A friend was asking me the other day “How is NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) different from Psychotherapy?”
My initial glib reply was “Other than it works?” ( because I saw my first shrink at 5 years old and did not deal with my ‘stuff’ until I discovered NLP some 35+ years later, I feel that I am qualified to make that throw away comment)
I explained to my friend that NLP focuses on the how rather than the why.
To illustrate the difference I relayed an experience of a client who came to me feeling over whelmed, depressed and in the process of destroying their business. One of the patterns of this client is that she was forever telling her story about how bad things are, and how life is forever dealing her a poor hand. As a result she had developed a victim mentality, and was spending almost all of her time associated into her bad feelings.
Much to the client’s surprise (and chagrin) I did not invite her to tell me about what was causing her to feel bad. Rather I asked her to associate into her bad feeling and pay attention to it, I asked her to notice a number of things about the structure of her bad feeling and how she was able to make herself feel bad, these included,
• Where it started in her body
• How large it was
• What colour it was
• Which way it rotated
• How fast the spin was
• What the noise associated with it was.
Once she had noticed how she did a bad feeling, we set about changing it, taking it out of her body, so she could see it I then asked her to alter it in a number of ways including
• Speed the spin up
• Change the colour
• Change the noise
• Flip it round it had the opposite direction of spin.
Once my client had played around altering the structure of her bad feeling, I invited her to bring it back to the original location; her immediate response was how different she felt.
I then invited my client to practice taking the bad feeling out, and changing the structure, bringing back in and feeling good. We repeated this process time and time again very quickly so within a few minutes she had developed a new reflex action changing a bad feeling to a good one.
Almost before we finished the process I asked my client to experience again her bad experiences with her new skill that instantly changed her bad feeling to a good one and finally associated into herself doing this in the future, noticing all the amazing experiences, opportunities and other things that happen as a result of her being able to change a bad feeling into a good one immediately.
This is the unsolicited client feedback
“I just wanted to drop you a line to thank you so much for our session last week. As I said several times throughout the day I thought about cancelling as I really couldn't see how you could help me at this even though I know what an amazing business coach you are I felt this was different and I just couldn't pull myself out of it. I am so glad I came I still don't know how you did it but I feel so much better and positive again. I really am focused and have even managed to smile through some of the other stuff over the last few days.
Thank you so much I really appreciate you putting yourself out for me it really did help”
The change occurs not because my client understood how she felt bad, but she now had a new set of choices and new skill set that enable her to transmute a bad feeling into a good one, by understanding how to change the structure.
If you want to make changes in your life, do it the quick, easy and lasting way, call me for your first NLP coaching session on 01296 770462 or e mail jane@healthyandwealthy.co.uk
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