BrainCram

The 4-Step Success Formula requires you to have an awareness of how your behaviour is affecting the environment and your progress towards your goals. NLP captures the idea of being aware of your surroundings and the impact you are having under the blanket term of ‘Sensory Acuity’.

Essentially, your performance as an NLP practitioner is dependent upon how well you notice the things that change around you. This is the essential feedback that you get when you change any behaviour. Just like a thermostat turns the heating on or off based on the temperature it senses, you must modify your behaviour based on the response you get.

As you increase your sensory acuity, you will begin to notice more increasingly subtle details about yourself, your environment and the people with whom you communicate. This increased attention to detail will help you to improve your actions and so get the results you want with more accuracy.

For example:

If you are selling a guitar and the customer says I just want to feel how it plays. You need to understand that this person needs to feel the instrument to get a sense of it, rather than listen to the tone or look at the shine off the rosewood neck.

By becoming more aware of the words people use you will more readily understand their ‘map of the world’ (see presuppositions) and be more able to communicate with them.

For the next few days, open your awareness a little more and expand your view of the world and the things that go on in it.

The next positing will take make you more aware of how sensory acuity can be of benefit as we move onto Representational Systems.

Dare to Aspire

As my earlier post on previously stated, NLP treats beliefs as arbitrary. That means you can adopt any belief that you like and just accept that it is true. SO why no create beliefs that are empowering.

NLP has a basic framework of beliefs that empower its practitioners and these are called PRESUPPOSITIONS.

Presuppositions are the foundation beliefs that NLP uses to define how the brain works. The key ones include:

The map is not the territory – We create a representation of the world in our minds and this map, no matter how rich a representation it is, could never be the world. It is like eating the menu rather than the food that is described upon it.

Experience has structure - Our thoughts and memories have a pattern to them, a way of encoding them in our neurology. If we change the pattern, we change the effect our memories and experience have on us.

What one person can do, another can learn to do – If we learn an achiever’s mental map, we make it our own. This increases our ability to more readily adopt the achiever’s successful behaviour.

Mind and Body are part of the same system – A change in our mental state changes the state of our body. And a change in the state of our body changes our mental state.

People already have all the resources they need – Mental images, inner voices, memories and sensations are the building blocks of our experiences. We can build these blocks into strategies and patterns that create new effects we want in our life.

You cannot NOT communicate – People are social creatures and we are perceptive to the behaviour of others. So even if you don’t say a word, you will not be able to avoid communicating something in a shrug, a sign, even a facial expression.

The meaning of your communication is the response you get – Others make sense of the world through their own mental map. So when you communicate, it is not always what you think you said that is communicated. Others filter that message and often hear something different, sometimes considerably different from what you meant to say.

There is positive intent behind every behaviour – People rarely act without gaining some benefit, even if that behaviour seems thoughtless or hurtful. A yell may be to ward of danger, so look for the positive intent in actions.

People are always making the best choices available to them – Given our memories, knowledge skills and experiences, we always make what we consider to be the best decisions we can.

There is no failure, only feedback – If something you are doing isn’t working, use that knowledge as feedback and change what you are doing.

If you consider these principles as being true and adopt them into your personal philosophy, then you will be making a conscious decision about being more open to the differences around you and so increase your awareness of people’s behaviour. That increased awareness will increase your flexibility and given you more options for improving your daily interactions with your friends, family and colleagues.

Dare to Aspire

NLP considers beliefs to be arbitrary. They are not truth or facts but merely mental constructions that make us act a certain way. Beliefs are the framework that makes us behave in a certain manner. Change the belief and you open up new possibilities in the behaviours you can adopt.

Nobody believed that the mile could be run in less than 4 minutes and so no one broke that psychological barrier. After Roger Banister ran the mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds (in 1954), he changed the beliefs of athletes around the world and 16 more runners broke the 4 minute mile by 1957!

