by Tom Hoobyar
As I mentioned, I used to motivate myself by just putting my head down and slogging through it. I figured, “If I bang my head against this wall, either the wall’s going to cave in or I’ll die, and if I die I don’t have the problem anymore, so either way . . .” At the time, it seemed to be a good way to solve the problem. But, as I look back on it now, I’m painfully aware that I was operating from a limited set of choices.
Now it seems easier to motivate myself by saying, “As I begin on this, the wall begins to dissolve, because as soon as I start, I’m immediately learning more about my energy, my abilities, the task—I’m immediately making it easier because I’m taking the first step.”
Basically, when my motivation kicks in, my optimism says, “I’m going to get started and it’s going to be easier than I thought, and I’m going to do better than I thought. And guess what? Next time, I’ll do better than this and the fiftieth time out, I’ll do even better than I’ll do this next time.” So I have a positive expectation.
Because of the way I experience time, I have an expectation that in the present moment, I’m in the middle of my personal timeline. So I’m going to do the best I can today and that combined with the experience of taking action—noticing what I might have done better or how it could have been more enjoyable—will make me even better at it the next time.
After you review how a recent or long-ago experience happened, just look at the sub-modalities of that situation. Once you re-create and fine-tune those sub-modalities, it will put you in a more constructive frame of mind. All the pieces go together.
Tip #2: Update and Relive Greatest Hits
As you enhance your NLP skills and self-awareness, you’ll experience many more successes. Be sure to add these to your list of greatest hits. To enhance your in-the-moment work, athletic, or interpersonal performance, before you get started, access earlier times of success, earlier feelings of success, and, as you feel them, anchor that to your performance spot on that joint of your finger (which you first worked with in Chapter 1). So now you’ve got energy, you’ve got self-satisfaction, you’ve got pride, and you continually anchor that.
Tip #3: Strengthen Your Positive Anchor
The kinesthetic anchor you created in Chapter 1 is sometimes referred to as a sliding anchor. Simply sliding your thumb up along that spot on your middle finger—just like turning up the volume on your TV—will increase the positive feelings. Let’s try that now and see how much more energized you’ll feel.
Discovery Activity:
Strengthening Your Anchor
Right now, go back to a time when you felt full of energy. Perhaps it was when you just landed an appointment with an important prospect you’d been pursuing. Maybe it was when you just came off a workout and you had that jazzed, tired, pumped feeling. Or maybe you just came back from a concert and you felt all revved up from music. Whatever it is that really gets you going and feeling “up”—set up into that experience and feeling—breathe into it—maybe even turn it up a little so you have more of that feeling. And when you have that, then touch that spot and anchor this energy to the same place where you’ve anchored your self-approval and confidence.
Here’s an interesting thing: When you touch that spot, you can slide your thumb tip a little bit, and every time you slide it, the energy doubles. That feeling can actually double. You can imagine the way to do that is to touch that spot with that feeling, and then say, “Wow, what it would be like if the feeling were even twice as strong as I slide my thumb along my finger?” and it becomes twice as strong. Wow!
Then go back and say, “What would it be like if it were stronger yet?” and you bring it up to a really pleasurable level. Don’t take it past your threshold, and I doubt that you will. Just bring it up to your pleasurable level.
When I’m writing or when I’m talking, I often find myself absently tapping that spot on the second knuckle of my middle finger. Because I use this anchor so often, it’s like my system knows what I need—and I don’t have to consciously remember. After a lot of practice, this will most likely happen automatically for you, too.
Tip #4: Celebrate Small “Wins”
Sometimes as I work with clients, I find that they get overwhelmed with a lot of these different ideas. It may feel like it’s difficult (or even impossible) to learn these NLP concepts and skills—or any new things. But here’s what’s true: learning easily is something the human brain is designed to do.
Despite this fact, we sometimes say to ourselves, “Oh, I could never learn languages” . . . “I’m no good at numbers” . . . “I can’t dance.” I went for years thinking that I was some sort of dummy because I had left school when I failed at algebra. I just couldn’t hack algebra. Well, I couldn’t hack algebra because I was in a hormone toxicity state and other things were going on in my life, but I blamed it all on algebra.
Then, in my thirties, I went back to junior college and took all the algebra classes—as well as Boolean algebra and trigonometry—just to kill that old belief. Why did I think I could do that? Because I did believe that I could learn. Unless you have some kind of actual disability, you can learn anything you want.
Remember, everything that you do well today was impossible, or at least poorly done, the first time you tried it. Whenever I watch my one-year-old grandson while he’s eating, I notice how he alternates between getting the spoon into his mouth . . . onto his cheek . . . into his nose . . . or flipping stuff on the floor. I notice how he’s learning.
It reminds me that every time we try something new, we’re all a little like my grandson. In the course of our lives, we’ve mastered many new things—so we should be comfortable with that process, right? Absolutely! And yet, our expectations are often out of sync with this “knowing.”
