Tag Archives: NLP

Come Back With Your Friends And Play

The Lost Monkey

Once there was this young monkey. He lived in the jungle, with the rest of the monkeys. And he played with all the other monkeys just like you would expect a young monkey to. He was at that age where the adult monkeys didn’t really expect much adult behavior from him, so they didn’t really mind him playing around all day. But he was still young enough so they felt as though they needed to keep watch over him to make sure he didn’t get into too much trouble. If monkeys are good at anything, it’s getting into trouble.

It’s not widely known that monkeys can be the most thrill-seeking animals there are. They have an elaborate warning system of cries and shrieks to warn the community when predators enter into their area. Some of the jungle cats in particular are very stealthy, and enjoy eating monkeys. Especially young monkeys that haven’t quite mastered the recognition of the various warning signs.

Young monkeys are so often yelled at by the older monkeys that they sometimes miss a serious warning cry, and end up being an afternoon snack for some hungry cheetah. So you can understand how monkeys at a certain age can be particularly troublesome for the adults.

Another thing that makes things difficult is that monkeys are much more communal that other animals. On the range of sexual behavior and monogamy, monkeys are fairly promiscuous. Some scientists believe it is the safest way to protect the young, or at least their best strategy. If you are an adult monkey, and you see a young monkey, you are inclined to protect it because there’s a fairly decent chance that it may be your own kid.

So having a group of young monkeys that are old enough to play around on their own, but young enough to not quite understand the warning cries are a nuisance to the adults who just want to go about their own monkey business, which in the monkey world is to find as many bananas and have sex with as many monkeys as you can.

Once that the young monkeys grow up and discover the secret of life, namely bananas and sex, they start to lose interest in playing around, and seeing how close they can get to the cheetahs without being eaten alive.

But this one afternoon, this one particular monkey had somehow separated himself from the group. He was swing around, from branch to branch, and suddenly noticed that there weren’t any other monkeys around him. He stopped, and didn’t hear any monkey chatter or monkey cries, so he became a bit nervous, inasmuch as monkeys can become nervous. Which in reality isn’t that much. They are monkeys, after all.

So this young monkey kept swinging from branch to branch when he discovered a big clearing in the jungle. It looked as if the trees had been cut down for some reason. Being naturally curious, he decided to investigate. In the middle of the clearing, was a big hole in the ground. But not just any hole, it had been dug to a specific shape. It was a perfect square, and went straight down into the ground as far as he could see. He kicked a couple rocks in, and waited to hear them drop, but he didn’t. He suddenly wanted to remember exactly where he was. His friends would really find this fascinating. He was torn between investigating further, on his own, or going back and getting his friends. He decided to climb down into the hole, just a little bit, to see what he could find.

The sides were pretty easy to hang onto, so he climbed down a few hundred meters. It took a while, but he had a sinking suspicion something really cool was going to happen. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but the further down he climbed, the more he got excited.

Finally the hole opened up into this giant cavern. Inside the cavern were all these strange looking machines and shiny pieces of things that he didn’t even recognize, let alone know what category to put them in.

He decided to go over and play on one of the machines. There were all these dials and knobs, and wheels. He started punching them and spinning them, and the machine, if that’s what it was, roared to life. It made all these strange sounds, and started rolling around, as if on its own power.

The monkey was scared and excited at the same time. He jumped of the machine, and stood back and watched the machine go to work. The machine started digging through the side of the cavern. When it dug, the monkey noticed some really shiny stuff, again that he didn’t recognize. He scooped up a handful of the shiny stuff, and climbed back up the hole. He’d have to tell his friends about his place for sure. He’d have to just be sure to remember how he got here, so he could tell his friends about this place and come back to explore.

Because he knew that what he’d found here was amazing, and he couldn’t wait to tell all his friends, so they could all come back here and play.

To be continued…

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

Lunar or Solar?

Change Perspective

The other day I was talking to one of my neighbors, one of them that I don’t talk to very often. It seems that there is a local festival happening this weekend, and she was trying to explain its significance. Something to do with the lunar New Year. Every year the lunar New Year comes at a different time, and the length of winter is thought to be dependent on the arrival of this day.

It got me thinking about the overlapping of the two calendars, the solar and the lunar. The seasons are based on the earth’s rotation around the sun, and the lunar New Year is based obviously on the moon. The revolution of the moon around the earth has nothing to do with the revolution of the earth around the sun. They are two completely different physical systems, although they are nested. The moon/earth system is nested within the earth/sun system.

When you take the larger scale of time, based on the seasons and the sun, and compare it to the smaller system, it can seem entirely random. Some years the lunar New Year comes early, while other years it comes later. And over the years, humans have developed a rich mythology to describe the relationship between the two.

Of course, from an external and much longer perspective, they are simply two oscillating systems, one inside the other, and behave according to fairly simple physical laws. But within the system, you have all these stories and mythologies about dragons and spirits and whether or not you’re going to have a good crop based on how much moon you can see at a certain time of night.

Being able to switch in and out of an objective/subjective experience is beneficial helpful and a lot of fun. If humans were always stuck inside the subjective experience, of watching the moon dance across the sky, we would never have evolved past human sacrifices to ensure the crops would grow every year.

Advances in science continue to give us an objective, outside perspective so we can do away with hoping and praying to the gods, and to not only understand our natural environment, but to decipher it and plan accordingly. It makes life a lot easier if you know it’s going to rain with a certain degree of expectation.

