by Tom Hoobyar
What this other you says is “Wow, I wonder what started that?” Then you have either the sound of a wave to interrupt the old pattern or, if you can actually see this other you, you can have a flash of white appear, like what happens when the film breaks in the movie theater. You need a blank screen. You need a break before the cycle starts again. So try that.
Again, the step-by-step directions for the “Curiosity Shunt Installation” can be found by following the link at the end of the chapter. And, to quickly summarize, it’s three steps. You find the cue for the emotion, you start to destroy the cue, and you immediately replace it with a future you who doesn’t have this issue and who’s curious. Play with this process and you’ll experience a profound shift.
Depression: Auditory Cues That Hold the Story
Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned that negative feelings are often linked to an auditory cue. Before I give you some tips to deal with depression, let me start by saying that I’ve really shifted my attitude about it. I’ve lived with people who have clinical depression and I’ve suggested they see a doctor and get a psychoreactive drug, because depression can result from a physical ailment. If depression is long-lasting, take it seriously whether it’s in you or in a friend, and seek professional help. Before I learned about depression, I used to think, “Well, just tough it out.” Now that I see how painful and debilitating depression is, I’m much more sympathetic to how difficult it is to cope with.
With depression, it’s also important to reframe its purpose, and here’s what I mean by that. Depression is illogical. To become depressed, we have to take a problem or bad news and we have to make it personal (it’s only happening to us); we have to make it pervasive (it happens no matter where we are, no matter what); and it happens forever (it’s permanent).
We call these conditions the 3 P’s: personal, pervasive, and permanent. They’re the way someone achieves depression. Depression is when a person takes discouragement and makes a habit out of it, which is a really painful way to go through life.
If you’re feeling down, that the world is against you, or that nothing is ever going to work out, go inside and explore what’s happening. As you do this, remember there is no inner enemy. Even if you’re feeling lousy and you don’t know why you’re feeling lousy, it’s wise to assume that there’s a positive reason for that. Something inside is trying to do you some good, even though you feel lousy.
Listen to the inner voice. If the inner voice is a broken record that’s just going over and over and over again, there are two things you can do. One is to disassociate: stop being in the picture and get outside the picture so you can see yourself in it. If it’s a voice, let the voice talk to you from across the room. Make the voice more seductive or make it sleepy. Make it a child’s voice that yawns. Maybe it’s time for it to take a nap.
Your objective is to find out what’s going on in your head to produce the emotion, and then to interfere with that sequence. Now you can experiment with different changes to your sub-modalities until you experience some relief to heaviness, darkness, weighty silence, or whatever stored information you discovered.
Shaping Your Experience:
The Habit of Fine-Tuning Sub-Modalities
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this chapter, but you can reread it or review the key points and/or follow the link at the end of this chapter to get detailed summaries of the processes. What we’ve been doing here is exploring the pictures, sounds, and feelings in our own brains. Finding them is sometimes the tricky part. But once you begin to find them, you’ll start looking and listening more intently. You’ll notice the difference in location, the difference in size, the difference in brightness, intensity, and all the aspects of pictures, sounds, or feelings.
As you examine these different representations and tinker with one of the qualities, you’ll discover that your responses and emotions will change. As I said earlier in this chapter, sub-modalities are called the “molecules of meaning” because they’re what give us the meaning. It’s a little weird how you get a meaning from a picture that’s bright or a picture that’s dull, but part of you says, “Good. That’s the way I like it.” This is the way your brain has bookmarked everything!
You can enhance or reduce the impact any picture, sound, or feeling has on your experience. If, for example, you have a positive emotion and you look inside and realize, “Yeah, I’ve just looked at my kids and they’re playing by the pool,” or “I’m at a family barbecue,” or “I’m with buddies playing cards,” or “I’m with the girls out having coffee,” or whatever it is, if it feels good, make it brighter. See if you can make it even better.
If it feels bad, then get disassociated from the picture. Make it small, push it away from you, and notice how that reduces your negative state.
Over the next several days, step into your own mind, and pay attention to the positive and negative states you experience. Explore what goes on in your head when you have these feelings. Notice the images, sounds, and feelings, then use the tools you’ve learned in this chapter to change them. It’s fun and the results are amazing.
Ready to learn more about living in the zone? Then, read on.
Key Ideas
• The brain operates pretty much on its own, and its focus is survival. The mind is able to focus on more than just survival; it affords us the opportunity to create and choose from a myriad of options.
• The Well-Formed Outcome process is a deceptively simple set of six key questions that enables its users to flesh out and evaluate a goal before committing to it and a course of action.
