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Ever wonder how some people who have gone through real hardships can be happy, while other people who have had a relatively even ride through life can define their life in negative terms and feel it has been full of unhappiness?. In this video renowned psychologist Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. Kahneman is famous for co-inventing behavioral economics, the study of human irrationality as it applies to economics and how we make decisions.

As NLPers it has lots of useful insights for us as to how anyone can experience ongoing happiness. Go watch it below - whether you are a coach, therapist or unofficial people helper this video will give you many ideas on how to help yourself and your clients experience more happiness right now.

Making it practical:

So Daniel covered a lot in his presentation - couple of the high points of note were:

"We don't choose between experiences but between memories (and anticipated memories) experiences"

Next time you find yourself feeling an emotion that you describe as unpleasant, especially if you have wanted to shift it but are struggling remember that chances are you won't remember it most likely a few hours or days from now. So let is move through you and fizzle into the abyss.

As Marcus Aurelius Augustus, a former Roman Emperor put it:

"Reflect on the rapidity with which all that exists and is coming to be is swept past us and disappears from sight. For substance is like a river in perpetual flow, and its activities are ever changing, and its causes infinite in their variations, and hardly anything at all stands still: and ever on our side is the immeasurable span of the past and the yawning gulf of the future, in which all things vanish away. Then how is he not a fool who, in the midst of all this, is puffed up with pride, or tormented, or bewails his lot as though his trouble would endure for a great while?"

A great saying and a great example of elegant language usage. Fact is .. whether we are dealing with ourselves or with a client, all we have is the current experienced moment - which Kahneman defines as 3 seconds or so long, with everything else that is going on being a choice we make between memories (which the brain "makes up" and re-presents to us) or anticipated memories.

This brings home another important point - whether you are happy when you think back about your life, the last year or even last month has a lot to do with what and how you are comparing stuff. If you want to help yourself or a client feel better about their life .. then help practice changing 1) what you are comparing yourself, your life to and 2) how you are running that comparison at a representational level.

Become like your very own Michelangelo of your mind. Paint the stuff you would like to feel better about with richer and more intense colors making it truly compelling and satisfying and the stuff you had been comparing yourself to as that of a scene of a non important, nondescript event. The exact coding of this will vary for person to person, so figure out what works well for you. (And if you don't know how to do this, feel free to leave a question below and I'm happy to give you some suggestions.)

"Being happy in your life and being happy about your life, are two very different concepts…"

As NLPers this points first and foremost to our awareness of the affect of language… and being conscious of what presuppositions you are using in your speech when you are communicating with someone. Asking someone "are you happy in your life?" vs. "do you feel happy right now?", vs. "are you happy about your life?" - are all very different questions. Knowing what the likely effect you will create when you ask a question is very important - especially since every question you ask anyone will have the function of directing their consciousness in one way or another and evoke all kinds of associations and with them states.

Kahneman statement also points us to notice how we are accessing our sense of "happiness". Wellbeing and happiness are two different concepts. And if you feel unhappy about something, go in search of some other references you can draw on. Intentionally direct your consciousness.

This process helps illuminate beneath the surface of the statement - "In life, (some) pain is necessary but suffering is optional". As strange as that may sound, even in apparent hardship you can have moment by moment happiness.

Three things influence how the Remembering Self remembers: changes, significant moments and endings

We can think of these things are the markers the "remembering self" uses to track and index what we remember of the millions of moments that we have in a decade.

Embedded in all of that I think there are a couple of other filters that drive what gets remembered - such as first and foremost does the said change affect you? In order to define something as a significant moment, someone had to first label it as "significant" relative to some comparison (perhaps the other events in ones life). As story tellers, anytime we can tell a story that the listener can directly relate to  or see themselves in it, the effect of that story will be much greater than if a person has no connection to it (conscious or otherwise).

