Tips and Techniques

How do you want to feel in 2010?

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It’s that time of year when we start to think about those New Year’s Resolutions. All the things we want to do, have and be in this New Year – new car, exotic holiday, lose weight, a new career, etc.

Often we don’t realise consciously that what we want to have or achieve are just a means to an end. What we really want from our possessions and experiences is the feeling or emotion that it gives us.

Perhaps you want to have an exotic holiday. As you imagine the holiday of your dreams what feelings and emotions arise for you? Maybe you imagine feeling relaxed, excited, enthusiastic and happy. Have you ever spent time day dreaming about what your holiday is going to be like – enjoying the feelings you’ll have before you even get there. Or perhaps you want to lose weight. That might make you feel fit, healthy and attractive.

Advertisers figured this out a long time ago. It’s obvious from all the sofa adverts at this time of year that having a deluxe leather sofa with recliner options will give you a happy contented family or an appreciative and attractive partner. Or you could join an exclusive health club and become fit and attractive like the lithe young people in the advert (who obviously don’t need it).

The seductive voices of advertising tell us “just get this thing or take part in this activity and you will be rewarded with these feelings”. I think a sofa is not the only way to have a happy family. Joining a health club is not the only way to feel fit.

I think there is a more useful way to think about New Year resolutions that gives us a better chance of getting what we want and many more choices in how we get there.

How do you want to feel in 2010? What feelings or emotions would you like to feel more of?

How would your New Year resolutions be different if started by choosing the emotional states you wanted to experience?

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It’s the season of New Year’s Resolutions. Perhaps prodded by optimism or guilt we decide to undertake a worthy project for the New Year: loosing weight, taking up exercise, learning French, being nicer to our in-laws.

I’ve got more than a few candidates for New Year’s Resolutions things I should, or could do, but rather than throw a dice or stick a pin in the list I decided to explore what is important to me. I thought that if I could get a clearer picture of my values then I would be able to make to make good choices for my New Year Resolutions and decisions in general.

Values or what we consider important are powerful influences on our lives.

Because they are associated with worth, meaning and desire, values are a primary source of motivation in people’s lives. When people’s values are met or matched, they feel a sense of satisfaction, harmony or rapport. When their values are not met, people often feel dissatisfied, incongruent or violated.

Robert Dilts

Goals are the tangible expression of our values. For example if one of our values is health then we will be motivated to maintain an exercise program or diet so that we experience that value.

There are a huge range of possible values, health, justice, peace of mind, excitement, honesty etc, etc. We collect them over our lives consciously or unconsciously. The constellation of values we live by are unique to us.

If we are lucky we get a set of values that mesh well together and help lead us to happy and fulfilled lives. If not, there are three ways in which our system of values may not be serving us.

1. Unconscious values: For most of us our values are out of our awareness. In effect we are being drawn to certain behaviours and  making decisions on values we don’t know exist.
2. Out of date values: Many of our values were established during our early childhood, we may have absorbed them from our caregivers or through our experience of education. They may be hopelessly out of date yet still exerting an influence.
3. Out of order values: Values exist in a hierarchy the values at the top of hierarchy will dominate over the values lower down. For example if you value your safety over excitement then you are unlikely to drive at 70 mph in thick fog. The ranking and relative importance of these values may be out of date and almost certainly out of awareness. So we may end up ’supporting’ a value that is way past it’s sell by date.

So how can you find out what your system of values is? One way (there are many) is based on an exercise from the book NLP The New Technology of Achievement by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.

1. Think of some goals, interests, loves and desires.
   Make a list of some of the goals you are pursuing now. For each of them in turn look into the future and imagine that the goals have been fulfilled.

   Pick what seem to be the most important 3, 4 or 5 of those goals from your list

2. Determine your values and principles
   In whatever way you find enjoyable hold the successful fulfillment of that goal has been realised. In your imagination step into that scene, noticing what you see, hear and feel.

   Do this for each goal in turn, as you experience it ask yourself: What do I value about this goal?The answer may be one or more values. Make a note of each one. Use the words that come to mind to describe the values.