On a personal level, this can be just as useful, but it can prove to be a little bit more difficult. If we look at our behavior from an objective viewpoint, some of our behavior that gets us into trouble can be pretty obvious. But it can be hard to do that. It’s very easy to stay within our own subjective experience and only see things as they show up in our own experience, without planning how to react.

One model in NLP is the ability to switch between the objective and subjective experience. One exercise I did at a seminar was particularly eye opening. It can help greatly if you ever feel yourself getting sucked into an argument that you suspect might not end well.

The exercise goes like this. You can do this with a willing partner, or completely covert.

While talking to somebody, try switching in and out of your “self.” During the conversation, imagine that you are above the both of you, and objectively watching the discussion, as if you are watching a debate between two unknown candidates on TV. Then switch into the other persons perspective, and watch yourself talking, and take the opposing viewpoint. Then switch back to an objective viewpoint, and then switch back into your own viewpoint.

This can be tricky and confusing to say the least, so it’s best to try this with a conversation that will allow for several pauses while you collect your thinking. Don’t do this while talking to your boss, or an important client at work.

It can be particularly useful to free yourself from a subjective viewpoint that isn’t as supportive as you think it is. You may even get a better perspective, and a few different ideas.

The more you practice this, the better you’ll get at it. I’ve known several sales people who perfected this technique, and were able to change their approach with clients during a conversation that resulted in them getting a sale, where before they wouldn’t have been able to.

They report that when they switched into their clients viewpoint, they got some ideas on how to better present their product or services, as well as some interesting insights into how to overcome some objections, many times even before they came up.

I’m sure you can think of many different areas where it would be good to be able to flip in and out of your own subjective experience. Try this and have fun.

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

What Is Beyond Our Five Senses?

More Than You Know

Once I was roped into going to this really strange seminar with a friend of mine. I say roped in because he had bought two tickets, or signed up for two people, and his buddy had flaked at the last minute. It was paid for, and although it was a two-day seminar at this hotel, it was local, so I didn’t have to travel anywhere. So I figured I had nothing to lose. So perhaps “roped in” is too strong a term to describe his persuasive efforts. Perhaps “talked into” would be a better term.

It was a weird combination of hypnosis and metaphysics. The guy who taught the seminar is a pretty widely know hypnotherapist, he has all kinds of self-hypnosis tapes and books out, a well as a pretty popular practice. He does seminars from time to time.

We started out doing some basic criteria exercises, where we spent some time doing some creative journaling to get to the bottom of what we really wanted out of life. Most people in attendance, myself included, were surprised to find out most of the stuff we think we wanted, wasn’t for the reasons we thought we wanted them.

One of the requirements for a “well formed goal” is to make sure you are going after the goal for your own reasons, and not or somebody else’s. Most of our goals, we found, were there because of beliefs and ideas that we’d all picked up somewhere along the line from other people. This one lady had a tremendous breakthrough. She’d been trying her whole life to get ahead in her career, and she found out it was only to try and please her father, who died when she was a young child. When she discovered that she was trying to please an imaginary person, or a memory of he father, rather than her own desires, it was a huge relief.

She said it was like this huge burden that was released, and she felt a lot more energetic than she’d ever felt before. When she uncovered her true calling in life, the thing that she really wanted to go after for her own sake, she nearly broke down in tears from happiness.

She wasn’t worried that what she wanted would require a complete career change, and perhaps some more education. Just finding a goal that was something that truly resonated with her on a deep level was enough to give her inspiration. And as a completely unexpected side benefit, this lower back problem, that she’d had for several years, had completely disappeared.

After that we moved on to uncovering some beliefs that were holding us back. This wasn’t so fun, as many of us in attendance found out we had some pretty crappy beliefs. The instructor said that one interesting thing about human nature is that we can really deceive ourselves into thinking that something unpleasant isn’t there, to save us the pain of confronting it. Because I few acknowledge it, and confront it and fail, it would be devastating. So many times we unconsciously choose to ignore these things. Which is why most of us, when we uncovered these beliefs that were holding us back, were a little worried that we wouldn’t be able to overcome them.

But then he taught us this powerful self-hypnosis technique to completely obliterate our self-limiting beliefs. I was lucky enough to be the “guinea pig” to go up in front of class and be hypnotized. I don’t remember too much of what happened, but it involved moving energy around and using this really cool visualizations. Then we later broke into pairs and guided each other through the same process. After we did that a few times, we were able to do it on our own.

Now, this wasn’t some instantaneous magic that immediately removed all of our limiting beliefs, but it gave us a meditative practice to do on a daily basis. And ever since then I’ve been doing it, at least in part, to slowly but surely chip away at all the limiting beliefs I’ve built up since childhood.
After we figured out our criteria, set some powerful goals, and removed the blocks, then we moved on into some pretty cool psychic energy work. Personally, I’m not big believer in psychic phenomenon. It think there has to be a physical or biological explanation for everything, but some of the stuff we did was pretty impressive.

One thing we did was learn to generate positive and negative charisma. When you generate positive charisma, people will naturally be attracted to you. I used to think that if you have positive charisma, guys would walk up to you and offer you money, and girls would walk up to you and offer you sex. But it doesn’t quite work out that way. What happens when you consciously generate positive charisma is people will feel a strong desire to be in your presence, but because you are the one generating charisma, they will kind of wait for you to tell them or guide them what to do.

If you were in sales, for example, and you generated a ton of positive charisma, a bunch of prospects would show up, but you would still need to go through the sales process and close them. But with positive charisma, it would be a lot easier.

Of course with negative charisma, you naturally repel people. Even if you tried talking to people they would do their best to ignore you, not respond, or simply jut walk away.

