by Tom Hoobyar
Dreads into Dreams Transformation Worksheet
Day 4: Turning Your Dreams
and Desires into Achievable Goals
Review your original list of Don’t Have & Want and yesterday’s new list of Don’t Have & Want. Compare these two lists and merge them according to your current priorities. You may want to arrange them in their new order. Of course, as new items come into your awareness, feel free to add these to your list.
Now pick one of your top-priority goals, and take it all the way through the Well-Formed Outcome model using the worksheet on the next two pages or downloading one of the online versions from http://eg.nlpco.com/2-1 or use the QR code with your phone.
Well-Formed Outcome Worksheet
1. What specifically do you want? Describe your desired outcome or state in a positive, sensory-based way that’s an appropriate chunk size and also addresses WHAT ELSE having or achieving your outcome will do for you (Meta-Outcomes).
2. How will you know when you’ve achieved what you want? Determine if the “evidence” you’re focused on is appropriate and timely (soon and regular enough).
3. Under what circumstances, where, when, and with whom, do you want to have this result? Reflect on the context(s) in which you want to have this outcome and evaluate the ecology so you can consider how achieving this result may affect other areas, aspects, or people in your life.
4. What stops you from having your desired outcome already? Identify and explore any feelings, thoughts, or circumstances that seem to inhibit movement toward your outcome.
5. What resources will you need to help you create what you want? Determine what resources you ALREADY have that will help you (knowledge, money, connections, etc.). Consider additional resources you’ll need to move forward.
6. How are you going to get there? Identify manageable steps to help achieve your result, consider multiple options to get where you want to go, and determine the FIRST step you’ll take.
Day 5: Making Your Goals Irresistible
Most of us are drawn to what we find attractive. It fills our attention and directs our decisions and behavior. Now that you have turned your dreams and desires into achievable goals, you can make them so compelling that you will naturally be drawn toward them. Remember to only use the following steps with goals you’ve fully taken through the Well-Formed Outcome questions, because it’s possible to make unwise or impossible goals compelling. (Unrequited love and quixotic dreams are two examples.) There are better uses of your energy and this technology.
Take one high-priority goal from your list and begin by imagining the goal in your mind’s eye and seeing yourself having already achieved it. If the goal isn’t already a movie, have it take the form of a movie now. Increase the size and brightness of these images, adding vivid colors and dimension. Notice the way this intensifies how attracted you feel to the goal. Continue to increase the movie’s size, brightness, and color as long as the feelings of attraction are intensifying until they plateau; then hold them there. Add rich, exciting, upbeat music to your movie of the goal. Have the music become surround sound so it’s coming from all directions. Hear strong, supportive, encouraging voices cheering you on to your future. Fully enjoy this mental movie and the associated feelings.
Having done one example thoroughly and experienced the effectiveness, you’ll easily be able to take any of your other goals through this same process at any time you desire.
Day 6: Creating Inevitable Success
Creating inevitable success means setting your brain on the path to achieving your goal in such a way that it’s working on your goal all day long—whether you are conscious of it or not. When you’ve vividly imagined that you have already achieved your goal and foreseen a possible path to get there, traveling the actual path becomes much easier.
This is the process of “chunking” down a journey into the actual steps you need to take to get there. To accomplish this, you’ll need to imagine going into the future to become the “you” who has already achieved your goal.
When you momentarily become the future “you” who has already achieved your goal, you can visit what is now your past and review the actions and decisions that inevitably led to this achievement. As you review the steps you took, you’ll notice different resources that helped you along the way.
Then, keeping this path in mind, return to the present to plan for your future and take the necessary actions in the present.
Having thoroughly completed this process and experienced how effective it is, you’ll easily be able to identify the steps and resources you need to achieve an important goal.
Day 7: Appreciating the Rest of Your Life
Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People identifies the importance of personal renewal—physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual renewal. Yet, with the ever-increasing reach of technology, the demands of life seem to expand well beyond the available hours in a day. As we juggle and struggle to keep up, many of us move rest and renewal to the bottom of the list. This decision can come at a price—to our well-being and to our relationships.
Today’s activity is as important as each of the rest of the days in this guide. It builds a foundation for heightened awareness, appreciation, and positive action. Looking back to Day 1, you’ll see a list titled Have & Want. These are things that you want in your life that you already have. In the rush to keep up, grow, and achieve, it’s often easy to forget the good things in your life and how far you’ve come.
