Your can change your state of mind or mood easily using the techniques of anchoring. This means you can, for example, stay calm and relaxed whatever other people are doing or however provoking they may be.
While NLP offers you techniques to create a desired anchor (see below), you are also already affected by anchors throughout your life and go into a good mood or a bad one … feel motivated to do one thing or to do another … feel confident and resourceful or the opposite. We are responding to anchors, but we may not know what they are. These anchors have been built up accidentally and some of them can be used in your favor even without knowing any techniques.
So it is worth investigating what resonates with you most. Very often this is connected to you preferred representational system (–> see VAKOG).
Being quite visual, pictures can work as an anchor (background pictures for your computer, a picture in your purse).
E.g. when I feel very tense and would like to get into some state of calmness and having a fresh mind, I like to remember an early morning hike on the Mount Batur in Bali (–> see Sunrise).
If you are (like I am) also a very auditory person, music playlist might help you to get into a desired state. I have playlists for all kinds of moods on my iPhone – one that helps me to be confident when I make a public appearance, one that gets me into a competitive mode when preparing for a tennis match, one to lift me up when I am down or one to calm me down when I am nervous.
NLP looks at the ways we experience the world through our sensory organs. These representational systems are called VAKOG. VAKOG stands for:
V visual seeing A auditory hearing K kinesthetic feeling O olfactory smelling G gustatory tasting
According to the NLP model, people use those five sensory channels with varying emphases. We each have a preferred way of representing the world to ourselves, a preferred representational system. E.g. some people are very visually oriented; information over the other channels have less impact.
“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” (Bruce Lee)
If you came across –> Why another blog already, I have told you that “For now […] this is just for me”. Which is actually only part of the truth. You may as well find something here that adds to your life and of course I would like to hope that you do.
Memory of a life changing moment. Could have been anywhere, but it was in Mannheim / Germany. Long story. To be told at a later day.
For quite a while my life felt like a slide … kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, A-levels, military, university, first job, getting new / more tasks, getting promoted, second job … I “automatically” progressed and developed, constantly (and accidentally) learned new skills, how to interact with people. However, retrospectively it does not feel as if I took much of an active part.
At some point I wanted to take more control over direction and speed, not just follow the slide anymore. To be honest – for many reasons (internally and externally) I had to.
This is when I started to take action. Btw – even though I started only in my 40s, I don’t believe that this is a matter of age. Everyone has hers or his right time to take charge of one’s life. I have met people in their teens and early twenties that hugely impressed me how reflective they already looked at their lives. And at the same time you see a lot of people take action in what may be the second half of their life time.
“Taking action” for me meant (among others)
to look at my lifeline (“Life is understood backwards; but lived forwards.” – Søren Kierkegaard – Danish philosopher and theologian 1813-1855)
to identify my core values (it is surprising how powerful it is to actually narrow them down to 5-6 values and write them down)
look a my “bucket list” and start crossing things off that list
identify the goals I still have in my life (and in my case meant to deal with the struggle not being able to identify any and find an alternative approach to that)
find what I would like to change in my life and what keeps me from doing so (immunity to change)
find ways to better understand myself and interact with others
I have read hundreds of books, had hours of coaching sessions, podcasts, conversations with inspiring people from all over the world and all kinds of backgrounds, frequently taking time to reflect in a monastery – you name it.
On the one hand the main message is that you never stop learning … the journey is the reward.
n the other hand it always surprises me how things are linked together, even though the labels are different. Right now I am reading a book about “Personal Branding” and first step the author recommends is to look at your lifeline and your values, your purpose in life to start from. Maybe there is not much difference between “Personal Branding” and “Personal Development”? Or maybe one can use the same tools in many different circumstances? When I did my qualification in NLP*, I found a lot of aspects I already knew from mental training in tennis – but no-one had called it NLP at that time.
* again a label that needs further explanation – I tend to describe what I learned the “white magic” compared to the manipulative “black magic” you may have heard of
So maybe there is something in that box for you …
P.S.: If you got to this point, you have already proven that you attention span lasts for more than 140 characters … which I am sure is essential.
