'I've already got what I need! ' A powerful lightbulb moment for my practice client and a strong reinforcement of my learnings for me!
It's weekend 3 of my Smart School Diploma in NLP and Hypnotherapy and the penny has dropped - this combination of NLP and Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool - each incredibly effective in their own right as therapies but put together and 'BAM' as the wonderful Peggy Guglielmino, our tutor, likes to say!
NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming and quite simply it is a set of tools that analyzes and changes how your brain processes information and turns it into emotions and behaviours. Now there is only a limited amount of thoughts, memories, behaviours and feelings that we consciously experience at any one time, everything that is not in our conscious mind is stored and organised in our unconscious mind - a huge library of thoughts, emotions and memories collated over all of our life. What Hypnotherapy does is allow you to access that unconscious mind, by directing your attention internally towards your thoughts, sensations and feelings. Combined together NLP and Hypnotherapy enables you to access your unconscious mind and make positive and beneficial changes to the way you think and communicate with yourself and others.
NLP is based on a number of principles, not rules, but more a way of looking at things. One of those principles is that we have all the resources we need to achieve our desired outcome - its not talking about physical, tangible resources like time, skills, money - but internal resources such as emotional states, for example confidence, calmness, inner strength, resilience or courage. This principle was demonstrated beautifully with a practice client....
My practice client was lacking self confidence in going back on the dating scene again, yet through explorative discussion we discovered that she has ooodles of confidence in specific areas of her work life. A simple but effective technique allowed her first to access those feelings of confidence she experiences in her work life and then to transfer that confidence into the dating context. I'm wondering just how quickly she will begin to enjoy her dating experiences!
What was so powerful for me was that she was concerned I would use hypnotherapy to try and control her thoughts, to put 'stuff' in there that wasn't there before - and she was delighted to discover that in fact she already has the confidence she needs. Just that that confidence had been 'filed' in her unconscious mind under work and not under 'dating' so of course when it came to dating - a situation she found a little scary - she couldn't find the confidence! So all we did was duplicate and expand that confidence file and filed it under dating too! And as an extra bonus she also now has a way of accessing that confidence file anytime she needs it - by a simple discrete physical action that no-one else would notice - whether it be for jumping out an aeroplane, speaking at a conference or any other situation when she needs an extra boost! Wow!
What emotional states would you love to be able to access at any given time in any situation?
