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NLP Misconceptions: The Five Mistakes People Make

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NLP Misconceptions

NLP Training

First of all, unless you are familiar with NLP, the name itself is daunting .. Neuro-linguistic Programming!!!

  •     neuro, as in neurology;
  •     linguistic, as in language;
  •     programing, as in .. changing how you think ..

We’ve adopted our own acronym, NLP as in Now Live on Purpose! .. but that still leaves the big question: How do you do that?

There are a number of misconceptions about NLP I’d like to clear up first:

NLP Misconception #One: NLP is manipulative.
One student told me that someone on her street used NLP to sell cars. He eventually sold one to all her neighbors. I asked her if her neighbors were happy with their new cars. She told me they were delighted with them. The truth is, you can’t make people do things they don’t want to do, not for long at any rate. More than that, NLP has always taught that you work towards the best possible outcome for everyone and everything concerned.

Was Martin Luther King manipulative because he was a great orator? One of the foundations of NLP is to adopt what works best, to emulate the best .. Martin Luther King, Meryl Streep, Buddha, Mother Theresa, Richard Branson .. to figure out how they got the results that worked best for them, so that you can get the results that can work best for you.

NLP Misconception #Two: NLP is superficial.
Actually the very basis of NLP comes from asking how to make fast permanent change for everyone from the mentally ill, and the severely disabled, to artists, communicators, and business people. So much NLP has been integrated into contemporary training for personal and business development, sports coaching , public speaking etc. that it’s often not recognized for what it is. Far from being superficial, NLP has become established as part of elite methodologies across multiple disciplines.

NLP Misconception #Three: NLP is voodoo psychology, based on unverified beliefs.
As new research in neuroscience becomes available and accessible we hear of “breakthroughs” that many of us have been using effectively with our clients for decades. There has always been a small group of dedicated change-makers who were ahead of the curve. Time and society usually catches up in the end. The originators of NLP were considered marginal, but then so was Freud and Jung, not to mention Galileo, Picasso, and the Rolling Stones.

NLP Misconception #Four: You can learn NLP from books.
If you can learn it from books, then there’s no point in getting Master Certification, or even working with an experienced trainer. But can you learn how to be a parent from a book, or play in an orchestra? You can learn something; but it’s not parenting or musical virtuosity. In fact, you can learn very little from books. The same is true with NLP because a lot of it has to do with the underlying understanding. Being a good parent is valuable, playing music to move hearts is valuable, creating fast permanent positive change in others is invaluable. But to master those skills, you need to rub shoulders with, experience and learn form those who have already embodied those things.

NLP Misconception #Five: NLP is geeky,  Intellectual and not at all spiritual.
Nothing could be further from the truth. One definition of spiritual truth I have always liked is from the Plotinus; “Truth is the mind in agreement with itself.”  If there’s one thing that NLP does it is to create congruity, wholeness, and alignment, so that you are in agreement with yourself, inside and out, emotionally, intellectually, and  spiritually.  If spiritual means learning to appreciating the miracle of living, respecting the humanity of others, respecting life itself, celebrating your highest values  .. then I know of nothing more spiritual than the outcomes people achieve through NLP.

NLP, Now Live on Purpose. Once again, how do you do that in a world which constantly pulls you in many often conflicting directions. Well, that is the question NLP actually  allows you to answer for yourself, in your own way, so that it works.

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Five changes: NLP Questions and Answers.

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Questions and Answers. Call Recording.

Five changes: NLP Questions and Answers

vudun_hex_depression_hypnosis-150x150If you missed the call/webcast  last Friday you can still catch the recording at  Recording of Call

We only had time to answer some of your questions. So here are a few more.

Thanks to everyone for your participation and energy. Most of these questions have a relevance beyond NLP, or our Five Changes NLP training. There’s a bigger picture here that has to do with change, transformation, and healing of all kinds.

Q: What are the possible negative outcomes for taking the training and doing this work?

