NLP Training, Techniques & Products for learning NLP

The use of NLP techniques can help professional service providers to substantially impact their results with their clients in a positive way. Here’s how Philip Atkinson, a management consultant, used a variety of NLP techniques, together with CBT, to bring about change in a number of organisations.

This is a theme that has recurred in many of Philip’s interventions in organisations including Telecoms, Banks, Insurance & Financial Services, Accountancy and Legal Firms, Manufacturing and Contact Centres. Philip has also used the concept of ‘Brand You’ to enable internal change agents such as L&D, Project, IT, Risk & Compliace and HR managers to be more effective when driving needed changes within their organisations.

Birth of the Concept

The concept of ‘Brand You’ is not new, but it is not a theme that many UK businesses have endorsed or applied – relying more on large corporate change initiatives to bring about improvement. Philip was asked to design a series of workshops by a large Telecoms company designed to improve the ability of Internal Auditors to influence their clients (managers within the business) to implement the recommendations inherent within their audit reports.

The Driver behind the Change

The driver behind this need was evidence that many recommendations made within internal audit reports were ‘accepted’ by the business managers but often never implemented. Consequently, when further audits were undertaken, it was clear that previous findings and recommendations has been ignored. The success of the internal audit team was in question because business managers frequently ignored the recommendations of any report and continued working in the same old way.

This IA Unit employed over 200 staff and the unit was tasked WITH increasing their involvement in the business, thus reducing the unnecessary cost associated with employing external auditors.

‘Brand You’ as a Concept

It was clear the technical capability of staff was high but what required some thought and effort was their ability to influence their clients. No amount of ‘up-skilling’ in technical expertise would deliver the results required. Discussion focused on the individual making a difference and hence the term ‘Brand You’ evolved.

Philip ensured that ‘Brand You’ is authentic and focuses on the individual, rather than ‘one best way’. Each of us leaves behind our own distinct signature but often we are unaware and unconscious of the impact that we can have on others. Philip’s workshops were designed to focus entirely on identifying the distinctive strengths that made each person important, and examined key strategies that would enable them to be more effective when selling their ideas, concepts and approaches to others.

Essential to this process was to consult various sales models and the components that encapsulated best practise. It comes as no surprise to NLP’ers that flexibility and adaptation to the other person’s objections was critical. Central to any sales or influencing model is anticipating the likely objections that others have to our proposals and ensuring that we can counter these in advance of them arising. We use the term inoculation against rejection. So as well as working through the various personal sales and influencing models Philip also focused on ‘taking a good look in the mirror’ and exploring what makes for a personal style of influencing.

Philip used a variant of Robert Dilts Logical Levels to focus on the role of Identity, and how this is continually shaped by one’s shifting personal Belief System and how this is in turn reflected in our Personal Values. Rather than working solely on Skills and Behaviours Philip focused on Values and Beliefs and used a variety of models including Myers Briggs Type Indicator to get a flavour of the engine that powers ‘Brand You’.

Philip further simplified the MBTI model into a four quadrant model of Regulator, Visionary, Analyst and Facilitator and started exploring the stances that people take if they happen to fall within theses areas. The important point is that by understanding the core personality drivers behind the person we are trying to influence, the stronger our repetoirse of tools and skills becomes in enabling us to persuade, negotiate and influence others.

Role Plays

The critical component in many Workshops is the use of Role Plays – that is, learning by doing. For instance in a recent intervention with a major Insurance Company, Philip designed role plays for Risk Managers. Here Philip took various ‘difficult situations’ when working with very senior staff of the business and ran all managers through a series of role plays over two days. Further, they had input in the following areas that enabled them to develop their own strategies.

Typical Content of Workshops

· Self disclosure and Rapport Building

· Accessing your personal Authenticity, and developing a win-win attitude at all times

· Assessing your preferred process of Influence and setting a ‘Yes-Yes’ frame

· Shaping Rapport with others in the change team

· Understanding how to drive the Acceptance of Change

· Utilising selling Benefits & Features to a win-win advantage for improvement

· Utilising 7 Assertive techniques to make your point

· Practising Listening skills on a variety of levels

· Facilitating the soft skills of Power and Influence

· Developing a confident Negotiating style

· Giving Bad News effectively

· Bringing things back from the edge – the de-escalation of conflict

· Using solution-based questioning to create win-win solutions

· Utilising Jungian analysis of personality to build rapport and diminish conflict

· Handling Personality Objections

· Identifying Motivational drivers in others

· Using the four quadrant Personality Tool

· Analysing Conscious and Unconscious Behaviour

· Developing your self confidence and self esteem

Rehearsal

One of Philip’s key strengths is his ability to support managers who lack the confidence to try new approaches, such as being more assertive. He believes firmly in rehearsal. No, not learning a set phrase or rote memorisation but, rather, adapting techniques to fit naturally and authentically with one’s own style. He says “You should never let your first rehearsal be the actual event’. You must have practised the approach and strategies a number of times to examine how you can deliver more effectively to create win-win solutions.