• Feeling uncertain or conflicted can be an internal signal called incongruence. If the conflict is about something unpleasant or something that goes against someone’s values, incongruence can be like a smoke alarm. There may not actually be a fire, but it’s prudent to determine what set it off.
• The structure of experience is based on five representational systems called modalities: pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells.
• Each modality has different qualities, subtle distinctions that are called sub-modalities. For example, some sub-modalities of vision are: location, brightness, and size.
• Sub-modalities impact how someone experiences a memory. By changing a sub-modality, a person can alter their experience, making it more positive, neutral, or negative.
• Associating into the picture usually makes the impact of seeing the image more intense (either positive or negative) for the person. Recalling difficult memories in a disassociated way reduces the emotional charge and makes it easier to get the information related to that situation.
• Feeling an emotion is just an option.
• Most of our emotions, interpretations, and reactions are so well rehearsed that they’re automatic and the initial “cause” is out of our awareness. To understand what’s going on with you, slow down the mental movie so you can more easily discover the “cue” (picture, sound, feeling, taste, or smell) that produced a feeling.
• When striving to discover a specific “cue,” some people may discover they are distracted or confused. Often, these reactions are just detours taking you away from the real destination.
• To improve your focus and productivity, consider asking yourself the following questions at the beginning of every day.
1. What am I looking forward to today?
2. Longer term, what am I looking forward to?
3. Am I doing things that lead directly to my goals?
4. Am I being my best friend and supporter?
5. Am I in my body and enjoying the gift of being alive?
• Someone can feel depressed when the three P’s are at work: personal, pervasive, and permanent. Depressed people may benefit from exploring related auditory cues and tinkering with those sub-modalities.
To enhance the skills you learned in this chapter, check out the recommended Bonus Activities at our special “Essential Guide” website: http://eg.nlpco.com/2-10 or use the QR co
de with your phone. This link includes a summary of the “Curiosity Shunt Installation.”
Discoveries, Questions, Ideas, and Stuff You Want to Work On
CHAPTER THREE: LIVING IN “THE ZONE”
Whoa, is my brake on?
Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.
—Brian Tracy
Some conversations, some projects, some relationships, and some days seem effortless—and most of us prefer to operate in that optimal zone. So in this chapter, you’ll learn how to improve your energy, confidence, focus, and productivity. You’ll discover how to remove energy obstacles, increase your ability to persevere, amp up your enthusiasm and optimism, and much more.
High or Low? How Expectations Impact Performance
The expectations we have shape our experiences. They can make us feel as though something is a piece of cake, a worthwhile challenge, or an impossible dream, right?
Let’s say, for example, that you’d like to change jobs. You might say to yourself, “I could easily change jobs because it’s never been a problem to do that before.” Or “It will be interesting to see what attractive opportunities are out there and how I can use my connections to help me find what I’m looking for.” Or you might feel discouraged before you even begin because it took your best friend, a talented professional in your field, eight months to find a decent job. Notice how these very different perspectives and expectations would influence what it’s like to explore various employment opportunities.
This dynamic is at work in our lives all the time. Yet quite often our expectations are out of our awareness—and they may not even be accurate! Even so, they can be very powerful. So, how can we make expectations work to our advantage? Let’s play with a simple example.
Discovery Activity:
Exploring Your Expectations
This activity will show you that your expectations are imaginary. Please stand up. For this exercise, choose an area where you have the space and privacy to move freely. (If you are reading this where you have an audience, either go someplace where you can do this alone, or wait until later.)
Stand with your feet stationary—about shoulder width apart. Now, extend your right arm straight out from the right side of your body, then rotate your torso gradually to the left. Bring your arm around to the left as far as it can go. Using the hand and arm that’s now across your body, point to the farthest place in your rotation—and notice where that is. Then come back around.
This is a very simple but helpful exercise because it teaches your body something important. An old Maori wisdom says that knowledge is only rumor unless it’s in the muscle. This honors the difference between seeing and doing.
Now, as you’re standing still—relaxed and breathing easily—just imagine that you can simply rotate your torso and arm farther to the left than you did just a moment ago. Just imagine what it would feel like if you were able to loosen up your torso and your shoulders so your right arm came much farther around to the left.
Now actually extend your right arm—and swing it around slowly to the left. Just for fun, find out how far you can go this time. Don’t bend your elbow. No cheating. Just notice that because you imagined going farther, you probably did go farther. It might not have been 50 percent farther, but it was certainly farther than you went the first time—even though the first time I asked you to turn as far as you could and I believe that you consciously intended to do that.
