Apologes for the recent lack of updates. I’m working on a little side project which is taking up some of my processing time, based around providing some information on NLP for volunteers to sample my new skills, to give me some practice and help people rid themselves of some stuck states, unproductive behaviours and annoying phobias. Once it’s up and running I’ll put details here. In the meantime I might be cutting back on the volume of waffle here on my blog.
So last weekend was module 2 of my NLP practitioner course. In this module we concentrated on states and state management. This refers to the overall emotional physiological and psychological condition of an individual. It involves the beliefs, values, capabilities and behaviour within a context at a particular time. The concept of state can also be applied to a family, corporation or any social system. So within any day we will enter numerous different states, mostly affected by environmental influences; weather, traffic, music, TV, other people, our wellbeing, books, the radio etc. Many states we enter everyday are triggered by particular sensory experiences (tunes, places, words, people etc), and I’ve discussed this previously on this post. From a positive perspective, I wonder if you can recall a tune or a smell that reminds you of a happy time in your life. Well we make these associations consciously and unconsciously - the unconscious is constantly making associations (or anchors) on your behalf. Unfortunately sometimes they have a negative impact - a tune reminds you of a sad time in your life or a particular person annoys you without even speaking.
Well as quickly as these anchors can be made, they can be broken. One of the simplest ways to do this is to collapse anchors - to take a negative association and corrupt it with a good one. This has the effect of breaking, or diminishing the strength of the negative anchor, giving the person back some choice in how to behave.
There is also the very cool ability to design your own states. Collapsing anchors of different positive states can create a supercharged state of mind that can be instantly recalled by an internal anchor, such as a particular tune, or colour, image or situation. Sufficient practice at this can reduce the amount of time we spend in states caused by external sources, giving us control of our state of mind, our behaviour, and hence giving us much more control of any given situation.
Cool? You bet. Read on if you would like more info.