Ecology & Change

Philip always confronted the ecological dilemma and his rule is “is it ecological for the other person . and does my ability to influence fulfil the win-win criteria of my own personal standards? Anything that falls outside this ruling is, Philip believes, manipulation and ventures into the ‘dark side of NLP.’

Summary - Brand You Today

Philip has developed the Brand You concept to include Facilitating Large Scale Change, Brand You and Strategic Interviewing, Managing Resistance to Change and he runs a series of workshops for Internal Audit Staff, Quality Managers, Risk Consultants, Sales Executives and Account Managers, Accountants, Engineers and Lawyers.

This is an opportunity for professional people to equip themselves with the interpersonal competence to take their personal performance to the next level.

In the last few years he has presented on the ‘Brand You’ concept at Conferences and at Brand meetings of the Chartered Institutes of Marketing, Internal Audit, Banking and Personnel Development and has speaking engagements into 2012. It is clear that the concept is well accepted and is currently focused on sessions geared for the Public Sector – entitled “Be the Change”.

Author

Philip Atkinson is a consultant specialising in strategic, behavioural and cultural change. He is a member of various training consortia and has recently focused on creating innovative business simulations through Learning Strategies. He consults in the UK, Europe and USA, has written seven business books and published many articles. He is a speaker at conferences and runs Workshop sessions for leading companies. Philip can be contacted on +44 (0) 0131 346 1276 or 07779-799286 or philip@philipatkinson.com or visit www.philipatkinson.com

Got a question or comment? Enter it below. I'd love to hear your feedback.

Note from Tom: This is a special guest post brought to you by Don MacNaughton. Don is an expert in how to create high performance in yourself. A practitioner of NLP, Don has worked with Olympic athletes across numerous sports, international teams and executives in billion dollar businesses.

In this post Don talks about the laws of performance and how to discover the high performance champion within you. Be sure to check out the book resource he recommends a the end, if you'd like to learn more about the laws of high performance.

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The relatively modern science of sports psychology only became recognised as a science in the 1920s but its origins also date back much further in history to the ’healthy mind, healthy body’ philosophies of the ancient Greek and Chinese civilisations. Mental skills training is recognised today as playing a key role in helping competitive athletes to achieve their full potential in sport and the techniques used to enhance sporting performance are now also used to equally great effect in other areas of life.

The Laws of Performance are the result of my findings after many years of experience working with not only elite athletes but also sportspeople and businesspeople from all walks of life and at every stage in their careers. The ‘Laws’ are the guiding principles that I have found to be effective in helping those I work with to perform to their ability and create their own success in life by reconnecting with what inspires them and motivates them to keep moving forwards, onwards, and upwards as they turn their goals into their realities.

Much of what we learn through an understanding of the guiding principles is are sometimes simple principles but not always easy to execute in today’s high pressure, fast paced world! We all inherit or develop certain beliefs about ourselves as we go through life. We all think we know who we are and what we’re capable of but do we really know?

Many of our long-held beliefs are sometimes not actually based on anything real at all, they are merely our perception of what we believe to be real and yet we allow those beliefs to rule our thoughts and influence our actions. We all already posses a built-in guiding voice of intuition but the majority of us have simply lost the ability to tune in to that voice or to believe in what it tells us. By gaining an understanding of the Laws of Performance, you gain an opportunity to play the game of life at the highest level. When you connect with the things that you feel most passionate about in life, you tap into your own inspirational energy source; a powerful and motivational source of energy that drives you towards realising your full potential in whatever you choose to do.

The Champion Within

In sport, it’s now widely recognised that champions become champions from within and the key to realising a top performance is to develop mental skill alongside physical skill. Getting to the top of your game takes undeniable physical skill and ability but staying at the top requires an equal degree of mental skill. Tennis champ Andre Agassi is a great example of an athlete who had the physical skills to outplay most opponents but early in his career he lost the matches that really mattered. It was not until he developed his mental skills to match his physical skills that he was able to get back into his game and to realise his full potential. The connection between ancient world wisdom and modern world sports performance is therefore the phenomenal power of the mind. Finding your success in sport and in life is all about finding your passion. Successful people do what they love and love what they do.

