by Tom Hoobyar
When an energy drop like this occurs, it’s your system saying that some part of you isn’t completely on board with doing that task, making that call, meeting with that person, exercising, or whatever it is. Your emotion about the task ahead may feel like a roadblock that you can’t figure out how to get around. “Eye Movement Integration” is a quick and easy nonverbal way to handle this kind of challenge.
Here’s the way it works: Your brain is processing and storing huge amounts of information quickly; it does this by divvying it up and storing different types of information in different places. In fact, it “files” things into six different sections. For now, it’s just important to know that as you move your eyes into these different sections, you’re actually accessing the parts of the brain where various memories and details are stored. The fundamental version of the process you’re about to learn is derived from Steve and Connirae Andreas’s “Eye Movement Integration” model.
Discovery Activity:
Decreasing Resistance or Trauma
To get started, you’ll need a pen or pencil that has a tip that is a different color from the shaft—or the end with the eraser can also work well. Once you have this pen or pencil, keep it handy because you’ll need it in a minute.
Now think of something that you need to do, but when you imagine doing whatever it is, you feel your energy drop. Using a 1–10 scale, with 10 being really resistant, how strong is your resistance to doing this task? Just make a mental note of that.
Now pick up that pencil and hold it out in front of your face about twelve to fourteen inches away from your eyes. You can easily see the tip, right? And recall that task you need to do—but also don’t want to do. It could be making a presentation . . . paying bills . . . confronting a friend . . . exercising . . . whatever it is that you’re not particularly keen about doing. Imagine that you can simply put that feeling of resistance right on the tip of the pencil that’s out in front of you.
Now look at that point and keep your head very still. In a moment, using the pencil, you’re going to slowly draw a sideways figure 8 in the air so it looks something like this.
As you’re doing this, you’re going to keep your head very still and allow just your eyes to follow the tip of the pencil.
Start now and move your hand—slowly drawing that sideways figure 8. So as you’re making the first right hand loop, you’re moving the tip around and down. And as you are approaching the middle part where the center lines would intersect, make this movement an upward sweep. As the tip with that feeling on it comes in front of the tip of your nose, just go up and then continue the left-hand loop—going around to the outside and down—and then back up through the middle as you make the next right-hand loop.
As you make the next loops, gradually raise the figure 8 higher and bring it down lower, so the loops you’re making are at the edge of what your eyes can see comfortably, and bring it back to the center. Make at least five complete figure 8 loops.
Once you’ve completed at least five figure 8s, stop and notice how you’re feeling now. Using a 1–10 rating, how does the feeling of resistance you have now compare to the one you had at the beginning? How much has it improved? Make a mental note of that.
If the feeling is not as bothersome, but you’d like it to be even less so, put that feeling on the tip of the pencil and make five additional figure 8s. Again keeping your head still, allowing your eyes to simply follow the movement of the tip as you go around each outer loop and down . . . and then up through the middle. Once you’ve completed these additional figure 8s, check and see how the bothersome feeling has been reduced.
You should notice an immediate change. This is not something that takes days, weeks, or months to shift. Because brains move fast and generally prefer comfort, they’re quick to adopt things that are more comfortable and more efficient—and the changes are literally instantaneous!
Now, do the same process, this time using a circle instead of a figure 8. This is a kind of a double-check or cleanup version. Do it three or four times, paying particular attention to whether there are any points in the circle where your movement seems to hesitate or stutter. If you notice any kind of hesitation like this, do the pattern a few more times until the movement is smooth and symmetrical through the whole pattern.
This process can be used to reduce minor resistance or to take the sharp edges off a physical or emotional trauma. Although you can easily and beneficially do this process with yourself, you may want to do this to help someone else. If you were talking with a friend who was feeling irritated or dreading an upcoming task, you could just say, “Let’s try something and see if it works.” Simply follow these same steps and see what kind of positive shift they make.
Just remember, the key is to move slowly. And make sure that when you cross the center you’re always moving in an upstroke, not a downstroke. Don’t move any faster than the other person’s eyes can go. As you do this and watch their eyes, you’ll probably notice that they’re following your pen smoothly, but at some point in the figure 8 pattern, their eyes may skip. They may just sort of jump to the next point. That’s where the person’s “glitch” is—where they’ve stored the troubling information. Your goal is to do this and help them smooth out that rough point—so they can follow the lines of your figure 8 smoothly, without interruption.
Here’s the theory. By moving a person’s eyes through all six sections of where the brain stores information, the information that’s troubling them (which has been stored in one spot and perhaps is stored in a distorted way) gets mainstreamed by holding that event in mind. And as their eyes move through all the areas of the brain where data can be stored, it seems to smooth out the glitch and reduce the emotional charge of whatever was troubling them. This technique is used quite successfully with people who’ve been victims of crime or abuse and with veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.
For additional demonstrations and/or examples, go to: http://eg.nlpco.com/3-4.
