WellSpring - Livng Well Guides - Neuro Linguististic Programming (NLP) -

WellSpring Practice Guides

Neuro Linguististic Programming (NLP)
Locate a Neuro Linguistic Programming practitioner

NLP has been described by one of its co-founders as "an attitude of mind leaving behind it a trail of techniques".

The "Fast Phobia Relief Process" that takes only twenty minutes or relieving panic attacks in ten using "Collapsing Anchors". NLP started its development over twenty years ago when John Grinder, a linguistics professor and Richard Bandler, a gestalt therapist, became particularly interested in "how" the great and the good are successful. NLP concentrates on three areas:

Outcome,
Sensory Acuity
Flexibility .

Outcome
In order to achieve any change, in order to resolve any issues, we need to know what it is that we want. The people I see in one-to-one sessions and on our seminars most often start by knowing what they don't want - "I don't want to be in this relationship", "I don't want to be smoking", "I don't want to be fat", "I don't want to be in this job", "I don't want to have these panic attacks".

We can only consciously concentrate on seven plus or minus two pieces of information at any one time. If this is true, then we can easily see that the individual above has already used up five of those pieces; add in today's shopping and a reminder to pay the rent and we have easily filled our capacity to the full. There is literally no room to even consider what we want and so all of our concentration, all of our energy, has gone on to what I don't want.

NLP practitioners help people to know what they want. This in itself can be a huge shift in orientation from the past and into the future.
Know your outcome - know what it is that you want.

"I want to be living in an environment with fresh air pumping through my lungs", "I want to be healthily slender", "I want to be in a job where I am satisfied and amply rewarded for my efforts", "I want to be calm and serene when I want to be".

Sensory Acuity
Sensory Acuity is noticing what is going on inside and outside your body. Most people are not aware of the internal bodily sensations that we call feelings, and then further dissociate from, and call emotions.

Becoming aware of the building blocks of our experiences - the pictures that we are making, the voices that we are creating, the inner sensations that we are producing - is one of the first steps that we need to take in order to change. Once we are aware of these building blocks and also that we create themselves, we can learn how to change them to ones that are more useful to us.

For example, changing that critical voice telling us that we "have to do this" or that we "must do that" is incredibly liberating. Moving that picture of being humiliated at school further away and turning it into monochrome takes a lot of the emotion our of it and allows us to take some perspective on the experience and on the emotions - perhaps it isn't the best reference experience to take into a job interview now that you are in your thirties.

Once we have a better understanding of what is going in our own internal experience we can then extend this to others. Most of our communication is at a para-verbal or non-verbal level. In our culture we put too much emphasis on the content, the words that are spoken, and we are probably missing a lot of information that is there before our very eyes and ears. Practising our sensory acuity skills and calibration skills can only enhance our relationships as we communicate with one another.

Sensory acuity at these two levels gives us vital information about what is going on for us and for others at any given moment.

Flexibility
We now know what we want and we know what we are getting. The next step is to have the flexibility to do something about it. "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. If what you're doing isn't working, do something else".

Bandler and Grinder went to the world experts in their field and worked out what they did. Working on the presupposition that with the same neurology as others I can do what they can do, they modelled what these people did, learned it themselves, and started teaching it to others. They discovered what external behaviours, internal thought processes, and internal emotions you would need to have to be able to replicate the desired behaviour. This is now known as The Mercedes Model.

External Behaviours
Movements, body gestures, eye movements, and breathing make up external behaviours.

Internal Processing
Processing our internal thoughts consisting of the pictures and words that we create internally. These can also start to create our beliefs about ourselves and about the world.

External Emotions
The sensations and feelings that we have we translate into emotions. These in turn we use to start to create our values. Those things that we measure the world and ourselves against.

When one aspect is changed it automatically alters the other two. For example:

Sit in your chair. Lean forward and over. Bring your shoulders round. Breathe shallowly and look down. And feel really happy and energised. It is not really possible.

Shake that feeling off.

Now, sit up. Pull your shoulders back and breathe deeply. Push your arms out and look upwards. And feel depressed. Not easy?

Shake that feeling off.

That little experiment shows that all three aspects of the Mercedes Model are connected. Change one and the others change. Say more empowering things to yourself in a strong voice and you will find yourself thinking differently and walking and breathing differently.
It does not matter where we enter the system because wherever we enter there will be change at the other two levels. The question becomes which intervention will have the most leverage and achieve the change more quickly.

However, to make any change at all, we need to know what it is that we want, notice what we are getting now for ourselves and in the world, and to be able to start to do, think and feel different things - Outcome, Sensory Acuity, Flexibility.