To succeed…You need to find something to hold on to, something to motivate you, something to inspire you - Tony Dorsett

Top performers are inspired performers, they are all passionate about what they do. So what inspires you? Each and every one of us has within us our own source of inspiration as we are all inspired by the things we feel passionate about. To find your inspiration, you need to connect or re-connect with your passion.

Champions become champions from within: champions know who they are and they know who they want to be. They use the inspired energy of their passion to keep practicing the physical and mental skills they need to realise their ambitions and become the best they can be.

Believe in the Champion Within

We are all who we believe ourselves to be and our circumstances are simply a reflection of who we believe we are. To become a champion, you must believe that there is a champion within you. Success is a journey and not a destination so getting to the top of your game is as much to do with wanting to play as it is to do with wanting to win. Getting to the top is going to take dedicated effort and it’s always going to be easier to do something you want to do and love to do rather than something you have to do or should do. Many champions in sport use the words “driven” or “compelled” to describe their feelings and their attitude towards succeeding in sport and they almost always refer to the fact that the “buzz” they first felt through taking part in their sport has never left them. That’s the key to success right there: win or lose, the motivation to keep playing remains the same. When you believe in the champion within, you are able to maintain your positive belief in yourself and your abilities even when the going gets tough or when things are not going your way. It’s not winning every game that makes you a success, it’s learning from your losses and taking the positive lessons forwards with you.

If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning - Mahatma Ghandi

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To find out more about Don and check out his new book click on the links below:

New book: The 12 Laws of Performance with added Launch bonus is available 1^st August

Or go to www.donmacnaughton.org for Don's Blog or www.zonedinperformance.com for information on High Performance Coaching.

Note from Tom: This is a special guest post brought to you by Philip Atkinson, a veteran NLP trainer and organisational psychologist who who specialises in professional relationships at work, influence and leadership and has over 25 years experience.

In this article Philip highlights how the NLP toolset can be a very powerful toolset in enabling organisational change. Enjoy.

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NLP can work in business but has to be de-mystified from the therapeutic model to a business model. For NLP to be useful and applied it has to be sold as a business model. Take it from me, NLP albeit as powerful a set of cognitive and behavioural processes, it is not a natural bed fellow for practitioners of business change. For NLP to be valued it has to make sense to the business population.

Tom shared with me that the majority of readers of NLP Times are focused on enabling people and their organisations change for the better. And that many are ‘enablers and facilitators of change’ who work in a huge variety of organisations from big corporates to SME's, Education, Health and Social Enterprises. Perhaps this describes you. Either way just about everyone who works in or with companies today have to deal with adapting or directing change. Fortunately for those of us with an NLP background we can help be enablers for change.

Interestingly although most attempts at organisational change fail to meet their objective.

Yet the reality is in the right hands, NLP can enable successful implementation of change. Central to it's success is how it is packaged and delivered to all the various actors in the change process.

NLP De-Mystified

Although my personal belief is that NLP can be a major contribution to change in companies large and small – I am wary of how it is perceived by business. Sometimes, NLP purists fail to create a positive impact with business people perhaps because they come over too “touchy-feely”. At an NLP presentation on ‘building customer relationships’ the audience was confused. The presenters used too much NLP jargon. The local business audience left knowing about ‘eye accessing cues’ but not how NLP could build their rapport with their customers.

Wider Context of Change

NLP can be of real value, but only if it appeals to your target audience in the change triad. In any business change arena you tend to have three sets of people. The Sponsor is ultimately responsible for the change, the Change Agent (facilitator, coach, trainer) – who presents the vehicle and process for change, and the recipients, the Targets for the change have to shape, accept, own, live and implement it.

Change Working when you Bring the Triad Together

Change frequently does not work because these three groups of people don’t communicate and gel. Their respective ‘maps’ occupy different territories. The reason why things don’t work out is that the triad of folk in the ‘change arena’ have not discussed, shared and agreed desired outcomes, potential obstacles, have mutual expectations and are not committed to make that change stick. In the larger scheme of things, they have not developed a giant TOTE for the organisation.

Further, most change people do not realise that some of those people they are helping change may have their own agenda, their own resistance and are unable to see the benefits.