3. List your values and principles
   Make a combined list of your values and principles. From the rough list there may be items that are common across your different goals. There may also be goals that seem quite similar, if there is a word or phrase that sums them up feel free to use that.

Note: You may need some time to complete this exercise, it’s not the kind of thing that can be rushed off in a couple of minutes

Example:

One of my goals for 2009 is to be a part of more NLP and EFT trainings. I chose this goal as one of the examples for the exercise.

Here are my answers (in no particular order) to the question “What do I value about this goal?”:

• To help people help themselves
• Help people be able to help others
• Enjoyment of learning
• Enjoyment of teaching
• Having fun
• To do some good in the world

That’s a small part of the overall list of what’s important to me.

In the next article in this series ‘Sorting the wheat from the chaff‘ I’ll explore how to sort the list into the order of their importance, how to identify and resolve conflicts of values and how to find out which values really belong to us.

The warmer weather prompts me to repost this article by my good friend Masha Bennett

Having been a horticulturist in my “past life”, I would like to include some leafy and flowery thoughts to contribute to your happiness and well-being. It is well known that gardening can be therapeutic – but no tips on digging or pruning in this article, you may be pleased to know! Instead, I will try to share my ideas on how to get the most enjoyment and pleasure from your own (or someone else’s, for that matter) garden.

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When I was growing up my Mum and Dad often used to say to us: “You should count your blessings”.

I think they were right that I had a lot of blessings to count. Now that I’m older and more aware of what’s going on in the world I can see that my ‘cup runneth over’ in ways that would boggle the mind of some people in the developing world.

Now I think they missed a golden opportunity. “Count your blessings” was good advice, at least it tells you what to do. Unfortunately it wasn’t very specific about how I should count my blessings.

If they had said “You should count your blessings, and here’s how …” then shown me a simple way to do that then they would have set me up for life. At the time I never thought at the time to ask “How exactly do I do that?”

Reflecting on the good things in our lives or cultivating a sense of gratitude is advice as old as the hills and the sages who lived in them. There is now good evidence that cultivating gratitude has a large number of mental (and physical) health benefits.

In a study by Martin Seligman* more than 400 volunteers took part in the following exercise:

Three good things in life: Participants were asked to write down three things that went well that day and their causes every night for a week. In addition they were asked to provide a causal explanation for each thing.

After just one week of doing these exercises they were followed up for six months. Those who ‘counted their blessings’ in this way for just one week became happier and less depressed and stayed that way for at least six-months after the experiment.

Not surprisingly they found that those participants who enjoyed the gratitude exercise and continued with it past the official time period were the ones that felt the happiest

What would it be like if you integrated this process into your daily routine?

One way of looking at this is that you are training your brain to look out for the good things in your experience. To become the person who sees the glass being half full rather than half empty. People who habitually ’sort for good’ tend to be happier, healthier and more resilient.

Unfortunately for us our culture and media are strongly encouraging us to ’sort for bad’, to notice what is wrong and unsatisfactory. Often so they can sell us something to make you feel better. By being more grateful and cheerful you may be going a little against the tide. There might not be as many people swimming in that direction but the company is good.

Here are the instructions again.

Every evening make a written list of at least three enjoyable or satisfying experiences you had during the day. They don’t have to be extraordinary events something as simple as enjoying the first cup of tea of the day would do. Write this down and write a sentence explaining why you are grateful for this. That’s it. Nothing complicated. Do this regularly and notice what you notice.

*Positive Psychology Progress, Seligman, Steen, Park & Peterson, American Psychologist, July-August 2005

I came upon this story from Vikas an NLP Practitioner from India on the excellent Art of NLP newsgroup. I particularly enjoyed the simplicity of his approach.

About 18 months ago a young lady asked me for help for her depression. She was visiting a psychiatrist and taking some medicine for depression for preceding few months.I suggested to her to look around and mentally say… “I am sitting on this happy chair. There is this happy table. And these are happy windows with happy curtains.” I made her do this for about ten minutes. I suggested she does this every day for about ten or fifteen minutes. (A happy person lives in a happy world, a sad person lives in a sad world.)