Everyone knew that the Earth was the centre of the heavens under Copernicus made observations that suggested the Sun was central. We now know that the Sun is only one of millions of star circling the centre of a galaxy, which is only one galaxy in millions in the universe.

All that had changed in both cases was the belief that people held.

By changing your beliefs, you can change the way you respond and act and unblock the limits that you used to have.

One way to change beliefs is through visualisation.

Think of something that you know is absolutely true, something that you believe deeply. This probably manifests as an image in your mind in a certain place, at a certain distance and of a certain size. Hold that thought for a moment and remember where it is, what distance and what size it is.

Now ‘clear the screen’ in your mind by thinking of the black screen at the end of a movie.

Next hold an image in your mind of you doing the thing that you currently don’t quite believe you can do. Run the activity forward like a movie playing in your mind. Make it appear in the same place, at the same distance and at the same size as the belief you truly believe in. Repeat this visualisation several times, each time ‘clearing the screen’.

After a short period, you will find that your belief of this activity is much more certain.

Technically, this is achieved by moving your desired belief into the same sub-modalities as a certain belief, so adopting the characteristics of a belief your truly believe.

A master of this technique was Mohamed Ali, who considered his belief change visualisation to be a way for creating ‘future history’.

Try this technique and see how much more you can achieve.

Dare to Aspire

Knowing what you want is the first step in the NLP 4-Step Success Formula. Looking at the gap between where you are and where you want to be is the best way of identifying your outcomes and the path to your success.

Perhaps you want a promotion, or to have more money or responsibility.

Perhaps you want a better relationship with your family or spouse.

Whatever it is, there is clearly a gap between where you are and where you want to be or you wouldn;t even be considering change.

The NLP 4-Step Success Formula is a good approach to adopt in achieving your success, but it does require you to have some fairly well defined outcomes.

The characteristics of outcomes are very important and NLP defines 9 criteria to consider when defining your outcomes:

1. Positive – Your outcomes should be framed in a positive way so that you are moving towards a goal rather than away from a painful situation. Eg state your outcome as ‘I will be have a positive bank balance’ rather than ‘I will be free from debt’. The first lets your brain focus on finding more money while the second just registers the term ‘debt’ in your unconscious mind which then works towards creating more debt.

2. Detail – Your outcomes should be vividly defined so that you will know when you have achieved them. You need to see movement from where you are to where you want to be, and you need to know when you get there.

3. Specific – Your should be specific on where, when and with whom you want to achieve your outcome. This builds clarity for the unconscious mind to focus on.

4. Resourced – You need to have or be able to acquire the resources you need for your outcomes. These are normally in the form of Money, People, Personal characteristics, Items and examples of behaviour to follow.

5. Self control and discipline – You need to remain committed to the outcomes you have defined and applying effort towards achieving them.

6. Ecology – Your outcomes need to fit into your life without any negative impact on you, your family and the environment.

7. Aligned to your identity – Your outcomes need to be coherent with who you are. That doesn’t mean you cannot reinvent yourself, but it does mean that the outcomes you chose need to reflect the person you truly are or want to be. An outcome that isn’t consistent with your underlying values and beliefs is unlikely to endure.

8. Coherent – Your outcomes need to be aligned with each other. There is little coherence in outcomes that are opposed. For example, if Outcome 1 is to ‘relax more by drinking alcohol’ and Outcome 2 is ‘Increase the quality of my health’ then one or both of these outcomes will not be achieved.

9. Put into action – Anthony Robbins suggests that you need a massive action plan to achieve outcomes. I suggest that a ‘Managed Action Plan’ is a better way to go. Too much change too quickly can be disturbing and may not be very ecological (point 6 above). Better to achieve outcomes in a manner that is controlled and at a pace that you can assimilate and consolidate rather than making too radical a change with a negative impact.

By setting your outcomes in line with these criteria, you are more likely to achieve them and to maintain that change for the long term.

Dare to Aspire