Stuck? Stuck in MLM? Stuck in NLP?

Stuck? Stuck in MLM? Stuck in NLP?

by David Townsend
MNLP, Dip.T.H. Th. Dip., TLTA, Hypnotherapist (ABH)

People who get stuck are mostly introspective, feel dissociated (I don’t belong, I don’t fit), or are narcissistic (I put up a front but I can’t cope inside).

OK, I know your psych professor would have a fit at generalisations like that, but he doesn’t have to sell anything. Bear with me.

For all sorts of different reasons, stuck people have grown up in continual contact with and dependence on their feelings. This is reinforced by lots of personal development leaders including some trainers in NLP who put their attention on changing your feelings so that you feel good and can then take action.

It doesn’t work for lots of people.

The reason is fairly simple. If you look inside to see how you feel, you find out! Feelings are a very unreliable primary reference point. Your feelings can go up and down triggered by all sorts of internal and external triggers which have nothing to do with what you need to do.

Feelings are what happens after you function, not starting points for action.

Of course we want good feelings, fantastic feelings, and so we should. They are the juice that makes life worthwhile. But they are results, not causes.

The most important way we deal with this is by checking how we make pictures in our mind (visualize).

VISUALIZATION

Before we go any further, I had better add note for people who say they can’t make pictures in their head. People think that they vary in the clarity of internal pictures right down to fuzzy dark shapes, but they are pictures and they have meaning. Don’t be worried about the clarity, just go with the impressions you receive. And for people whose primary system is thinking with words, you can do fantastic stuff with this, because you can add a descriptive structure to this that makes it more powerful.

All goal setting asks us to picture or visualize our goals. And we do that. Unfortunately, for many of us, that makes no difference. We don’t do anything.

We then go inside and ask ourselves why we have failed. We test our feelings. They are not good.

The problem is that there are different types of visualization, and we are using the wrong one.

The First Way

One way of visualising isn’t specifically relevant to this so I’ll get it out of the way first. This is constructive or creative visualisation (in NLP V^c ) in which most people look up right or left to create a picture. Think of a flying pink elephant. You just did it the way you usually do it.

The Second Way

The second way of visualising is where we often go wrong. It can work like this:
We ask ourselves a question like, “What do I want?” Then we search around inside for a “wanting” feeling.

Unfortunately, whoever brought us up taught us that it’s naughty to want things, so we never learned a way to want and the scan of our feelings produces no result. We say, ”I don’t know what I want!” That really messes up our goal setting. We don’t have any goals, or certainly nothing that we feel committed to.

Of course, tucked away are things we sort of want. A better house. A better job. A car that doesn’t break down. And we can picture them.

Notice the way that you picture them. It is internal. Your eyes are defocused. It’s like the picture is part of a little sphere or circle that connects us and our feelings –not good at the moment, with the picture. We are able to do all the things trainers tell us. “See yourself in the picture, then make a picture seeing your goal through your own eyes.” It all happens.

It just doesn’t work, because it’s a trance picture. Your eyes are defocused. You have stepped put of reality into trance.

Now trance has great value and you can do a lot of preparatory and creative and therapeutic work there and I love it and use it in my therapy practice. But ..... You can’t set goals there.

The Third Way

And now let’s look at the third and key way of visualizing. I call it Envisioning, to distinguish it from the others.

The difference you will note immediately is that you do it with your eyes open and focussed.

Say you feel that you want a new car. Make a picture of the car in front of you. Superimpose it on whatever is right in front of you, full size, there in your room. Make the picture as strong as possible. It could be like a transparent solid 3D plastic model, but better yet, make it dynamivally powerful, with real colour and chrome and leather and the lot. You can see it, touch it, smell it, hear the motor running. It is there in front of you. And you can run a movie (still out there focussed in front of you) of you in the car, driving. At that stage you can let yourself feel what it would be like to drive and own.

The next step is getting it, so you make a plan THE SAME WAY. Push the car out to where you might get it, and between you and the can put the steps you will take to get the car. Make those steps out in front of you FOCUSSED EXTERNAL PICTURES.

And here’s the good bit. Make the first step a great picture out there in front of you. Run a movie. Say, for instance, you’re a network marketer. The first step is to approach a prospect. In your picture you can see yourself talking with the prospect and it’s all going to plan to a signup.

Motivation

Now note this: You can see yourself out there helping someone achieve what they really desire, doing something really worthwhile to help them achieve a better life. That is especially good. And you can see yourself functioning easily and being very pleased about it. (Yes, you are running the movie so nothing can go wrong. Why would you run a movie where things go wrong for you?) Your alert focus is out there in the movie. And your feelings are there, too.

Your feelings are out there in success. And you make that picture as rich as possible – wonderful colours, glorious colour, amazing smells and tastes. Extraordinarily enthusing and powerful. You are barely attending to the junk your body is producing inside you.

The next step is to make pictures of how you are going to achieve your goal, and arrange them in the order you will carry them out. You will move from step to step. You have the first one right in front of you, in fact, you’re standing in it. You are free to act, because it’s going to work.

How is that for motivation?

So what do you have now?
You can select a focus that gives you pictures that are powerful.
You can put your emotion into success, not the pit of your stomach.
You can arrange your pictures in a useful order and plan.

You can go to the first step, and take action, now. You are taking it! Now!

NLPers

When you carefully distinguish between focussed and unfocussed visualization, you will make a major difference to your work with yourself and your clients. Too many people who believe NLP was ineffective have been left stuck in internal states. Time for a powerful change!