Three Ways to Change Your Mind for The Better
29 December 2006
Being a former court-lawyer, I am extremely aware of the importance of language in expressing our thoughts and opinions. Using the wrong word in the wrong context can mean making or breaking a case. Using one specific word instead of another specific word can give a positive twist to my argument, or a negative one to the argument of my colleague at the other side of the table. Non-verbal language has much power as well. A specific look, a specific pose, specific hand movements, they all convey messages within court, and can be used to one’s advantage.
Having stepped away from law, and being a Master NLP practitioner, the importance of verbal and non-verbal language is emphasised daily in my work with clients, in as much the same way as it did in Law. You have to understand that without language, we are not able to express ourselves. Without language we are not able to give meaning to what goes on around us, cannot set goals for ourselves, and cannot discern between emotions.
Our brain takes information in and processes it. Without language, the whole process would stop right there. Our brain would just be a ginormous hard-drive, storing information. Luckily we have language to create internal representations within this complex array of experiences, and label them accordingly. That’s how you can know a certain neuro-chemical “buzz” within your body as “being happy”, and another neuro-chemical “buzz” as “being sad”. It also makes you able to distinguish between experiences, so that one set of “brain-waves” means you have encountered a “tree”, while another bout of brain activity represents your seeing “a car”.
Language is not only the means to create these representations in our brain, it is also the only means to express them in the outer world. In order for someone else to understand what goes on inside us, we have to use verbal and non-verbal language.
As we speak, millions of synaptic responses are being fired off in the brain, as our brain tries to match the spoken words with the associated pictures, sounds and feelings. This produces emotions within us. When you talk about something that really excites you, for instance, you will feel your emotions going up in intensity. That is because of the association between the actual words and their meaning in your brain.
Over time, we form habitual language patterns, based upon habitual thought; we speak “a certain way”. This also means we start to develop certain emotional states associated with these words. This is why a “negative” person usually will speak “negative” language, and an emotional person will use emotional language.
What we need to understand is, that our prolonged use of our personal language has a profound effect on how we feel and behave now and in the future, even though we may not be consciously aware of that! If we keep using the same language, we keep getting the same (or similar) feelings! It is a vicious cycle.
Now that is obviously not a problem when everything is working for us, but can definitely be problematic when we experience difficulty in our lives. Very often we perpetuate these problems by virtue of the verbal and non-verbal language we use to describe them. This creates, because of the Law of Attraction, even more of them! Our futures are lingual repetitions of the past!
There is a simple, three way process to break away from this “Groundhog Day” experience; I’ll share it briefly with you, and will expound the theory in other articles.
Imagine a triangle, with on each corner a word: THOUGHT, WORD, ACTION.
In order to change your experience, you can first of all change your thoughts. Simply THINK different thoughts, refocus your brain! Think more uplifting thoughts, catch yourself when you think negatively, and your life will begin to change. You will speak different words, and contemplate different actions.
For some people this is too hard. They’d rather change their language, which also works. SPEAK different words, say things a different way, use affirmations and mantras. This will ultimately make you do different things, and will make you think differently as well.
The third option for change is behaving differently, which works better for yet another group. DO things another way, come up with new ways of behaving, strike different poses and other forms of body language, and you will slowly start to think differently, and will say different things.
Each way works, it is just a matter of finding which one(s) work best for you. Ideally you would want to work on all three of them! That’s powerful stuff!
In a subsequent article I will elaborate some more on the change of language, as this is a major part of Neuro Linguistic Programming.
Try one of the three ways of change on for size, and see how you go with it for the next couple of days/weeks. You will be surprised!
Marc is a certified life/business coach, master NLP Practitioner and Body Stress Release Practitioner on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. He specialises in restoring people’s health, and coaching professionals and small business owners at critical junctions in their careers and/or lives, using the all-encompassing Law of Attraction. Marc inspires his clients to find out what has been hindering them all along in achieving what they want, and to then make the conscious choice to take their lives and/or careers to the next level.Having been a lawyer for nearly 6 years in his “previous life”, before immigrating to Australia from The Netherlands, Marc knows exactly how daunting taking the first step in a new direction can be. On the other hand, he also knows how fulfilling taking that step is, and has the knack of imparting his knowledge and wisdom in a stunningly simple and highly effective way. Call him or email him at marc@landmarc.info to arrange for a complimentary face-to-face or phone session!Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Marc_De_Bruin
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