The NLP Blog

Most of us at some stage will suffer from that critical voice inside our head.  It is completely normal to self talk throughout the day but wouldn’t it be good if we could turn that critic into a more effective inner voice.Wouldn’t it be much more beneficial to you if your inner voice was one that encouraged you and helped you to succeed?  Or a voice that was full of praise and positive statements that help you to be happy and enjoy your life.One thing that you should realise is that even if your inner voice is often critical, at some level it actually does have something of value to you.The way that you ‘self talk’ has been going on for years, it has been learned from an early age and is now just habit.  The good news with this is that you can break habits and you can retrain your mind to make your inner voice more beneficial to you.NLP offers you techniques to retrain your mind, let’s look at this technique:Think of your inner voice criticising you and imagine where that voice is located in space.  In other words, do you imagine that voice to be behind you, to the left or right of you or in front of you?  Try to picture in your mind where that voice is.  Become aware of exactly how it speaks to you and how it sounds.  Think of this in detail, as in the quality of its voice, how loud or soft it is, does it speak fast or slow?  Becoming aware of these qualities helps you to discover the structure and this is what holds the thought pattern together.Now for the fun part, we are going to interrupt that thought pattern and sabotage it. Let’s have a go at this:1.      Think of that annoying, critical voice one more time.2.      Imagine it being played backwards, like you are rewinding it.3.      First do it fast and then slow, then hear it backwards fast, really fast.  Do this about three times.4.      Now replace that backwards voice with a new positive message.  Give this positive message a nice, calm, friendly voice.Thought processes such as internal voices can be changed quite quickly and easily if you know how.  By interrupting the pattern and changing the structure, our mind is able to access more resources and as a result makes us feel better and giving us more behavioural choices.This is just one of the many techniques that you can learn through Neuro Linguistic Programming that can help you to change your life for the better.  NLP offers you amazing tools to transform your life. 

This article was written by Shezz P who has successfully changed her life using self taught NLP techniques.

You too can change your life and create personal and professional success by using NLP techniques learned through the The NLP Toolbox!’

The mind is a very powerful thing and can learn very fast.  A very good way to approach life is to view all your experiences as learning experiences.  Just about every habit, decisions and even phobias that we have are as a result of learned behaviours in the past.  A person who has a phobia for example has learned to associate a stimulus (such as seeing blood) to a response (fainting).   When you think about this idea for a while you will begin to realise the amazing implications it has.    But does a person develop a phobia over time or is it developed quickly?  For example a person who faints when they see blood, do they see blood one day and then the following week see blood again and each time they see blood become more reactive and begin to faint from the sight?   No, they don’t build phobias over time.  Phobias are learned and they are learned very fast. They are learned in our subconscious and are learned usually in about half a second.   A person will have an intense emotional response which then becomes associated or anchored to the stimulus (in this case the sight of blood) in such a way that the response (fainting) is automatically triggered every time they see/hear/feel/smell/taste the stimulus again.   It is quite incredible really how the mind works that will make a person automatically go into an altered state, within half a second, of experiencing a stimulus.   So I guess you’re probably thinking what my point is.  Phobias aren’t at all useful and in fact can be very inconvenient not to mention embarrassing.  So who cares how you obtained the phobia, you are probably only interested in if you can relieve that phobia, right?   Well what if you could use that same stimulus/response mechanism to create automatic states of joy, fun or bliss.  How useful would that be in your life?   By using Neuro Linguistic Programming you can learn to retrain your mind to have a different response to particular stimulus. Here is one technique known as ‘Merging Metaphors’ that can help to alleviate the problem of phobias.   1. Select a problem state or stimulus that you react negatively to.   2. As you think about your problem state what visual image comes to mind? Notice where it is located in space.    3. Break your current state: eg) Remember you phone number backwards or pretend to be staring at a blank white screen. Now think about the desired resource state that you would like instead. Notice how you represent this as a visual image. Pay attention to where it is located in space.   4. Now go back to the first image (problem state) and allow your mind to turn the image into a metaphorical symbol or icon. Keep it in the same location in space. (This visual metaphor could be quite complex or it may be as simple as a colour. Just trust your unconscious.) TOP TIP: It can be useful to ask yourself, "What is this problem state like?" This often allows a metaphorical representation to arise.   5. Do the same thing with the desired resource state you selected in step 3, making sure to place the new metaphor symbol in the same location in space as the original image.   6. Now see the two metaphor symbols at the same time noticing their locations in space. Next slowly rotate them around each other. Keep rotating them around each other and do so faster and faster. Do this spinning for about 10 seconds allowing the rotation to be so fast that you can no longer track the images and you may even feel a little confused.   7. Now allow the images to merge together, that's right. And push this merged image out in front of you where you can view it easily. Describe the new image briefly, quickly moving to step 8.   8. Immediately begin telling WHATEVER story comes to mind. Just allow yourself to start telling a story. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be a real memory, a story or just simply made up ramblings. The point being is that this process taps into your vast unconscious resources.   9. Now ask yourself, "How is this story relevant to my problem/challenge?" or "How can this story help resolve my problem?" (This step can help to give you conscious insight into how the previous steps have made some useful changes).   This is an amazing technique and although if you are just reading it through and not actually trying it, it may seem a little strange.  You will only realise the difference that this technique can make by actually giving it a go.   The mind is a very powerful thing and having control over it can make an amazing difference in your life.  By learning Neuro Linguistic Programming you can learn many techniques that can change your life amazingly for the better.  

