Have you ever taken a test, or assessment to discover who you are, what job best suits you, or which relationships fit you best? Do you know your “type”?

Thinking Styles.

Too many modern assessments and models put people in boxes: you’re an A-type, where you hang in the 4 quadrants, models of personality etc… As much as it is useful to discover certain character traits, those tend to limit us rather than assist us to expand our perception of who we are and how we are “supposed” to behave, because they tend to function deductively (from outside to inside) rather than inductively (from inside to outside).

Another less obvious, but probably more accurate and constructive approach is to focus not on WHAT people think or believe or their personality type, but HOW they think about them, looking at the lenses they use to understand their world: their work, their relationships, themselves in relation to the environment. It’s an inductive model of understanding (i.e. the opposite of limiting), because it reflects the increasing level of complexity that a mind has to develop in order to fit in a given external environment.

The question we ask is: are the mind capacities of a person suited to their life conditions? When we achieve congruency between the 2, we are in balance. Balance is the ultimate purpose, because when you reach a state of perfect equilibrium… you function perfectly in your world, and… what else do you need?

When life conditions change, we often need to develop new ways to cope with a changed reality, which means essentially, new mind capacities, and new ways to think about our world.

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THE NLP TUTORIAL GROUP SITE CLOSED FOR NOW, WE SOMETIMES REOPEN THIS TUTORIAL. SIGN UP TO BECOME THE MASTERMINDS CLUB’S MEMBER NEWSLETTER (it’s fr.ee) TO GET NOTIFIED WHEN WE REOPEN.

To know more about NLP, go to the NLP Tutorial website. It is a member only website (you need to be registered as a student of our certification course to have full access), but the blog is public, so you can read more on NLP there.

NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming. Nowadays, it is widely used in business to improve management, sales and achievement/performance, inter-personal skills; in education to better understand learning styles, develop rapport with students and parents and to aid in motivation; and of course, NLP is a profound set of tools for personal development.

Neuro: The nervous system (the mind), through which our experience is processed via five senses:

Visual
Auditory
Kinesthetic
Olfactory
Gustatory

Linguistic: Language and other nonverbal communication systems through which our neural representations are coded, ordered and given meaning. Includes:

Pictures
Sounds
Feelings
Smells
Tastes
Words (Self Talk)

Programming: The ability to discover and utilize the programs that we run (our communication to ourselves and others) in our neurological systems to achieve our specific and desired outcomes.

In other words, NLP is how to use the language of the mind to consistently achieve our specific and desired outcomes.

So, what’s NLP all about?

It is about understanding and knowing what’s going on inside our mind in order to master our behaviours, our emotional states, and ultimately our results.

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Speak soon!

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Click below to listen to the Switch-Position exercise.

switch-position-super-power

Is that useful for you? Please leave me a comment below!

Thanks!

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Sometimes, misunderstanding arises when we do not understand other people’s map of the world, or in other words, when we cannot put ourselves in their shoes.

Each person reacts to the other, the situation escalates, emotions intensify, and the chance of reaching a mutually beneficial agreement disappears in a puff of smoke.

Whether you’re preparing for a meeting, dealing with family members, selling, negotiating, coaching, or giving a presentation, the ability to put yourselves in other people’s shoes massively increases the likelihood of success.

When you are able to adopt a different point of view easily, you gain in your ability to detach from the immediate situation, and to keep your cool in challenging circumstances.

In a word.. you don’t go bananas!

Sounds good to me!

But not only that…

Your ability to look at things from a number of different perspective makes you more flexible, more adaptable, more able to see everything from a higher point of view, and therefore more likely to keep on the right track rather than get swallowed up in non-essential issues.

In a word, you make better choices and decisions.

Sounds really good to me!

The Background for the exercise

The idea is to adopt 3 different perspectives
1. Your own perspective (seeing through your own eyes, in NLP terms, it is called “Association”)
2. Another person’s perspective on the same situation (seeing through THEIR eyes)
3. The Fly on the Wall perspective (a totally detached, 3rd party perspective).

Now it’s important you actually DO IT! Understanding intellectually and experiencing and 2 VERY DIFFERENT THINGS! When you experience, you fix things at the unconscious level, and it is easy to get back into state.

The exercise

OK, so here’s how you do it. I’ll detail the process step by step below, read through it, and then go ahead!

So the first thing I’d like you to do is to recall an argument that you had with someone recently. Not necessarily a major argument, but chose something important enough that you can feel something when you recall the event.

Got that? Good!

OK, ready to go? Sit comfortably and close your eyes now.

1. See what happened through your own eyes, see the other person’s face, his/her facial expressions, what he/she looks like, how he/she moves, the gestures.

Hear the other person’s voice, the tone, the pitch, is it loud, is it soft?

And feel what you were feeling at that time.