This will apply to any genuinely transformational work that changes you from being the victim of circumstances to living your life at choice. Think of all people who have done amazing things in their life, sometimes against all odds. Some may be iconic heroes, like Mandela, or Oprah, or Cesar Chavez, others may be people you know. You may even be one of them yourself. Think about it! Think of people who have beaten the odds to do something extraordinary.

At some point they refused to put up with excuses for not doing what they knew they could do, what they had to do .. whether it was changing the world or dealing with some personal misfortune.

When you change what you are willing to tolerate in your life, whether it’s a bad situation or negative people, some doors may close. But others will open. When it becomes more important to you to face your challenges, than to continue hanging out with the situations and people who reinforce your excuses for not changing, you may lose some of those friends. But that may not actually be a bad thing, It may not be a negative outcome. You may have to change some of the things you do and places where you hang out. That may not be a bad thing either. But anyway, consider yourself warned ..

Five Changes Soul Work and Classical NLP Certification Training

Q: Are NLP and hypnosis the same? How are they related?

milton_erickson NLP Questions & A
Milton Erickson

Yes and no. Hypnosis and NLP are certainly related, and share some common ground. But you can practice NLP without any formal reference to hypnosis, and there are numerous styles of hypnotherapy that make no overt use of NLP techniques. Consider hypnosis as simply the means to bypass the rational mind in order to effect deep long-lasting healing and change by accessing unconscious mental and neurological patterns. Based on that, then NLP and hypnosis certainly have a lot in common.

Some people are intrigued by hypnosis. Hypnosis may seem exotic and mysterious. Actually, hypnosis is a daily occurrence for all of us. As the great Milton Erikson said, “Most people walk around in a trance of disempowerment, our work is to change that into a trance of empowerment.” We are using the words hypnosis and trance interchangeably.

You will learn more about the amazing Milton Erickson during our training. His use of Conversational Hypnosis is very much a part of our NLP curriculum.

Q: I’ve heard people speak of ‘NLP magic’ and would love to know what that means.

It used to take weeks, or even months, to get people to overcome a phobia. In the traditional behaviorist methodology curing a phobia is a long process of gradual desensitization.

With NLP we can effectively remove a phobic reaction in just a few minutes, permanently. People find it hard to believe that something that used to take so long can now be done so quickly; but in NLP rapid permanent positive change is commonplace.

Q: What else can NLP change?

If you can quickly and permanently change a phobia, something that used to be considered so hard to change, do you think it might be possible to identify and change a limiting belief? Or a deep-rooted negative emotional pattern? Or compulsive or addictive behaviors and habits? Do you think common fears, like fear of public speaking, might also be something you might be able to change pretty easily?

One of the things we teach students of NLP is the importance of letting go of negative expectations of their clients. Studies have shown that clients and patients tend to fulfill the expectations of those they go to for help. Even completely unexpressed expectations are like self-fulfilling prophesies.

This may be one of the fundamental problems with traditional diagnostic approaches. Diagnoses are valuable, but only as ways to identify problems. If the diagnosis defines the client, or patient, it places them inside a box. But the client is always more than that box. Likewise, the cure, or the transformation, is always more than the conventional prognosis.

You don’t have to believe in miracles. More than fifty percent of remissions from ‘in-curable’ illness is unexplainable by conventional means.  These are already ‘miracle’ cures. In other words, for those fifty percent something changed on an unconscious level to make healing possible.

NLP has always been very curious about how this happens..

Q: How’s is NLP done?

We don’t have time to cover all the details. But the simple answer is that we all create our deepest reality, our inner landscape, our responses to the world, through the words and images that we use for mental access and recall. It is much easier to change those words, images, and the meanings associated with them than anyone realized back in the days when behaviorism and psychoanalysis, and related disciplines, were the only games in town.

