What is NLP you may be thinking?
Well, if what you’re doing isn’t working then its time to do something else and NLP is a exciting process to help you find that something else that will make such a difference to Your life.
How could it help you?
You may want to experience some NLP coaching or psychotherapy, or attend a workshops, learn about communication, or self-leadership, you may want to know more about being Highly Sensitive and how that affects you and learn some strategies for change…..NLP ripples through everything that happens at Making Changes!
What ‘they’ve’ said about it:
Science Digest said that NLP ‘could be the most important synthesis of knowledge about human communications to emerge since the sixties. ‘Time Magazine announced that ‘NLP has untapped potentials for treating individual problems.’
Training & Development Journal reported that NLP ‘offers the potential for making changes without the usual agony that accompanies these phenomena’ and that it ‘allows for increasing options, flexibility, creativity and therefore greater freedom of action than most of us know.’
Best-selling author and motivational speaker Anthony Robbins said that NLP is ‘an incredibly effective and enjoyable way to access more of the true potential of your brain.’
You may know a little about NLP, or you may know nothing, so lets begin…
The founders of NLP are Dr John Grinder and Richard Bandler and in the early 70”s they began to look at how people respond to the world, did everyone see it the same or was it dependent on beliefs and mental constructs, they began to explore the hypotheses of: if you change a person’s model of the world does that change how they respond both internally and externally?
NLP stands for:
Neuro – is about how the mind and body interact
Linguistic is about how we communicate, both verbally and non-verbally, the language and body movements we use and how these give insights into a person’s thinking.
Psychology or Programming refers to the study of thinking, emotions and behaviours that people use in their daily lives, our patterns if you like.
NLP is a bit like an ‘owners manual’ for your brain, we take our thinking to school! In school and college we learned amazing things like English,history, geography and math but we did not learn much about our thinking and how our thinking determines how to feel good or to how to have great relationships did we?. Or how to become more of who we already are, now that would have been useful wouldn’t it, how better would we have been at those lessons if only we had known that? …. That’s where NLP comes in. It’s a set of insights and skills..with which you can actively use your mind and your emotions and your body to run your own life more successfully and to communicate with other people with ‘extra-ordinary’ effectiveness… even as I am writing this I think how long I waited to find all this out, you’re not going to do that though are you?
How does NLP work?
So to put it all together really simply, it’s a study of how the mind creates reality through language and behaviour. NLP helps us to know what we know and to know what we want and also has tools and techniques to discover what we need to do to get where we want to be! NLP is an ever-growing collection of information, insights and mental techniques that can enable you to improve how you think, behave and feel…
If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always got! NLP helps to dissolve the barriers of your unwanted familiars and supports you in creating new neural pathways that allow you to really be who you know you are becoming.
What will NLP give you:
NLP is a ‘how to’ methodology, it provides a way to to examine your values, beliefs and capabilities around unwanted behaviours. It sharpens observations and listening skills and teaches awareness. It enables you to identify patterns and looks at the reason or intention behind the behaviours, which in turn gives you more choices about how to think and run your life.
NLP works beautifully within coaching and therapy and can assist you to make the changes you want, both to your behaviours and your life.
Perceptual positions:
Each Journey Begins with a very small step and learning something new could be that first step for you.
If you knew how to look at situations, things differently would we really need hindsight?
What if you were able to look at something from the other persons view or float upwards and see it from a distance, that’s right ‘a birds eye view’ so that you can see where all the pieces fit together and how things work. Would learning this help with your communication and your relationships at work and at home? I think so!
Mostly we look at how things affect us, its all from our perspective isn’t it? And then it all goes a bit wrong and then the hindsight bit comes in, well that’s if you are aware that there is another opinion and sometimes some of us are not. Its often the verse according to us, isn’t it, and then we jump on our soap box or mountain top and make sure everyone knows exactly what we think. Ooops, that didn’t go so well, what happened there then!!!
Simply we just didn’t take a couple of seconds to stand in the other persons shoes, see what he would see through his or her eyes and feel what it would be like for him or her. Because its all about points of view isn’t it? its also about beliefs and rules too and some people have different ones to us and if you don’t stand in their shoes, you will never know what they are.
Another point of view is from the ‘birds eye view’. Imagine you can fly way above the problem and in NLP terms go Meta, the Greek meaning for Meta is above or outside of the position. Completely disconnect from the situation and look down and notice what you see, think and feel about it. Say to yourself, ‘what can I learn from here that would make a difference to what’s happening down there.’ When you have a clear idea bring back the knowledge and apply it.
Its amazing what a different perspective can have on a situation. Remember there are always three different places to see it from, yours, the others and Meta, have a go and see how different the word can look.
And remember you are always more than you think you are, and you are always more than your behaviours…..