Pre-Loading & Developing a Preventative Culture

In any organisation large or small you will have folk who resist change more than others. If you are lucky you may have a few change champions and early adaptors who align with you straight away. Overall you will probably experience some resistance simply because we are not very good in this culture at managing organisational change. Sooner you later you will experience the resistors and the terrorists – so get them on board sooner.

90% of Change Fails

Our research indicates that 90%+ of major changes initiatives in all sectors fail. Did you know for instance, that at least 70% of Mergers & Acquisitions fail to achieve the synergies for which they were brought together? The reason being that when merging the businesses, there was too much focus on the ‘hard’ elements: strategy, structure, reporting relationships, systems and processes – to the detriment of what really makes a business work: the people and the culture.

In reality, what drives business success is leadership, engagement and team motivation. And this is what is often missing when the accountants, tech specialists and IT guys get together to create a solution. They forget about the people. Now that is where NLP can help - but not the therapeutic or counselling model! It has to be a business model that makes sense to the recipients of that change.

Case Study: Engineers as Change Makers in the USA

This big Multi National company manufactures agricultural and construction equipment. It is driven by a very strong engineering culture: Logic, data, reasoning, structure and evidence based thinking. It has some challenges. Engineers tour the world selling engineering solutions to Plant managers who often don’t want to implement the engineering solutions. The VP of Manufacturing Strategy believes in NLP and behaviour change. He also knows that it has to be sold differently to appeal to the engineers, who are really the Change Makers. Working with many functional teams and Plants worldwide we devised a process of NLP as a process change tool that worked, and was implemented in Plants from Wichita to Doncaster (England), From Toronto to Paris

Training was provided with logical strategic models based on Best Practice in change management. We then focused entirely on creating and maintaining strong relationships between the Engineer (change makers) and the Plant Managers (target audience). Once the engineers realised that the application of NLP could make them more effective, they committed to the whole process of learning and applying NLP successfully.

Case Study: Legal Firms & Professional Service Businesses

Some people believe that technical expertise is the sole route to success. But we know that success is based on building relationships with ‘win-win’ outcomes as in the Engineering example above. NLP can do that. Start with the end in mind. It has worked building businesses in many Firms with whom I have worked – but only when staff and colleagues realised that their technical analytic ability was only part of the success solution. Once NLP processes are valued learning and change commences.

The use of NLP technologies such as language patterns, motivation strategies and installing new belief systems to win the acceptance of change is achieved by ensuring that Sponsors, Change Agents and targets are all aligned. This means you work with the top team first winning their commitment to drive the change. Never dilute the change by moving too fast down the business. Stay with the Sponsors until they realise they have to lead the change process. The rest is easy.

Case Study: Environmental Charity

A very large Charity adopted our approach through a Leadership Development Programme that was cascaded down through 300 managers. Many of these managers worked in local communities with large groups of volunteers. Volunteers are not employees. To manage volunteers you have to be engaging, charismatic and demonstrate vision and leadership. Control has to be replaced by mutual respect. By working with the Charity’s top team and their direct reports we used an NLP approach without using the therapy jargon. It worked and now the organisation is functioning well and growing with over 1 million members and a positive public presence.

Summary

Sure, NLP as a business change process works but only if it is tailored to the particular context of the organisation. So whether you are a retailer with just ten staff, a small bar and restaurant chain with twenty people, a GP practise with fifty, or a community group of one hundred to a large conglomerate, NLP can be a very powerful process for implementing change. And what is important is implementation of change – not the theory and the jargon associated with the therapeutic roots.

About Philip:

Philip Atkinson is a consultant specialising in strategic, behavioural and cultural change. He is a member of various training consortia and has recently focused on creating innovative business simulations through Learning Strategies. He consults in the UK, Europe and USA, has written seven business books and published many articles. He is a speaker at conferences and runs Workshop sessions for leading companies. Philip can be contacted on +44 (0) 0131 346 1276 or 07779-799286 or philip@philipatkinson.com or visit www.philipatkinson.com

Update All Winners For This Competition Have Now Been Contacted.

Richard Bandler, the co-creator and creative genius behind NLP is coming to London on October 13th and you can be one of a small group of people who get to see him free as he talks about the "The Technology of Success and Happiness".

Tickets for the 2 and 1/2 hour event are £50.

To be in with a chance to win a free ticket simply leave a comment below describing how using NLP has changed your life or how you personally have used NLP with yourself or others. The more detailed and colourful the better.

I'll personally be reviewing the replies and will award tickets to the best 17 entries. Competition closes Friday and winners will be notified by email if you've won.