NLP uses very specific ways to help people change how they represent and perceive the world they live in. We use a wide range of inductive techniques.In the NLP training we teach you how you can continue to develop ways to do the same for yourself, and others. You may take NLP into a therapeutic situation, a classroom or training room, or you may use it from the stage. The tools and techniques are applicable to almost any situation.

If you are working with clients you will have the tools to effectively change the physical, emotional, behavioral, social, professional, and even spiritual dynamics of their life.

Q: Can I talk to Caitriona or Michele about this training before I register, and will I still get the special price?

If you have worked with either of us privately in past the couple of years we do have a special offer for you if you would like to join us for this. The offer is good through the end of this month. So call us before March 31st

A Story

changeOnce a client came out of desperation – as clients sometimes do – having exhausted all other options. She had chronic back pain from an auto accident years before. She had had several surgeries; had been to neurologists, acupuncturists, and pain doctors. She had been to a psychiatrist at a well-known Los Angeles university hospital who gave her pain medication on condition that she had sex with him. He told her that she would have back pain for the rest of her life. He also told her that if she ever mentioned his sexual abuse he would claim that she was psychotic and delusional.

She came to me for hypnotherapy. After one session her pain was gone. A year later she reported that she had no recurrence of the pain. Such cases help me remember how powerful these tools for change really are. Does that mean her pain was not real? Of course not! It had been very real for her .. for years. Does it mean those other healthcare professionals were incompetent? Aside from the psychiatrist, they were all probably very good at what they did. It is simply that she came to me at a moment when she was truly ready for change. Fortunately the tools I have were able to catalyze that change in an effective and permanent way.

The deepest change is often not about the symptoms. Effecting change is often a matter of helping people to claim their power back, and remember who they are. People may come with ‘incurable’ problems. But those problems are incurable only because the person had learned to believe them to be so.

We do not claim that hypnosis or NLP trumps every other healing or transformational modality. Amazing transformation takes place in many contexts and through many healing modalities.

We do say that there are huge possibilities for the deepest sort of healing outside of the traditional paradigm; and that deep healing often takes place beyond known and familiar territories.

Five Changes Soul Work and Classical NLP Certification Training

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It’s not WHAT you believe: Is NLP Not for you

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jane_reed-1948
Jane Reed 1948it’s not what you believe, it’s how you live your life ..

As I take care of my old mum through her decline into dementia, navigating the family dynamics, and learning from all the ‘stuff’ that comes up while doing what I imagine, and hope, is best for the person I’ve known longer than anyone else .. I realize that no amount of commitment to a belief, or to an ethical principle is a genuine substitute for authentic personal alignment and congruity.

In other words, if I let unresolved issues get in the way, or if I look at things as they unfold as anything other than a gift and an opportunity to learn something new, then I would be missing life’s big opportunities.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with belief, or faith, or clear principles. It’s just that, by themselves, they won’t make you happy or change you. Your life is a work in progress. Your hardest challenges are often the greatest gifts, sent to heal and transform you. All it takes is to recognize them for what they are.

Because I value all I have learned over the years from meditation, hypnosis, and NLP; and because NLP in particular is something that people are asking us about in anticipation of our upcoming NLP training I want to write about the connection between NLP and what I referred to above as ‘personal alignment and congruity’.

Is NLP not For you?

First of all, NLP is NOT for YOU if:

  • Your inertia is stronger than your sense of adventure and discovery.
  • You prefer to blame others rather than change something within yourself.
  • If you don’t want to challenge the limits you have set for what is possible then NLP not for you.
  • You like to win people over to your point of view, rather than listening to where they are  coming from.
  • You have high ideals but find yourself compromising a lot.
  • If you avoid doing things that cause you to risk failing, or making a mistake then NLP not for you.
  • You avoid learning new things that challenge what you believe and how you think.
  • IF you don’t want to change any of the above Then NLP is not for you.

