Eleven day Training Intensive

Condoning or Condemning?

Keeping things simple can be a comfort. But sometimes comfort does nothing to move you forward. It doesn’t challenge you, or help you to learn new perspectives, and create new possibilities for yourself.

I am talking about the assessments we make of others.

You ask yourself, “Do I agree with you?  Do I accept you? Am I safe around you?”

If  you conclude, “I disagree. I don’t trust you.” You might also inadvertently add “I don’t understand you,” “I don’t like you,” or even “Because your belief system and values are different from my own there may be something wrong with you.”

Sometimes the most interesting thing can be to spend time with someone who is completely different from you. It may challenge you. It may be uncomfortable and edgy. But it  may teach you something new about yourself and your own presuppositions and assumptions.

If you always need others to agree with, it may be because you lack confidence in your own perspectives; or it maybe that you’re just taking yourself too seriously.

If you have only two options:

1. Agreeing, condoning, liking, approving, trusting, or
2. Disagreeing, condemning, disliking, disapproving, mistrusting.

then you may be missing a range of other possibilities:

• challenging your assumptions and strategies
• refining your communication skills
• deepening your empathy
• getting over yourself
• having more fun
• learning to be more flexible
• deepening your perspectives

In the world of NLP it is axiomatic that to help other effect genuine change it’s essential to respect their model of reality. Otherwise, how do you imagine you can genuinely communicate with them, let alone influencing them? Beyond that, it’s also to your benefit to do so.

Respecting others’ model of reality doesn’t mean condoning that model; but it does save you the aggravation of having to oppose it, condemn it, or persuade them they are wrong.

What sort of anxiety would lead you to spend all your time only with those who agree with you anyway?

Stretch a little. Spend a little time with people who make you uncomfortable and notice some of your patterns which, once noticed, you can change – if you choose.

You don’t need to know anything about Neurolinguistics, or NLP, to do this. It may just be an expression of you own evolving emotional intelligence.

Eleven day NLP and Hypnosis Training Intensive at Manzanita Village

• A friend in Los Angeles told me today, "I met someone who does NLP. They were really weird. They kept looking at me in a way that was really intense and off-putting."

• Other people tell me that NLP feels like a cult. Apparently they have encountered newly-certified practitioners of NLP who were so excited about the tools they had learned that they couldn't curb their enthusiasm.

• Some people have experienced NLP as inappropriately applied sales techniques, used by unscrupulous sales people, to persuade customers to buy things they didn't need, or want.

No doubt there's truth in all of this. Anything that works well is going to have a downside.

For many of us, life is almost unthinkable without the convenience of cars and airplanes; yet both cause incalculable damage as pollutants, and kill people whenever they crash. Name anything you like, and you can discover ways in which it is misused, or causes harm – language, love, religion, food. At one time or another, everything has been used to gain power over others.

As for NLP, one of the misunderstanding common among beginning practitioners and clients alike, is that it consists of a series of techniques or patterns. There are certainly a lot of them. There are even books available with compilations of hundreds of such patterns. But this misses the main point. NLP is not primarily about techniques or patterns. If you imagine that this is what it consists of, then it's certainly going to be weird, and somewhat unsatisfying, a never-ending accumulation of strange exercises. So what is NLP?

More than anything else, NLP is – the mindset that recognizes that any behavior or internal mental state can be changed.

To be effective, an NLP practitioner must believe this in their bones, and they must then communicate it to their client, by whatever means are available to them. Only then can the tools and patterns be used effectively to cement the transformation that has already begun.

Are those patterns and tools necessary? Absolutely! But the initial acceptance of the possibility of unprecedented transformational is a prerequisite. Otherwise the tools are mere tricks; and the client will end up with yet another reason to believe that nothing can help them overcome the problems for which they came to see you.

As a hypnotherapist, my practice changed completely as soon as I recognized the vital importance of my explanation, and demonstration, of the power of the mind to effect previously unimaginable transformation.

Once the client has truly absorbed this, then the work begins. Once the reality of the possibility for almost unlimited transformation is understood by the client, then they can imagine a new destination for themselves. The rest of the work has to do with planning the journey, removing the roadblocks, negotiating the inevitable diversions, and undertaking the journey itself. Is it always as simple of that? Actually, yes.

There are, of course,  many different sorts of roadblocks, and many ways of approaching the journey, many possible roads to take; as many roads, in fact, as there are individuals taking that journey towards congruence and fulfillment.

And yes, it is that simple!

In the presence of an experienced hypnotherapist, or practitioner of NLP, you will not experience the weird feeling of being scrutinized. Instead, you will feel like you are having a conversation with a good friend who has your best interest at heart, and who also happens to have the skills to help you to embody those changes you are seeking. You will experience a feeling of being seen, and heard, and understood, and appreciated, and supported.

If not, look elsewhere.

