NLP

by Tom Hoobyar

  Take your time and repeat this process with another associated negative memory that you wish to change. If there are quite a few, make a plan to change several of them each day until you’ve shifted them all.

  Day 16: Amplifying What Is Excellent

  One way to achieve excellence is to remove the roadblocks and difficulties on the way to your goals. Another is to amplify the excellence so much that the roadblocks just become little bumps in the road.

  Pick an area of your life where you’re already excelling. Find a real and specific event, a memory of personal excellence you’re pleased to remember—and relive it. As you begin to reexperience it, also begin to amplify it. Make it bigger and brighter and more colorful and compelling.

  As you enjoy this excellence thoroughly, where would you like to experience it in your near future? Vividly imagine that happening now.

  And where would you like to experience this resource in your longer-term future? Take this resource to that future time and notice how real that excellent future moment feels now.

  Continue to place this amplified excellence in your future moments wherever you want or need them.

  When you have “spread it around” to your satisfaction, let it go and recall another memory of personal excellence and repeat the process. By amplifying more and more moments of personal excellence and placing them in your future, you will raise the overall quality of your life—as well as the level of your performance—and you’re making them a much more likely occurrence. For more details on using sub-modalities and anchoring, refer to Chapter 2.

  Day 17: Accelerating Your Learning

  In every endeavor, there are usually new skills to learn. How easily, efficiently, and effectively you learn them can make a tremendous difference, right? Two crucial aspects of learning are how to acquire good “form” from the beginning and how to successfully reprogram poor form created by habitual errors.

  In Chapter 3, we talked about the study in which college students were asked to shoot basketball free-throws after mental rehearsal or actual practice. As you may recall, those that didn’t practice at all showed no improvement, while the students who mentally rehearsed scored within a point of the students who actually got to physically practice. This study provided some of the first hard evidence about the power of visualization. Today athletes in every field—and professionals in other disciplines—practice some kind of visualization to perfect their performance.

  NLP also recognizes how mental rehearsal stimulates and reinforces the same neural pathways and micromuscle movements as the actual activity. The mind and body are learning, remembering, and developing habits from both kinds of rehearsal. Whether your activity is rock climbing, a job interview, or a presentation to a client, you can use this for yourself.

  And whenever your performance is extraordinary, you can increase the likelihood of a repeat performance by taking a moment to mentally rehearse your excellence. Since you just performed it, the patterns are fresh in your mind and body. Mental rehearsal will reaccess these pathways again each time you relive the experience—that day, the next day, and in the weeks to come. Replaying your excellence makes it more and more your consistent performance pattern.

  On the other side, if you’ve developed a habit that no longer serves you, whether it’s an athletic misalignment like a slice, or a useless behavior pattern like performance anxiety, you can eliminate it by “writing over it”!

  You can do this by first reviewing your undesirable experience from a disassociated position. In your mental movie, see yourself with your undesired habit. Keeping the beginning of the movie the same, consider how would you like it to turn out differently. Watch the movie again starting from the beginning, only this time, watch yourself with a more useful response. Try several alternatives and pick one you like best. Now step into this new revised movie as a real and associated experience. Start at its beginning and vividly experience this new movie as if it’s happening to you right now all the way through to its new ending.

  When you have completed this, you have set yourself on a new track with a new natural response. To strengthen this new pattern, play the updated movie whenever you want.

  Day 18: Making the Peak a Regular Part of Your Life

  In NLP, we have a saying, “You don’t have to be bad to get better.” Improvement is always possible. So another way to encourage peak performance is to let your brain know you want to go there. Here’s how you can use the Swish Pattern to take yourself to ever-higher levels of performance.

  To start, recall a specific moment when your performance faltered or you felt yourself on a familiar plateau.

  Bring this particular example vividly to your mind’s eye, and in the center of it, see a dot. In the dot, there’s an image of you having already exceeded your current level of success. You don’t know how you did it. You just know you did. When the image moves closer, perhaps you’ll see your satisfied smile and a gleam in your eyes that will let you know you accomplished this in alignment with your values and well-being.

  Now watch as the performance-plateau experience rushes away from you, getting smaller and darker and farther away—until it loses all significance. At the same time, notice how the dot blossoms toward you, getting bigger and brighter and more real, until you are face-to-face with your exceptional self.

  Clear your internal screen and repeat this process from the beginning at least half a dozen times. Notice if the performance-plateau image naturally fades away and/or the “exceptional self-image” automatically comes in.

  This is just one example of a Swish Pattern. With a little bit of practice, this will become an automatic mental habit. If you’d like to learn more about this pattern, visit www.nlpco.com.