Getting in the habit of noticing and adjusting your physiology and internal resistance allows you to maximize your physical and emotional energy.
Not Just Pollyanna:
How Energy, Enthusiasm, and Optimism Act as Drivers
Energy, enthusiasm, and optimism are important drivers; they influence how we feel—and are responsible for how we actually get moving.
As you have become more proficient at going inside yourself, you’ve been noticing various feelings . . . then going back behind those feelings to find what triggered them . . . and asking yourself, “What triggered that—was it an image—was it a word or tone . . . ?” You’ve learned to slow down your personal mental movies and explore what your process has been.
To help you apply your new understandings to enhance your optimism and enthusiasm, I invite you to set up an inner barometer that will regularly assess, “What’s my level of optimism today? How am I feeling about this? Am I enthusiastic? Am I looking forward to things? Am I happy? Am I grateful?” Get creative and give yourself some kind of scale so you easily notice these positive drivers. You can also choose, if you wish, to play with your sub-modalities, as described in the last chapter, to feel even more enthusiastic.
Motivation in Action
Motivation is a close relative of enthusiasm. Let’s say that you have something to do—like organizing your financial records to do your taxes—and you don’t know how to make yourself do it. People typically motivate themselves one of two ways. They do it either by creating anxiety or imagining a positive experience. These are pretty different strategies, aren’t they?
So, if you’re someone who uses anxiety to get into gear, you might imagine not getting everything done by the deadline, not being able to find a specific receipt, having your accountant tell you you’ve missed the extension date, or getting an audit letter from the IRS. All of these negative imaginings produce anxiety—and adrenaline. However, some people get so anxious that they kind of just freeze up and they can’t get
anything done.
Fortunately, there is a simple alternative to stirring ourselves into a negative (or even frozen) state, and that is to hold a positive expectation. How do you motivate yourself most of the time? Here’s a way you can find out.
Discovery Activity:
Understanding Your Motivation
Think for a moment. Consider how you got yourself up this morning. What did you actually do to get up? What did you say to yourself upon first awakening that kept you from rolling over and going back to sleep? What did you say to yourself—or imagine—to get out of bed and begin your day? Just take a look at that and see what comes up for you. What motivators were at work with you? Make a note of these.
Getting out of bed may seem like a mundane example of motivation. Yet it’s an important one because each of us has to do it every day. Understanding how you do that can provide you with insight into how you motivate yourself in other situations.
For most of my life, I wasn’t much of a morning person. And yet I was almost always expected to be somewhere in the morning. So I’d hear the alarm, open one eye, and see what time it was. Then I’d usually say to myself, “Ugh, I better get up. I don’t want to get stuck in traffic and end up being late.” As you can see, I used negative pictures to keep from hitting the snooze alarm.
In contrast, a thirty-four-year-old client of mine, who’s an artist, described her experience of waking up like this: “When I open my eyes in the morning, I first look for the dog. When she looks at me and we connect visually, it gives me energy to reach out and pet her. Then, after a couple of minutes, I get up and go to the bathroom. Then I’m up and awake . . . everything is fine . . . and I’m ready to begin my day. When I see my dog, that connection—the love and affection she has for me—gives me energy to do anything when I wake up in the morning.” My client, Ellie, gets started by a positive see-feel strategy.
Even though I’m still not a morning person, I’ve changed my getting-up strategy since I learned NLP. When I fall asleep, I’m telling myself about something I’m looking forward to doing the next day. It might be making breakfast with my wife, working with a specific client, going for a leisurely walk—whatever it is, there’s always something to look forward to.
If you find that you are currently using a stressful strategy for getting out of bed, I recommend that you not abandon it until you have something that works equally well. It’s usually safest to start playing with a pleasure-based strategy for waking up on weekends or doing nonessential projects. Then you can see how you can also create a more positive set of feelings to get you up and out of bed on workdays or ready to tackle more critical projects. To get the best results from your experiments, use what you’ve learned about sub-modalities to enhance your feelings.
Generally, when people look ahead to something pleasant, the folks that do it effectively do it in an associated fashion. They actually can feel themselves doing that thing. So when I get up in the morning and I can feel what it’s like to be sitting at the kitchen table watching my wife make her tea, I feel happy and pleasantly energized. When I imagine taking a walk, seeing the trees along the path, running into neighbors who are walking their dogs, I’m sure to do this in an associated fashion so I can feel the movement of my feet, the sun on my face, the dog’s fur against my palm, and I am beginning to feel energized.
Unfortunately, sometimes people get it sort of backward. For example, if they have something unpleasant planned, like going to the doctor or the tax guy, they do that associated, and anything pleasant they do disassociated. Sounds painful, doesn’t it? And it’s probably unnecessarily so.
Here’s what I recommend. Instead of imagining, in an associated fashion, the penalty of something possibly going badly, imagine (again in an associated fashion) the payoff of a potentially positive result. For example, you can do this two ways. You can focus on having gotten something done. And even if it’s something that might be yucky or tedious for you, you can still imagine how good it will feel. Or imagine how good you’ll feel about yourself when you’ve made some progress, or completed your task, right?
