FREE! NLP Articles

• Being Joyful  (scroll down)

• Synesthesia  (scroll down)

• Falling Out of Love Threshold (scroll down)

• Put Your Whole Self In (scroll down)

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Article #1: ‘Being Joyful’

by Bill Thomason (September 2007)

What would you have to give up to live in joy and to be happy? “The trick to being happy…,” Wyatt Woodsmall said while conducting an NLP training in Dallas, Texas in the 1990’s, “…is to remember to be happy.”  That sounds pretty simple. Could it be that simple and really work?  What you would have to give up is feeling bad, pressured, sick, insecure, hurt, and as if you had no choice about the how you feel.  What we know about how the neurological system works is that you can literally lose neurological connection to feelings of joy when you do not experience the state on a regular basis.

People report that it is easy to get focused on worry and responsibilities to the point that there seems to be no time to enjoy life and the relationships of those people we love and care about.  It seems to many people that there is just not room in modern life for the full expression of ‘joy’ and feelings of happiness.  They ask questions like, “How can I be happy when my finances are a mess?”  Or, “How can I be happy when my relationship is not working?”  And when we don’t experience and express those feelings we have less and less access to them.

Simply remembering to be happy may be an oversimplification, and there is an amazing wisdom there.  The more you do remember to be happy, the happier you become and more you allow yourself to experience joy, the most joy you will feel.  You literally build the neurological pathways for joy to be the common state you experience in your life.

The favorite NLP question, “Can you remember a time, a specific time when…you felt totally X’d?(insert an emotional response for 'X')” is a really great question to ask.  Of course, you can insert joyful, happy, loved, or any other positive emotion for ‘X’d.”  So, remember a time when you experienced being totally joyful. Can you?  Remember a specific time when you were in a moment, now, that you were feeling joyful.  How far go you have to go back in your life to access 'joyful.'  That’s right!  Assuming you are able to remember now and be in a moment like this for a while, stay right there, continuing to experience joy.

If necessary, find a similar emotionally charged state, like happy, loved, excited, confident, etc. to work with.  Sometimes changing the label for a word makes it easier to hook up with a particular event.  Trust yourself to find a positive event. The first that comes up is usually a good one.  You might think of an event like the birth of a child.  My personal experience when my daughter was born was more like ‘awe’ or a state of ‘enraptured,’ for example.  As you do access a moment in a similar state, check to see that the state is close enough to ‘joy’ that you can count it.  For me, that state of ‘awe’ goes beyond ‘joy’ and I could easily say that it includes joyful and happy.

Now, as you have accessed a state that is joyful, notice how long you can stay in the state.  If you find yourself slipping out of the state, put yourself back in long enough to notice where you feel that in your body.  Is it in your heart area or stomach, or in your head?  As you do allow yourself to be in that moment, feeling joyful, happy, in awe, ecstatic, enraptured or whatever other descriptor works, remember where you were then now, and notice what you see in this moment now.  And notice what you can hear as in voices or other sounds.  And notice what you can feel as in textures, temperature, softness, hardness, pressure, etc.  Allow yourself to experience the state with all your senses.  Include what you smell and taste if you can.  You are ‘anchoring’ the state.

Now step out of that moment and come back to the present.  Dis-associate from the experience for a moment. Look around focusing a couple of things around you.  In a moment I want to step back into the ‘joyful’ experience.  And before you go back into the joyful state, allow yourself to imagine that you are going to amplify the state by three times.  You are going to step back into the experience of being joyful and happy and you are going to allow yourself to amplify the feelings, including what you see and hear, by three times.  Ready?  Jump back into that experience and let the feelings surge through your body from the top of your head to the tips of your toes and allow the spreading sensations to fill your bod and beyond your body until you are vibrating with those good sensations of joy, love, awe, etc.  You are now in the experience three times more intense that before.  Step out.  Break state as you focus on at least of couple of things around you; in the present moment.  I’m going to have you step back into joy in a moment.

Now, imagine you are going step in and when you snap your fingers, you are going to intensify the state by three more times.  That’s right three times more intense than it was a moment ago.  OK, NOW! Jump back into the moment of ‘joy.’  Snap your fingers and say ‘yeessss!’, and allow yourself to amplify that state by three times.  Excellent!

Now, step out of the experience and refocus on the present.  Focus on a couple of things around you.  And as are in the present now, test your anchor by snapping your fingers one more time.  Whether you get the whole picture of the event or not, you can reproduced those good feeling, haven’t you?  You can reproduce this good state of ‘joy’ anywhere, anytime, can’t you?

