. Identifying limits of the client’s world
3. Exploring and expanding the quality of meanings and choices in life

Resource Meta Modeling – you want to assume people already have the resources to achieve what they need to achieve, so that they can find evidence of resourcefulness and move forward on any problem they encounter.

1. Information gathering
2. Identifying limits of the client’s world
3. Matching the external meaning/map (what you need) to the inner meaning/map (what you have)

Meta Modeling Resourceful States

Find someone who has a resourceful state and model that state by asking questions within these broader categories:-

1. How does this (emotion/state)process work?
2. What internal structure governs the way this experience works?
3. What does a person represent first, then second, then third, etc? What is the sequence of thinking?
4. What other qualities and factors play a crucial role in the formula of this piece of human excellence?

Anchoring basically refers to the process by which we get conditioned to certain behaviors, and there are several kinds of anchors. Any external stimulus could be an anchor, and the key characteristic about an anchor is that when you re-present the anchor, it triggers of the [...]]]> Okay! Let’s get started on a simple lesson on anchoring.

Anchoring basically refers to the process by which we get conditioned to certain behaviors, and there are several kinds of anchors. Any external stimulus could be an anchor, and the key characteristic about an anchor is that when you re-present the anchor, it triggers of the emotional state that was associated with it.

photo credit: A6U571N

The key to anchoring is emotional intensity. Well, think of a moment when you were very excited. Using this emotion, it’s likely you can think of a situation that had that state of excitement. In your mind, you’ve successfully made a link between the state and the event. Now the question is, does it work the other way around? Think of that situation, and realize that it reconnects you with emotions of excitement.

These are basically conditioned responses. However, you can enhance its effects quite easily. All you need to do is to choose something that you’d like to use (something you can see, hear or touch) that you wish to link to the emotional state you desire.  If it is something you see, it’s known as a visual anchor and could be a photograph or even an object. If it’s something you hear, it could be a sound, a phrase you say to yourself in your head or even a piece of music. If it’s something you touch or can feel, then it could be  a unique feeling of touch that you apply to your arm, or grasping an object.  So…

Step 1: Recall with deep intensity your emotional state.

Step 2: Apply the anchor.

Step 3: Clear your mind.

Step 4: Test the anchor.

You’ve successfully created an anchor!

How did this happen in the first place? Well, simply because you were looking, hearing or feeling your anchor at the peak of  an intense emotional state. It’s a simple triggered response and all you need to do is to re-introduce the trigger to get back the emotion.

Application

If you need to be charged up, there are certain processes that will allow you to access states of motivation and drive. You could apply this is almost any area in your life.

Generally, I’d advise that anchors are created in order to be more resourceful generally. It’s impossible to create a positive anchor when there is an adverse problem. Instead, preempt this problem and develop resources within yourself so that when such a problem does occur, that you have the inner emotional resources to pull you through

What do I use submodalities for?

Generally, submodalities are used to change the way we represent or perceive information in the mind. While this [...]]]> Submodalities are like mind codes. The way it is explained is that it is a “sub” element of a modality, comprising visual, auditory and kinesthetic modalities of perception.
photo credit: h.koppdelaney

What do I use submodalities for?

Generally, submodalities are used to change the way we represent or perceive information in the mind. While this can be quite heavy to understand, think of it as a new software that you want to install into a computer.

Your mind carries a “template” of thought. This “template” is filled with your experiences based on certain codes in your mental template. This template of codes can be found in this submodality checklist.

What parts of experience are coded by submodalities?

Situations represent the context of your experience. Submodalities are the structure of our experience. Submodality Techniques are the process you use to change your experience.

I’ll give a variety of examples to illustrate this.

Do you realize that there are movies that give you a different feeling, simply based on the lighting they use in the movie? For instance, a dark movie that brings out more mystery would be “Batman: The Dark Knight”. notice the visual effects bring out a much darker, ominous feeling.

However, looking at a much more lively and vibrant scene in a show like “Sex In The City”, you’ll discover the colors are much different. The mood and rhythm of the entire movie is different, bringing out a different flavor in the movie.

How do I use submodalities?

Since we know that submodalities are like the elements that movie directors use in order to shift the way we experience the movie, then it is clear that by creating these changes in our mind, we literally become our own movie directors.

Using The Submodalities Checklist I have on this site, you can easily compare and contrast the effect within the submodalities in your mind. So I’m warning you ahead of time, until you have received proper NLP Practitioner training, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to fully grasp the way submodalities can work, even though I’m giving a detailed description here. You’ll need supervised practice most of the time in order to gain the maximum benefit out of using the submodalities.