You can also notice the little sort of substeps involved in getting something completely done, and what pleasure you can find in each of these. Oddly enough, as in the case of preparing your tax information, there can be satisfaction in finding and organizing the receipts and bank statements . . . in coming up with an accurate total for a set of expenses . . . in filling out a whole section of the tax worksheet. You get the picture—in every task, there are lots of potential little victories on the way to the finish line.
And as you’re performing a difficult task, imagine how good it’s going to be to get it done. Be sure to cheer yourself on while you’re doing it. “Look, I’m under way. This isn’t as bad as I thought. This is actually getting pretty easy. Dang, I’m good at this.” Positive inner dialogue will help increase your energy, optimism, and enthusiasm and keep you rolling forward because you’ll have more brain cells available. So give this a try on any project.
A Case in Point: How to Generate Energy
So far, we’ve explored how to improve the conditions to accessing energy. Now let’s talk about how you can generate energy. I’ve had tremendous personal success with this. All my life, I was a slow riser (even though I’ve been in many occupations where I was either up for twenty-four to thirty-six hours or had to get up at all hours of the night). I just always liked to ease into my day—and sometimes that wasn’t possible.
When I learned NLP, I thought, “Since I can picture these images and I can do what I want with these images, I wonder if I can energize myself on my way to work in the morning.”
Here’s what I did. I created a process that kicks in as soon as I leave the house. As I step out onto the front porch, I hear the sound of violins beginning the “Ride of the Valkyries” (which is a powerful and uptempo piece that opens the third act of Wagner’s third Ring opera and has been used in many movie sound tracks, including Apocalypse Now).
Then, as I get out to the garage, into my car, and start driving down this small suburban street, imaginary loudspeakers pop out on either side of the car—they’re about eight feet tall and capable of the volume you’d experience at a rock concert.
And then the song begins to crescendo—and all the way down the street, the symphony horns are blaring. I can actually feel the car vibrate as the sound waves hit it. It’s an amazing experience. I usually let that stay with me for the first two miles of my trip, until I get out of the car to go into a coffee shop, where I get my second cup and am ready for the rest of the ride to work.
The amazing thing is, on the mornings that I do this, as I walk into the coffee shop, heads turn. It’s like I’m radiating energy. Understanding how I’m motivated enabled me to create this internal process that has had a profound effect on my energy, enthusiasm, and optimism. This is another use of anchors that you can easily set up for yourself. Just choose a favorite piece of music and anchor it to a place you touch every morning. Practice it consciously for a week or so, and you’ll find yourself doing it automatically from then on. Nice, isn’t it?
Optimism and Confidence in Concert
Helen Keller said, “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” So let’s focus on confidence for a moment.
From my experience coaching other people, I’ve learned that feeling more confident seems to be a universal desire. Before we experiment with ways to do that, I want to be clear about this: confidence is not based on truth. Confidence is based on choice—and I’m happy to be a beneficiary of this discovery.
One of the things that used to run in my mind was “Well, it’s not reasonable to be confident. You’re a screw-up. You dropped the ball. You did this and that.” Of course, the part of my mind that was devoted to keeping me hesitant would just select and bring up the experiences where I’d been less than stellar . . . I’d really screwed up somehow . . . dropped the ball . . . not lived
up to myself . . . not lived up to my rules . . . or not lived up to somebody else’s rules. It seemed unreasonable to feel confidence in the face of these examples.
When you want to feel confident, it’s better to be unreasonable. This is about choice, not judgment. After all, you can’t judge yourself fairly anyway—you’ll either be too favorable or too unfavorable. In this case, it’s better to err on the side of too favorable.
A long time ago, I was just coming off a crushing failure and about to build a success. One day, the lady I was dating came to me and she was very troubled; she said, “You know, I just had lunch with your ex-wife. She said you say that these failures are always just glitches, that you always just explain these away.” My girlfriend was concerned that this was a problem.
In response, I said, “No, it’s absolutely right. All entrepreneurs need to be neurotic enough to ignore their failures. They can take the information from it, but it’s only feedback. You take the information so you’ll do better next time, but you can’t internalize it.”
So what I did instead was to consciously and conscientiously rehearse my triumphs. I recommend that you keep score so you can remember your victories and the many ways you’ve improved. Literally write them down—little victories and big ones.
I have a list of about thirty of the things that I’ve done that make me feel good about myself. They’re not earthshaking by any means. For example, I bought my kid brother a bicycle with money that I earned on my paper route. In fact, I bought both of us bikes—and that made me feel pretty good. Another time when I was little, I remembered another guy’s Bible verses at church. I did mine and then I did his, too, because he had stage fright and couldn’t remember them at all. Your list can be anything that makes you feel good about yourself, but write down those examples. A friend of mine calls these her “greatest hits.”