And as you are now aware that you can experience feelings of joy and happiness, I want you to consider that the more times you allow yourself to go these good positive states, the more that your brain and nervous system make stronger and better connections for the feelings that you want to experience in your life.  So, what would you have to give up to experience joy more moments in your day than the negative states you were finding yourself in before you make the choice to experience joy in life.  That’s right!  What if you just decided to let go of the old negative feelings and be a happy and joyful person, now?  You can do it and you can choose to do it easily now.

Remember, to remember that you can fire your positive anchors anywhere, anytime.  You have choice and you have already learned to be proactive about the states you choose to live your life from as you find way to spend more moments of your day in positive, joyful states than you spent in less than resourceful states in the past.  And anytime you are noticing that you are not in ‘joy’, shift your state, because you can change the way you feel.

Imagine a moment in the future, a specific moment a month from now or three months from now. In this moment, notice where you are specifically.  Pick a place and be there now in this moment noticing that you have been living your life as a happy person who has been experiencing more and more joyful moments.  Now notice what is different in your life in this moment. How has the quality of your relationships changed, and how much more positive are you about your work or study?  Notice that you now spend more moments in joyful states than you could have imagined was possible now.  Excellent!

Bill Thomason

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Article #2: Synesthesia

by Bill Thomason

First published in the newsletter, August 2001 “Oh, I must have had synesthesia!”  Does that sound like a lapse in brain function, or maybe a lame excuse, or maybe a someone who has been watching too much Walt Disney. 

Actually, synesthesia is an important part of how people organize reality.  Let me give you some background in basic NLP before I explain about synesthesia.  We perceive the world that we live in through our five senses; sight, sound, feeing, taste, and smell.  NLP combines Olfactory (smell) and Gustatory (taste) together inside the Kinesthetic (feeling) category.  That leaves three categories. NLP people abbreviate the three primary sensory channels; Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic; to “V-A-K.” Part of what NLP co-founders, Richard Bandler and John Grinder recognized when they were developing NLP was that people tend to have a primary or “lead” representational system.  They tend to start with and stay in one modality more than the other two. 

In addition, behavior and language tends to match the system the individual is operating from at any particular moment.  An individual operating in Visual will use Visual predicates in their language. For example, a person in the Visual “lead representational system,” might say, “I see what you mean,” or “I am getting a clear view of the purpose of this exercise.” 

A person in Auditory might say, “It sounds right to me,” or “I hear what you are saying about that.”  And then the Kinesthetic person uses language like, “It feels right to me,” or “These are concrete examples, I feel I am getting a firm grasp of what you are proposing.”  Examples of Olfactory and Gustatory would include, “This is a very sweet deal,” or “Something smells fishy here.” 

When an activity in one representational (rep) system initiates activity in another rep system, that is synesthesia. A harsh sound (auditory), for example, can cause an individual to feel uncomfortable (kinesthetic).  I had a client who would feel nausea every time he remembered a tone of voice used by his Father.  That would be an auditory-kinesthetic synesthesia. 

To begin to understand synesthesia, read the following sentence to yourself.  “Tell me the flavor of what you were seeing when you first feasted your eyes on this fragrant land of rhythms and form not found in everyday experience.”  This sentence is an example of synesthesia.

Let’s take a look at the sentence. “Tell me” requires hearing and is Auditory. “Flavor” is something that you taste and is Gustatory/Kinesthetic. “Seeing” is Visual.  “Feasted your eyes” is Gustatory and Visual. “Fragrant” sounds like it should be smell or Olfactory.  “Rhythms” is about movement and it involves timing.  You experience rhythm with your body, which would be Kinesthetic and you also hear it, don’t’ you.  “Form” is seen but may also be felt.

Synesthesias make up a large part of how we make meaning from the world around us. Synesthesia is thought to be at the root of many complex processes including knowledge, choice, and communication (pg. 23, Neuro-Lingustic Programming). It is thought that many of the major differences between people’s talents, abilities, and skills are due to the order and sequence of these representational system correlations.

Synesthesia is a useful concept in business.  A primary concern in the business context is about how to install capabilities in employees.  Training is expensive and people are different from each other.  An experienced NLP Trainer can help people to unpack beliefs and habitual behaviors that are held together in synesthesias and then install new choices so that learning increases.

In private consultation, an NLP practitioner might help a client unpack a problem state held in place by a synesthesia.  By helping the client take apart a synesthesia and then re-represent the Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic parts of the problem state, the client can get some freedom of choice to notice that the individual parts do not have the same power.  With the synesthesia unpacked, the client can then reframe the problem state to a more resourceful state with new behaviors.

On the other hand, understanding synesthesias can help you communicate more effectively.  Did you notice that the sentence we started with above sounded somewhat poetic.  Poetry is filled with synesthesias.