Take time today to review this list in detail. Really notice what you like about your life. Linger over any items that draw you in. Savor them. If you find that doing this prompts you to call someone, send a note, go sit outside, take a moment in meditation or prayer, or do something so that these items appear more often in your future—great! As you begin to enumerate and appreciate what you Have & Want, you may notice that additional things you have and appreciate or enjoy come up. Feel free to include these on your list.
When you have completely reviewed your Have & Want list, in your mind’s eye look over the previous week or month and notice what you have done with this book and program to improve the quality of your life and yourself. Notice the activities you’ve completed, what you’ve learned, and what you’ve achieved. Consider what you could do for yourself right now to appreciate or celebrate the investment and progress you’ve made.
Week 2: Persuasive Communication
Day 8: Finding and Transmitting Your Mission
To communicate your life mission is to speak what’s in your heart. Men and women who live out their life missions are naturally charismatic. They have a compelling clarity, persuasiveness, and commitment that stems from their vision. All communication techniques pale in the face of simple words said by someone who truly believes them.
Before doing today’s exercise, it’s helpful to have taken at least two of your priority goals completely through the Well-Formed Outcome model. You need to have made these goals into compelling futures by enriching them visually, auditorily, and kinesthetically. If you haven’t done this yet, make that today’s exercise.
Having done that, get each of these important goals in mind simultaneously and ask yourself the following questions.
• What do these goals have in common?
• What themes or elements appear in all or most of them?
• How do these goals express your life’s passion?
• How do they express your deepest values and principles?
Write down, draw, or even act out your answers.
Remember, you’re in search of your life mission. This is not something you decide; it is something that emerges from within you. Take time to explore what deeply motivates what is most important to you. This could easily take more than the time you’ve allotted to complete today’s activity. Begin now and find out what “bubbles up” for you—today, as well as in the days and weeks to come. Visions emerge from dreams, daydreams, and spontaneous thoughts. Be cur
ious about how you’ll discover yours.
Once you have a sense of your mission, share it with someone. Expressing it will help refine your mission and serve as an invitation to others. Who might want to participate in your mission or at least cheer you on, if he or she only knew about it?
Day 9: Listening with Rapport
As you know, listening is key to creating rapport and to understanding. The kind of listening that notices how another sees, hears, feels, and thinks demonstrates intention and invites you into someone else’s world.
When someone is face-to-face with you, there’s an incredible amount of information being communicated: the words, gestures, emotions, and unconscious cues. Although in-person communication is more complete, in today’s environment much of our communication is done by phone, email, or texting.
Today, practice your listening and rapport-building skills when you’re on the phone. While listening to the other person talk, play with speaking at the same speed or tempo as they are. Experiment with using their intonation patterns. If their voice is flat, flatten your voice. If they are expressive, try speaking more expressively.
Here’s something you can do to build rapport on the phone or by email. Keep the following list of “process” words handy and begin to “feed back” to your callers the same kind of words they use. For more details on communicating in someone’s preferred representational channel, refer to Chapter 7.
Generic or Unspecified Words:
Know, Understand, Believe, Notice, Discover, Consider, Communicate
Visual:
See, Look, Watch, Peak, Imagine, Appear, Reveal, Perception
Auditory:
Hear, Listen, Tell, Ask, Sounds, In Tune, Tonality, Whisper
Kinesthetic:
Feel, Touch, Grasp, Catch On, Contact, Push, Reach, Impression
Words that imply . . .
Visualization:
Color, Sparkle, Contrast, Flash, Snapshot
Sound:
Dissonance, Crackle, Silence, Orchestrate, Noise
Feelings & Sensations:
Weigh In, Curious, Warm, Soft, Impact
Day 10: The Magic of Physical Alignment
As you know from Chapter 5, 93 percent of the emotional content of face-to-face communication is nonverbal—so words are only 7 percent of a communication. With every person you meet face-to-face, practice matching his or her body language and gestures. If they move slowly and deliberately, do the same. If they move quickly or gesture a lot, then move more at their rate and add some gestures that are similar to theirs.
For a completely different experience, first mismatch the other person’s nonverbal behavior (moving fast when they move slowly, gesturing a lot when they don’t gesture at all) and then, after rapport has begun to drop off, reestablish it again by matching their rhythms and gestures.
Day 11: The Secret to Wonderful Feelings
Today, make it your secret mission to encourage whomever you meet to feel better. You might compliment them, simply smile, or gently (and appropriately) touch their arm or shoulder. Experiment with different approaches in different situations. Write down your results at the end of the day.
You can also encourage yourself. Here’s how:
• What emotion, if you could experience it at least several times every day, would make your life smoother and more wonderful?
• What are three things you could do to encourage this emotion in yourself?
