How to Talk to Yourself so Your Unconcscious Hears You

Last week on my radio show, "Your Life, Your Relationships", I had a caller who was so frustrated with his body and his situation that he wanted to 'break up with himself'. He had reached a place where he was feeling negative about everything in his life and wanted to be more positive. I suggested a particular language intervention for him.

I think I should pass this on to you, along with a few more ways of helping yourself think positively. It does take work to make a practice of using these positive language interventions -- and it is well worth the effort.

What follows is a list of what to do to change our most common ways of thinking negatively into more useful thoughts.

• Avoid the word "not" - The unconscious mind is very literal -- and it believes everything you tell it. Unfortunately,  it is incapable of hearing the word "not". (Don't believe me? Don't think of a purple walrus. What just happened? If you're normal (and don't know the game), you just thought of a purple walrus. Why? Because you have to make a picture of something in order to eliminate it.) Notice I used the word "avoid", rather than saying "Don't use".

• Eliminate the word "but" - When you use the word, "but", you are implying that what came before it is somehow false, or partly false. For example, when you say to a friend, "I like that dress, but the color isn't great on you" implies that you don't really like the dress, because when your friend asks you if you like it, "do you like it on me?" is implied.

          It's much better to use the word "and" - "I like that dress, 

          and the color isn't great on you" sounds very different, doesn't it? 

          Eliminate the word, "however", as well. As my friend, Janet 

          Crawford, says, '"However" is just "but" dressed up in a tuxedo.'

• Avoid the word, "can't" -  When someone uses the words, "I can't", what (s)he usually mean is "I won't". It's not that she can't come to your dinner party, it's that she isn't willing to do whatever is necessary to come. Occasionally, when someone says he can't, he really is disabled, as is the man in the wheel chair who says, "I can't run".

          If you choose not to do something, take responsibility for
          that, and say, "I have other plans" (even if the plans are to stay
          home and watch TV). This implies that the other plans are more

          important for some reason, and that's okay. It's okay to make
          choices -- that's life.

• Avoid the passive voice - "It can't be done" is just a way of avoiding responsibility; what the speaker probably means is either "I can't do it" or "I won't do it". Plus passive voice is boring and confusing for the listener. If you mean, "I'm not willing to do it" -- tell the truth -- say that.

• Avoid the words, "I'll try" - Right now, put your right foot flat on the floor. Now, try to pick it up. Don't pick it up, just try to. This is what Yoda meant when he said, “Do or do not... there is no try.” 

         Make a commitment. Yes, you might fail -- and you are much
         more likely to succeed than if you just "try".

Whining can be fun! & So can listening to it!

Next time you catch a regular complainer in the act -- even yourself -- try this great technique:

1. Set a timer (most cell phones have them) for 2 minutes. - This limits the amount of time for the whining to something you actually have time for.
2. Complain for a solid 2 minutes. The catch is that the only word you can us is "blah". 

Frustrated? Blah BLAH blah blah blaaaaaah blahblah blah blah blah.

Annoyed? BLAH BLAH blah BLAH blah blah BLAH!

Super ticked off? BLAH BLAHBLAH BLAHBLAHBLAHLAH!!! BLAH!

And go on for 2 minutes. Run out of rant on one subject? Switch to another: blah blah blahblah blah!

If you're listening, then respond as you usually would -- but again, only using the word, "blah": a soft blah blah blahblah.

You'll be amazed at what happens! I don't want to tell you, because I want you to try this for yourself, but there were 2 main reactions in the group of 40 or so people with whom I learned this, and both were good. Try it, post a comment here, or send me an email, and I'll let you know how you compare to the group.

[Big thanks to Suzi Smith, who taught this technique at last weekend's NLP conference.]

Motivation/Election

One of the things you learn first in NLP Practitioner training is the difference between motivation 'towards' and motivation 'away from'.

Both are useful. Towards' motivation moves you to act for something you desire, like a great relationship or a new car. 'Away from' motivation gets you moving away from something, like a tiger bounding towards you, or a rampaging boss.