This article was written by Shezz P who has successfully changed her life using self taught NLP techniques.

You too can change your life and create personal and professional success by using NLP techniques learned through the The NLP Toolbox!’

The human mind is an amazing thing.  Everyone’s minds are so different and yet every one of them is amazing, even yours.  Everything that we see, feel, smell, touch and hear, everything around us all started somewhere in someone’s imagination.   Every one of us possesses this creative mechanism, it’s just that some of us just don’t exactly know how to unlock it and use it.  Sometimes we may become stuck in a rut or our mind just goes blank and you can’t get it to go else where, with NLP you can learn how to move out of this state and into a more creative state.   So just how can you snap out of this mind state and into a more creative one?   This technique is known as Switch Representational System.   It may sound complicated but it is in fact quite simple.   The first thing is to take notice of where and how you feel in that stuck state.  Where in or on your body is that feeling?   Now switch representational system by giving that feeling a colour.  What colour do you think represents that feeling best?  Just go with the first colour that you think of when you think of that feeling.   Now, if you wish you can give that feeling a sound.  What sound represents that feeling?   Ok, we’re getting there now; you’ve done the main part.  What you have done so far is to access a different part of your mind by representing those feelings in a different sensory system.  If you wanted to go one step further you could even represent he feeling as a smell or taste, although it is not necessary to succeed with this technique but is something you can do if you like.   With what you have done so far, you have instantly assessed multiple resources from different brain centres, allowing your creative process to emerge.   Next you can explore the new representation in its own sense system.  For example, let’s say the feeling you had was grey, cloudy like and sounded like a deep, drumming sound.  Now, play around with these images and sounds.   What happens if you paint a silver lining around the grey clouds?  Imagine the drumming sound coming closer, how would it alter the sound?  What if you changed the drum for a symbol, how does the sound differ?   You probably get the general idea by now so go ahead and play around with them for a while, be funny and adventurous and see what you come up with.   Once you have done that for a while, now think about the ‘stuck’ state that you were in, I bet your feelings have changed.   By using this process you have enabled your mind to have more choices.  Instead of being in a stuck state of mind you have given it numerous choices and made your mind more flexible which in turn makes your mind more creative.   So while you are playing around and using your imagination by doing this technique, you are opening up your mind and allowing it to become more imaginative in other areas.   Your creativity is a state of mind that can be triggered with specific mental strategies.  The more you practise creative thinking the more creative you will become.   By learning to use our minds in more diverse ways we can discover amazing tools to unlock the power of our creative imaginations.  This is just one technique that NLP teaches and there are many more that teach you how to retrain your mind to do what you want it to do.      

 
This article was written by Shezz P who has successfully changed her life using self taught NLP techniques.

You too can change your life and create personal and professional success by using NLP techniques learned through the The NLP Toolbox!’