Submodality Comparisons

First of all, submodalities are a way to understand the way we think, and how we construct our reality. For instance, taking two different emotional states, you can discover their differences through contrastive analysis.

Contrastive analysis is the process in linguistics to compare sentences and to identify the difference it makes to our mental representations.

• Statement #1: Happy young boys play enthusiastically.
• Statement #2: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Notice both statements follow the exact same sequence grammatically, but one makes sense and the other does not, thereby enabling a linguist to determine the effect of syntax (structure of the sentence) versus the semantics (meaning).

In the case of linguistics, we use contrastive analysis with sentences. In submodalities, however, you use situations and contexts. Think of the time you are working at your office and compare the time when you were stressed and the time you were energized. You will be able to detect the difference between two experiences quite easily, and therefore know how they were coded.

“So what?”

By understanding the way they are coded, you can:

• change the way you perceive and therefore experience a context.
• shift a negative experience in that context and adjust it so that it appears more positive.
• shift a positive experience in that context and adjust it to become even more positive and powerful.
• utilize processes that make change more habitual and natural

Example: Submodality shifts

I had a client once who had a build up of panic just prior to doing a presentation. In his mind, the audience was bright, loud and big. All I did was to get him to adjust the audience in his mind so that they were of the appropriate size and volume that made him comfortable to speak to them. He reported that he could not change the size of the audience, but said he could make himself turn into a giant in his mind so that the audience was in awe of him. This shifted his emotional state when speaking on a stage.

Example: Submodality utilization

A client once asked me how to be more motivated. So I asked what kind of pictures and sounds she made when she feels motivated. Generally, it seemed that she made brighter and closer pictures (compared with less motivated ones) and said “yeah!” in her mind whenever she was motivated.

The client has just accessed a resource state, which I can now utilize.

In this case, I got her to think of the context in which she was not motivated, or in a place where she had to be more motivated. She said it was her work. As a result, all she had to do was to perceive the workplace as brighter and closer in her mind, and as she was about to get things done, say to herself “yeah!”. This created a very obvious change in her physiological state: face flushing, smiling, and posture shifted to become more upright.

Example: Submodality Process

Another client had a phobia of snakes. Taking the image of a snake, she freaks out and goes into a phobic state, tearing and screaming. After the image is taken from her, she regained her composure. We first shifted the representation of snakes by thinking of a way to represent the data in a more comfortable way. She changed the snake to feel smooth to the touch (instead of slimy) and her favorite color. We even got her to imagine that the snake was like a baby she could cuddle. We brought in a real snake and she embraced it like a baby with little effort, because now the perception of snakes (domesticated pythons) was much different than before.

Conclusion

There are many other ways to utilize submodalities, and even in this post, I’ve barely scratched the surface. To be able to become masterful at submodalities, the processes and strategies you learn to shift a person’s emotional state must be learnt. In NLP, many people have invented dozens of useful and powerful strategies that can be applied in different situations. I’d advise you to learn how to model.

photo credit: A6U571N

Self-talk is a habitual process we all go through. Sometimes, we talk to ourselves nicely, sometimes we don’t. I’ll be willing to bet that everyone experiences some form of negative self-talk some of the time.

If this gets out of hand, you might actually experience lower levels of productivity [...]]]> Do you talk to yourself?

photo credit: A6U571N

Self-talk is a habitual process we all go through. Sometimes, we talk to ourselves nicely, sometimes we don’t. I’ll be willing to bet that everyone experiences some form of negative self-talk some of the time.

If this gets out of hand, you might actually experience lower levels of productivity and energy, and possibly depression.

So in order to kick start a new habit, you need a couple of things.

#1 – what is the source of negative thinking?

If you experience the negative thought as an imaginary voice in your mind telling you that you can’t do something (such as your father/mother/boss, etc), then you might have to go one step beyond just the verbalized message. What is the reason they might say that? Perhaps they are worried for you, or that you could get hurt. By exploring their highest positive intention, you will soon get to the root of the issue and begin to diffuse the negative thought. Once you discover this, repeat in your mind “They only want me to ____” and fill that blank with their positive intent.

#2 – What replacement habit do you want?

We all know that negative thinking is a cycle of habit. If you have negative thoughts, it could be because you’ve turned it into a habit. One of my students had been trained to think negative simply because he felt it was the requirement of his job. He started by believing that he had to always think of the worst case scenario in his job as a quality assurance manager. However, this habit started to eat away at lots of other things in his life including his family, and his family members sometimes just wanted comfort and understanding, not a troubleshooter.

So eventually he learned how to differentiate the need for building a contingency for things on the job versus really listening to people.