So I invite you to relax and ease up on yourself in terms of your expectations about how fast you can do something or how good you can be at something. And while you’re doing that, raise your expectations of how easy and fun it’s going to be to get there—because the process can be known. By making this mind-set adjustment and using sub-modality distinctions, you’ll find your actual abilities changing even more quickly. And celebrating small “wins” will contribute to the momentum you’re creating.
There’s no limit to how you use your imagination. Because each of us is so uniquely individual, it’s up to each of us to discover on our own what works best. Finding ways to optimize experience helps us make life sweeter. So play with the different ideas you’ve explored in this chapter to understand what draws you forward and makes you feel even more energized, confident, and enthusiastic.
Next, we’re going to move beyond just “self-esteem” and learn how you can remodel your whole self-concept.
Key Ideas
• The expectations we have shape our experience. People can limit or expand what’s possible for them by changing their expectations.
• Mental rehearsal, like visualization, can enable someone to increase their actual performance.
• Our energy levels are linked to our physiology. Someone can improve how their brain, body, and mind work together by changing their body position, breathing deeply, drinking enough water to be well hydrated, and breaking large tasks into smaller ones of where they focus for twenty minutes and then take a break. (For more details on the Pomodoro Technique, visit http://www.pomodorotechnique.com.)
• “Eye Movement Integration” can help reduce resistance to doing specific tasks that seem almost too energy-draining to even contemplate.
• Someone’s get-out-of-bed strategy is a sample of a motivation strategy that works for them. Once someone identifies a motivation strategy that works well, they can apply those insights and sub-modalities to motivating themselves in other situations.
• Energy, enthusiasm, and confidence work together to shape motivation and build momentum.
• Navy SEALs training uses four key practices to strengthen confidence, productivity, and tenacity.
• Critical
voices can be internalized and active for years. These bullies can be silenced with a quick fix like making the voice sound like a cartoon character or doing the “Auditory Swish” process, which is outlined in Chapter 2.
• Someone can increase areas of current competence by rehearsing positive mental states, reliving their greatest hits, tinkering with sub-modalities, strengthening existing positive anchors, and celebrating small “wins.”
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/3-10 or use the QR code with your phone.
Discoveries, Questions, Ideas, and Stuff You Want to Work On
CHAPTER FOUR: UPGRADING YOUR SELF-CONCEPT
How’d things get this way?
It’s never too late to be the person you might have been.
—George Eliot
Whether you’re twenty-five, forty-five, or sixty-five, it’s not too late to make the changes in yourself that you’d like to make. To understand how this is possible, in this chapter we’re going to be looking at ourselves—how we’re built, who we think we are, and how we got to be this way. And we’re going to explore options for changing that. Ready?
Life Vest First: How to Prevent and Reduce Stress
Before we talk about self-change, which is really kind of profound work, you have to get in condition. To prepare for dealing with your unconscious to make this sort of change, it’s important to know how to manage your stress reactions and practice stress reduction.
In Chapter 2, you learned how to explore and fine-tune what you want, as well as how to recognize and resolve internal conflicts so that you’re congruent about whatever you’re doing. These new skills will help you significantly prevent and reduce the friction and stress in your life. And yet, no matter how much you do to improve your choices in life, some things are beyond your choosing. There will still be red lights, rudeness, and bad weather. Some amount of stress is a perfectly natural response.
The problem with stress is that it generates some pretty nasty chemicals in your brain—and those chemicals can do some long-term damage. They also actually degrade your performance—at work, at home, and in virtually all areas of life. They preoccupy parts of your neurology that would be better utilized by thinking creatively. To help you be in control of your response to stressors, it’s important to have an emergency protocol and a daily practice. Let’s explore these one at a time.
911: PANIC MANAGEMENT
There’s something called a panic reaction—the “fight-or-flight” (or freeze) reaction we touched on at the very beginning of the book. As you may recall from the last chapter, the amygdala determines whether or not you feel safe. It’s a very primitive part of the brain that can trigger a cascade of reactions and hormones in your blood stream. It shuts down critical and deliberate thought, so all your energy can be dedicated to move into fight-or-flight. Once all that starts, it’s pretty much a stampede.
Rather than get run over by this rush, you can employ the four practices you learned about in Chapter 3, the ones that Navy SEALs use. Here’s a brief refresher. (1) Be only in the exact moment; don’t think about the next thing; (2) break a task/activity into small, achievable steps and celebrate your progress; (3) at the point of discouragement, do six-two-six-count breathing to oxygenate your brain; (4) create a cheering section (in your own voice) that’s encouraging and supportive.
LETTING THE AIR OUT: PREVENTING STRESS
Stress also accumulates over time. It’s a little bit like blowing up a balloon. If there’s too much air in it, it will explode. So it’s important to monitor your stress level; then, regularly and proactively, let a little air out of the balloon. A powerful way to raise your level of stress endurance is a daily practice of meditation. There’s an abundance of research going back to the 1970s that enumerates the physiological, neurological, emotional, and psychological benefits of meditation.