It's as simple as that

. April 2010 NLP certification program

There are amazingly long lists of phobias, all are very real for those who suffer from them:

Agoraphobia – fear of open spaces
Claustrophobia – fear of confined spaces
Anthropophobia- fear of other people
Fear of flying, fear of mice, fear of spiders, fear of driving, fear of public speaking, fear of such things as water, dust, bicycles, owls …  the list is endless.

It used to be that back in the the dark ages of psychology (which may, unfortunately, still prevail in some quarters) it could take months to cure a phobia.

Then along came NLP and it became possible to cure phobias, even powerfully debilitating phobias, within minutes. How is this possible?

The first thing to understand is that delving into the original cause of WHY a phobia or fear exists may eventually help cure the phobia, but in a very long winded and roundabout way.

Discovering HOW the phobia opperates, how the pattern of thought and association plays itself out in sequence, is much more effective — because you can then learn to rapidly change it.

The way a phobia is evoked in the mind is usually fairly consistent… a sight, a sound, a memory, a feeling in the body, a strong emotion. Once that sequence is discovered it can be broken, scrambled, or even turned into a comedy routine.You will have blown its cover and it will never affect you again with quite the same power. It’s power will fade, perhaps even before your very eyes.

I say you will have “blown its cover” because that unconscious pattern had been hidden from you. When you make it fully visible, you are already half-way to resolving the phobia that depended on it.

Of course, you may not be able to do this on your own, but an experienced NLP practitioner can guide you through the process very easily.

Even people who are housebound due to extreme agoraphobia can be effectively treated over the telephone with amazing success.

I live in Los Angeles. I used to experience anxiety of one sort or another much of the time. It felt like a part of who I was. As I look back it seems strange. Most of my anxiety was about things that never happened, worst case scenarios, projections of my own insecurity and paranoia. I owe this change in my mindset to hypnosis, and all that I learned about the power of my imagination in a series of hypnotherapy sessions I did with Caitriona last year.  M.E.E.

Anxiety is a misuse of your time. It’s something that comes about through choices you made about where you should focus your attention.

The Dark Clouds of Anxiety

This might be hard to accept when you’re in the middle of an anxiety attack, or when you’ve been officially diagnosed with anxiety disorder, or when your anxiety is complicated by depression.

Even so, anxiety comes about because of how you have learned to focus your attention, and how you choose to give certain meaning and weight to particular experience. This may indeed sound harsh if you have been trying in vain to find an effective treatment for anxiety, or have been given the run around by health-care professionals who are better at prescribing medications for anxiety than at helping you find lasting solutions.

But what you once learned you can unlearn. For example, although you may have learned long ago to process similar experiences in the same old ways, with the same old emotions — in this case stress and anxiety, how would it be if you learned new associations; so that when the pressure was on, instead of anxiety, you felt calm, focused, determined, and excited?

It is possible to learn to do this; and it’s easier than you think

The best solutions are often the simplest. Rather than complicated diagnoses and a lifetime of being condemned to live under a cloud called anxiety. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to a little bit of work to do.

But that work involves simply applying the mind-skills and mindset you will learn through hypnosis and NLP. Much of that learning is through the power of your unconscious mind. So it’s about as hard as learning to ride a bicycle. After a day or two you may wobble from time to time. Within a week you’ll be amazed, delighted, and thrilled that what once seemed almost impossible has become a natural skill.

Forty years after its creation, NLP still does not fit into any easily recognizable category, and continues to develop in new and exciting ways that are often misrepresented, and even more often misunderstood.

What distinguishes NLP from conventional forms of psychotherapy, (itself so diverse that it’s hardly possible to speak of it as a singular field) is that it begins by asking an unusual question.

Rather than asking why things happen or why people behave in certain ways, NLP asks, “How?” Knowing why you do certain things, or why you have a certain problem, can be very helpful in effecting change; or it might be of merely academic interest.

By ask how you arrive at questions such as:

• How can I develop motivation, focus, clarity?
• How can I loose weight and keep it off?
• How can I become a non-smoker forever?
• How you I act, think, feel differently to achieve better results?
• How can I model excellence in others to achieve it in myself?
• How can I fulfill my goals?
• How can I communicate more effectively?

Simple enough! Why then are there so many misunderstandings about NLP?

Neurolinguistic programming explores and models

• effective communication
• optimimum internal representations and perceptions to achieve excellence.

It has become very effective at both. Which is why some people have come to see that NLP is nothing more than a way to help unscrupulous sale people sell to unwilling customers even more effectively. Or else it has come to be seen as a series of patterns and techniques that automatically produce magical results.

Unfortunately, NLP has been so impressive in achieving results, and so enthusiastically received by some, that it has come to be perceived as something of a cult. Also, because some of the patterns and techniques are relatively easy to learn, it is often practiced without the skill that is required for it to achieve the best results.

NLP is more than clever sales techniques, more than procedures and techniques learned by rote. It is more that a system for person change because it is infinitely adaptable, continually asking how certain results are achieved, drawing as few fixed conclusions as possible. Because is asks how and explores patterns you might call it a meta system, a lens to explore other systems, and to change the behaviors, attitudes, and emotions that have limited you from achieving the results you want.