Now it’s one thing practicing these techniques in the seminar room, when everybody is “playing along,” but often times when you go out into the real world, it doesn’t quite work out as well. Which is exactly why he had us go out at night and practice these techniques around real people.

And let me tell you, I was amazed at how effective these were. I tried generating both positive and negative charisma in a large bookstore that evening. I went to a section where there weren’t any people, and did the exercise. Within few minutes there were about six people within a couple meters of where I was standing, where there was nobody there before. While this could have been a complete coincidence, I got the distinct feeling that every single one of these people was waiting for me to start a conversation with them. Their body language and posture all screamed openness. There were three women, and every one of them had their chests pointing straight at me, and their arms completely open. For those of you who study body language, this is a pretty strong unconscious sign of openness.

Next I went upstairs and did the negative charisma exercise. Again, I was shocked at its effectiveness. No matter where I walked, people would scatter like I had bubonic plague or something. Nobody even faced me, let alone made eye contact with me.

This seminar really opened up my mind to what is possible when you tap into some of the metaphysical energies that are surrounding us all the time. That was about five years ago, and ever since I’ve been interested in that kind of thing. Hypnosis, NLP, and all kinds of esoteric metaphysics. While some of it is complete nonsense, a lot of it isn’t. And the stuff that isn’t can have a powerful and profound impact on your life, and everything you want to accomplish.

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

How To Access Genius Level Creativity

Imaginary Friends

I was having lunch with an old friend of mine the other day. I hadn’t seen her since just after she had her baby. That was four years ago. I can’t believe how fast time flies when you’re doing the same routine day in and day out. If you don’t and look up from what you’re doing, life can zip right by without bothering to take you along for the ride.

She was telling me about how her son has all these imaginary friends. He has normal friends as well, he goes to this kindergarten three days a week, and he gets on well with the kids there, but while he’s at home, and his dad isn’t around, he’s always wandering around talking to people that aren’t there. When my friend asks him about them, he acts like she’s the one living in an alternative reality. He can see them, why can’t she?

She wasn’t too worried, but seeing as he’s her only kid, and she’s never experienced the “imaginary friend” thing, she started checking around to find out how normal it was. Maybe her house was actually filled with ghosts or something, and he could see them, and she couldn’t. If that were the case, she would need to learn to communicate with them so they wouldn’t keep him up past his bedtime.

She was telling me she did all this research, and actually went to see a specialist in child development. What she found out was both interesting and relieving. Her kid was normal, and her house wasn’t filled with ghosts. At least none that she or he could see.

What he told her was how the brain develops as we grow older, and one way that the brain switches between externally focused and internally focused. All of this has overlap with other areas of brain research, but part of it is particularly useful for understand how children develop, and how they are often in their own worlds, which seem to them as real as these words you are reading now.

The brain has four basic categories of brainwaves. The brainwaves are made up of all the electrical impulses pulsing throughout the brain at any given time. Every time you have a thought, conscious or unconscious, several billion neurons fire off in particular orders. The sum total of the firing of neurons, and the resultant wave of electrical impulses can be measured. They range from very slow, long brainwaves, to fast and short ones. Each category is associated with a different “type” of brain activity.

Most adults alternate between beta and alpha. Beta is the fastest, and is what most people experience when we are awake. Externally focused, thinking about the things around us and how to deal with them. Extremely high levels of beta are thought to be an indication of stress and anxiety. (An indication, not a cause).

The next is alpha. (An interesting side note, alpha is not the fastest, even though it’s called alpha. It’s called alpha only because it was the first one they discovered.) Alpha is associated with daydreaming, drifting off into imaginations about the past or the future. Artists and creative thinkers find alpha particularly helpful, as this is where they get a lot of their inspiration. When you kind of “zone out” in the middle of something, you have slipped from beta into alpha.

The next one down is theta. This is where all hallucinations, hypnosis, and deep meditation occur. During theta you can have wild ideas and thoughts. When you are falling asleep at night, and you drift from thinking about normal, every day thoughts, and catch your thoughts drifting seemingly on their own, with you just watching them, you’ve slipped into theta.

As adults, it’s very hard to be in theta and stay awake. Theta is that brief space between waking and sleep. Advanced meditators can hold this state for a while, but it takes some practice. Theta is though to be where genius ideas come from. Edison used to sit in a chair in a dark room, holding a weight in his outstretched hand. As soon as he drifted into sleep, and into theta, he would drop the weight. This would wake him up, and he would immediately write down as much as he could. This is how he came up with so many creative ideas. It wasn’t that he was smarter or more creative than the rest of us, it was just he effectively used his brains capacity to slip into theta, and exploit all of the genius level thinking that occurs during that phase.

Other scientists and inventors have used dreams, which are also in the theta brainwave state, to come up with ideas that have literally changed the face of science and industry.

One of the things that child development researchers are starting to discover is that when kids are growing up, they are in theta state a large portion of the time. Much more so that adults. Their brains are growing, and learning, and theta is the natural brainwave state to be in if you are learning about your environment for the first time. Learning how to walk and talk is one thing, but kids also naturally learn complex things like values, beliefs handed down with their parents, and complex emotional issues. They believe that theta is the perfect brainwave state for building strategies in the brain for dealing understanding and dealing with reality.

This may be why thinking of a problem just before bed is particularly helpful. Even though you may not remember, while you’re in the theta state just before sleep, your brain can come up with some pretty creative solutions to your problems, as Edison and others can attest to.