Much of this research was done by Herbert Benson at Harvard University, who wrote The Relaxation Response. What he found was that a daily practice of meditation—even fifteen minutes just once a day—creates long-term benefits in people’s health, sense of reality, and even manual dexterity. Blood pressure lowers, the alpha relaxation rhythm in the brain deepens, and both halves of the brain synchronize. There are numerous significant long-term health benefits. Best of all, these begin within two weeks of regularly meditating.
In fact, when I began meditating, I noticed a change within a week. I felt more relaxed and moved a little more easily in the world. By the second week, my friends noticed and were commenting about the changes they saw.
Meditation is also a great way to just slow down your brain so you can observe your thoughts—where they come from, how they form, what comes up for you as you notice them. This is a very valuable way to make using NLP easier, too.
If you don’t already have a form of meditation that works for you, here’s an easy sort of plain-vanilla process to play that only requires that you find twenty minutes away from the world. Start by picking a quiet place that feels soothing to you, where you can relax without interruption. Then set a timer for twenty minutes so your conscious mind doesn’t get distracted wondering what time it is. You can just let go and rest easy knowing that the bell will go off when the time you’ve allotted is up.
Here’s how I do it. I just sit, take a few deep breaths, and relax my body—beginning with my feet, up through my calves, my thighs, my hips, my lower belly, my chest. I make sure my breathing is easy and regular. I feel my arms relax on the arms of the chair or in my lap, and finally I relax the muscles in my neck and my face. I’m just paying attention to my body and letting my unconscious know that I intend to relax myself. This part of the process takes about two minutes.
As I do that, I notice my breathing is getting deeper and more regular, and I allow myself to just let my breathing go and I try not to think of anything specific. My experience is that random thoughts tend to pop up. Often, I notice that my brain wants to reengage with whatever I tore myself away from. Once I’m relaxed, I find myself remembering things I forgot to do or I wanted to do. The trick here, in terms of not getting hooked into this inner dialogue, is just to allow those thoughts to go on their own.
If I notice that I’m kind of getting caught up in the inner chatter—“Did I turn the gas off? Why didn’t I pick that up at the store yesterday? Now it’s three more miles . . .”—I start repeating the word one to myself very softly. The word one suggests unity. It’s actually the word they used in the relaxation response research at Harvard. This single-syllable sound works well for me—it’s easy to make and doesn’t have a lot of meaning. It actually sounds quite a lot like om, which is the Sanskrit word a lot of meditators use.
The only things you need to pay attention to are that your body remains relaxed, your breathing remains steady and deep, and the sound in your head that you’re doing deliberately is just the sound of the word one—“one, one, one, one,” just like that.
Take a moment and try it right now. Breathe deeply and let any tension in your body melt away. Say “one, one, one” in your mind and just let your conscious thoughts drift away. If you’re not already doing it, give it a try now just for a few minutes.
I predict that if you try it for even five minutes today, tomorrow, and the next day, you will have a different week next week. You might even choose to continue meditating—and make it a daily practice.
I find that when I take time to relax this way, I feel refreshed when I return to my other activities—and I’m more resourceful. A lot of the daily events that had normally bothered or kind of paralyzed me—didn’t. I feel like “This is small potatoes,” or “You know, I can see several different ways this could be handled.”
In the beginning, for me, meditation had all the earmarks of being a discipline—rather than relaxation. I sometimes found myself thinking, “This is a reward? This is like a time-out. This is like a punish
ment.” But I persevered and over time, it’s amazing how meditation has become something I look forward to. Because some people really struggle with sitting still, they enjoy the benefits meditation offers by doing something like qigong, yoga, running, or dancing instead.
When you meditate or follow a discipline that allows you to relax, it relieves stress, and your immune system likes you better. Studies show that cancer rates drop, heart disease drops, the quality of life improves—and it doesn’t cost anything! Utilizing a preventative daily practice and an emergency protocol to manage stress enables you to create an inner environment that makes it possible to become a happier, better you.
A Look in the Mirror:
Who You Are Today and How You Got to Be This Way
Before exploring additional changes you may want to make, it helps to consider who you are right now and how you got to be this way.
If I asked you who you are, you could come up with lots of different ways to respond. You could tell me what you do for a living, what roles you play in your life—like mate, parent, friend, sibling—what your goals are—almost anything that has to do with who you are right now. Today’s you is a product of all your experiences—of the gifts you were born with, the things you learned at home, at school, at work, in relationships, in your community, and in your travels, right?
It’s like each of us is an onion that has lots of layers. Our outside layer is what other people most often see—what we look like, where we live, and how we behave. As the layers are peeled away, we learn more about our core selves. Beneath the papery onion skin, we’d find our capabilities, beliefs, values, and perhaps even spirituality.
You might look like one of your siblings or one of your parents and you may be similar in many ways. And yet you are uniquely you. How you process information, what you believe, and what you value drive your decisions and actions. In earlier chapters, you discovered how sub-modalities and your motivation strategies affect your experience. And you learned how you can tinker with those two things to improve your experience. So let’s expand your understanding of how you work by briefly exploring beliefs, the Meta Model, predicates, and meta-programs. Okay, I know that’s some scary lingo, but don’t let this run you off. Stay with me a moment. I promise you’ll find it really interesting.