• How will you begin to integrate these three things so you can enjoy your chosen emotion more often?
Day 12: Understanding the Values of the Heart
As you know from Day 9’s activity, listening is much more than the physical act of hearing. Today, focus your NLP listening skills on noticing, understanding, and exploring the heartfelt values of others.
In your interactions, listen for their goals and values. Repeat aloud what you hear about their goals and values to give them an opportunity to confirm or clarify your understanding. Ask them what’s important about achieving their goals and values. When you elicit their meta-outcome(s), you’re asking for their higher and deeper values, their heartfelt values. Really listen to what they tell you. As you do this, you’ll notice there are many different heartfelt values, and all of them are uniquely important to the individuals who hold them.
Because deeply held values drive people’s goals and choices, you may even want to start a file of heartfelt values for the folks you frequently interact with. As you increase your acuity of noticing and understanding values, you’re likely to discover that these are important criteria that must be met before a person will completely commit themselves to something. One of the most empowering things you can do is assist the people around you in finding ways to express their heartfelt values. Where people express their hearts and passion, they also release their talents.
Day 13: Finding Motivation and Giving Direction
An effective parent, teacher, manager, or other person in authority gives those he or she is responsible for clear and positive goals with measurable evidence of achievement. This way everyone in a partnership, team, or family not only knows what the goals are, they also know how to recognize when these have been achieved.
Successful leaders also communicate how the goals and values of the enterprise are in alignment with the goals and heartfelt values of all the individuals who are involved.
Review the previous day’s list of goals, values, and heartfelt values. Pick one or two of the individuals from whom you’ve gathered information about their heartfelt goals and values.
Ask them what the fulfillment of their goals and heartfelt values will do for them—then listen for the motivation direction that’s expressed in their answers. What do you notice? Do they want to attain or achieve something—moving ever closer toward it—or do they want relief and release in getting away from it? Notice whether they are more interested in solving problems (away-from motivation) or pursuing goals (toward motivation).
Build on this awareness whenever you’re giving instructions or offering guidance; this will allow you to communicate with them in ways they will much more readily understand and appreciate. For more details, review Chapter 7.
Day 14: Appreciating the Love in the World for You
On this day of rest, take a few moments to reflect on the people in your life who love and care for you. You’ve obviously touched their lives in some way.
In your mind’s eye, visit each one and imagine what it would be like to be this person and then notice what he or she appreciates about you most.
Most likely, you’ll notice things you’ve done together and ways you’ve been “there” for this loved one, so far. You might have in mind some important situations or events you shared.
Also take time to notice the ways your presence—in silence, in jest, in seriousness, and in just being—have also touched this person. When you have given yourself an opportunity to appreciate this first loved one’s perspective, do this again with another key person in your life. If time permits, do this appreciation process with several loved ones.
When you have done this imagining with at least two loved ones, notice any patterns of appreciation. Are they different from what you expected before this activity? Take a few additional moments and let yourself absorb as much as you can of the acceptance, acknowledgment, appreciation, and affection you’ve just discovered. If this prompts you to call someone, send a note, take a moment in meditation or prayer, or do something so this experience appears more often in your future—great! Take the actions you’re inspired to take and see what happens.
Week 3: The Peak Performance Program
Day 15: Stepping out of Limitations and into Resources
When many people think of achieving peak performance, they often turn their attention to the obstacles they think are blocking their way. Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” It’s true, right? Achieving peak performance has much more to do
with how we think about our experience than with our actual experience.
To demonstrate this for yourself, begin by noticing how you mentally “code” the positive and negative memories in your life. Are you associated (into the memories as if they are happening to you now) or are you disassociated (watching yourself on a TV or a movie screen) in your memories? Take enough time to sample several memories. You may even want to list them.
Very often, people find they have inadvertently coded many of their negative memories in the associated form and therefore reexperience them, and the negative feelings, strongly at inappropriate times. For example, they may vividly relive a social embarrassment as they are about to speak to a group, or they remember earlier rejections as they are about to explore a new relationship.
Now let’s look at the other side. Check to discover if you are associated into your positive and resourceful memories. Too often, people have accidentally coded these in the disassociated form and thereby made their own resources inaccessible to themselves. Both of these memory codes can be changed for the better.
Begin by thinking of a single negative memory that is specific and associated. As you begin to reexperience it, vividly imagine yourself stepping out of it. Now see that memory at some distance away from you, with a big black frame around it and thick glass separating what is in the heavy picture frame from what is outside it. Examine the heavily framed picture to confirm that a younger you from that time is truly in that image and that you are outside it. Notice how different the feelings are now?