NLP is a model of how humans think, feel, behave and communicate. When NLP was developed in the 1970’s by Bandler and Grinder it was a radical departure from the field of psychology, which at the time was focused more on human dysfunction than peak performance.

Today, with the acceptance of positive psychology, NLP appears less radical can be viewed as an excellent framework for learning to communicate effectively, to model people and systems and to design strategies for peak performance. Learning NLP can improve the performance of athletes, sales people, business people, coaches, trainers, teachers, therapists and parents.

NLP for Consulting, Training and Coaching

I use NLP and NeuroSemantics in my consulting, training and coaching and I enjoy sharing the technology through public programs that I hold in Singapore and other parts of SE Asia. You can get a list of the upcoming programs by clicking here. I highly recommend NLP Communication and  Coaching Essentials which is the first 3-day of a NLP Practitioner program and covers how to communicate and coach effectively plus we are conducting  a full NLP Master Practitioner training in October.

NLP  Association of Singapore Video

If you like watching videos on YouTube then you can watch part of my presentation to the Singapore NLP Association.

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This is commonly called being in two minds. You might be in two minds about your career, your work/home balance, a business decision or a romantic commitment. Being in two minds is certainly not a productive or even comfortable state to be in, nor is it demonstrating self leadership.

We do not in fact have two minds, but one mind that has two functions; conscious attention and unconscious processing. When we are torn between two choices, it often means that we cannot consciously process a conflict that exists in the unconscious functions of our mind.

Modern living/working overloads our conscious attention and so we are mostly unconscious of our values, beliefs, identity, paradigms and intentions. It is the nature of these ‘frames of mind’ to operate automatically and so out of conscious awareness. This does not mean that they are inaccessible; on the contrary, self-leadership is about gaining awareness of our frames of mind and choosing frames that empower us.

During our Self Leadership workshops we explain and practice a number of methods for gaining focus and resolving the inner conflict of being in two minds. For blog readers I invite you to try these two exercises.

1) To resolve the conflict using your conscious mind; identify the two choices – For example, some time ago my wife, Zurina, was in conflict about having a family and continuing with her career. Take one choice and ask yourself the question, “What’s important about this?” The first answer that comes to mind is the right answer for you, write this on the bottom of a piece of paper and ask the question again, “What’s important about this?” Write the answer to this above the first answer and ask the question again. If you keep asking the question as instructed you will get a ladder of intentions/values that drive you to consider this choice.

Now repeat the process with the other choice using a separate piece of paper. When you have completed the process, compare both pieces of paper and notice the hierarchy of intentions and the similarity of the intentions between both choices. Take the highest common intention and ask yourself, “What action will allow me to be true to my highest intention?” The answer might not be either of the first two choices, but a completely new choice or a fusion of the first two.

2) To resolve the conflict using your unconscious mind; hold out your hands in front of you, palms up. Because your unconscious mind thinks in images, allow it to create an icon or image of the first choice to appear on one palm. Now ask it to create an image of the second choice on the other palm. Using your power of imagination float up and look down on the two images, and cause them to spin from palm to palm. As the two images spin faster and faster they will merge and a new image will emerge. If the new image was to tell a story what would that be? Now you have your answer.

When Zurina did this process, on the one hand she saw a baby and on the other herself working at a desk. When the icons spun, the image that emerged was of many people. The story she told was that she could achieve her work objectives by project managing many people. The results of this process are, our children Tasha and Nathan and the multiple associates that now work with us.

Still stuck? Then make sure you come to one of our workshops or contact us if you would like to work with a Self Leadership International coach.

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Have you ever wondered why some people get what they want and others don’t?

Can I make a suggestion?

Remember a time when you really wanted something; something you couldn’t have right away but something you would have to wait for, you pictured it in your head, you imagined what it would feel like to possess it and you could feel the pull.

Now I don’t know what you imagined but if you did remember something, as I suggested you will have got in touch with a feeling; notice that feeling.

Creating imagination and feeling is the the secret power of influence.

It works like this; your brain was triggered to locate a memory or an imagination and finds the associated feeling that it has stored with this. Your brain is a huge neural network of associations and these associations are linked to your feelings and your feelings motivate you to act.

Knowing how the mind works is the secret to influence and creating the right associations in the minds of others will help you to get whatever it is you want. Do you want to sell more?  Motivate your employees? Get your children to come home on time? Find a special partner?

I have been interested in influence for many years and studied NLP, Neuro-Semantics, Cognitive Behaviourism and Hypnosis to understand how to communicate more effectively and to achieve my goals. When I first met my wife, I knew I had only one chance to make a first impression. It was a crowded environment and I needed to create a positive association and give her a reason to see me again. Using all my best influence skills I succeeded, and we now have two gorgeous children, Tasha and Nathan. Now my need for influence skills has increased! – if you have kids you will agree.

Having learned the secrets of influence it is now my pleasure to share these concepts with you. I have worked with companies to help their sales teams connect with customers, with their managers to influence performance and with coaches to facilitate change; I have even helped people to get a pay rise.

When teaching the power of influence I find most people grossly underestimate their ability to influence an outcome and are wasting opportunities. Moreover many people are creating negative associations that are creating the exact opposite of what they want.

Here is an example of negative associations. A good friend of ours is a committed doctor who wants to influence teenagers to make informed choices about sex and asked me to speak to the teenagers and coach their parents at a public forum. Consider how a parent’s good intentions could backfire if they don’t understand influence; telling a child that, “You can’t have sex until you are an adult,” can get linked in the mind as, “Having sex makes me an adult.”