Have you noticed that when you are motivated towards something, you tend to be happier than when you are motivated away from something?

This played out in the Presidential campaigns. Obama showed people a picture of how things could be better, while McCain campaigned on fear, mostly 'away from' Obama -- those were the attack ads. And that is probably why everyone with whom I've spoken in the last day or so says, "I finally have hope" and feels better.

What you focus on, expands. For the last 8 years, we have focused on the negative, on what we're afraid of, and things got steadily worse. Now we will begin to focus on the positive, as a country, as a people, and things will slowly begin to get better.

But remember the laws of thermodynamics, which say that things tend towards entropy, and it takes work to reverse that. So what it took 8 years to destroy (due to intentional destruction, along with the forces of entropy), it could take many more years to build back up.

MeMedia

Here's the link to recording of the teleclass I did on Thursday night:

http://www.thewisemind.com/audio/NLP.mp3

It includes some of the presuppositions of NLP, some history of NLP & a couple of very useful processes for changing how you feel about and in situations. The first, Changing the Soundtrack, will change how you feel about an incident from your past, and the second will give you a resource to use any time, anywhere in the future.

Have fun! And if you want a whole day of fun, it's next Sunday, 4/27 in Oakland, CA. For more info, look here:

http://www.hypnotherapycenter.com/work_main.html#nlp

No Gremlins, No Demons, No Self-Sabotage!

I was teaching Hypnocoaching last weekend to a group in Oakland, when a student’s question started me on a rant about a pet peeve, which is the very concept of gremlins, demons, or self-sabotage. This is important, so I’m sharing it with you.

We all have emotional baggage -- internal things that get in the way of us creating what we want in our lives and businesses. Perhaps you’ve heard these referred to as ‘gremlins’ or ‘demons’.

And we’ve all had the experience of wanting something, and just as we get really close to achieving it, it slips away. Maybe you’ve had the experience more than once. And then you’ve wondered, “what’s wrong with me?” So someone handed you the idea that you could be sabotaging yourself. This sets up the idea that you could deliberately, intentionally be stopping yourself from getting what you want. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What’s actually happening in both these cases is that part of you just wants something different -- and perhaps incompatible.

Just labeling these admittedly less-than-helpful parts of ourselves in these negative ways is doing yourself a disservice. Why?

First, whatever is stopping you from getting what you choose is a part of you. And you don’t react particularly well to someone calling you a nasty name, do you? If I called you an idiot, would it make you want to cooperate with me? No. And calling these parts of yourself nasty names doesn’t make them want to cooperate, either. Making yourself wrong by saying ‘I’m sabotaging myself’, just makes you feel bad about yourself, which makes the situation worse, without offering a solution.

Let’s use my client, Stephanie, as an example. She desperately wants to “take her business to the next level”, but can’t make herself do any of the things that she knows will get here there. She had labeled the part of her that is stopping her a ‘gremlin’, which set up a struggle with it.

What do you do instead of using these destructive labels?

First, recognize that any part of you that is getting in the way of what you (think you) want actually has a positive purpose. Perhaps this part of you was created at another time, in other circumstances, to get you what you needed or wanted at the time, and has outlived its usefulness. Or perhaps it wants something good for you now, that you’re not aware of, or that seems to conflict with what you want consciously.

Some discussion uncovered that both of Stephanie’s parents were very successful — but they worked all the time, so that she felt ignored and unloved. So the part of her that was stopping her was created when she was about 5, and it was worried that if she were successful, she’d never have any time for herself or her family. So, of course, it wanted her to avoid business success, so that she could have a happy family life, and both she and her kids would feel loved.

Second, honor and thank that part of you for doing such a good job. If it were sleeping on the job, it wouldn’t have come up! And it’s much more likely to cooperate if you are respectful of it. Again, if I say to you, “I honor what a good job you’re doing, and could you please just do your job a little differently?”, you‘re more likely to work with me than if I call you a “pea-brained a**hole”, right?