A characteristic of the classic detective novel is language synesthesias.  The comedic group, Firesign Theater, spoofs private eye novels in a 1970's skit.  One of the lines goes, "Her words hit me like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist.”  What does that mean?   You can’t separate the words out and get a logical meaning from language like that, but somehow you know what the character is experiencing.  Outside the synesthesia, it would not make sense.  The individual words may seem to be describing opposites at time.  I just wonder how many ways you can think of now to use synesthesias to generate your experience more powerfully to achieve more of what you really want in life.

Bill Thomason

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Article 3:

How We Fall Out of Love - (A Threshold Phenomenon)

It is often the case that at least one of the partners is relationship has already reached a threshold before deciding to get coaching or therapy.  At the moment of threshold is a belief is formed that the relationship is over.  That makes things more difficult.  Typically the new belief is that the relationship is not longer worth it and that the partner cannot provide what is needed.  The problem is that at the moment of threshold memories change and previous associations become seriously distorted.  The person disassociates from the pleasurable experience and fully associates with the unpleasant memories.  The person may know that there were positive memories, but can no longer feel those feelings.  This phenomenon reshapes not only the past and present, but also the future, in that unpleasant associations become more real and significant.

You are likely to hear the person say things like, “It’s too late.” or “Now I know him for who he really is.”  Any evidence that is presented for a contrary view is reframed with, “Yes, he did and said nice things, but he didn’t really mean them.”

As bad as this experience is, it is even more sad and terrible for the partner who did not.  Everything that this person does will likely to met with resistance and it taken as just another example of how bad he is.  The partner may also sabotage and become angry at seemingly insignificant details regardless of efforts at reconciliation.  Everything seems to verify the belief that the partner is stupid, deceitful, devious, or ugly.   No matter what the person tries to do to make things better, they wind up being even more hurt by the reactions. 

Coming Back From the Threshold

Sometimes both partners have reached some type of threshold.  To bring people back from the threshold is obviously difficult and may take some time.  The old advice of never going to bed mad is solid if you can also teach the couple to find positive states to anchor with each other so that they never leave an emotional conversation with some kind of neutralizing of the negative feelings.  You will want to do as many things as possible to stack the deck on the positive side of the scales. 

Reinforce Positive Behaviors

Card Game:  Reinforce Everything That Supports the Behavior You Want More Of

Give each person 8 cards, 4 black and 4 red.  Each partner gives a black card every time something they do or say reinforces positive feelings and partners give a red card every time something that is said or done hurts or annoys or is insensitive. This is really about listening.  Assuming that you know what your partner wants is counter-productive to finding out.  Check it out.  Ask.  Be gullible and listen without judgement to whatever answers the partner gives.  Remember, they are sacred to the person and that the partner is allowing enough vulnerability to express himself is critically important.

Anchoring Positive States

Some states you will want to anchor include appreciation, being cherished, respected, etc. and then begin to take opportunities to trigger attraction, enticement, and whatever adds spice to the individual couple.

Four Qualities

1. Know what you want and find out the same from your partner.
2. Be willing to be flexible enough to express and manifest your partner’s specific wants and needs the way they want to have them expressed.
3. Have enough sensory acuity to know when your partner is in appreciation or has slipped out of the desired positive state of attraction, appreciation and habituation. 
4. Have or develop the skills to lead yourself and your partner back to attraction, appreciation and habitiuatioin.  

According to Leslie Cameron-Bandler in her book Solutions, as long as these qualities remain present, people in relationship can move toward and stay in incredible wonder and appreciation with comfort, security and richness.  These are characteristics of a healthy and fulfilling mature relationship.  

Article 4:

Put Your Whole Self In

By now, you must have heard me or someone else say that NLP is experiential. You can’t really get it from reading about it or thinking about it at a distance.  So, how do you get the best results from NLP patterns. 

I'm sure you remember the group sing-along tune and dance where everyone sings, "You put your left foot in; you put your left foot out; you put your left foot in and you shake it all about..." The song/dance then goes through a list t of body parts, ending with the revised chorus, "you put your whole self in..." Then there was the bumper sticker that said, "What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about."  That's right!  You have to put your whole self into NLP patterns to really get the experience  and the full result. 

We Are Pattern-Making Devices

The Life-Change Patterns of NLP are specific that have been successful helping people make the changes they say they want in life.  Since humans tend to be pattern-making devices, we are really good a developing habitual patterns of behavior.  The general tendency is really important to learning and for creating a sense of continuity in life.  Lots of things are possible because we can count on the behaviors and strategies that worked last time to work again and again. Once a habitual pattern is in place, we no longer have to use so much brain power to reproduce the same effects. Brain mapping techniques, like fMRI and SMt  brain scanning research shows many pathways light up for novel behavior and over time repetition shows that excitation narrows down to far fewer pathways.   Pattern making and pattern recognition are important to lots of positive behaviors. 