The Linguistic Neuro Programming process is all about retraining the mind and senses to work better together to improve your skills and your life.  Is that really possible? Let’s break it down a bit…. Neuro – our minds, the way we think, the way our brain works Linguistic – our senses, how we use our senses Programming – self explanatory Everything that we feel and think is brought into our lives by our five senses. How we process those senses goes through the mind.  Every person will process different situations or experiences differently according to how our minds process what our senses bring in to them. How we process this information will be largely determined by our past experiences.  Which is what makes everyone process situations differently, as everyone has different past experiences. A happy, positive person, for example, is most likely to view a situation in a positive way and the outcome will probably be a good one.  This person has had a happy, positive life that has made them the person that they are; their life has been full of positive experiences. A sad, negative person on the other hand, is most likely to view a situation in a negative way and as a result the outcome may not be such a good one.  This person has more than likely had a life that has been full of negative experiences. Just because you have had many negative experiences in the past does not mean that your life has to continue to be negative.  It is possible to retrain your mind to think of the past experiences in a positive way, even though they may have been negative, you can teach your mind to view them more positively. As a result of this, your decisions and the way you perceive situations in the future will become more positive and turn your life into a much more positive and happy one. I have never come across another technique or program that can enable you to retrain your mind in this way and it is incredible to be able to do so.  You don’t need to spend countless hours visiting a doctor or counsellor to do so either.  NLP can be self taught and you will often see results very quickly, so if you want to change your life to a more positive one, give Neuro Linguistic Programming a try and see what it can do for you. 

This article was written by Shezz P who has successfully changed her life using self taught NLP techniques.

You too can change your life and create personal and professional success by using NLP techniques learned through the The NLP Toolbox!’

What exactly is NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming?  Six months ago I had never heard of NLP, however since I discovered it my life has changed dramatically. I work as a ghost-writer and a while ago one of my clients asked me to write a report about Neuro Linguistic Programming.  I had never heard of NLP and had no idea what it was, so as part of my job I started doing research on the topic. This particular job changed my life, as while doing research I studied and learned many of the NLP techniques.  These are techniques that can retrain the way that your mind thinks and change the way you behave and respond to situations. Every decision that a person makes in their life is made from your past experiences.  In other words, your past experience influences all your decisions and so if you have had many bad experiences in the past, then those influences can cause you to make bad decisions.  As a result of which you will most likely continue to have bad experiences. This is not something that a person does consciously; no-one wants to make bad decisions on purpose.  It is something done in the sub-conscious.  So how can you change sub-conscious? Neuro Linguistic Programming teaches you the skills and techniques that enable you to do just that.  You can retrain your mind to rethink past negative situations with a positive view and therefore have that positive view in mind when sub-consciously making future decisions. I know that sounds a bit confusing and perhaps even a bit far fetched.  I certainly thought it was a bit far fetched and too good to be true, but as part of my research I decided to give the techniques a go. These techniques really did work for me and has enabled me to deal with situations in my life that I previously didn’t deal with very well. I can now handle stressful situations in a much better and calm way than I did in the past. NLP techniques can help you to improve many personal skills as well as business skills and can change your life immensely in both of these areas. If there is any area in your life at all that you would like to change then I definitely recommend giving Neuro Linguistic Programming a go. You can thank me later!!   

This article was written by Shezz P who has successfully changed her life using self taught NLP techniques.

You too can change your life and create personal and professional success by using NLP techniques learned through the The NLP Toolbox!’

Let’s face it, we all need to communicate with other people at some time or another and often it may be to ask for their help.  May people don’t like asking others for help for fear of rejection or even because they just aren’t sure how to approach it.  By having the ability to develop and maintain a good rapport with a large number of people you will be able to get help with anything you want.  Having a good rapport with someone will allow you to do anything.  Therefore, rapport is one of the most important skills that you can have if you want to have good communication skills.

Rapport works generally by people that are like each other tend to like each other.  Likewise when people are nothing like one another they tend to dislike each other.  If you like someone you are much more likely to want to help them than you are with someone you dislike.   Only a low 38% of communication is tone of voice and a big 55% of communication is physiology.  So a lot of how we communicate we are not even consciously aware of, which actually gives us an enormous advantage if we know how to consciously use the physiology side of communication.   To be a really great communicator you need to realise that you will communicate best with people when you take on their primary modality.  So if they are in an energetic, excited mood then you will come across well to them if you act in that sort of mood also. Often communication takes place where people are unconsciously mismatching modalities.  To have a good rapport it is vital to match the modality of the person you are communicating with. You need to try and act in a similar way to what they are doing.  For example when talking to someone who is auditory, you want to slow down and really listen. When talking to someone who is in high visual you want to sit up, breathe from the top of your lungs and be excited.  When talking to someone who is kinaesthetic then you want to slow way down and talk to them about feelings.  You need to change your tone of voice so that it matches theirs. Another way to establish a good rapport is by using similar gestures as the person you are communicating with is using.  Hand gestures or postures play a huge part in communicating but we just don’t consciously realise it.  By mirroring person’s gestures they will not consciously notice but subconsciously they will and they will like you and enjoy communicating with you much more. These are skills that once learned can make an amazing difference in your life and in communicating with others.  It can help to practise these skills by doing simple things like going into a restaurant and test your new skills out when ordering your meal.  For a week or so make a big effort in watching people’s gestures and modalities and try to mirror their actions. It will take a little effort at first to keep remembering to do this, but once you have mastered these skills they will soon become automatic and you will do them subconsciously. Neuro Linguistic Programming is a set of techniques that can help you improve many aspects of your life including communication.  The above is just a small part of what Neuro Linguistic Programming can do to improve your life.  