Instead of calling this part of her a ‘gremlin’, Stephanie thanked this part of herself for doing such a good job.

Third, figure out what its positive purpose is, and then help it get that, in a way that works for the rest of you. This is often a sort of internal negotiation.

Stephanie told this part of her that she was grateful for its desire for her to take care of herself and spend plenty of time with her family. And then she explained that it really didn’t work for the rest of her, and in fact, was getting in the way of her taking care of her family — financially. It understood and relaxed. She promised it that she’d make sure to hire people to take some of the burden of a successful business away from her, so that she’d have time to relax alone and time to hang out with her husband and kids. In the end, the part of her agreed, and then also agreed to remind her with a particular feeling when she wasn’t keeping up her end of the agreement.

What parts of you are getting in your way? If you want help identifying, making friends with and working with the parts of you formerly known as ‘gremlins’, call me at 888-4-hollis! Stop the struggle! You can do this. With me as your guide, it’s quicker and easier than you think.

What NLP has taught for decades finally hits the mainstream

Psychology - Mimicry - Persuasion - How to Build Rapport - New York Times

How to Change Your Mood FAST

Have you ever been unfocused before an exam, when you really needed to concentrate instead?

Or have you ever been really nervous before giving a lecture, when instead you needed to be confident?

Or perhaps you’ve been down in the dumps when you needed to be ‘on’ and positive at a social event?

We’ve all had the experience of wanting or needing, for one reason or another, to be in a different mood that the one we were actually in. Most of us just give in, accept our moods, and do the best we can. But there is a quick, easy way to shift your mood when you must, or even just when you choose to. No drugs, no pills, no cost, no side effects!

It’s really simple. It’s easy, too. It’s called ‘anchoring’ a positive emotional state.

In his wonderful online Encyclopedia of NLP ( http://nlpuniversitypress.com/indexA.html)”, Robert Dilts says:

“...“anchoring” refers to the process of associating an internal response with some environmental or mental trigger, so that the response may be quickly, and sometimes covertly, reaccessed.”

If you’re American and have ever heard the first notes of The Star Spangled Banner, and noticed that your right hand flew to cover your heart, even before you were aware of what it was doing, you have experienced a powerful anchor. (If you’re not American, perhaps you’ve seen this and puzzled over it.) If you smell a particular cooking smell and are instantly back in, say, your grandmother’s kitchen, you’ve experienced an anchor. If your partner has ever said, “We need to talk” and you’ve felt icy fingers of fear crawl up your back, you’ve experienced an anchor.

In a famous experiment, Pavlov used this stimulus-response conditioning to get dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. He rang a bell and then gave them food so often that they associated the food with the sound of the bell, anticipating the food so well that they began to salivate just from the sound, even when no food was present.

All of these examples show that a trigger, a stimulus, can instantly and automatically result in a response. Most of these anchors, that is, trigger-response pairs, were set unconsciously (at least, unconsciously by us!). But what if you could set one intentionally?

You can! You can set an anchor to stimulate a positive emotion whenever you need it. Now, with a little advance preparation, you can turn lack of focus into concentration, or a case of nerves into confidence, or feeling low into feeling good. It just takes a little advance preparation.

Before you need the anchor, in a quiet place at any convenient time, do the following:

1) Pick an anchor. I generally recommend hand positions that you don’t normally use (like touching the thumb and pinkie of your non-dominant hand), for a couple of reasons:
- you can do them anywhere, any time
- they’re unobtrusive
- they take a minimum of effort
- they’re uncontaminated by other feelings

2) Think of a specific time and place when you really felt the way you’re choosing to feel. Make it really real for yourself by graphically imagining the scene:

- seeing what you saw around you at the time, looking out through your own eyes at the time
- hearing what you heard, no matter how faint
smelling any smells that were associated with the time and place that you left how you choose to feel now
- touching something in the scene
- feeling all the feelings that go with the flood of emotion. Really notice where those feelings are in your body.