Thanks to the great folks at Alternatives for making this possible.

The event is happening on Thursday the 13th of October between 7PM and 9PM in central London. Full details here.

Richard is an incredibly gifted speaker, teacher and master of how to create change.

Enter your comment below now to be in with a chance to win.

NLP has a lot to offer. Yet I also think as a community of people practicing and applying NLP we also have much further we can go.

I've been learning and practicing NLP for nearly 14 years, have had the pleasure of connecting with hundreds of thousands of people through the NLP Times blog, videos and products and one peculiar thing I noticed that marks this field out more so than most other training related fields I've been involved with is a unique groupie mindset and over emphasis on the guru trainer.

Many in the community seem to value higher titles over results. Certificates over skills. Concepts and worldviews over simplification and practical applications.

I get that different trainers and different schools of NLP resonate differently for different people. And many trainers are exceptional but not becuase they were born "perfected" with awesome skillset in working and helping people or applying and using NLP with themselves and others.

Any one who has spent time watching, hearing or reading about the "early chapters" of NLP will know that not even Richard or John were a fraction as skillful then as they have since become. Yet in their own ways both have continued to develop their skills and what is possible with the technology.

The Dangerous Consequence Of The Groupie Mind

Some people are die hard fans of Richard Bandler, others of John Grinder or Tony Robbins. Or other well known trainers like Michael Breen, John LaValle, Paul Mckenna, Owen Fitzpatrick, Gabe Gurrero, Robert Dilts, Michael Hall, to name a few more. And the list doesn't end there. There are many others that could be named.

For the ones I've personally worked with or studied from I can say each of them are great trainers and do a superb job teaching the toolset of NLP.

The bit that I find curious is when people over focus and hype up the seemingly spell binding skills or life of any trainer. The problem with this; is it usually restricts their growth. They create false ideas about what the technology can do (without, when required, consistent effort and commitment to get good) and believe NLP is a magic pill or one stop wonder.

The common context I hear is often from a novice and even highly experienced students who believe just becuase a trainer is a X level, been "successful" or is well known that they must have the perfect life life, never have anything go wrong, be happy all the time, slim, fit, wealthy and know how to solve every problem.

This thinking for the most part is usually the creation of mental fantasies.

Left unchecked the trainer is placed firmly on a Guru pedestal and each training can become more like a sermon.

From there the student typically only focuses on how brilliant they are rather than wondering how quickly can they apply what they have learned or feel poor about themselves if they don't produce similar result.

This approach is a strategy on how NOT to get progressively better.

If you are comparing yourself constantly to any other trainer or NLP practitioner and put them on a mega pedestal you are almost certainly inhibiting the development of your own skills.

Why? Because if you are spell bound by the magic your focus won't be on how they are producing that result.

Learning NLP is first primarily about you and your life and then, if you so decide using it to benefit others.

It's not about becoming a Guru trainer or having a Mega Master Delta Level - training certificate that says you are "in the club".

Certificates these days primarily have a business and product function. Having a certificate shouldn't make it so you think you really know NLP. Being really good with NLP is never about how many certificates or titles you own.

(And for the record, while it is human nature to like having your work liked, fanned and acknowledged I'm not proposing that the trainers listed above were or are seeking a "Guru" following or are Gurus in any kind of pejorative term. The Guru-ism where it was/is in our own thoughts. The people on that list that I know promote the complete opposite approach.)

The Truth About Top Trainers & People In Every Profession

Every performer you've ever seen do something exceptionally well and be able to do that thing consistently (for example evoke rapid trance, change beliefs, hold an audiences attention for hours, solve highly complex problems, put the ball in the top corner of the goal) did so as a result of putting the time in.

They are that good for good reason.

So seeing someone be really good is not a time for "I'll never be that good" or "It's easy for them… they are a mega master Guru". Instead of this kind of thinking… hear yourself say "mmm, I wonder how they did that and how I could do that?"… if that something is what you really want.

What research indicates and what your own experience will likely support is consistent excellence is not a magical end result that just was born. Rather it is the result of a specific set of behavioral patterns repeated over and over until they form well worn habits of excellence.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, defines the number of hours needed to reach high level of success in any domain as 10,000 hours. The actual requirement will vary from person to person and depend on many factors, but most people agree a lot of practice is required.

Every person is really good at producing some specific results.

The folks who are really good and exceptional in any profession are so as a result of them absorbing, processing, outputting and refining what they have learnt. NLP is no differently. The trainer and "experts" we admire have done this over and over again, in which some type of feedback; either by themselves or via an external person plays a big role.