For most adults thought, accessing theta is only achievable through long practice of meditation. Unless we consciously practice in a regular basis, theta only comes with sleep, and unless we program ourselves before sleep to solve problems, the usefulness of theta is only useful to children.

But recently there have been discoveries that theta brainwave states can be achievable by listening to specific sounds. Sounds that we listen to have a profound impact on our brainwaves. With properly engineered sound, and focused concentration, theta is easily accessible by anyone with a CD player and pair of headphones.

It really is possible to tap into that same genius level creativity that Einstein, Edison and others have used over the years to solve problems, and come up with some astounding ideas that have changed the course of human history.

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

Watch Out For Cracks In Reality

Saved By An Old Woman

The other day I was wandering down town, not really wandering, just kind of maybe shuffling along. Shuffling doesn’t quite describe it either, shuffling is what drunken people do that don’t have a destination. While I didn’t have a destination, I wasn’t drunk, so maybe I’d better choose another verb. Staggering? No, ambling? Not sure if that’s a word. Meandering. That’s it, I was meandering down town the other day, and I saw this strange looking man. He had this peculiar feeling about him, and he was looking at me a bit strangely. I wasn’t sure if he was going to introduce himself as a long lost pal, or pull out a knife and kill me where I stood.

But before I describe the strange looking man, I need to explain why I was meandering down town in the middle of a sunny weekend afternoon. I had originally gone downtown to catch a movie, but as it sometimes happens, the times they list on the movie page are not the same as at the actual theater. To make matters worse, the movie I had intended to see not only started at a different time, but instead of being in English with Japanese subtitles, it was dubbed in Japanese.

Of course if I read a synopsis of the movie before hand, and paid close enough attention, I’d be able understand enough of the dialogue to make out the basic plot. But that would require brainpower, and that’s one of my main reasons for going to the movies, so I can shut off my brain for a couple hours. Not completely shut if off, I still need to be able to work my mouth and my hand so I can stuff my face with as much popcorn as possible.

But there I was, ready to spend a couple hours of brain-free relaxation, when my plans were thwarted by Internet inaccuracy. I wasn’t going to give in without a struggle. I was determined to expend a little brain energy as possible.

I can be frustrating when you are expecting one thing, but then something else entirely shows up in its place, and despite really liking this thing that you have here in front of you, you were maybe expecting something else. And no matter how much you try and convince yourself that this is OK, part of you continues to wish that you’d gotten the other thing that you’d expected in the first place.

Kind of like if you were expecting to go on vacation in Hawaii, but you got on the wrong plane and ended up in Alaska. Alaska is a cool place, and had you planned on going there, you’d likely enjoy it. They have some cool stuff in Alaska. But since you were planning on Hawaii, you wouldn’t be able to fully throw yourself in to your suddenly determined by fate vacation in Alaska. Not to mention that you’d probably be pretty cold, seeing as how all you had was a grass skirt, a surfboard, and a couple of ukulele’s. And to add insult to injury, instead of getting lei’d by a cute Hawaiian girl, you’d get hit in the face with a snowball by some angry alcoholic Eskimo. Which would suck under any circumstances.

I was just about to try and ignore this strange guy, and turn into the shop I happened to be standing next to, when he called out my name. So he did know me. I turned, wondering where I knew him from. When he started to approach, he did the strangest thing. It was odd, and I looked around wondering what other’s reactions would be, as most people don’t do what he was doing right there on the sidewalk.

Either nobody seemed to notice, or they just pretended they didn’t notice. Or maybe part of them noticed, but another part of them didn’t notice that they noticed, like some strange form of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is an interesting thing. Some say it’s the brains way of keeping everything in order, and not seeing things that are right in front of you, because if you acknowledge certain things, you would have to go through a lot of mental recalculation to re figure out your model of reality. And that can be time consuming. So the brain has evolved this mechanism for shutting out certain parts of the reality.

Those that study Freud say it’s to protect the ego. People that have bad habits, for example, don’t see them as being bad, at least to the extent that they do them. If we were to look at them objectively, or if we saw another person with the same habit, we’d be much more realistic in our judgment of the habit. But because that would require making a hard decision about what to do, we tend to ignore it.

But that only goes so far to explain why all those people ignored this guy, who pretended to know me, when he started doing what he did. People don’t usually do that out of context, and especially when they are alone. I certainly hope that I didn’t cause this strange looking man that pretended to know me to start to do that. I checked again to everybody that was walking past this guy, within a couple feet of him, and they didn’t even turn their heads. I started to think maybe I’d slipped through some crack into an alternative reality, I even started thinking that was why the movie times on the Internet were different from the real movie times.

I started to really get nervous. Everything that I thought was absolutely true was turning out not to have any corroborating evidence. What if reality really was a fiction of your imagination, and you can only succeed in life so long as you find enough people that have an overlapping hallucination? How do you know that red really is red? I started to panic, when this old lady stopped and started to lecture this crazy guy. As soon as she started to lecture him, other people turned to look, and started whispering amongst themselves. He apologized, and said he’d got carried away. He kept motioning over toward me while he was talking to this old lady, and for some reason, I stood where I was, a bit curious, and relieved that reality was still intact. But before I knew it, the man apologized once more, bowed to everybody that has stopped to watch him receive the shellacking from this old woman, hopped on his unicycle, and rode away.

Of course, I was left standing there, absorbing all the residual curiosity from the now very interested crowd. What I did next is another story.