The downside, however, is that we sometimes outgrow the benefits of patterns and strategies that we have developed.  We’ve all experienced difficulty letting go of old patterns that no longer serve us.  A summer construction job in college exposed me to other workers using bad language and I got used to cursing.  I felt a kind of power from the impact of those words that was honestly hard to give up.  When college started the next semester, I had to real difficulty dropping the bad language.  As an NLP Coach, I have worked with clients to become non-smokers, for example.  The behavior that a client reported working so hard to model or mimick from peer group members as a teen-ager, had become unattractive over the years and extremely costly to overall health.  These people pay me to help them end the old now unwanted behavior.

State Creates Ability - Master Your States

NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming, as the term was coined in the 1970's by cofounders Richard Bandler and John Grinder, is extremely useful in helping people make positive life change and in gaining mastery over the moment to moment states that determine effectively in life situations. 

If a person is calm, inwardly focused, breathing slowly with relaxed muscle tone and looking down a lot, he may be in an excellent state to practice meditation or read a book. However, if that person is actually in a raft on a river approaching a class-4 rapids with the sound of approaching white water becoming almost deafening, there could be problems if he does not adjust his state.  He is likely to miss important clues that would otherwise prevent him from slamming the raft into a wall or hitting a boulder that could flip the raft.  For humans, survival has often depended on how well internal state matches the reality of a given situation.

Case In Point

Not long ago, I had a woman attending my introductory NLP class who was educated as a psychotherapist.  She understood most of the basic ideas I presented about NLP and she was relating what was being presented to her from her cognitive understanding.  I noted as the evening progressed, that she took a few things more literally than I intended them.  When I calibrated others in the class they were generally not taking things that way.  I concluded it was not some error I was making, but simply a processing style on her part.  She seemed to be black-and-white, more concrete thinker and regardless of my request, she was not putting herself in the pictures I was asking her to imagine.  We were OK as long as she could keep the conversation theoretical and very general.  When I asked her to think of a specific example of a particular type of problem behavior, she had difficulty picking a single experience.  It was almost as if she could not separate one experience from others of that type. 

I asked her again to make a picture. Her eyes focused out several feet away and down to the left just a little and she put her hands up, palms outward, pointing off in the general direction of the picture she seemed to making in her head.  Even when I explained my request more slowly, the woman had difficulty understanding that she would have to imagine differently than her normal way of processing information and put herself into her pictures if she expected to get the results.  She seemed to be able to make pictures in her head, but she was clearly keeping the experience at a distance.  It’s a fairly common defense mechanism.  Some people literally picture events at a distance as a life strategy so they don’t have to experience the messy feelings from such events. These people tend to be disconnected from both positive resourceful experience as well as unresourceful experience and others evaluate them as distant or unapproachable.  NLP makes no value judgment.  There are upsides and downsides to the behavior.  In this case, the downside was that the woman did not give herself a chance to learn something new.

When the woman appeared to be a little agitated that I should be asking her again to put herself in the picture, I gave up and moved on thinking that she might learn something from seeing someone else go through the change pattern.  Others were involved and fully associated to doing the group NLP Pattern at the time.  Looking back on the situation, I wish I had pursued the issue with the woman, because I later found out she told someone that she thought the meeting content was too simplistic for her level of sophistication.  I left her needing to come up with an explanation that worked for her. 

The Gold Is In the Breakdowns

Sometimes I learn most from breakdowns.  Clearly the woman would have benefited from the NLP Life-Change Pattern, as did the others in the group, if I had not given up so quickly.  I believe she went away having missed an opportunity to learn.  Rather than experience learning that she failed at the process, the woman had come up with an explanation for the mismatch.  I am sorry for that and then again, I have learned something important as a trainer.  I’m not likely to give up on someone so quickly in the future.  I’m not second-guessing myself and I believe, as an NLP Practitioner and Trainer, that if I had been curious enough, I would have found a way that she could experience success with the pattern.  I have to ‘put my whole self in’ to do that. 

What are your thoughts?
Contact bill@nlpskills.com  

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Ask about how to purchase NLP Life-Change Patterns and other NLP Articles by Bill Thomason. 

For NLP Success Coaching sessions at the office or by telephone or internet chat with Bill Thomason call 602 321-7192 or email: nlpskills@earthlink.net . 

Locally Serving: NLP Arizona, NLP Phoenix, NLP Scottsdale, NLP Sedona, NLP Tempe, NLP Carefree, NLP Cave Creek, NLP Chandler, NLP Tucson, NLP Paradise Valley, NLP Mesa, NLP Prescott, NLP Flagstaff, NLP Southwest USA.  Bill Thomason is available for coaching and training worldwide and has worked extensively throughout the US and Canada.

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