  Day 19: Creating a Breakthrough Mind

  When the British runner Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile and the Russian weight lifters broke five hundred pounds, none of them knew they had done it! In both cases, their coaches had conspired to keep them from knowing they were even attempting to break the current record. In interviews after the record-breaking events, these different coaches were quite clear about their reasons for not telling their athletes. And even though these interviews were given decades apart, their explanations were quite similar.

  These coaches believed their talented athletes could do what had never been done before. They noted that the numerical difference between four minutes and less than four minutes was a hundredth of a second, and the difference between five hundred pounds and more than five hundred pounds was less than an ounce. They were convinced that the limitations were not in their athletes, but in the meaning their athletes had attached to these numbers. This proved true for the runner and the weight lifters, for within months of each athlete’s breakthrough, several others repeated the achievement—which had previously been thought impossible!

  To create any kind of personal performance breakthrough, you need to change your own mental limitations. You may have had a personal experience that led you to conclude that something was not possible—or you may have come to believe it’s not possible because others told you so. You may have thought this for so long that you only vaguely remember how and when this came to be true for you.

  Begin by thinking of something that you decided years ago wasn’t possible for you—it might be getting your dream job, becoming physically fit, finding your soul mate, or quickly and effortlessly mastering something complex—whatever it is to you.

  With this limitation in mind, what experience—if you had had it before you acquired this belief or made this decision—would have transformed it from impossible to highly probable? Take a moment to create this enabling experience in your mind. It may be similar to something that happened later in your life, or it might be something that never happened to you but you could imagine it—or perhaps it happened to someone else.

  Vividly create this enabling experience using the sub-modalities of a previous peak performance, a time when you really excelled, even if t
his example is from a completely different context. (You can also build on the sub-modalities you discovered in Day 16.)

  Once you have created a rich and powerful reference experience, take that back in time with you and imagine it happened just before the situation that created your limiting memory. From this point, move ahead from that time—travel ahead with this new enabling memory and as you pass through the limiting memory, notice how having the enabling memory transforms the negative effects of the original limiting memory (and any other ones) into positive ones—all the way through your past into your present!

  Now check to sense if that old limitation is completely gone. If you want to, repeat this last step to strengthen your new enabling memory. This new memory will not guarantee success, but it does guarantee that the limitations will be in the world, not in your mind.

  Day 20: The Practice of Loving What You Do

  Even as you transform your negatives, increase your positives, orient yourself to your best self, and raise expectations, there’s still the need to practice. In Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell’s research revealed that people who really excelled—like the Beatles and Bill Gates—invested more than ten thousand hours in mastering their craft! He also pointed out that practice was not just something they did to accomplish a particular goal, but was something they were drawn to. For them, practicing is part of who they are.

  Those who excel in any endeavor actually love to practice. Basketball great Magic Johnson has his own full-size basketball court. In addition to having his own court, Larry Bird would find a court wherever he went, spending hours a day there, all through the off-season. Rock-and-roll greats Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen play their guitars as much when they’re off the road as when they are on. Chess masters the world over study and replay famous games. The great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright used to rebuild his own studio almost annually just to try out new ideas. These greats, and others like them, are attracted to practice. They want to find out what they have missed. They want to find out what they might do this time that they have never done before.

  You can increase the attractiveness of practice in the important areas of your life with a simple NLP technique. Once you have decided to do something worthwhile, you might as well enjoy doing it, right? Most people do things for the results, yet everyone has a few things they do simply because they enjoy doing them. Find an example of a time when you wanted the results but getting them was not a lot of fun. Many people feel this way about doing their taxes. Identify something that you dislike doing. Then step into a specific experience of doing that to discover the sub-modalities associated with it.

  Now think of an activity that you do simply because you enjoy it and the end result doesn’t really matter. For many people, computer games, sports, or even puzzles have this quality. Step into the activity that you enjoy and discover the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sub-modality distinctions of that experience.

  Compare the two memories until you have found the sub-modality distinctions that make the difference between the two experiences. Use the worksheet on the next page to capture these differences. Be sure to identify a number of differences.

  Next, associate into the wanting results experience—holding the content of its images constant—and transform its sub-modalities into the ones you found in the experience of enjoying the doing. Notice the effect this has on your experience. Better, right?

  Now associate into the practice of a skill you would very much like to improve and transform its sub-modalities into the ones associated with enjoying the doing. The next time you practice that skill, notice how much more compelling and enjoyable it is to do so.

  Worksheet to Increase Enjoyment

  of Practicing & Doing Tasks or

  Skills You Want to Improve

  Day 21: It’s a Wonderful Life—If You Notice

  On this day of rest, it’s time to appreciate you. You might begin by acknowledging that you’ve completed all the activities in this guide so far. And we invite you to “zoom out” and notice how others appreciate you.