This article was written by Shezz P who has successfully changed her life using self taught NLP techniques.

You too can change your life and create personal and professional success by using NLP techniques learned through the The NLP Toolbox!’

Many people would just love to be more persuasive but just don’t really have any idea how to be.  You need to ask yourself what is your intention?  Your intent directs the flow of energy in your interaction with others so don’t you think it makes sense to have in your mind a very clear and strong intent before engaging in your persuasion mission? Think about the person that you will be attempting to persuade and try to think of how your persuasion will benefit them.  Your persuasion efforts will be more effective if you make it clear what their benefits will be from the situation. Try to put yourself in their shoes and think of what benefits you can see looking at it from their angle.  Also try and look at the situation from an independent view as this can also make you aware of other ideas and benefits. It pays to have an idea of what the other person wants and keep the positive intention nice and strong in mind when interacting with the person. This will automatically create a good vibe between you and therefore create the well known fundamental persuasion skill – rapport. During your interaction with the other person make sure you ask well focused questions as this will increase your persuasion parlance.  You will want to ask questions that will get the person to open up so that you can discover one of the very powerful motivators known as values. This is an interesting aspect of how the human mind works because you find yourself becoming more curious about people’s values as your persuasion power increases. You MUST remember however that once you have got the other person talking, make sure you be quiet and LISTEN. That’s right, just sit back and listen as they are giving you lots of high quality information that you can then use to persuade and guide them.  Pay lots of attention to discover words that people may use that have a lot of emotional value for them. What do you suppose would happen if you were to then describe and incorporate those valuable words into your persuasive ‘pitch’? They would be much more likely to go along with your persuasive intention because you are using words which stimulate powerful feelings inside them for the changes that they really want. In the art of persuasion – or indeed anything – there are many ways of doing things, many perspectives, techniques, methods and tools.  By using these things and paying attention to feedback, you will get the results that you are looking for.  Neuro Linguistic Programming teaches you these valuable tools and more and shows you how to use them to your advantage.

 This article was written by Shezz P who has successfully changed her life using self taught NLP techniques.

You too can change your life and create personal and professional success by using NLP techniques learned through the The NLP Toolbox!’

Neuro Linguistic Programming is one of the best set of techniques that enable you to change your life. When you get stuck in a negative pattern in your life it can be very, very difficult to get out of it and make changes.  Especially so if you don’t see any results quickly you may get discouraged and give up. This is the fantastic thing about Neuro Linguistic Programming.  The results are very quick and the skills and techniques are very easy to learn.  As the title of this article states – any dummy can use nlp. NLP can be a little off putting sometimes because of the name.  The name ‘Neuro Linguistic Programming’ does sound quite technical and makes it sound like it’s something you need a degree to learn.  But that is not so, it is actually extremely easy and the only difficult thing about it is trying to type the name when writing articles. I came across NLP about six months ago when I was writing a report on the topic for a client.  I had actually never heard of it before and had no idea what it was about.  I thought it had something to do with computer programming – goes to show you that I was a big dummy and so if I can learn the techniques then anyone can. As soon as I started doing research on this topic I became fascinated by it. I have suffered from depression in the past and have always been a very negative thinker.  I have never been able to handle stressful situations very well and in particular if they involve my children.  This was an area of my life that I was very keen to change. So when I came across Neuro Linguistic Programming I was a bit sceptical, as I had tried other so called guaranteed methods of improving your thinking and none of them had ever worked. Since I was doing research to find out as much as I could about the topic I figured it wouldn’t hurt to learn some of the techniques and give it a go. Wow – what a life changing experience, so much so that I am here now writing my own articles about the topic because it is something that I want to share. I now manage my stressful situations much more effectively and don’t panic every time something goes wrong.  I am thinking in a much more positive way and am a happier person because of it. So, if you are looking to improve your life then I highly recommend the NLP techniques and if a big dummy like myself can learn them and succeed with them, then I’m sure you can too.
This article was written by Shezz P who has successfully changed her life using self taught NLP techniques.

You too can change your life and create personal and professional success by using NLP techniques learned through the The NLP Toolbox!’