Actually, NLP is not so easy to define, because it’s not what you do with it, as much as the thinking you use behind what you do. What shows up as personal alignment is different for everybody. When people ask us what NLP is we often say, “Everything you experience is made of the words and pictures you use to represent it .. and you can change that!”

NLP is not strictly a modality, because there is such a wide variety of ways to practice it.  Some of them may even seem to contradict each other! Though there is certainly a body of coherent skills within NLP that can be learned.

NLP is certainly not a belief system. In fact it tends to question the very mechanism by which we formulate beliefs. It emerged in the early 1970’s out of a handful of curious and brilliant innovators who took it upon themselves to integrate, synthesize, and model what worked best in the fields of psychology, personal development, and human accomplishment in general. Though it’s roots go back much earlier. The momentum that created NLP was through a methodology, a way of questioning and experimenting.  So NLP is best described as a method for replicating effective strategies, it is a means towards an end, the road to a positive desired outcome.

For example, someone may have an intense irrational fear of spiders, so strong that they avoid going anywhere near them. How might you instill a similar fear, not of spiders, but of needles in a drug addict? With NLP you can do that.

With someone who is chronically late for appointments, but never misses their morning coffee, you can apply a similar strategy .. to help them either to give up coffee, if that’s what they want to do, or to be punctual for all their appointments. With NLP can do that.

 Some good questions to ask are:

” Is NLP Not for me”

“What can I learn here?”

“What can I take from this situation to other situations, that will allow for greater effectiveness and maximum benefit?”

“If this is the best thing that could have happened, how can I make use of it now towards the greatest positive good?”

When should you use these questions? Anytime! Especially when you are least inclined to; when you don’t get what you expected, when your car breaks down or you are delayed in getting to the most important meeting of your life, when someone, or something, you had relied on suddenly isn’t there anymore, when someone surprises you with a devastating personal attack ..

Managing Your Emotions

Another way of say this is that NLP is all about managing your emotional state, and since NLP has allowed me to begin to learn how to do that, one of the great pleasures I now enjoy when I am with my ol’ mum, is to engage her sense of humor and irony, to be playful with her, to help her remember that there are ways to be light, relaxed, free from anxiety

 

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Illuminated Brain

NLP Meta States

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NLP Meta States:

All things splendid have been achieved by those who dared to believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances. Bruce Barton

In the 80’s and 90’s I used to go for month-long retreats in Southwestern France to study with Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Master, who was our teacher for many years. One of his constant themes, and something he would repeat over and over again, was that whenever strong negative emotions came up in our meditations, we should treat them kindly. He suggested simply being mindful whenever resentment, anxiety, regret, self-judgment or similar emotions came up; and instead of pushing them away, to treat them with the same respect and affection you might treat a good friend in need. Listen to them, be kind to them.

What would happen to your relationship with a friend in need if you were to judge them, show impatience and anger, or try to ignore them when they showed up?

The suggestion was to develop a relationship with those difficult emotions as you would with a friend. When you do. You can be sure that those emotions will cause you less grief in future encounters with them. It’s not that they won’t show up any more, it’s that your relationship to them begins to  change. This is a basic strategy of mindfulness training; simple, though not necessarily easy to do.

Go on, beat yourself up! You do it so well!

Unless you do something different than just fighting and blindly resisting negative emotions you will never learn the valuable information they carry. You never get to truly heal the deep wounds that we all carry. Worse than that, you end up compounding the negatives:
– beating yourself up about beating yourself up
– getting angry at yourselves for getting angry
– shaming yourselves for failures, weaknesses, your lack of confidence
– having anxiety in anticipation of anxiety or fear
in a repeating pattern of neurotic loops.

Those layers of resistance accumulate and compound, creating a tangle so dense that it seems almost impossible to ever extricate yourself.

NLP Meta states   

Those meditation instructions echo the ” NLP meta state ” model of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which I use now, to great effect with clients who have no experience of, and no particular interest in meditation.