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

How To Remember Names Easily And Automatically

Mrs. Big Hair

Once I was at this party, and I was with a friend of mine, actually a date. I saw some guy that I’d met before; at least I think I’d met him before. We did that bit of recognition when you make eye contact with somebody that you know. An almost instantaneous acknowledgment of who they are. As soon as we did that, he came over. Then, to my horror, I realized that I not only didn’t remember where I knew this guy from, but that I also couldn’t recall his name. Not even a first letter.

For a few seconds, I hoped he was the kind of guy that just walks up and introduces himself, regardless of the situation, like some politician running for office, or the host of the party, or something. No dice. He walked, greeted me, (using my name of course) and then stood there waiting for me to introduce him to my date. Of course, my date, not knowing anyone at the party, was patiently waiting for me to introduce her to him.

One of the most common complaints that people have about their memories is an inability to remember names. The trick (that I didn’t learn until after that embarrassing moment at party) is two fold. One is an understanding of how memory works, and the other is a simple trick that you easily learn and put into place so you’ll never have trouble remembering names again.

The way memory works is that it’s not passive, unless it is for life or death information. Let’s say you’re walking through the jungle (back during our evolutionary past), and happen to look up at a banana tree. All of a sudden a group of ferocious monkeys swing down, beat you up, and chase you away. You’ll likely have no trouble remembering that spot, aided by the presence of the banana tree, as a no no in the future. You wouldn’t have to go back to your cave, and review you notes of the day and drill yourself so you’d remember where the safe places were, and where the dangerous place were. It would be automatic.

Likewise, if you were huffing it across the desert, and saw strange looking tree, and upon arrival at the tree found a source of an underground stream, you wouldn’t have any problems remembering where the stream was. Remembering where a hidden source of water in the desert is much easier than remembering where you parked at the airport.

So our memory is only passive when it comes to life and death. We somehow know that when we take classes in school. We listen attentively to the boring lecture, and know we have to study and drill the information into our brain before a test. We can’t just sit there passively listening to the lecture and soak it all up without a problem (at least most of us can’t). So why do we think we can remember names without putting in any effort? Who knows. The key is to realize that we need to remember names just like we’d study and remember information for a test. We have to consciously input the information into our brains in a specific way so it will make it easier to find them later.

When we listen to a lecture, we usually take notes, and then study for our notes later. You’d look kind of silly at a party walking around with a pencil and a small notebook writing down everything people said to you. They would think you were some kind of reporter or something. Since writing the information down is out, we need a better trick to remember names.

The trick is to apply a mnemonic device, like “all good boys eat cows”, or however it goes for remembering the musical scales. That reason I can’t really remember that is because it’s lacking an emotional component. Remember the deadly banana tree and the hidden water source? Both those came pre filled with a strong emotional component. We need to use those when creating our mnemonic devices. Here’s how you construct an emotionally laden mnemonic for remembering names:

A visualization of the person + a visualization of their name + a funny picture connecting them together = remembered name.

When you first meet somebody, you need to think of one visual thing about them that stands out. This is only private, so it can be as goofy or as derogatory as you can imagine. You won’t be sharing this with anybody, and it’s only to help you remember their name, so whatever you come up with is OK. Let’s say you meet somebody, and the first thing you notice about them is that they have big hair. So before you hear their name, you can think of them as Mr. Or Ms big hair. Now when you hear their name, simply think of a picture to associate with their name. Let’s say their name is Lynne. So you run “Lynne” through your mind until you can think of an easily to visualize item that will help you recall “Lynne.”

Lets’ see… Lynne… Lynne… Lint! Lint from the dryer, all over your clothes. Now you simply attach “lint” and “big hair,” and what do you have? Some poor woman whose hair is filled with lint. So now every time you see this woman, you’ll immediately think of “big hair,” and “lint,” and you’ll have her name in a heartbeat. The funny thing about this is that you only have to go through this process of remembering all the pictures (which really only takes a couple seconds) once or twice. After that, their names will be automatic.

The best time to do this is within a few moments after you meet them, whenever you get a second. Picture associated with the person, picture associated with their name, and hook them together somehow. The crazier, the funnier, the more derogatory, and more sexual you can make either picture, will make it much more easy to remember. If you make your pictures boring, like “all cows eat grass,” it won’t be so easy to remember.

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Success with NLP

Success with NLP

Oh, and at the party, I suddenly remembered where I knew the guy from. His name was Mike, and I’d met him a couple weeks earlier at a toastmasters meeting.

How To Achieve Lifelong Learning

A Punch Is Just A Punch

Do you remember what it was like before you knew the difference between a small “b,” and a small “d”? Some adult, maybe a teacher, parent or an older brother or sister would write a bunch of squiggly lines, that were supposed to have some kind of meaning. After a period of time, they start to make some kind of sense to you. And pretty soon you knew all the letters.

After that you started to notice, or maybe it was pointed out to you, that certain letters always showed up together, and when they did they actually had meaning. Meaning of something that existed in the physical world that you already knew about. You knew what an apple was, maybe you even ate one every day. You knew what others meant when you heard the word “apple,” and you could say it yourself.

But somehow, when you first saw that collection of letters, a p p l e, it took a few tries to sound out what that word meant, and what it was referring to. After a few tries, you could look at the word and immediately think of an apple.

And before you knew it, you could look at the word apple, and you would think of an apple just as quickly as if somebody said it, or even just as quickly as if you saw a real one right here in front of you.