  Each of us has made a difference, in fact, many differences, in the lives of others. Frank Capra’s classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life reminds us all that our lives are deeply interconnected. Even though this movie is shown dozens of times a year, few of us take the time to notice the rich weave of connections that form the tapestry of our lives.

  So take a few moments now, in your mind’s eye, to go into your past and find small, as well as significant, ways you have affected the world around you in positive ways. Perhaps you helped your siblings with their homework, supported a friend at a crucial juncture, volunteered at a local shelter, or provided information that helped reveal unintended consequences to someone’s important project. Identify the times you have touched others’ lives with your words or your actions.

  Use the worksheet on the next page to make a list of your positive words and/or actions (column 1) and their effects (column 2), even if these effects weren’t obvious until years later. Because what we value isn’t always what other people value, expand your yardstick to include how important you have been to others (as well as what’s important to you).

  With these experiences as proof of the importance of even your everyday actions, take a few moments to write down specific actions you would like to take in the future, actions that will add to the lives of others and the world. As you capture these in column 3, rehearse where you will take these actions and enjoy your participation in the world.

  It’s a Wonderful Life Worksheet

  What you do makes a difference—in your world and in the lives of others. Consider what you’ve learned from this book, and how you will be even more conscious of and active in making good things happen in the weeks, months, and years to come. Keep wishing, wanting, and dreaming. You can begin a new cycle tomorrow.

  Today, do something for yourself that really delights you. Watch the sunset, smell the flowers, dance to the music, and touch another heart. Keep learning and growing to create the person you want to be and the rewarding relationships you want.

  Now that you’ve completed the 21-Day Guide, you may be ready for more information on NLP. If so, follow this link to a list of my favorite books and courses, http://eg.nlpco.com/21-4, or use the QR code with your phone.

  Congratulations on making this commitment

  to yourself and your well-being.

  The work you do to improve yourself also affects your entire world, and for that, you have our sincere thanks.

  Best wishes for good fortune as you continue your journey.

  —Tom, Tom, and Susan

  A Lasting Legacy

  Vikki Hoobyar

  My darling husband, Tom Hoobyar, was an interpersonal genius. My first interaction with Tom was in an elevator that went from the garage to the entrance of a very popular bookstore in Menlo Park, California. A teenager was standing next to him, so I smiled my “I know what it’s like to have teenagers” smile. When the door of the elevator opened, the kid skateboarded away and I was dismayed to discover that I had smiled at a man who was alone. Because I don’t usually do that, I put my head down and marched into the store, not daring to look back.

  A moment later, Tom offered to help me find a book after the salesperson “with too few brains and too many piercings” (as Tom described it) had blown me off. This was a reader’s bookstore. He seemed so nice and knowledgeable about the bookstore that I took him up on his offer to help me.

  We talked about what I was searching for. The book wasn’t there, but it no longer mattered because we had begun an interesting conversation about NLP. There in the bookshop, Tom treated me to my first taste of NLP by having me visualize my favorite food and then my least favorite food. I was fascinated by this brief experience and what my brain was doing, so we went next door to grab coffee and continue the conversation. It was delightful.

  At that point in my life, I was willing to be “friends” with men, but I was not
willing to date a man until I really got to know him. Tom kept finding reasons to get together with me to continue our discussion about NLP. I knew he liked me a lot, but I really just wanted to be friends. He picked me up at work and took me to lovely restaurants. Afterward, I would always shake his hand.

  On one particular day, although we had only planned an outing to an art fair for a couple of hours, we ended up spending the entire day together. That afternoon I said, “Aren’t we spending too much time together on our first date?” What Tom heard was that I had called it a “date” and I had said it was the first one. About three months after meeting him, I fell completely, unreservedly in love with him. We married fourteen months later. Years later, I told him that had I been looking for a man to date; he would have been disqualified immediately as “too old, too tall, and too bald.”

  Tom had a lot of impact on others—people in business, NLP clients, and my family. When I met him, I was entering my first year of graduate school to get a master’s degree in marriage and family counseling. As we got to know one another, he discussed NLP training with me and I was more than happy to learn the skill set. So while I attended college, I also attended several NLP trainings. When it came time to actually start counseling clients, I had a lot more confidence than my classmates because my NLP training had taught me that there was no objection a client could bring up that I couldn’t handle. (How’s that for “wow”?)

  During our courtship, my youngest son quickly came to Tom’s attention. He was fifteen, a high school dropout who was drinking a lot and taking drugs. His father had died when my son was eight years old, and he had had a very negative experience with his first stepfather. Tom started taking him out for dinner once a month. He told him that they were going to be in each other’s lives whether they liked it or not. He explained to him that he was going to be the older guy in my son’s life; that in fact, the day was coming when he would be calling Tom to bail him out of jail. (And that actually happened.)