In the Mind’s Eye: The Power of Mental Rehearsal
What’s important to take away from this is that whenever something takes place in the mind first, you’re likely to have a better performance—simply because you’ve already tested the reality of it. In fact, top athletes visually rehearse their performance as part of their workouts and preparation. To test the power of this phenomenon, Professor L. V. Clark of Wayne State University conducted a study in the 1960s to determine the effects of visualization on the free-throw performance of basketball players.
In the study, first the athletes were tested to determine their free-throw proficiency. Next, they were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups. The first group went to the gym every day and practiced doing free-throws for one hour. The second group also went to the gym, but instead of physically practicing, they laid down and simply visualized successfully shooting free-throws. The third group did nothing. In fact, they were instructed to forget about basketball and told, “Don’t touch a basketball—don’t even think about it!”
What happened was interesting. At the end of thirty days, the three groups were tested again to determine their current free-throw proficiency. The players who hadn’t practiced at all showed no improvement in performance; many in that group actually exhibited a decline in performance. Those who had physically practiced one hour each day showed a performance increase of 24 percent. And the visualization group, by merely imagining themselves successfully shooting free-throws, improved 23 percent!
Researchers concluded that visualization enhanced motor coordination and intrinsic motivation. Bottom line? You can improve your performance by mentally and/or physically rehearsing a task or interaction to expand and refine your expectations.
In Sync: The Link Between Physiology and Energy
The first thing I want you to consider about energy is that the mind, the body, and the brain work together—they’re in concert. So it’s important to use the body in a conscious way because it will affect the mind. Let’s work on enhancing your physiology right now because it will help you feel more energetic and get more out of the rest of this chapter.
Tip #1: Breathe into It
If you straighten your spine, even in this moment as you’re reading—straighten your spine, bring your chin up slightly, and breathe deeply and slowly—two things will happen. First, the rhythms in your brain will begin to deepen. You’ll start to relax, and oddly enough, you will also increase the level of your intention. This is an example of energetic physiology.
Just as conscious breathing is a technique to enhance the harmony of brain and physiology, there are other ways to minimize the impact of energy obstacles. In addition to deep breathing, here are a few things you can easily do that will raise your energy level and keep you living in the zone.
Tip #2: Hydrate Your System and Your Brain
The second simple energy improvement tip is to drink plenty of water. Today, most Americans and Europeans are dehydrated. In previous eras, in which we were outside and our lives were more physical, we would drink water every time we had a chance. Now we confuse our bodies with coffee, tea, and sodas, which are all diuretics. Drinking pure water hydrates the brain and that actually increases the speed with which you can transfer nerve impulses. It also keeps your energy up, smooths out your digestion, and helps your skin. Like exercise, this is a simple practice that will pay immediate and long-term dividends.
Tip #3: Break Tasks into Small Bites
The third strategy, based on the Pomodoro Technique, is to take a physical and mental break. About every twenty minutes, change your posture and get out of your seat. If you work sitting down, get up. If you work walking around, sit down. Take a brief break about every twenty minutes—and a longer one about every two hours. The positive effect on productivity is so apparent that many people set a timer to remind them to shift their physiology—and avoid the temptation of “Oh, just another ten minutes . . .” which can easily turn into an hour or more!
This technique has such a good track record of increasing energy and productivity that many management consulting firms have adopted this approach. Basically, all you need is a timer, your list of to-dos, and your appointment schedule so you can divide your work into twenty-minute segments with breaks in between. This way, you’re working in thirty-minute blocks. That’s more manageable, right?
This method increases pro
ductivity by guaranteeing that you take some kind of break to refresh. By committing to shorter, focused work states, you’ll find you can stay at it. If you don’t challenge yourself to be hard at it for hours on end—and you instead truly focus for a short time—you’ll discover that you can be even more productive.
Tip #4: Notice and Reduce Resistance
In the last chapter, you began to explore how incongruence and resistance affect you. Resistance and coping with it can take a toll on your energy and really slow you down. It’s like driving with the parking brake on. You use a lot of extra gas and rubber getting around this way. You wouldn’t consciously choose to do this, would you? However, all too often, we do this physically, emotionally, and energetically.
Imagine for a moment that there’s a task you need to do—and every time you think about it you just feel sapped. This used to happen to me a lot. I left high school because I couldn’t stand doing homework. It’s an irony that I now make a living writing—it’s actually something I’ve come to really relish. Here’s what’s funny. Even though I enjoy the process of writing, I don’t enjoy contemplating it. When I contemplate a task that requires me to sit down in front of a computer, part of me says, “I don’t want to come in. I don’t want to stop playing. I don’t want to come indoors yet”—just like a little kid. Perhaps something like this happens internally for you, too.
Roadblock Removal: “Eye Movement Integration”