3) When you are completely associated into the positive state that you’re choosing, especially feeling the internal feelings strongly, then set your anchor (touch your thumb to your pinkie).

4) Relax for a minute or so, distracting yourself with something else.

5) Repeat steps 2 – 4 several times.

6) Test the anchor by using it (touching your thumb to your pinkie). The feelings that you intentionally associated with the anchor should flood your body. If not, repeat steps 2 – 4 again until the using the anchor creates your chosen feelings/emotional state.

Then you have “anchored the resource state” so it’s available to you whenever you need it, say before an exam, a lecture or a social event. Just touch your anchor and go!

How to Really Connect on the Phone

Many years ago, I was the head of customer service (and a few other things, too!) for a small business that sold proprietary products to the fire service. One of my duties was to answer questions from any fire captain or chief who called in to ask about the products, or to get the information they needed to them. Another thing I did was to help staff our booth at 3 - 5 fire service trade shows each year, which meant that I eventually got to meet many of the people to whom I had spoken on the phone.

I began to notice that, when I met them, I already knew what these men (and they were almost exclusively men) looked like! Now, it wasn’t that they looked exactly as I had imagined them, had I even been aware that I was imagining them. Rather, if I described the impression I had, that description would have exactly matched the person. So while it wasn’t like seeing an exact photo of a particular chief, I would have described him, say, as being slightly overweight, with shaggy brown hair, smallish light eyes, a regular nose and a mustache — and that description would have fit!

And then I began to wonder how I did that.

What I realized was that as I heard a voice, I was unconsciously flipping through my internal data base of all the people I’d ever met and their voices, and making a picture of the person I was talking with based on that. I’m sure you do it, too. Think about it — you can usually tell a woman’s voice from a man’s, or hear someone’s approximate age (though I can’t say how), or native language, or which region of the US he or she is from, and sometimes their ethnicity. A more resonant voice is generally a larger person, though not always. How do I ‘see’ eye color, or hair color, or facial hair? Avoiding the obvious blond jokes here, I can’t put my finger on it — but again, flipping through that data base in my mind gives me clues.

Then there’s the emotional stuff. You can hear tension in someone’s voice — happiness, sadness and anger, too. You can hear uncertainty in “uptalk”, the way someone raises their pitch at the end of a sentence. Or certainty and confidence in the opposite — a lowered pitch at the end of a sentence. Yes, you can hear a smile — or else why would all those sales training folks tell you to smile when you call a prospect? Or maybe what happens is that the smile changes someone’s internal state, and you can hear that. If you pay close attention, you can even hear people’s emotions when they’re trying to hide them. Maybe it’s in the length of the vowels, or the breathing.

You can do this! Part one of connecting to people on the phone is to listen to how people talk, and not just what they say. Pay attention to how fast they’re speaking (can’t you just see certain people gesticulating wildly?), whether they speak with a more even pitch, or whether it has lots of peaks and valleys, how loud they are, which words they emphasize, where and when they hesitate. And notice what impressions come to you from this, however they come. You may not be “seeing” the person on the other end of the line, but you may learn a lot about him or her.

In fact, you are probably already doing this beneath the level of your conscious awareness — maybe you’ve already decided you don’t like someone you just “met” on the phone, for example. But making it conscious for a while will help you improve the skills you already have.

And when this noticing becomes automatic, phase two of “how to connect on the phone” is to begin to match the other person’s speech. Maybe you slow down a bit if you’re talking to someone in the South — or speed up a bit if you’re speaking to a New Yorker. Maybe you have more peaks and valleys than you normally have, or maybe your tone of voice is more level than usual. Or perhaps you just address the feelings implicit in someone’s tone of voice — if (s)he sounds hesitant, ask what that hesitation is. This may feel uncomfortable in the beginning, but keep at it, and eventually, you’ll connect with people just as well on the phone as in person.