Now, I’d like you to float up outside your body, and float down into the other person’s body. And when you do that

2. You see everything that person saw: he/she can see your face in front of him/her, so see your face right now, the facial expressions, the gestures, the body language.

And hear your voice as you are speaking to that person, the tone, the pitch, the volume.

Feel what that person is feeling at that time.

And now, float outside that person’s body, and go and adopt the 3rd party perspective, be the fly on the wall.

3. And see these 2 people there, see their gestures, their body language, their faces, the facial expressions.

Hear the voices, how they speak to each other, the volume of the voices, the different tones, the pitch.

Notice any feeling, or are they not there?

And now come back into your body and open your eyes.

Debrief

How was it, did you notice anything different as you were adopting different perceptual positions? How about your feelings?

What have you learned? What are your conclusions on that matter?

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Beliefs are prime examples of generalisations about ourselves AND the world, which act as a spring board to all our decisions. Beliefs are JUST IDEAS, there is nothing intrinsically TRUE about them.

One of the most powerful character of beliefs is that they often become self-fulfilling prophecies.

A common example of this is when a person firmly believes they’ve lost something, and sure enough, they can’t find it until someone points out that the lost object is right in front of them!

The unconscious mind deletes the visual information (“the object is right here”) to prove the belief right.

Where do we learn them from?

• From direct experiences filtered through the senses (what we see, hear, feel etc…)
• From our parents,
  
• From other people and what we hear in our direct environment (example: religious figures, teachers, media, peers, etc…)
  

Most of the time, our beliefs have an enormous positive power in how we see the world around us. For example, the most confident and successful people have a strong deeply anchored supportive belief about themselves and what they can achieve.

Sometimes however, some beliefs, which used to serve us have stopped doing so, and have become a source of limitation in our life.

One little known fact about beliefs is that they are embedded in our senses, and in the language we use to communicate with the world AND with ourselves (the conversation that we run in our own heads, that you are probably familiar with.)

Therefore, of the many techniques that are used nowadays to assist people change their beliefs about themselves to create results in their life (be it business, relationships, or health), none is as astonishingly effective and swift as the sensory and language-based belief change.

HOW TO IDENTIFY A DISEMPOWERING BELIEF?

Look for clues in words such as: “I must”, “It should”, “I ought to” etc… Technically, these are called modal operators of necessity. What they do is limit the possibilities which are open to us.

Also, possibility words used in the negative such as “I can’t”, “I couldn’t”, “I’ll never be able to” etc.. have the same effect.

When someone uses these words repeatedly, it shows that their model of the world is extremely restricted.

EXAMPLE OF QUESTIONS TO SCRAMBLE A NEGATIVE BELIEF

“How is that a problem?”

This will get people to the source of their problem, which ISthe limiting belief. Most people are only aware of the manifest issues in their life (example: “I smoke”, “I am overweight”, “I can’t sleep”, “My back aches”, “nobody takes me seriously”, “I can’t get promoted/loved”, “I should exercise more” etc…) but very few are aware of the source of their problem (if they were, their problem would disappear by magic!)

“How do you know it is a problem, as you sit right here right now?“
This will put light on the internal process they go through to make the problem a problem. Each belief exists because it follows a certain thought sequence (called “strategy”). The only thing often needed to get rid of the entire belief, is a mere scrambling of ONE step in the sequence.

“What is the higher purpose of this behaviour?”

All behaviours have a positive intent. Even those behaviours which appear silly, impossible to understand, or even downright obnoxious, have some kind of positive intention behind them.
A classical example is the unruly/“badly behaved” child (NB: “badly behaved according to whom?” is the question, but that’s the subject of another article!) who just uses offensive behaviour as a way to attract attention and confirm that the adults around him love him.
Don’t underestimate the power of the positive intent behind negative behaviours. Some people can make themselves sick if they believe it is the only way to attract attention from loved ones who seem too aloof.
Once the higher positive intent has been discovered, it is easy to
– find the belief behind the behaviour
– change the negative behaviour to satisfy the positive intent.

“How would you know if it wasn’t true?”

This question challenges the belief, the idea, that we hold true. It opens the possibility that, maybe, after all… there is another way to think about this. This question acts as the grain of sand in a perfectly polished mechanism.
Hum… Maybe, just maybe…

And finally, I want to share a secret with you.

This is something I ONLY teach in the advanced levels of language training certifications we run.

It’s a HIGHLY advanced language pattern that is used to totally scramble someone’s thinking sequence, and in the process, help them to dissolve deeply anchored disempowering beliefs.

And you’ll probably feel very uncomfortable using it the first few times, but I promise! It REALLY works!

The patterns uses a DOUBLE NEGATIVE question that the brain cannot process.

It goes something like this:

“What would not happen if you did not do it?”

Have fun!

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