Recently, I received an email from someone enquiring about the NLP certification courses asking me a question that I thought would be interesting to share with you.
Caroline said: “You claim that NLP is one of the most effective change technology in existence today. Why is so effective?”
Great question!
This is how it works.
At the basis of NLP Coaching, lies the question:
“what has to happen in this person’s brain to bring about the presenting problem?”
i.e the pictures, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes that form our internal representation of the outside world, what are they like?
How do they have to combine to create the issue at hand?
In NLP coaching, we do not focus on content, but on process. This is really at the core of everything we do.
Content refers to what happened, the story, the characters in the story, the words said, the events that took place etc…
Process refers to what lies behind the content, the sequences, the steps, the system that has to exist for the story to be possible, the causal relationship between things.
What does this mean?
It means that in order to generate positive change, you don’t need to go back in the past and relive traumatic experiences, or analyse what happened 15 years ago to give you insights into what’s happening now.
Process-focused means that we want to discover the various elements involved in creating an internal representation of something, then change some of them, and as a result, change the behaviour or how we feel about an event.
Let me give you an example:
S. had a rather important surgery coming up.
There were chances that it would not work the first time and she would have to go through it once again, her doctors were not sure.
She was very anxious and could not stop obsessing about it day and night. She could not fall asleep at night, then when she finally did, it was only to wake up a few hours later thinking about it again. The thought disturbed her work, her relationship with her family (she was absent-minded when with her son, and resented her husband’s apparent detachment from her emotional situation) and her whole life was affected negatively.
She tried sitting in meditation, she tried visualising the successful outcome of the operation, but to no avail. Nothing could relieve her anxiety. Her relative and friends recommended her to “just not worry about it, wait and see”.
By the way have you ever tried ‘NOT worrying about it?’ It never works.
Why? because the human mind does not really understand negatives.
If I ask you not to think of a read car, what do you have to do? Well precisely, think of a red car.
You have to think about what you don’t want to think about in order not to think about it. It just does not work.
She was really lost and confused and exhausted as well. What was she to do?
We just sat together for 15 minutes.
I asked her to bring back the picture of the event that caused the anxiety, and she did; her face changed and she looked almost in pain.
I then asked her whether the picture was in colour or Black & White.
It had bright colours, which I asked her to dim down to almost black.
The picture was very close to her and I asked her to push it far in the distance and see it becoming small and dark as it zoomed away,
and to lock it there.
She could feel a felling associated with this picture in her throat, which I asked her to move to her feet.
She opened her eyes, her face had changed, she looked at me with a smile on her face.
She had not felt so calm for days.
What we had just done was merely to change a few elements of how her brain encoded the information in order to change the emotion.
Do you see how easy that was?
S. could go through exactly the same process all by herself every time she felt anxious about something (and she did!)
In NLP jargon, we had changed the ‘submodalities‘ of how she represented the event.
To finish the story, her operation went well, and she was so blown away by the effectiveness of the process despite its simplicity
that she became a NLP Practitioner & Coach a few months later.
If you have questions on NLP & Coaching, leave a comment below.
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