The common key, and the starting point, is Awareness. You begin by simply being aware of the negative emotional state. As if you were with a good friend who was in trouble; you listen to it. You accept it as it is. Later you begin to evaluate the emotion. Is this state valid? Is it appropriate? Am I digging up some old reaction that is completely outdated in the present circumstances? Can I learn from this? What is it telling me?

Asking clear questions with awareness is the first step of becoming  master of your emotions. Most people don’t develop even this basic skill; or if they do, it is haphazard at best. But if you could learn to handle the infinite progression of emotional states, as they happen, with alignment and clear focus – imagine what would then become possible! You can transform all the emotional patterns that limit who you are, and what you can do.

What I am describing is a way of handling your emotions so that you can play the game of life in an entirely new way, with resilience, resourcefulness, energy, and creativity! And because treating it as ‘play’, may just be the one of the best ways to embody those qualities!

Welcome to the NLP Meta State -Zone!

In previous blogs I described how to use NLP Meta States. There are many ways of doing so, and after  you become familiar with the process, you will be able to adapt it and create your own unique approach.

I gave you an example of taking a negative emotional state and then gradually accessing  its higher level underlying intention. Grief and loss was the initial negative state, and I moved from there to joy and gratitude as its higher level intention, using four intermediate states to get there. I layered each state one on the other, until I was immersed in the joy and gratitude.

Here is another approach to creating NLP Meta States. You begin in the same way, asking what the underlying highest purpose behind the negative emotion is. Then you go directly to it, and move  backwards to find the sequence that connects it to the original negative emotion. Once again you are layering state upon state, to transform that negative emotion.

Recently I experienced a strange and unfamiliar fear. I was about to stand up at a large gathering of entrepreneurs to publicly acknowledge someone from whom I had learned some life-changing lessons, and for whom I felt profound gratitude. My fear kept me paralyzed in silence. Then I examined it to explore it a little. I began simply with an awareness of the fear, and an acknowledgement that it was there for a reason. I realized that underneath my fear there was a stronger feeling – my gratitude. My gratitude had been buried under old habits, and emotional triggers that had lost their relevance years ago. That awareness alone was enough to shift my focus in such a way that the fear disappeared completely. As I tracked back from gratitude, through layers of love, celebration, energy, I found that I couldn’t even access the fear any more. The fear was now the messenger of profound gratitude.

The use of this powerful process called NLP Meta States are something we use to help our clients learn to live with clarity, focus, and purpose. There are some amazing ways of using them that are impossible to describe fully here, but I hope you get a sense of how it works. NLP Meta States are also something we cover in depth in our NLP Certification training.

 

 

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Using Meta-States: Change Grief, Anger, and Fear

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Using Meta-States: Change Grief, Anger, and Fear

Down with rain up with flowers!

meta_statesIn an earlier blog I mentioned meta-states. In this piece I want to give you some pointers as to HOW you can actually use meta-states as a process. First I want to clear up some confusion. Meta-states have nothing to do with the word ‘Metta’ from the Pali language. The word meta, with one ‘t’, comes from the Greek, and means: above, beyond, the big picture. Metta, with two ‘t’s, refers to the meditative cultivation of unconditional love.

Actually, the Meta-State Process may have more to do with Metta—unconditional love—than is apparent at first; though the two words have no direct connection to each other. But I’ll leave you to decide that for yourself.

The ‘Meta-State’ process I want to tell you about here comes from our NLP training program. It is a way to help you to redirect your focus away from un-resourceful, unresolved emotions, towards positive emotions: and then to combine the two to develop a more fully proactive ongoing positive emotional and energetic resource. It is key for your own, or for your clients’ ongoing journey towards integration and emotional and spiritual wellbeing; if that journey is to be more than a quest for Band-Aids and quick fixes.

