photo credit: pasotraspaso

Okay, disclaimer over.

Let’s look at using NLP for creating wealth and prosperity. I’ve observed that there are a number of people who appear to be wealth and prosperous who have certain characteristics about them. There is a certain path through which they travelled to arrive at the destination of “success”.

I had written before that “mastery” is not just about skill and that it really is about perseverence. The idea that hard work really gets a person to achieve their goals sometimes eludes people.

The other thing is that most of these people don’t consider it hard work. They actually enjoyed doing the things that they did. They were obsessed with doing the work they had to do.But, how does one obsess about something they have no passion to do?

Well, it brings to mind moments in my life where I had little passion to achieve something. When I was much younger, I hardly had the motivation to get things done, let alone finish my homework in school or prepare for examinations. Because I hadn’t taken much of it seriously, I didn’t have much of a focus for anything.

It seemed that learning how to play the piano was easier for me to do than to submit my homework on time. I didn’t improve because I was “driven”. I merely made a “wish” to get what I wanted, and I did. It was less about “pain” than it was about making a decision, even though I admit that pain is sometimes a useful way to drive oneself toward success. Some people, however, don’t know how to do this, and end up filling themselves with bad emotional states that drive them but also make them sick.

I find that people who are successful overall have a nice blend of success in many areas of their life, particularly in relationships, money and health. I find this particularly intriguing. It no longer is a balancing scale of two sides, but three. Of course, it means there is potential to make this idea more complex – what if we had 4 or 5 balancing poles, etc… but I’m not going to go there yet.

So it begs the question – what really causes someone to drive their health, wealth and relationships? I believe it is the way in which we make decisions on a regular basis.

I suspect that you know how to stay healthy already. It simply takes exercise. Sure, additional strategies can help you to develop your body properly, but you really just need to keep your body exercised. Even if you don’t know how to exercise, you could probably do some research or ask someone.

I suspect that from reading, you already know that you have to create wealth through multiple streams of income, through prudent spending and the like. Even if you don’t have strategies to run a business or trade, you know you can learn these things from people who do know.

I even suspect you know how to create a loving relationship. It’s the way you communicate, and yes, even if you don’t know how to do it, it’s not that tough to learn – by communicating with your loved ones.

So does it mean that success and prosperity is all about action? It seems pretty simplistic, right? You might even question the purpose of this article.

But I think at a deeper, fundamental level, this is what everyone wants to hear – that there is something more than just action. Ever tested an action plan? Maybe you were really good at starting something but never was able to follow it through. Maybe that’s the issue rather than motivation.

In other words, we know that people who succeed are able to sustain their effort over a period of time.

Ask yourself: how long have you been able to sustain an interest enough to become good at doing it? Has there ever been a time where you were able to keep doing something (exercise, diligent work, effectively listen to others) over a sustained period of time? Why?

This sounds even more simplistic, doesn’t it. It implies you haven’t been doing enough. But when I look at people who don’t sustain their progress, it becomes a tell-tale sign that there’s something else at work here. If you don’t do what you are supposed to do, what do you do instead? Is this where all your attention has gone to?

Remember – while we enjoy doing certain things because we prefer it, does not mean that we should be allowed to indulge in that. Whenever we have no time/money/relationships, it’s likely that we did not create enough space for them and keep track of what did exist in the first place.

I think that to be driven to do something, you need a very strong reason. You need to have access to the “why” and that usually can sustain you. What do you want to achieve? How clearly can you see yourself doing it for the next few years? How much better can you get at doing this?

As you create a clear mental picture about what you want to get, it might even be good to review the reasons why this is so important to achieve. Even if it isn’t, make an excuse and consider how bad it could be for you and the people around you if it isn’t achieved. This is a basic propulsion system as described by NLP. Emotions, as it seems, can drive us to move in the direction we want once we notice the importance of that outcome – the reasons why.

By driving the process into an unconscious habitual mode, we need to first of all believe that what we want to achieve is compelling and worth doing, and that we can do it. This is the basis of the belief change process as described in NLP as well. All you need to do to make your beliefs more compelling are to explore how other beliefs of yours became compelling and follow the same process that you did previously: literally, self-modeling. When I doubted I was a good speaker, I realized I was constantly comparing myself with other people. When I shifted, I discovered that I stopped making those comparisons and started focusing on the people who were in the seats. For me, believing in myself was more of looking at someone’s need and helping them to reach their goals, than a popularity contest of who’s better.

If you believe you can handle your life well across those three areas, it is likely you will produce the relevant results. If you find these areas important, you will find yourself obsessing about them so you can achieve positive results. Once that happens, working hard at life becomes a passion rather than work.

You can use techniques; at the same time you need to realize that techniques do not define a human being.

Let’s take one habit creation strategy known as The Swish Pattern and discuss this. Common mistakes made by people when using the Swish Pattern include a lack of understanding submodality patterns and driver submodalities.

In the Swish Pattern, you basically want to think about creating a cause-effect behavior pattern.

Think about what you want to do (as opposed to what you don’t want to do). You want to be in a position where this has happened for you. Now for a moment, ask yourself what it would take for you to reach there. What emotional states will help you be resourceful to get here?

So, we have a set of resources that lead to the behaviors that create those results.

Now it’s time to build the habit. Ask yourself waht you want to trigger off this emotion. Do you want to look at something and this emotion fires off?

For example, people who are constantly in a state of lethargy don’t realize they associate certain situations with that lack of energy. If you walk into a room, and you actually want to feel great doing stuff in that room, you must use that image of the room and all its surrounding visual stimuli to trigger off the emotion (say, motivation) you want.

So, now you have something called the trigger image, and the ‘desired’ image.

Using the drivers you learn from NLP, take your trigger image and transition it as rapidly as you can to the ‘desired’ image. Your transition could be distance (i.e. trigger image moves out away from you into the distance followed by the ‘desired’ image moving toward you). You can use brightness as a transition. Use your trigger image, brighten it until it turns into complete white-out, then when it dims back to normal brightness, it reveals the ‘desired’ image.

You must remember to do this several times. The faster you do it, the more associations you make to it. Also, you will get an ‘impact’ when you do it the first few times. However, after those times, you might feel like you’ve lost the impact. That’s normal. You’re supposed to feel that way – because when you look at the desired image, it usually feels as if you already have it. After you’ve rehearsed this several times to the point of “taking it for granted it will happen for you”, you can do a future pace.

When you future pace, you go into the future and see what the trigger does for you. Does the trigger bring out that emotional state and desired image again? If not, why? Could it be that there is a benefit for remaining the same (secondary gain)? Or else, could it be you didn’t make your resources effective enough?

Go back and review your process until it works… or, seriously, get a professional NLP coach to guide you in the process. It’s not that tough to do, and you might find it easier when you have a ground foundation of NLP.