So when you see someone who is exceptional, applause their commitment to their craft. Celebrate it - becuase it is awesome.

Then if you want to, focus on what you need to learn to produce a similar result.

Every great trainer will be very appreciate of a student who wants to really learn.

And remember - contemplation and ongoing assessment of your own performance in any domain is key.

The stars of any field didn't accept their first results - they used feedback to get better and better and better, until now it seems to a lesser experienced eye like a kind of magic. And for someone who doesn't yet have that skill it is.

The take away is, for the most part if you really want to become very good you can.

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If you are looking to become dramatically better with NLP, in a progressive fashion then the Platinum Audio News Club is a great resource to help.

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Where Do You Want To Take Your NLP Skills Today?

Many years ago I once asked Richard Bandler where did he think NLP was going? His response was

NLP isn’t going anywhere. That’s a nominalization. The question where the rest of the NLP people are going? I have no idea. Me? I’m just going down the road trying to get things done faster and quicker and to have more fun doing them.

It was a great response and full of insight on many levels.

So my question for you is where do you want to take your NLP skills today?

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Got a question or comment? Leave it below I'd love to hear your feedback.

Edward Demming once said "Learning is not compulsory but neither is survival!"

And in today's fast paced world your ability to learn, unlearn and relearn is key. In NLP we say the map is not the territory and this applies to scientific maps as well.

So a basic understanding of recent scientific research about the brain is worth getting on your map about the nature of learning and change.
Before I get into that, let's clarify what the process of "learning" means from an NLP viewpoint. In it's most basic definition we can say that learning equals behavioral change.

This definition goes much deeper than the idea that you've learnt something when you can recite it. Rather this definition points to the idea that in any contexts where skills play a key role, your ability to demonstrate and do the thing you've learnt is the criteria for whether you have "learnt" that something. Unfortunately based on this definition a lot of trainings, books and learning resources would fall short. (More on why in a future post.)

So what insights can science share…

Science Gets An Update

Up until the 1980's scientists held the view that the brain did most of its development in our childhood years and after it had pruned back the excess connections the structure was essentially fixed.

To quote one of the world's leading neuroscietists Fred Gage, the old idea was: "If the brain was changeable, then we would change. And if the brain made wrong changes, then we would change incorrectly. It was easier to believe there were no changes. That way, the individual would remain pretty much fixed."

This old and outdated view of the brain was forever changed with the ground breaking work that has been occurring within the field of neoroplasticiity over the past two decades.

The latest research by neuroscientists today indicate that:

• The structure of our brain is not fixed

• That the brain is highly malleable and subject to continual change as a result of experiences

• That our brain is constantly reorganising throughout our life time

So the good news is - if you are not happy with who you are or what you can do, you can change, regardless of age.

Going Deeper: How Your Brain Changes

Yet the breakthroughs didn't stop there. Further research brought home an equally important update on our understanding of the brain.

• That the actions we take - each and every moment - can literally expand or contract different regions of the brain over time.

• That through experiences we can change not just the brain's structure (anatomy) but also its functional organisation (physiology). In lay mans terms that means our brain will devote more cortical "real estate" to functions that we use more frequently and less to those we rarely perform (so be mindful of how you habitually act).

• Learning is always happening - both consciously and "unconsciously" (i.e when you are not consciously aware you are learning something the brain is always learning).

From an NLP perspective this brings us to an interesting point…

Everything you say or do is some form of practicing, instantiating a certain thought-feeling-behaviour on your brain. When you repeat the process many times (habituate a thought, evoke strong affective imagery etc) you influence the configuration of your brain. We each have done this countless times.

Kinda cool, isn't it?

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If you would like to learn more about how to use NLP to create more of the life you want check out our online training here.

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But equally this ongoing process is something that you will want to be mindful of - because the more frequently and with richer intensity you repeat certain activities (thoughts, feelings, movements) the more your brain's real estate is wired to produce that result - on que. Over time your brain can be triggered to create an emotional response or thought process by a greater number of generalized stimuli. (i.e. your brain has generalized the trigger).

Bottom line is what you habitually do you become more of.

So if you habitually talk badly to yourself or get annoyed whenever anyone is late for example then that is the instruction you are giving to your brain to wire and zone for brain real estate.

The question to ask yourself is - is that what you want?

If not, maybe now is good time to pimp your brain!

Got a question or comment, I'd love to hear your thoughts - feel free to leave a message below.