The third marker, endings, influence how the Remembering self remembers. This also plays an important role in many contexts from persuasion to creating change to leaving a lasting impression etc. If you want someone else to remember you or some key learning point, then make sure that you do something that is

1) a noticeable change in the status quo that captures the other person's attention

2) significantly changes their state or a long held view on something (ideally for the positive - if you want them to have a positive association to you)

3) had some form of specific instruction or frame of reference included in it that you would like the person to take on board

4) is linked to some form of environmental trigger that you know the person will see/be in the presence of at a later point (so that it triggers them to re-call back or remember that situation with you and everything that went with it)

Learning NLP has always been focused in the doing rather that the theory so have fun applying whatever resonates most for you from this post. If you put into practice the one habit of connecting more consciously with the "experieicnign self" and being more aware and intentional about what gets called back on by the "remembered self" you can literally transcend hardship and experience much greater happiness and moment by moment joy.

Wishing you much happiness in all you do.

Almost everyone likes to believe they have good powers of observation, but as NLPers many of us, hold ourselves to a higher standard (or at least expectation/desire) that we should be able to notice things better than most. Unlike practitioners of TFT who use their SUDS (subject/subjective units of distress) test to calibrate where the person they are working with is on a scale of 1 to 10, we as NLPers often are tracking for non-verbal changes like a change in state, access ques, shifts in breathing etc, in addition to what the person says.

Yet as human beings first and foremost, we can be as "blind" as the next person in thinking we are excellent at observing others. As a species the information gathering capacities or our body exceed the capacity of our central nervous system to process it. We are constantly deleting stuff out. And many times, what we delete or distort after we have begun processing it, is important stuff.

Refining our observation skills is key to doing greater and greater work with the technology, whether on ourselves or with others. In this post I have two fun observational tests for you and share some insights about the implications of not seeing what is actually there and the pitfalls and benefits of this.

But first, what are some of the key factors that cause us to miss so much.

1. We are limited by the our biology

Specifically we are limited by how much the brain can consciously track. The usual story line is we can only track 7 + or - 2 things "consciously", although experience will tell you that sometimes people can only track 1-3 things. In addition, because there are literally so much potential data points we could focus on, our body deletes out massive amounts which means that we typically have little awareness for the multitude of things that are going on inside and outside us - things like how you are holding your body (posture), the relative tension, the pressure of the air around you, and so and and so forth.

2. Our perception is also limited by what we focus on (and how we focus on it)

Whatever grabs our attention, temporarily has got us hooked and tends to be what we focus on. During this time our brains filter out most of everything else that is going on, depending on how "hooked" we are on whatever it is we are focused on. If you have ever had to shout a few times to get someone's attention while they were engrossed watching a program on TV, you know this problem only too well. Usually it ends in the person who was shouting saying to the viewer "are going deaf, I was calling your name!"

But it isn't just TV that hooks our attention. There can be any number of things, however once we do get hooked we then to quickly frame how we are looking at that thing or situation from a specific perspective. For example, lets say you hear from a friend that "John was out last night and threw up all over the sidewalk". Well if you have already had some prior experiences with John and these have always been about him getting very drunk, then without the person saying anything more, there is a good chance that you will instantly assume (lock in on) that John was getting drunk again. However he have just eaten a bad curry!

In fact there may have been many reasons why he threw up, but your brain will instantly lock in on the most probable bias you already have wired up, and then you will most likely state it as fact.

"John is always on the bender. I don't know why he just doesn't take it easy and have one drink and not twenty when he goes out".

This tendency of human nature to lock in on a fixed perspective, typically without any reference to reality, rather simply a pre-wired model of the world and then treat their opinion as if it was "reality" can cause no end of mis-understandings and problems.

It can also be very useful, for example if you see a car swerve in front of you when driving and will trigger you to "be careful, pull back" pattern etc.

The problem of "I have seen this already" mindset for NLPers is we instantly label something as X (our prior judgement) and think however we described the said situation is the only way of that something is. This can have  negative consequences because you completely miss out on what is actually going on in a situation. And in a learning context this can result in years of waisted effort.

