P.S. If you find this has lit a fire in you, as it did early on with me, and you’d like to learn more and deepen your understanding and expertise of NLP, the Portable Practitioner is a FANTASTIC next step. It goes much deeper into the concepts covered in the book, and will give you knowledge and ability to use NLP to improve your life, and the lives of those you love, beyond your imagination. You can pick up your copy here. http://shop.nlpco.com/The-Portable-NLP-Practitioner-Training-p/905d.htm
So What? How You Can Use This Information
Excepted from the forthcoming book,
“NLP: The Essential Guide” by Tom Hoobyar, Tom Dotz, and Susan Sanders
2013 Harper Collins, © NLP Comprehensive Reprinted with permission.
835 words, 2.5 minutes average reading time
You might be thinking, “So what?” or wondering how you can use this information. Here are a few examples.
If you’re haunted by some dark memories, they may be affecting your behavior or limiting your choices. In this book, you will learn to change the way you hold a specific experience, if you wish. Or, suppose you had a habit you wanted to change. By managing the process of your thinking, you can learn how to shift old unwanted habits into new and more useful ones. There may be other behaviors you might want to adjust. Perhaps you’re shy, you put things off, or you’re hesitating to explore the life of your dreams.
In these first few Discovery Activities, we’ve begun to develop an understanding of how, by storing elements from our senses combined with some internally generated comments and imaginings, we actually re-create reality inside our minds. In the rest of this book, we’ll be looking at the many ways we can shift the pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells in our memories so that we get better results in our daily lives.
Here’s something else that always amazes me when I work with clients. You won’t remember who you were when you began reading this book-because you’ve already begun to change-but your friends and family around you will. In fact, a couple of months from now, somebody is going to comment on the changes they notice in you. They’ll see the difference between the way you are and the way you were. They’ll notice a single, specific way that you’re different-or the cumulative effect of all these things that you’re learning and applying-which is why the first chunk of this book is about applying these processes to yourself. When you have successful experience with these different techniques and ways of thinking, they’re real to you.
As you integrate these strategies into how you think and the choices you make, they become second nature. What happens as you become more aware and more expert is that you begin to see how they are at work around you in other people, too-which is fascinating in a whole new way.
Because your NLP skills can heighten your awareness and personal effectiveness, you want to keep them handy and sharp. After all, like any tool, it only works when you use it, not when it’s stashed in a drawer. Let me tell a story about my friend, Tom Dotz. Even though he’s been immersed in the NLP field for years, running a major NLP institute in the United States, he still has moments where he forgets to use his NLP skills.
I was visiting his Colorado office one day and we were about to go out to lunch. Like most people, he felt compelled to check his email one more time before we left. When he did, he suddenly looked much less than happy. “Damn, it’s so-and-so again. I’m getting to the point where I just hate to look at my inbox.”
I couldn’t resist responding to such a limiting statement from my friend since it wasn’t a reflection of how he usually thinks and behaves. And because Tom and I have had a long and enjoyable friendship, I just laughed out loud. Then, with a big Gotcha! smile, I said, “Well, Tom. It’s too bad you can’t do anything about that.”
My choice of words was quite intentional. You see, Tom has a leaning toward what, in NLP, we call “Counter-Exampling”-which means that if you give him an absolute statement, he feels almost obliged to point out an exception-or two, or more!
So when I jokingly said, “Too bad you can’t do anything about that,” I knew his mind would automatically start feeding him ways he could. And it did.
“You’re right, Tom. Sometimes I forget to use my own stuff on me. I’m totally congruent about changing this. One thing I can easily do is anchor a different more positive response. Or, I could . . .” and on he went to list several more ways he could change his response to his inbox to one that served him better.
The point is that knowledge is power-but only if you use it. After all, positive and negative anchors are everywhere-someone’s name in your email box, the tone of someone’s voice, the way they shake their head or chew their fingernails may stimulate a feeling in response. When you notice a feeling you don’t want (or do want) and trace it back to the cause, you will find a trigger-it could be an image, sound, touch, or even a taste or smell-that sets that feeling in motion. Then, you can do something to make your experience better. Once you learn NLP, you always have the power to make positive changes. You just have to remember and use the amazing selection of tools you have right at hand.