If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you get to repeat this process all over again. It takes a while to get used to automatically connecting a thought to a spoken sound, and then a little bit longer to produce the sound yourself. The next step, of course, is to recognize it in written form. If you are learning a language that uses roman characters, that isn’t such a big deal. But if you are learning a whole different writing system, like Sanskrit or Chinese, then you’ve got to go through the whole squiggly line learning process. Once you’ve learned the sounds, both how to hear them and how to make them, and how to recognize a specific set of squiggly lines and automatically associate them an apple, then you’re back on automatic pilot, and can spend your precious brain resources on other stuff.

This process happens over and over again as we move from the cradle to the grave. Unfortunately, for some of us, as we get older, it happens less and less frequently. Few skills are moved from the area of total confusion into autopilot. It seems to be much easier when we are younger. And we also seem to only associate “learning” with school, and things like language, mathematics, and classical literature. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

There are four discreet stages of learning in the human mind. Unconscious incompetence. We don’t know that we don’t know. After we are introduced to a topic, like a new language, and we first get started, we move into the conscious incompetence. Meaning that we know about this skill, and we know that we are no good at it. This can be very frustrating if you are trying to learn something new.

After this comes conscious competence. This is when we are good at something, but we need to really pay attention to what we are doing. We need to sound out every letter to understand what the word means, or we need to turn of the radio and tell our friends to shut up if we are driving just after we got our license.

The next phase is unconscious competence. This is obviously the best part. We know how to do something, and we don’t have to think about it when we do it. We can drive while listening to the radio, having a conversation, and shaving. Many times we drive somewhere, and forget completely how we go there.

Athletes that get into the “zone” say that everything just “clicks,” and they don’t really have to think. It’s like they are merely observing themselves giving a stellar performance. Conscious thinking becomes an obstacle.

Bruce Lee described a punch three ways. He said that at first, a punch is just a punch. Then when you study a punch through the frame of Jeet Ku Do, a punch is a complex movement of breath, body, energy and intention. After you skillfully master those elements, a punch is just a punch again. An altogether more effective and potentially deadly punch, but to the conscious mind, it is just a punch.

The great promise of the human mind is that you can learn any skill to the level of unconscious competence. You can easily learn to do anything without needing to think about it. There are literally thousands of things you’ve already learned to do in your life, where you moved through this process. Things that at one point in your life, you didn’t even know existed, but now you can do them without a thought.

So what skills would you like to have? Powerful public speaking? The ability to walk up a woman and sweep her off her feet within moments of meeting her? The ability to write a sales letter that will convert fifty percent of its readers? Artistic talent? Gold medal sports skills? The skill to look fear in the face and still have the courage to act?

When you learn the structure of learning, it becomes much simpler to make learning life long habit. You don’t need to sit in boring classroom, or study boring textbooks. With NLP, or Neuro Linguistic Programming, you can break any skill you want to learn into easy manageable tasks. NLP studies the structure of learning in such a way that you can model others who are performing at levels that you’d like to be at. You can basically reverse engineer their skill set, and make it your own.

While it’s not magic by any means, it can seem to be if you are stuck in the idea of learning the traditional, classroom way. With NLP you are able to explode your potential, and turn yourself into a life long learning machine, someone who will always be growing, and always be improving.

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Success with NLP

Success with NLP

Easily Change Your History For A Powerful Present

How To Build a Mental Time Machine

There was this really cool movie called “The Butterfly Effect,” that came out a few years ago. They made a sequel that was OK, but not nearly as powerful as the original. The reason it was called “The Butterfly Effect,” was because of part of something called “Chaos Theory.” The name, of course is a misnomer, as Chaos means behaving without any set of rules. The chaos in Chaos theory though refers to not having any discernable rules or observable cause/effect phenomenon.

The weather is a great example of Chaos Effect in action. There are many different variables, and they are all strongly interactive. A change here, will effect a change there, which will in turn affect a change over, which will cause a change back here, and so on. Because we humans have a fairly limited capacity when it comes to having instincts for multi variable systems, it appears chaotic and impossible to describe even using our best computes. That’s why when they predict the rain, they give percentages rather than absolutes. No matter how sophisticated our machines and computers get, due to the nature of the system, we still have to guess about the weather.

The term “Butterfly Effect” refers to a butterfly flapping it’s wings on one side of the planet, and the effect rippling through the complex interactive meteorological system, and eventually causing a hurricane on the other side of the world.

It was also alluded to in a story by Ray Bradbury, where a group of scientists created a time machine. They were getting set to go on their first mission, but they were strongly admonished not to interact at all with anything they saw in the past, as it would have an unknown effect in the future. So they went back in time, and were looking around. One of the scientists saw a butterfly, and decided to collect it. This of course, violated the rules of “non interaction.” When they returned to the present, everything was vastly changed, language, society, government, everything. One butterfly changed the entire future.

There was even an episode of the Simpson’s where Homer had a time machine, and they kept trying to come back to the normal present, but kept messing up. In one particular future they came back to, it was raining donuts, but they had big tongues like lizards.

If you’ve seen the movie, “The Butterfly Effect,” you know it follows the same pattern. The character can go back in time and relive part of his past, and when he comes back to the present, everything is changed. Every time he comes back, everything seems good, until he discovers something horribly wrong, and he has to go back and change something again.

While that is only a movie, and the idea of a butterfly causing a hurricane on the other side of the planet is largely metaphorical for the complex interactions in nature, there actually is a way to go back and change part of your past.

The way we are today, our behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs about our capabilities are based largely on what we have experienced and how we remember our past. While this is horrible news if you come with a bunch of baggage from an unpleasant or abusive childhood, it doesn’t have to be that way.

This is because our past is not really as solid as we think. Our own personal histories are based much more on our interpretation of events rather than the events themselves. If we can go back and somehow give a different interpretation to the events of the past, we can change our present.

