State Management
NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It’s about how we, ourselves, pattern and program ourselves to habituate our responses to people and reality. Because we give attention to the things that are most important to us, it’s important to understand how we use language our neurological experience to program ourselves to habitually react to the world.
An understanding of NLP can give rise to state management, which is part of emotional intelligence. It’s the capacity to control the movies that run your thinking and drive your emotional experience. It’s being able to hold and maintain, through choice, the kind of states and state experience that you want because everything is grounded in state.
Filtering Experiences Through Your State
Here’s an example of state management. If, at the end of a bad day, I asked you, “What do you think of XYZ idea?” you likely wouldn’t be in the best emotional state experience. Your response to the question would be grounded in your experience of your day. If you had a good day and I asked you the same question, it is more probable that you will answer the question with a different response. In both scenarios, the same event is occurring, but the way you would filter through your state would change the tone of your response. Your experience of the question would vary depending on your state.
Your physiology leads your state, and most people don’t have the capacity to shift and alter what they are paying attention to. This means that you are not experiencing as fully as if you were truly present. Being able to run our own brain when we are not at our best is a real skill set that can save relationships. Being able to manage your own mind, body, and emotional state enables you to have the kind of experience and quality of life that you desire to have.
Freedom from Your Environment
Most people are subject to the environment and their mind, body, emotional state is directly linked to what is going on outside of them, not inside of them. When you are present, your state stops changing in relation to the environment. This gives you influence over your environment, instead of the environment influencing you.
Ironically, there are times in parenting when you need to be at your best, but you are at your worst. When you can run your own brain and your own states, you can turn this around. It’s an easy thing to do, but very few people know how to do it.
Changing Your State with Anchors
Suppose you are in a situation where you want to feel more confident. Take yourself back to a time when you experienced confidence. Remember everything about the experience with all of your senses. As you do this, you’ll re-experience that experience when you laid the memory down. Fully re-experience it, and bring the confidence to what you need confidence for now.
It’s the same as when you remember something sad; you feel sad. Or you recall a joke, and it makes you laugh again. The memory takes you back to the state experience you felt when the memory was being laid down. We remember things that are funny or sad, but shouldn’t limit it to just those emotions. We can tap into a variety of memories when we need to feel different states.
It can help to link the memory directly to the state experience. When you bring the experience up, you bring the state with it. Once you re-experience the memory, it can change your current state. In doing this, you are controlling the movies that govern your state in a way that serves you. Tie your positive memories and experiences to an anchor to help you recall them.
An anchor is simply associating a thought or physiology with a feeling. For example, the smell of a particular perfume takes you back to how you felt about a previous lover.
In NLP, we show you how to recall an experience and attach it to a resourceful anchor that you self-create. Then, when you need to change your state, you simply fire off the resource anchor and change your state-experience.
The NLP Journey
The NLP journey can be a challenging experience because it invites you to look at who you are as a human being. For me personally, it was scary, invigorating, and enlightening. Even though I wanted to develop, I was nervous about what I would find. What I found was a belief structure arising that was the limiting me; what I call the probability of me, not the possibility of me.
If you are interested in further training in this area, The Coaching Room offers an NLP Practitioner Course which is an 8-day program. The course is entertaining and interactive, and is an investment of your time and money into your ongoing learning and personal development.
We hope to see you in the room.