The activities involved in thinking and feeling are dynamic and nonlinear. Everyone has multiple ways of doing them. Thinking and feeling are interconnected, not always predictable, and infinitely more complex than we usually realize. The meanings we give to things (thinking), and emotional states (feelings) make up a system .. which you experience as yourself, as ‘I’. In going through this meta-state process I encourage you to create your own categories and distinctions. Use the methods, as you understand them from what I will describe; and then adapt them to suit what you intuit will work best for you. It will enable you to begin loosen up that rigid construct of ‘I’, and give you some more options towards becoming, ultimately, a master of your emotional states.

The Meta-State Process

Not so long ago I visited my elderly father in the nursing home where he now lives. I was feeling such intense grief that for a while I felt like I was drowning in it. I stopped for a moment to check in with myself. Then I made a choice to create a meta-state sequence. First I needed to find a quiet place, and take a little time to engage in some very specific self-observation. I began by looking for more than the experience of the emotion. I checked in with myself—body, thoughts, as well as my emotional states. We often imagine that by giving a word to an emotion that it is just one thing. But when you allow yourself to be completely present to it, you experience it as a system. So I checked in with multiple shades and nuances of the emotions I was feeling, as they revealed themselves to me, through the process of my observation. I could then begin to experience my grief more fully. Gradually I could take it to a higher-level state of joy, gratitude, and love.

Through the presence of an intense feeling of grief, I was able to shift, in a few steps, to a sense of peaceful inner calm. By asking, “What can I learn here? What is this grief telling me? What is the highest purpose for this emotion?” I uncovered compassion, nostalgia, love, and determination. In turn this allowed me to experience an ongoing and active acceptance of the situation, which then brought me back to the joy I used to feel in a more direct way when I was with my father years before. Then I expanded this joy in a specific way in order to create an anchor. The joy now spontaneously erupts whenever that grief is triggered again, creating a new, complex, and a more effectively positive emotion than the joy alone.

This meta-state process is not an analytic process, nor does it rely entirely on moving through a sequence of random emotions. It is not substituting one emotion for another; nor is it covering an emotion, or numbing yourself to it. It is similar to some meditation practices like Vipassana, but it involves more active engagement than is usually taught. It also requires that you trust your intuition. It is much more closely related to Psycho-magic than to either cognitive therapy or meditation. It works best when you have someone to guide you through it—at least initially. But you can certainly use the information here to great effect.

This process is strongly rooted in a deep trust in the human energetic and emotional experience. Imagine that every emotion is there for you as a gift, a healer, and a guide.

Meta-States on Your Own

If you have no-one to guide you, simply sit with the emotional state you want to shift and begin asking, “What can I learn here?” and “What is the higher level purpose of this?” The questions immediately change your relationship to the negative emotion. They move it to a meta-level, so that you can create a meta-relationship between the two states, negative and positive; and then move yourself to a meta-experience that is entirely above and beyond either of those emotional states as you would experience them on their own! The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

The essence of all NLP work is to effect rapid, positive, permanent change. The meta-states process produces new emotional experience that makes it impossible to engage in negative emotions in the old way. Naturally it is better experienced than described. This is one small piece of the work we use to empower our clients to live a creative, impactful, spiritually rich life. It is also part of the curriculum we teach in the Five Changes NLP training and Certification that we now teach.

Down with Rain, Up with Flowers!
Before my father entered life in a nursing home, one of the ways he used to express humor and beauty in his often difficult life was to write poetry and paint. Down With Rain Up With Flowers was a cycle of poems he wrote about the resilience of the creative force. What seems to dampen the spirit can actually regenerate it.

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Meta-States and Negative emotions

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Meta-States and Negative emotions: When Bad Emotions Turn Good

Cloudy. Chance of Rainbows!

Abstract Creature

Wouldn’t it be great if negative emotions such as anger, sadness, disappointment, and fear, didn’t drain you, confuse you, overwhelm you, or cloud your thinking? Wouldn’t it be great if you learned to use them to bring you more energy, clarity, resourcefulness, even more happiness? Wouldn’t it be great if they became the very best way for you to solve problems and awaken your creativity?