Some people can do this pretty easy in the present. They’ll be walking down the street, bump into somebody, get cussed out, and simply write it off as the other guy having a bad day, without taking personal offense. The same is possible with our past, even though it’s already happened.

When we were kids, we didn’t have a lot of resources or a lot of experience, so there were only so many ways we could respond to bad things that happened to us. We didn’t have the adult experience to write it off as somebody simply having a bad day, as the example above.

If you have a particularly painful memory from the past, here’s a great way to “re program” your history.

Sit back, relax, and close your eyes. Drift back to that “event” that is still causing you problems today. Watch the event unfold. Watch it again, but freeze the frame every so often, and look at the other people involved in the event with a more adult, forgiving attitude. Maybe they just didn’t know any better. Maybe they were expressing their own pain the best way they could. Give them the benefit of the doubt as much as you can. Remember the wise words of Nelson Mandela: “Holding a grudge is like swallowing poison and hoping the other person dies.”

Stay dissociated, that is, watch the event unfolding, as if you are some kind of ghost from the future watching it unfold. After you’ve given as much adult understand as you can to all the players involved, watch it again, but this time, step in and interact with your child self. Explain to your child self who you are (yourself from the future) and what is really going on. Tell them whatever all the other people are doing, it’s nothing personal. Make sure your child self understand.

Now for the cool part. Go back and relive that experience, but this time as associated as you can. Float into your child’s body, but this time, really feel and experience your future self giving you guidance and support as the event unfolds. As a child, listen to the advice of your future self. Run through this several times.

This may seem awkward, and perhaps even emotionally painful at first, but just like with any other exercise, you’ll get better with practice. Pretty soon you’ll be able blink yourself back into your past, and re organize your responses to what happened, and give yourself a much brighter future. Just like Richard Bandler, the co founder of NLP said, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

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Success with NLP

Success with NLP

What Is Your Motivating Strategy?

Push or Pull?

Once I was driving to Vegas with a couple of buddies. I was driving, and they were goofing around. They accidentally had knocked off my rear view mirror, so my friend decided he would hold the rear view mirror and check to see if anybody was behind us. Luckily we were in the desert, on long flat stretch of road with clear visibility, so it didn’t really pose any danger. For this particular situation, the mirrors on both sides of the car were fine.

We did have to stop and fix it before we got to Vegas, as driving around the city streets mid day required much more visibility.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently, and she was saying that she has a problem, and based on her conversations with some of her other friends, they have the same problem. She’ll decide on a goal, and get really fired up to go after it, whether I be losing weight, or learning a new skill, or making an effort to improve her current or find a new relationship. But something always seems to happen after a couple weeks.

She said she always starts out like gangbusters, and then for some reason, she loses her motivation and a few weeks later, her drive to achieve what she thought was extremely important fizzles to nothing, and it’s quickly forgotten.

She said several of her friends experience this same thing, and she was wondering if she was doomed to spend the rest of her life on short bursts of motivation for various projects that soon fizzle out. It seems to be a common problem for many people, especially for things like exercise and weight loss.

Could there be a solution?

One answer may lie in what motivates us. In NLP, there are these things called “meta programs.” These are basic, general filters that everybody has, ways that we categorize the world and our own feelings and beliefs. If you can uncover and change on of your meta programs it can completely change the way you view the world and the possibilities it contains.

Depending on who you ask, there are around twenty or thirty general meta programs, and while NLP tries very hard not to label anything as “good,” or “bad,” as everything is contextual and has it’s place, in meta programs, some “settings” seem to be more resourceful than others.

Generally speaking, each “meta program” has two different extremes, and being closer to one extreme tends to be more resourceful rather than being closer to the other extreme. It would be better to be 30% of one side and 70% of the other, rather than the other way around.

When I asked my friend what motivated her to start her goals, it became clear what was causing her to fizzle out. One of the “meta programs” is your motivation strategy. We are all either motivated by moving away from pain, or motivated by moving towards pleasure.

If you are motivated by moving away from pain, you may look at yourself in the mirror, get disgusted and get right into a high intensity exercise program. After a couple of weeks though, because you’re putting hard effort into your routine, the disgust diminishes, and the pain that you are moving away from goes away, which in turn kills your motivation. It’s like jumping back from a hot stove. You are motivated to move in a hurry, but only until you are far enough away so you don’t get burned. If you were to use your hot stove to motivate you to take a trip to France, it wouldn’t work out so well.

On the flip side, you can be motivated by pleasure too much. People that are incredibly driven to thrill seek and experience all kinds of endorphin rushes while ignoring the risks are an example. They are always after the next rush, but ignore the pain or injury they may be causing themselves. Another example is the stereotypical businessman that never has enough money. Always more, more more, until they keel over from a heart attack due to the massive stress they didn’t notice because they were always thinking more more more.

One analogy is the driving with the rear view mirror. You need to have some pain to remind you of, to keep you motivated, and a solid expectation of the pleasure you’ll receive when you get there. If you compare the sizes of your windshield to your rear view mirror, that is a good metaphor for the balance between a motivation away from pain, and a motivation towards pleasure.

So how do you do that in real life? Make sure you create several different emotional filled visualizations when starting out on your program, whatever it is. For the diet and exercise example, some good negative away from motivations would be your naked body in the mirror, all your buttons popping off at a party, the scale breaking when you stand on it. Some good positive motivating visualizations that would pull you toward your goal is an imaginary photoshopped picture of your face on a supermodels body, or listening to all your friends tell you how great you look, or getting propositioned on the street (if you like that kind of thing).