To do this, you can frame up your experience by focusing fully on the mental context. When does negative thinking come up when it’s not useful? Now, in that context, choose specifically what you would like to think instead. I’d suggest that you pick up an NLP Practitioner program to discover the various ways to do this (you can do this by registering on the list on the top left on the blog).

#3 – Does negative thinking stop you from taking action?

A lot of my clients and students tell me that they just can’t do anything once they get into a spiral of negative thought. Here’s a simple technique I found works.

For the longest time, I had been procrastinating exercising because I would effectively talk myself out of it. Whenever I am already dressed to go for a run, I could talk myself into eating or playing a computer game. Unfortunately, this caused a lot of problems for my exercise routine. So I realized that the best way to stop procrastinating was to stop that inner voice. When we need to make a decision, an effective strategy occurs when the thing to be done is acted upon, not “thought” about. Test it out – once you have a mental trigger about what to do, use that to get into action, not talk to yourself. You’ll then find there’s no need to even eliminate negative thinking because you won’t have the mental space for it in the first place!

photo credit: djjewelz

To stop binge eating with NLP, all you have to do [...]]]> Binge eating and snacking are common issues among people who are unhealthy and unfit. They experience low levels of energy, and very often, they are unable to garner enough energy to get things done. So, they end up procrastinating too.

photo credit: djjewelz

To stop binge eating with NLP, all you have to do is to follow these steps. Do note – in order to effectively use the technique, you need several pre-requisites. Not everyone can apply the techniques well because they lack a few things:

• Sensory acuity, or the ability to observe details and maximize their senses.
• Self-suggestion, or the ability to communicate with yourself internally.
• Emotional state control, or the ability to change your emotional states effectively.

If you are unable to do these well, I’d recommend you seek out an NLP practitioner who might be able to help you.

Here’s the technique!

1. Categorize the type of food you binge eat. For instance, it could be fast food, snack food, chocolates, etc.
2. There is usually a situation or context where such binge eating takes place. For instance, you might snack whenever you watch TV but not really anywhere else. Or you might binge eat snack foods after meals. You have to identify the context where you get the feeling of wanting to binge eat.
3. Picture the context in your mind. During this time, notice the full-sensory experience of binge eating. Notice what you see, hear and feel, especially after that food goes down your stomach.
4. Clear your mind.
5. Now imagine something that is totally and absolutely disgusting for you. For instance, it might be the garbage dump or decaying meat.  Smell and taste this foul thing in your mouth (this may take some getting used to) and notice how you feel like wanting to throw up.
6. Clear your mind again.
7. Go back to #3. Picture your favorite food again and imagine yourself eating it like the first  time, noticing the level of pleasure your experience, but this time, on the next time you taste that food, notice how you chew or bite into it and it opens up the sensation of something absolute foul-tasting, as in #5.
8. Do this about 4-7 times  (if you feel really sick the first time around, you can go to the next step).
9. Clear your mind.
10. Test by imagining your binge-eating-food in your mind. Does it bring back the same desire? By this stage, you would have successfully disconnected the automatic behavior of binge eating.

At the moment, the best way to utilize NLP techniques is to find a [...]]]> There’s actually a very wide range of NLP Techniques available out there in the world, and they’ve been “invented” by various people in the NLP community. The truth is that once you have mastered the NLP you can develop your own techniques.

At the moment, the best way to utilize NLP techniques is to find a community of practice. All you need are three people to begin with and start off with a Practitioner licensing training program. (To be notified, just register on the top left signup box in my main page)

When you do pick up the skills and techniques, just remember that the most powerful medium is not the face-to-face medium, even though a lot of people can create maximum change through this method. The most powerful in the internet age is to do this in a conversational format without even having the need to touch an individual.

In other words, you need to have a series of practice sessions that hone your linguistic capabilities to their maximum, so you will be able to use that to leverage the change work you are expected to do for your clients.

I like to use Dilts’ SCORE model for the purposes of exploring a person’s issue. This is purely an interview, so you can extract some information about the way an issue has evolved and find the root cause of the problem.

S = Symptoms.

Identify what are current complaints and issues surrounding those complains.

C = root Cause.

Find out what the cause is and identify which level the cause is appearing at. Sometimes the cause is behavioral or a capability issue, but at other times it may be an identity issue.

O = Outcome.

Find out what the intended outcome is. Make sure you seek evidence procedures for the outcome.

R = Resources.

Check what kind of (inner) resources will be required for them to achieve their outcome. Then find ways to activate them.

E = Effect.

What is the long-term effect of the intervention? Are there any variables that are not useful or appropriate as a result of achieving this outcome?

Therefore, whenever you use the approaches in NLP, always make sure you apply them appropriately in a broader perspective.

I’m constantly surprised by the fact that many people have habits they claim they can’t change. The things that are happening in the mind includes: