Full Satisfactioion Model: Selling/Persuasion context
1. Of all the _________ you have owned (or seen, heard, or read about) which one comes closest to being JUST RIGHT FOR YOU?
2. What did you like about it? (Remember these and repeat back as soon as possible, take notes, make a list, and/or ask Get to the Real Issue questions as is appropriate)
3. What would be necessary to make it JUST RIGHT FOR YOU? (Listen for Criteria. CRITERIA are values-based items that your client wants satisified)
4. What would a _________ that had (short list of Criteria from 1 or 2) do for you?
5. If you had a _______ that has all that (list of Criteria) and allowed you to (answers from 4) would that make it JUST RIGHT FOR YOU?
6. If you had a ________ that had all that (Criteria), is that the one you would buy (choose) today?
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Get to the Real Issue
When you hear a complaint or limiting belief, ask:
1. "How's that a problem?" Ask again until you reach the most important value criteria under the complaint or limiting beleif. Ask, "How's that a problem for you personally?" or "How specifically is that a problem for you?"
2. So, what's really important to you is (state value elicit from 1)" Look and listen for a congruent response.
3. "When you have (underlying value criteria from 1) what will that do for you?" Ask until you are confident you have the whole list.
Note: Now you can transition to the close or initiate a brain storming session to elicit possible solutions.
(Call Bill for more information 602 321-7192)
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Achieve Your Goals as Outcomes
Purpose:Achieving your goals as outcomes assures you will stay resourceful, are more likely to find solutions to any problem, and that you will not give up.
Question to consider: A question to ask yourself is: "What would you do in your life if you knew you could not fail?” The following is a quote credited to Thomas Edison and it is a presupposition of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).
"There is no such thing as failure; only feedback!"
The basic idea about achieving goals in NLP is that there is popular wisdom that you either achieve your goal or you fail to achieve. The truth is, you are going to get an outcome no matter what happens. Act or don't act; you get a consequence that is an outcome. It may be the outcome expected or it may not be. Regardless of what happens, you are getting valuable feedback, so why not get excited about achieving your outcome and keep varying your approach until you do acheive it.
Perceptual Positions
NLP concept prerequisite: For this exercise, remember that there is 1st, 2nd, and 3rd perceptual positions; or Self, Other, and Observer. Note: Although all three are outlined below, you will only need 1st and 3rd Postions for the exercise.
First Position (Self): You are in first position, looking out through your eyes, where you are sitting/standing right now as you read these words.
Second position (Other): Is when you imagine fully being another person, looking through their eyes, moving the way they move, and processing from their beliefs and ways of being in the world.
Third position (Observer): Is when you imagine being in any other point of view that is outside the 1st and 2nd position interaction. Note: This is a little like the “fair witness” from the book “Stranger in a Strange Land,” by Robert Heinlein. Fair witness is a detached non-emotional point of view that makes no assumptions about what is being perceived. Oberserver could be a mentor, angel, or coach.
The pattern:
Choose an OUTCOME (goal).
Write down your goals stated as a well-formed outcome. (what you want; not what you don't want, present time, action language oriented, free of negatives and/or wimp words, self generated, free of comparatives like more, less, better, enough.)
Choose a Mentor (3rd Position). From the point of view of your caring mentor or person you admire, look back at yourself and write down the resources the are available to that you, but were not being accessed. Communicate the resources you are aware of from 3rd Position Observer to 1st Position Self. From 1st Position, thank the Observer and receive the resources fully and completely and say "thank you" to the Observer.
Now notice what resources you now have that can help you to be more creative to learn and develop the additional resources you might need to achieve your outcome. Write these down additional resources you can now be aware of. Consider the resources that are now available and imagine bringing them into yourself. Fully integrate and allow yourself to experience having the resources you have created.
Repeat adding resources until you are congruent, excited, confident about your outcome.
Take immediate action today in the next few moments to hours toward your outcome. Do what is necessary to take the next step toward your outcome within hours or days, until the outcome is acheived. Remember to vary your approach until you arrive and enjoy the journey at every step along the way.
Reward yourself. What can you do right now today, before you sleep tonight for your decision to achieve your outcome? Reward yourself, take action and vary your approach as necessary; reward yourself and take more action until...
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Change Bad Feelings
This pattern is adapted from my review of Richard Bandler's book, Get The Life You Want. It uses submodality shifts(bright vs. dim, near vs. close, color vs. black & white, warm vs. cool, etc.) to change the emotional reaction a person has to someone in his or her life. It is simple and elegant. Just follow the suggestions below
1. Think of a person who annoys you. Access an image of the person who annoys, irritates, or intimidates you. Imagine what this person looks and sounds like when he/she is doing what he/she does when you feel the 'bad feelings.' Notice where you feel these feelings most in your body as you allow yourself to think of the person and whatever situation is attached to those feelings.
2. Change the submodalities. (Visual) Make the image of the person go black and white and allow it to shrink smaller and smaller to about 1/8th of the original size. Notice any changes in the intensity of internal feeling and body sensations as you change how you represent the picture to yourself. You can put a clown's face on the person, and a big red nose that you can squeeze and hear the 'honk, honk' sound. Put big clown's shoes on the person and notice how he/she has to waddle around with those big shoes. If you are laughing, that is perfect. The more ridiculous, the better in affecting you representation and feeling about the situation.
3. (Auditory) Hear the person talk in a Mickey Mouse voice now. You can use a Donald Duck, Sylvester the Cat or Yosemite Sam voice if you prefer.
4. (Kinesthetic/feeling) Notice that you feel different. Break state. Come back to present and look around the room or other place where you are and focus on a couple of objects, or remember what you had for lunch yesterday. Then think of the person again and notice that you still feel different. You now represent the person to yourself differently and you can check your feelings later today or tomorrow or the next day and those feelings will continue to be significant less intense or you may start laughing immediately each time. You can expect that there will be a future time you are exposed to the person and you will never have those old feelings in the same way ever again, can't you? Imagine that. Seriously, think of a situation in the future when before you would have had the old feelings, and now you have a completely different feeling.
5. Notice that you will feel differently now, and in the future you will notice that you have more of the good feelings that you want to have in similar situations with the person and others who may have been difficult for you in the past. See, hear, and feel yourself situations in the future where you have the good feelings. Allow yourself to remember to continue the good feelings out into the future. Great! Excellent!
1. Identify a Recurring Negative Suggestion. Sort for one that someone told you, or if you don't remember who, find one you say to yourself often. When you have fully accessed the negative suggestion and notice how you feel about it, break state.
2. Think of a person you distrust. This is a person who told a lie and remember how they told the lie.
3. Notice the Submodalities of the lie and the negative suggestion. Access fully and then break state.
4. Move the negative suggestion into the submodalities of the lie. Change each visual, auditory, and Kinesthetic submodaly to match the lie. Snap it into place (you might imagine the sound of Tupperware sealing).
5. Test. Think about the suggestion with the submodalities of the lie.
1. Think of useful suggestions you want to believe, 2. Imagine your past time line coming from behind, through you in the present, and forward in front or you into the future. Float back along your time to when you were young and find a person person who was convincing and whom you believed saying the useful suggestion(s) to you. 3. Let that in. Receive it. Evolve forward with the useful belief in yourself. Notice the way you feel in light of the changes you have made, 4. When present, repeat with different suggestions, notice each time that you feel better about the past and about who you are in the present.
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The NLP Love Yourself Pattern
Purpose: to increase self worth, build a more complete identity, and become more integrated as a person. It is also good for ego strengthening.
Description: this process is designed to help a person move from SELF CONTEMPT to SELF LOVE. At the very least the process is useful in developing self appreciation.
Credit: This pattern is adapted from Suzi Smith and Tim Halbom by L Michael Hall.
Note: the process is best with a partner but can be done alone. If there is any difficulty after #2, find someone to work with will be empathetic and encourage you to access useful representations. .
Access a 'Loving Model.' a. Remember an example a time when you were doing something you deeply enjoyed. If you are not already experiencing that you are in the event, move into it and notice the feelings and thoughts. b. Now, think of a time when you experienced that someone cared about you intensely, even if for only a moment.
Describe the 'loving model.' Describe this person' qualities and attributes. Explore how you know you are loved by this person (loving model).
Take 2nd position. Imagine you can now float into the body of the other person (loving model) and notice what you SEE. Then notice what words you are using as the 'loving model.' And notice the feelings toward you. Notice how you look through the eyes of the the 'loving model' as you become aware of how how this enhances your experience for knowing you are loved and loveable.
Anchor the feelings. Go into the state of being loved by this person or 'loving model.' Anchor visual, then auditory, and then kinesthetic.
Experience receiving love. Fully receive the love sent to you from teh other person. Experience what being looked at with loving eyes is like. Receive the loving feelings. Appreciate your loveable qualities. From 1st position, now, what do you see, hear, feel. Allow yourself to experience love and acceptance.
Anchor and Amplify the state. Notice how you created the state of feeling 'loveable.' Recall all the information about yourself. Take it in. And then enrich the sense of your loving self.
Test and Future Pace. Imagine a situation that in the past might have had you respond in some unresourceful manner toward yourself, but now you have these loving model feelings as your resource state and imagine a movie of yourself interacting in the future movie with the new resources. Notice what is different now. Pick another example in the future and experience it with the new resources. Congratulate yourself for making these changes now.
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Release Your Grief
- by Bill Thomason
Grief is very deep emotional pain. It can be the result of the death of a loved one or a particularly difficult life circumstance accompanied by feelings of deep personal loss. Grief is a natural part of the healing process. However, the grief process can be complicated by guilt, shame, anger or other negative emotions. Until the grieving process is completed an individual may be having difficulties in life in general as they are trying to work over the top of these deep and unresolved feelings.
An individual may not be able to easily experience the positive feelings in life that used to be associated with a person who is no longer accessible or after an event like a tornado or hurricane. These people often report being shaken to their roots and they cannot come to grips with the reality. When an individual does not allow themselves to complete the grieving process for whatever reason, it is not uncommon for them to report difficulty coping with daily activities even after many years have passed.
One of the problems with grief is that the individual may have internal representations of the loss that are vivid, bright, harsh sounding, painful, and felt deeply to the exclusion of positive thoughts. When the grief process is not allowed to occur in a timely manner, an individual can experience more and more disassociation from the positive feelings that used to characterize their previous life. The focus on negative emotional experience tends to delete the possibility of emotions like gratitude and appreciation. These people tend to 'mismatch' any suggestions that they get on with their lives or allow healing to occur. Some people even say they want to heal, but believe they cannot or don't know how.
The process below was developed by Robert Dilts (1995):
Identify and associate into the experience of separation, sadness, and/or grief.
Break State. Focus on a couple of things in the area around you. Move to another spot, separate from the first.
Allow yourself go into a centered and resourceful state. Remember a time, a specific time when you were aligned and wise and allow yourself to experience this state. Break state, again.
Choose 2 mentors who will act as 'guardian angels.' Select mentors who will always be with you from this time forward.
With your hands, sculpt a life size 'hologram' of the person you are missing. Create the person (or event) as you want him/her (it) to be.
Check for any negative or painful memories. Tie balloons to them and let them float away. (Images to the outside of the balloons, voices to the inside)
Breathe life into the hologram and give your new mentor the voice you would like him or her to have.
Ask the new mentor, "What is the gift you have been wanting to give me all this time?" Go to 'second position' with your new mentor. Be that person, standing in their shoes, looking from their eyes and answer the question. Create a symbol for the gift you receive.
Return to 'first position.' Associate back to yourself, and answer the question, "What is my gift for you?" Create a symbol for your gift to the other person.
Exchange gifts with your new mentor and connect your hearts with an eternal silver thread of light.
Honor the gift you have received by finding someone else in your life to share it with. Future pace how you will share this gift and keep it alive. Use your new mentor as a resource to help you share this gift.
Imagine your new mentor being welcomed by your other mentors.
Bring your gift, your new mentor and your other 'guardian angels' into the situation where you had previously experienced separation, sadness, or grief, and notice how your experience is transformed.
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Stored Pain and Negative Emotion
This article contains a process that is designed for people who have a lot of stored negative emotion. From a hypnotic point of view, physical pain is equivalent or at least similar to emotional pain. More than just a metaphor, I teach the following process as a tool for clients to practice at home to teach them to release old unwanted pain and negative emotion. In my Core Decisional Repatterning(c) work, and sometimes with other NLP patterns, I find people who have so much stored pain and emotion that it is difficult to get them to focus on the work at hand. In setting up the process, I may take a client through a parts negotiation (like in a 6-step reframe) if I detect any resistance to the process.
