By Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner
The myth of self-development and change says that it takes lots of effort, time and commitment. Psychology tends to describe difficulties, categorizing and searching for historical causes rather than providing practical solutions. NLP the New Technology of Achievement dispels these myths, and provides a guide to success.
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Basic exercises
- Movie Music – changing an unpleasant memory
- The picture frame – unlocking creativity in a difficult situation
- Circle of Excellence – having more confidence
Getting Motivated
We need a motivation strategy when we don’t feel like doing something but we want the results. People are motivated either toward what they want, or away from what they don’t want – our motivation direction. Both orientations have their downside. By combining the two, moving away from problems and toward goals you have a powerful strategy.
We lose motivation when we disconnect from our values. All of our goals, dreams, and desires are simply the vehicles for fulfilling our values. The way you think of an experience will determine whether you respond to it strongly or weakly.
Motivation exercises
- Identifying what makes an experience compelling – how your brain codes images.
- Increasing motivation using submodalities
- The New Behavior Generator as a toward motivation strategy
Finding your Mission
A mission is a sense of purpose that lures you into your future. It unifies your beliefs, values, actions, and your sense of who you are. We usually become aware of our values when they are violated. The second way to understand your values is through events that fulfill them
Mission creating exercises
- You are a learner – finding undeveloped talents
- Finding your life’s passion
- Reexamining your deepest values and principles
- Developing a Grand Vision of your purpose in life and identity as a person
- A specific direction for your grand vision
- Aligning yourself with your mission to gain congruence
Achieving your Goals
Traditional approach to goal setting says that outer achievement leads to inner success. This approach has some major pitfalls.
If your goals require other people to make changes, it places you in a vulnerable and helpless position. If you don’t have sensory specific evidence for what successful means, you may work at being success for all your life without feeling successful. Another typical difficulty with formulating goal evidence is to place it too far in the future.
Goal achieving exercises
- Utilizing your favorite hero/heroine to add to your goal resources
- Discovering the individual roles for your mission. Role identities are a key aspect of our belief system. The identity you take on can make or break the goal.
- Work roles for your mission
- Personal and family roles for your mission
- Citizen roles for your mission
- Creating a compelling future
- Developing a plan. Having a realistic, doable plan is a major difference between idle dreamers and visionary achievers
- Rapid rehearsal to refine your sequence of steps
- Taking action and making it happen
Rapport and Strong Relationships
Research shows that 83 per cent of all sales are based upon the customer liking the sales person. While rapport is short term, we must build relationships over time. Creating consistent feelings of rapport enables the highest quality relationships however.
Long-term relationships lead to further sales, referrals and business. Competency is the currency of long-term rapport – you need to be able to deliver the goods, agreements and promises. People come to us with their goals whether they are conscious of it or not. The ability to fulfill these goals ultimately determines their satisfaction with the relationship
Matching isn’t a gimmick to control others; it is a specific way for you to adjust your own behavior in order to get in sync with that person. All non- verbal behaviors are expressions of a person’s state of mind.
Rapport and relationship building exercises
- Making people part of your goals. It is relationships that sell things and get things done.
- Setting relationship goals to develop them
- Developing voice matching to increase rapport
Powerful Persuasion Strategies
Persuasive people find out others key values and demonstrate how what they’re offering satisfy these values. If it’s big, compelling and dramatic in your own mind, it will be expressed naturally in your actions, words, expressions, gestures and voice tone.
Persuasion exercises
- Signals for congruence and in congruence. The most important person to persuade is you.
- Creating inner alignment. Incongruence from inner conflict expresses itself in nonverbal behavior. People may interpret this as incompetence, dishonesty or confusion
Fears and Phobias
Everyone has fears that are out of proportion to the actual danger in some situations. Feelings come from how you think about things, not the things themselves.
For instance, depression can arise from dissociating from pleasant events and associating to unpleasant ones. The mental structure of grief is exactly the opposite of phobia – a person dissociates from a very pleasant memories and feelings of connection
Exercises for fears and phobias
- Using association and dissociation to deal with unpleasant feelings.
- Running a backward movie to process unpleasant memories
- The fast phobia technique to turn a fearful experience into a detached memory
- Taking other position as a basis for agreement and conflict resolution. Much of Gandhi’s wisdom was from his skill at taking different perspectives
- The neutral observer to improve communication
Building Self-Confidence
Negative Self-Evaluation can effectively derail you. For example making internal pictures of failing or a critical voice reminding you of what you are doing wrong. Sometimes however, we lack confidence because we don’t have the competence
Confidence building exercises
- Reframing an inner voice – an adaptation of The Six Step Reframe Technique
- Frustration into flexibility to increase behavioral choices
Self-esteem and Appreciation
Self-esteem is not due to the reality of how you actually are but to your internal representations of yourself, to the way you think about yourself. Someone who is completely alone can still feel criticized and self-conscious.
Feeling worthless leads to fewer choices, this leads to repeating ineffective behaviors. In turn, this leads to fewer successes and to feeling worthless. Feeling like a failure makes you play it safe.
Steve Andreas expands on this topic in Transforming Your Self – Becoming who you want to be
Self-esteem exercises
- Developing your self-esteem. Low self-esteem is typically associated with a self- image that is usually very intense in form and very negative in content
- The autobiography using multiple perspectives.
- NLP Swish pattern to create an objective favorable image of yourself
- Responding comfortably to criticism. To protect us from other’s criticisms we often warn or criticize ourselves
Positive mental attitude exercises
- A positive mental attitude
- Your personal timeline to organize past and future experiences
- The decision destroyer to reevaluate past, present and future
Peak Performance
We create our peaks by contrasting with what is not peak. Yet some people continue to build their careers and their happiness around the idea of a permanent peak of perfection. By celebrating only the peak, they may make the rest of their lives into long drawn out drudgery.
Peak performer’s key characteristics
- commitment to a large mission
- purposeful activity with real, measurable results
- teambuilding
- course correction
- changing with the times
- maintaining momentum
Peak performance exercises
- swish pattern for more resources and feelings of empowerment
- Peak performance imprint to affect beliefs about what is possible
- liberating your perspective for unlimited achievement
21 Day Unlimited Achievement Program
Consider what change, if you were to get it would make the most difference in your life? What small but significant change could you make in your day now that would encourage this?
What emotion, if you experienced it several times every day, would make all your life and work smoother and more wonderful?
Creating inevitable success means setting your brain on the path towards achieving your goal so that it’s working on it all day long, whether you are conscious of it or not. By amplifying more and more moments of personal excellence and placing them in your future, you will raise the overall quality of your life and the level of your performance
And finally, in our rush to attain, again and achieve more, it is easy to forget how far we have come