When you develop a powerful push/pull engine, by using pain to push you towards your goal, and using pleasure to pull you at the same time, you’ll have a much better chance of succeeding.

By using just this one meta program, the away from or toward motivating strategy, many people have found it incredibly easy to consistently and repeatedly set and achieve goal they otherwise would never have accomplished.

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Success with NLP

Success with NLP

Integration of Parts

Come Together

I remember once I went to see a movie a while back with this girl I was dating. It was this particularly large multi plex with around thirty screens or so. When we went, we didn’t really have any specific movie that we wanted to see, just that we’d decided to see a movie. Talk about information overload. It took us almost half an hour to decide what to see. Even if I’d been there by myself, I would have likely taken me a while.

It reminded me of another time, one particularly long day at work. As soon as I got home, I decided I wanted fast food. A big bag of greasy, fatty, fast food. I didn’t eat lunch, it was Friday night, and all I wanted to do was gorge myself before falling asleep, most likely in front of the TV. So I jumped back in my car, and drove through my residential neighborhood until I came to the main road. Decision time. Turn right for big chain tacos or burgers, turn left for a couple smaller, but just as greasy and fatty, taco, burrito, and burger shops.

I must have sat there for about ten minutes trying to decide. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You have a general idea of what you want, but can’t decide on the specifics. Part of you wants to go this way, and another part of you wants to go the other way.

This can be frustrating when it comes to small things like fast food and movie choices, and you can’t really mess up by choosing one over the other. It’s not like I was going to go into a tailspin of depression if I got halfway through my burger and decided I really would rather have gotten a sack of tacos instead.

But what about bigger issues? What happens when you are conflicted on really important stuff? Or what happens if the choices are between action, and inaction, such as applying for a job, or asking out girl? What then?

Luckily, there’s a helpful NLP procedure that can get to the bottom of this. Imagine a discussion between a business owner, and a union leader. The business owner wants the cheapest labor, for the cheapest product, for the maximum profit. The union leader wants the most wages and benefits, for the least amount of work. If the business leader has his way, he’d pay everybody ten cents an hour, with zero benefits. If the union leader had his way, the blue-collar line workers would earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, with massive benefits and vacation time.

So what do they do? Both need each other, so they can’t really just walk away. They negotiate. They find solutions that will satisfy both their needs. Sometimes this takes a while, but usually, they eventually come to an agreement that will satisfy both parties. They workers might have to give up their dental plan, while the business owner might have to accept a higher cost of doing business, and therefore a smaller profit.

How about on a personal level? There’s a theory, or an idea, that people are made up of different metaphorical parts. So when you say that a part of you wants to eat tacos, and another part wants to eat burgers, that is actually an accurate description of what is going on.

And to resolve internal conflicts, you go about it the same way as a business negotiation. The cool part about this is most of the negotiating takes places unconsciously. All you have to do is set up the meeting between your parts.

The name of this procedure is called Integration of Parts. I know, creative, huh?

Here’s how you do it. Think of an internal conflict. Any conflict where you have an idea that one part wants to do this, and the other part wants to do that. Got it? Ok, good.

Now sit down someplace quiet, and someplace where there aren’t a lot of people. This looks a little bit strange for the uninitiated. Make sure to read through this a couple times so you really understand this. That way it will be easier to do later on.

OK. Sit down, take a deep breath. You are going to be talking to your different parts. For the example, I’ll use waking up early to exercise. Part of me wants to wake up early to exercise, while the other part wants to sleep in.

So I ask the part that wants to exercise if he’d like to come out for a bit. Wait for an internal “yes” or “no,” whatever that may be. I put that part in my right hand. Then I describe that part in as much detail as possible. Color, texture, weight, thickness, etc. Then I ask that part, what’s important about getting up early to exercise? Health. Ok. Then I ask him what’s important about that? Live longer. OK. Maybe one more. What’s important about that? Enjoy life more. OK, good. So I’ve gotten a pretty good idea of not only what that part looks and feels like, but what’s important to him. (Or it or however you want to refer to it/him/her).

Next, I ask if the part that wants to sleep in wants to come out. Make sure to keep holding the first in your right palm, don’t drop him!

I got through the same procedure with the part in my left hand, the part that wants to sleep in. First describe it, and then start asking the questions. Be sure to go slow, as these parts can sometimes be shy.

What’s important about sleeping in? It feels good. What’s important about feeling good? It makes me happy. And what’s important about feeling happy? I can enjoy life more.

AHA!

Both parts want the same thing, but they have two separate strategies to get there. Now for the integration.

Talk to them both at the same time. Explain to them that they both have the same things in mind. (Now you know why you should do this alone!)

Since they both really want the same thing, ask them if they’d like to join forces. To get together to make a new part, and have much more resources to get their goals met. If they say yes, then slowly allow your hands to come together, both palms up, both holding the parts. Slowly merge the two parts together as one palm slips under the other. Once the new part is formed, slowly bring it to your chest, and take a deep slow breath as you press the new part into your heart.

Take a few slow breaths, and allow the newly formed part to work out its new place.

That’s all you need to do consciously. Pay attention to your intuition over the next couple of days. You’ll likely come up with some ideas that seem totally obvious now about what to do regarding sleeping in or getting up early to exercise.

This is just one powerful “procedure” of NLP. To learn many more, that can have profound effects on your life, click on the banner below. There is no limit to the uses of NLP to improve your life, relationships, and finances.

Success with NLP

Success with NLP