After fifteen days she called to say that she was feeling great now. After about two months she visited the psychiatrist and he stopped her medicine. She continues to call occasionally and reports that she feels great now. The most recent one was when she was in my town about ten days ago.

I am not suggesting it will work with every patient of depression. I am not even suggesting one should use it with every patient. I am only saying I found that it worked with my patient and it is very easy to do.

Many thanks to Vikas for allowing me to share it with you.

So, are you sitting on a happy chair?

This is a very useful (non-EFT) method for reducing anxiety recommended by Andy Austin. All you need is your anxiety and a tennis or juggling ball. Brain scan studies have demonstrated that anxiety only occurs in one hemisphere of the brain. If you force the both hemispheres of the brain to communicate with some physical actions then the anxiety state can be quickly diminished.

Here’s what you do:

1. Conjure up the state of anxiety (if you are troubled by anxiety you may not need to do much conjuring).
2. Holding your hands out in front of you, elbows bent as if you were holding a tray. Toss the ball back and forth between your hands. The ball must cross in front of you as you catch and throw. As you do this you will find your anxiety level beginning to diminish.
3. After a while stop ‘juggling’ to guage your level of anxiety. Typically it will be reduced.
4. Continue juggling and checking until the anxiety is reduced to zero.

You can use this process when the anxiety arises or imagine an anxiety provoking situation and reduce the anticipated anxiety. Here’s a video explanation and demonstration of this approach by Andy Austin on YouTube.

Nigel Hetherington and I of IntegrityNLP are hosting a two day Excellence in Therapy workshop with Andy Austin on June 21st & 22nd. We’ve both done some training work with him and we are very impressed with what he does and how he presents.

Get in touch if you would like some more information.

Riding on the bus into Newcastle this morning, sinking into the familiar flat feeling that’s been with me since my mum passed away. It’s barely noticeable a slightly sad, low and flat feeling the Victorians would probably have called lassitude. It’s been quite constant feeling not bad enough to do something specific about but here, sitting on the bus, I’m able to tune into it fully.

It feels like a cloud of grey fog, thick and motionless, surrounding me. That gives me an idea. On our Integrity NLP Practitioner trainings we teach The Cloud Process developed by Kevin Creedon. You imagine that whatever unresourceful state you are feeling at the time is like a cloud surrounding you. The cloud is a metaphorical expression of your state having properties of size, colour and motion.

In the process you step out of the unresourceful cloud (usually dull and gloomy) and create a more resourceful cloud (usually brightly coloured) to step into. Stepping out of the unresourceful cloud and into the more resourceful cloud usually creates quite a change in the person’s state. It’s a very effective way to change your state. Sitting in my cloud I’m reminded of this process.

I’m already aware of my unresourceful state ‘cloud’ so I imagine the state I’d like as a glowing and sparkling gold cloud at the entrance to the bus. My stop is getting close, when it’s time for me leave I will step out of my grey fog, walk down the ailse of the bus leaving it behind and step into my new cloud before leaving the bus.

The bus starts to pull up, I leave my grey cloud behind on the seat, I stand in the queue of passengers waiting to get to my new cloud. Other passengers are standing in it, but I don’t mind, it’s a metaphorical cloud and there’s plenty to go round. The bus stops I move forward step into my sparkling gold cloud and step off the bus carrying it with me. I’m smiling, I feel pleasantly alive.

I stroll down the street to my first port of call (my favourite coffee shop). Standing at the counter I order my cappuccino and I am aware of a slight sense of the greyness returning. I look over to where I’m going to sit once I have my drink. While the espresso machine hisses I tune into the wispy grey cloud I’m standing in and imagine my sparkling gold cloud surrounding my table and chair. The drink arrives, I step out of the wispy cloud and into the golden cloud at my seat. I get another lift and feel inspired to write something for the first time in two weeks(this is the result).

It occurs to me that this is a very useful way to change the way you feel in day to day situations. We all spend time sitting or standing in one place then moving to another. Getting on and off buses, entering and leaving buildings, standing in queues. What would it be like if every time you moved you stepped out of any unresourceful state and into a resourceful state? What would it be like if you imagined a happy state at your front door, every time you left or arrived home you would have to step into a resourceful state? That might be kind of useful.