This human behaviour pattern can be summed up as: we have lost touch with "reality", and replaced it with "this is the same as that" and so we lack awareness of what is actually occurring.

Take for example an NLP training. Over the years, many NLPers and non NLPers have said "I attended so and so's seminar and I couldn't notice them anchoring .. they were just telling stories… were they actually anchoring us?". Inevitably they almost never get how to do conversational anchoring, as least while they are framed by their current model of the world. This pattern of putting a pre-conceived label on top of what is actually occurring, frequently repeats itself many times and soon a person comes to the (inaccurate) conclusion "NLP doesn't work", and often moves on to something else.

So what is the antidote? We will come to that in a moment.

The important point for now is: if you can't spot when your mental models are holding you back (relative to some outcome you are in pursuit of) and don't know how or what to change them to .. then you are going to experience considerably more pain and so called "failure" when your "model of the world" doesn't match up to what is required by the environment and goal success factors you are in pursuit of.

So let's take a quick test of your basic observation skills.

Watch this YouTube video below and see how accurately you can passes the players in white make.

So how did you get on?

Did you see it or miss it? It doesn't matter if you did or not, you just want to "stay frosty" as they say in the military which means be alert and keep your senses fresh.

Many people miss the _________, and are convinced that she wasn't there the first time round .. until they rewind the video back.

Regardless of how you got on, now lets see how well you can get on with this awareness test. This test is somewhat tricker, your job is to find a specific scene (which the video will tell you about). Go watch it now.

So did you spot the lake, ducks and bear background? If not you can catch it between seconds twenty two and twenty three seconds - there is a very rapid flicker of it.

The point of these short videos is to warn all of us to never think your way of thinking or perceiving is telling the complete picture (this applies to me as anyone else). In fact, the situation is even somewhat worse, in that only thing we have is the present moment in which to make our observations - everything else so called "past memories" is only accessed through our minds and we all know how inaccurate ones memory can be. Of course camcorders are handy, but again that is from a single external viewpoint.

As NLPers this has big implications for when you are "rewiring yourself" and also when working with clients. The quicker you are able to identify how a person keeps themselves stuck, the quicker you will be able to help them and visa versa.

However missing key pieces of what went on isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact as NLPers some times we deliberately will want to shift a persons focus so they no longer lock in on something that they remember as having occurred. We deliberately intend to distort their perception of what went on.

Where could that function be useful in your life?

Making it practical:

So try something out with me. Pick an area of your life where you are "stuck", somewhere in your life right now where you feel you can't or haven't yet been able to make the shift in X situation (life, business, career, nlp skills etc). Got it? Good. Now drop all sense of certainty, at least temporarily that the way you think of it, is as you describe. Just let it soften and dissolve.

Now assume you are framed by your own thinking. Re-connect with your senses. Stay with what is sensory observable. Become like a architect… write down on paper how you are currently holding X situation i.e. what narrative do you use to define the situation? What story do you be-lie-ve is at cause for you not yet having what you want?

Take another step back, ask yourself what presumptions did I make about the problem state? How many weren't true? Assume they are not and look for evidence that indicates your previous way of looking at this thing is inaccurate or at least partially incomplete.

Once you discover how you have been holding the "problem" state it's time to "kick the legs" off the old assumptions and identify what specific action steps you can take to liberate yourself and get yourself closer to the outcome you want. Assume there is a way, especially if your first pass doesn't produce the solution yet that you want. Keep trying on different perspectives by doing "what if scenarios?" that will give you new insights.

If you need some creative input, seek out other people's perspectives about how they would go about solving X or what can they see about X situation or how you are approaching it, that you are presently not?

Listen and test out their ideas as hypothesis that can lead to a possible dissolution of the problem or at a minimum a workable solution.

Continue until you have shifted that thing that had been bothering you.

Have fun with this process and stay frosty.

Tom

PS: If you'd like to read the latest news from science about "how blind we are to change" then check out this article here.

PPS: If you'd like to learn the strategy for developing enhanced sensory acuity used by those who excel then check out our digital download training here.