Emotions occur for a reason. They also occur because of a choice you make; or made in the past. Which means that emotions are often based on long-established patterns and habits.

Anger. Fear. Sadness. Go for it!

Think of negative emotions as signals; information you can use to catalyze change; to regain balance, for example; or to trigger deeper degrees of happiness, confidence, joy, equilibrium, excitement.

Think of negative emotions as friends. When an apparently debilitating emotion pays you a visit, what they are doing is reminding you that something is off-balance. Invite them in, ask yourself, “What can I learn here?” Imagine that your friend is bringing you a gift. Ask yourself “How will this .. anger, sadness, disappointment, fear ..  serve me?”

This is the beginning of learning to become a true artist of your states of mind and emotions.

When you learn to use your self-reflective capacity in a particular way, you create the space around these strong emotions so that they won’t trigger you. Some spiritual practices use an observational approach to  meditation. Yet there is a tendency to simply switch from negative to positive, thereby missing the opportunity to use the momentum behind the negative emotion. Certainly, there are times when we need to switch off and experience calm and peace; but if that’s all we do, we miss huge opportunities for genuine and permanent transformation.

Meta-States. The complete and utter transformation of negative emotions

For a few years I had been caretaking my father who is in the middle stages of dementia. He is living in a Catholic facility where all his needs are attended too. Several years ago, when I visited him there, I felt profound sadness. Once my sadness was so strong that I felt it would be dangerous for me to drive. It was as if I was intoxicated with my sadness! So I went back to the small chapel in the building. I just let the feelings be there. Then I began to use my skills to create Meta-States from the sadness. Using Meta-States begins with the question, ”What is the highest intention of this sadness? What is its greatest purpose?”

The answer I got was, “Get back to the joy!” My natural joy was inside, underneath, and behind the sadness. It was a question of simply taking the time to recognize it. In fact, it was a little more than just recognizing that simple fact. Working with Meta-States is a specific way to change deeply ingrained patterns we sometimes use to limit ourselves with emotions we imagine happen to us. They help us learn that we are doing them, and that with skill we can navigate them to effect a complete transformation.

In simplest terms, when you use a Meta-State, you are moving to a resourceful internal experience from the starting point of a self-limiting experience. Of course, there are specific ways to do this. (which we will cover in a later article).

Meta-States is something that comes out of NLP. Despite much confusion, NLP is actually very simple. It is the ongoing investigation and replication of what works best, for the greatest benefit of all concerned.

If the question is, “How do people who remain unshakably happy maintain their happiness, even in the face of setbacks, disappointments, and even tragedy?” Then the answer is, “By applying the specific Meta-States that those people use. In other words, Meta-States is a strategy, a sequence of inner shifts, that you can learn to use in order to bypass old debilitating emotional downward spirals.

Now when I visit my father, my sadness immediately expands out to joy. It happens so quickly that I hardly recognize it as sadness.

There is a Japanese word that actually translates to ‘happy-sad.’ I learned to appreciate what this word meant from my own experience. Not only did I reap the benefits of transforming my sadness, I have learned to hone my skill in developing Meta-States in just about any situation that comes my way.

Of course, there is the added benefit that when you take responsibility to feel good, others feel good around you. Not only is my old Dad happier to see me, but the staff and the nurses noticeably perk up whenever I show up. They’ve even told me as much.

.. Spread the Joy!

Meta-States is part of our Five Changes NLP snd  Apprenticeship  training and is also one of the key skills we teach to our clients.

 

When bad emotions turn good, Meta-States and Bad emotions, Which means that emotions are often based on ,long-established patterns and habits.  negative emotions as signals, turn negative emotions into friends, your states of mind and emotions, transformation of negative emotions, Get back to the joy! Mediation, nlp, spiritual practice, Neuro lingusitic   programming, Hypnosis, personal development, unconscious mind.