The idea is that in our western culture, people tend to stuff emotion instead of expressing it fully. As a metaphor, the emotional body generalizes to the physical body. In a healthy system, you take in food. Your body separates the waste and you utilize the energy. This is called homeostasis. Anything not used up in this process becomes toxic and may lead to physical dis-ease. The same would be true of the emotional body. When we are exposed to an experience, there is a bio-chemical response. In the healthy system, we release or discharge any negative emotion from that experience, producing an 'emotional homeostasis.' If there is unresolved emotional residue, you might here people say they 'stuffed the emotion.' One might call that, 'emotional constipation.' In a healthy situation, the emotion if fully discharged or transformed to a higher vibration.
The process below is designed to be ONE way (hopefully of many) that a person can learn to release negative emotion. Finding one way, and practicing a few times, can cause the process to generalize to lots of other ways of releasing emotion that might have been stored over a lifetime. Tad James and others refer to SEE, Significant Emotional Experience as way to explain the 'Gestalt' of an emotional chain going back in time to an earliest time an individual remembers an emotionally charged experience. The problem is we often respond to present events as if they were connected to all the other negatively charged events going back in time. The response, then, is often out of proportion to the issue in present time.
Here's the process:
Release Pain and Stuffed Emotion
Find a comfortable place to sit as in a recliner or chair. Turn the lights down low and relax, focusing on your breathing, at least 3 long slow deep breaths and then begin to notice where there is pain in your body. (It has been suggested that there is pain/discomfort somewhere in the body at any time.) As you do notice pain in your toes(slowly pace through each part of the body), feet, balls of your feet, top of your feet, ankles, calves, etc, allow that pain to begin to move up your legs, through your calves and lower leg, into your knees. Allow the sensation of pain to come up into and through your lower legs. If the pain in your body had a color, what color would that be?
Continue to let the pain move up and through your body. All the pain, everywhere in your body moving upward through your hips, abdomen, organ, lower back, middle back, and notice your breathing as the pain continues to move up through your upper back, and your neck. Notice that as you shift your breathing, swallow, and any movement, involuntary movements in your jaw. Notice now that you can control the pain/the emotion. The pain is your emotion and it is moving up into your head. Notice any change in color as your allow the pain from your entire body to center in your head. Notice the color as it comes into your head and then allow that pain, that emotion, that color, to become a sound. Let that sound grow and grow until it wants to get out. Make the sound that is the pain, emotion, color in your head. Make that sound. If it is a scream, scream. If it is crying, let the tears come. If the sound it a kind of breath or a hiss, or a clicking, make the sound. Whatever the sound, make it. Make the sound more and do it again. Do it again, louder and more intense. Keep making the sound. Make the sound more, louder. Keep making the sound until you can not make it anymore. When you think you are done, make yourself do it more, let it come, more and more, until you cannot do it any more.
Now, breath and notice what is in the place of that sound, that pain and emotion. 'Imagine that 'joy' is what the universe is made of and you have created a vacuum that pulls the joy, the relief into you. Allow yourself to feel the difference. Let yourself feel the joy that has taken the place of the pain and negative emotion that were there before knowing that as you have verbalized your pain and negative emotion, you have released it forever. Let it go and feel the joy.
Do this process daily or more that once per day, until... If you think you have released it all in one sitting, do it again, until..
Click here to purchase the Release Your Pain audio CD by BIll Thomason.
To schedule sessions with an experienced NLP professional, you can get facilitation with this and other patterns and processes in private one-on-one coaching sessions. Call 602 440-3578V/M or 602 321-7192.
NOTE: Another NLP pattern for grief is credited to Steve and Connierae Andreas (1989). The pattern uses submodalities in a two stage process to transform grief into a way of reconnecting with the part of the person that was lost. This is very similar to the Forgiveness Pattern. Also similar to Soul Retrieval in the Shaman's Mind Training program.
Purchase the Forgiveness Pattern CD for $20
Purchase the Forgiveness Pattern 30-page manual for $29.95.
Or purchase the complete Thomason Method - Forgiveness Model and the Forgivenss Pattern with CD and manual in attractive 3-ring binder at the NLP Skills store.
For more information or to set up an NLP Coaching session, contact Bill Thomason, 602 321-7192.