Minds are amazing things – they create all sorts of associations, or cause-effect mental maps and not all of them are accurate. For example a phobic might associate snakes with danger to the point where they don’t want to leave the house. They have created a horror movie in their mind and this is creating feelings that paralyse. Just talking to this person won’t work – you have to demonstrate that their mental map is not accurate. This can be done by vicarious experience – having them watch someone else hold the snake.

Vicarious experience can create new mental maps as we role model the person engaged in a particular behaviour. This morning I was role modeling my tennis coach as he showed me a serve, then I tried to experience the same thing myself. So after watching others hold a non-poisonous snake, phobics are able to visualise themselvea holding the snake and finally able to take action and hold it themselves.

So in summary; to positively influence someone:

1. Create an image in their minds of them doing the required behaviour. This can be done by telling a story about someone, like them, that has engaged in that behaviour.
2. If possible show them someone else who is doing the behaviour you want to influence them to do.
3. Invite them to do the required behaviour and praise them for even the slightest positive action

Why else do you think that car salesman wants you to test drive the car and tells you how good you look when you do?

If you want to know more about coaching for influence, feel free to contact us.

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Fear is a part of our every day lives and to achieve Self Leadership we must understand and work with our fears so that they do not prevent us achieving our objectives.

Or as the bard,  William Shakespeare, put it, “Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt”.

Fear takes many forms and can vary in intensity from a mild discomfort to a paralysing phobia. You may be surprised to realise that most people have some type of fear that is preventing them reaching their full potential in life or business.

Fear of… flying, public speaking, meeting people, commitment, success, failure, cold calling, criticism, ill health, death, closed places, confrontation, snakes, spiders…etc. etc.

Fear can a survival mechanism with the purpose of prevent us from engaging in dangerous activities, but overdone it can be extremely limiting.

With the Self Leadership we can ’step back’ from our fears and question whether our fears are real and valid or blown up out of proportion; and if our fears fall in the latter category – to overcome them.

It is worth considering that FEAR is an acronym for…
False Evidence Appearing Real.

NLP and Neuro Semantics teach us that we react not to reality itself but to our mental representation of reality. Our fear is a reaction to the movies we play in our mind about past and future events.

I was once  giving a training on presentation skills when one, otherwise successful bank vice president told me she had cold sweats for three days before each presentation. I asked her what mental movies she created when she thought about a training – “Well first I see all the people staring at me without blinking and I see their faces getting bigger and closer to me and I hear a voice inside my head saying – you are going to freeze, you are going to stuff up”. That certainly sounded like a horror movie to me, no wonder she is afraid to present.

In this case the fear was out of proportion to the risk. Presentations aren’t life threatening. They can be career threatening if you don’t prepare and speak with confidence and in this case our bank VP was robbing herself of confidence.

If you change your mental movies you change your reactions. To do this you need to be able to step back from the movie and realise it isn’t real.

There is a Moorish proverb that says, “He who is afraid of a thing gives it power over him.”

Have you ever hired a video or DVD and then realised that it was a really bad film? Would you hire it and play it again? Of course not! Why is it then that when we have a bad experience we play that mental movie over and over and over again?

With this current financial crisis are you playing horror movies of how bad things are? Or are you playing mental movies of how to best position yourself and your company for future success?

To de-power an unresourceful mental movie you need to step back from it and create distance so that you realise it’s only a movie. In addition if you change you movie to black and white you will find it has less power over you. You did know that you could change the quality of your internal movies – didn’t you? Editing our internal movies gives us power over our states of mind (self leadership).

If you would like to erase a movie that has been playing over and over, follow these steps.

1. Start with a black and white, still frame that just precedes the start of your ‘fear’ movie.

2. With the movie in black and white and you distanced from it (as if you are in the projection booth), run the movie to the end, and keep on running it until you reach a pleasant scene (this might be quite some time after the original movie).

3. Step into the pleaseant scene, fully experience it.

4. Now run the movie backwards to the first still frame. It helps if you can make the whirring sound of a video recorder being fast rewound.

5. Step back into the pleasant scene and rewind the movie 5 or 6 more times.

This process has the effect of scrambling your neural association to this movie and frees you to make new meanings in your mind for what is empowering for you.

This is an abbreviated description of the fast phobia cure that is taught in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Neuro-Semantic (NS) practitioner trainings. If you know a coach who is trained in NLP or NeuroSemantics you can also ask them to run this pattern with you.

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”

Realising that there is a way to release you fears, large or small, is now the time to let them go?

’’Come to the edge,’’ He said.
They said, ’’We are afraid.’’
’’Come to the edge,’’ He said.
They came. He pushed them… and they flew.

- Guillaume Apollinaire

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If the rooster crows and the sun comes up, was it the rooster that caused the sun to come up? Of course not! But if I say in an authorative tone, “look up at that light above you and as you stare at that light your eyelids will become heavy and you will want to close your eyes,” my words match your reality (staring up at a light does make you want to close your eyes) and I have set you up for a conditioned response. A conditioned response is one where the cause effect is repeated so that we respond automatically.

Stage hypnotists are masters of setting up cause-effect scenarios with naturally occuring phenomena. The hypnotist has no special power other than the power of knowledge about how the human mind proecesses information. It does make for a good show though, don’t you think?

(This blog is copyright Andrew Bryant. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)

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