If you want to convince people what you want them to the Conversational Hypnosis course is the best one around. Get people to do what you want including …

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This is not some far fetched CIA mind control story. A good conversational hypnosis course will show you the techniques or methods it takes to be successful in dealing with every day situations that involve people

Learn how to hypnotize people and you learn how to get people to like you. A leader in society knows that the hardest part about changing peoples minds is about getting someone to like you through actions words ad body language.

Voice control methods can help you use activate emotional triggers and get the response you desire. The power of suggestion and similar techniques can help you learn how to mind control a girl or guy and help make people agreeable. When you know how to hypnotize the correct way it makes your task easier.

If you want to make someone agree with you, make sales or just easier to work with this hypnosis may help you. This conversational hypnosis course is tough by one of the finest coaches around.

You will learn not only what to do but what to avoid so you can instantly connect with people. You will learn methods of matching and mirroring the correct way and this is where many experts get it wrong.

When you have mastered the techniques of persuasion people will be attracted to you. You should have the ability to persuade a woman, man, your boss even a stranger.

When you learn how to hypnotize someone you will have learned the art of persuasion. These are just tips and tricks that people use already at a subconscious level.

This is like having the keys to the mind. Many influential people are where they are at because they use the art of persuasion subconsciously.

By: Pete Marks

There is every likelihood that you may be acquainted with Trance Formation Neuro Linguistic Programming and The Structure Of Hypnosis. You can learn so much knowledge from this publication and it is based around Bandler/Grinder who speak and teach on the ever so popular subject of hypnosis, therapy, NLP and Milton Erikson. This category of hypnosis is just so amazing in respect of the fact that you can hypnotize using what is known as embedded commands. I mean let’s stop and think about this for a moment, the majority of all communication, beliefs and thoughts are hypnosis. Everything is actually hypnosis. You begin thinking that you’re clumsy and at some point you will find that you really are clumsy! The key here is that we must choose to hypnotize and input beliefs that are helpful to us, not anything that might hold us back!

Defining Neuro Linguistic Programming.

Let us be clear about the definition of Neuro Linguistic Programming. According to Bandler, Trance Formation Neuro Linguistic Programming and The Structure Of Hypnosis is an attitude and methodology which leaves behind a trial of techniques. NLP author Robert Dilts defined it as study of structure of subjective experience.

Looking At The Basic Idea

The fundamental concept is that human senses are somewhat limited. It is not possible to perceive all parts of the world through these senses. Neuro Linguistic Programming says that the human body and mind complex which is called linguistic interact to form perception of the world and programming. In straight forward terms we can say this that people act and feel on the basis of their perception rather than the actual world around them. This is actually quite interesting when we look at it in this light because plainly what this means is that people will create destructive patterns of thought. In a bid to enhance the experience of clients , practitioners update, change or upgrade the thought patterns to achieve effective and desired behavior patterns. Of course we can add further to this school of thought but out sole intent of this article is to familiarize you with the fundamental concept of Neuro Linguistic Programming.

Methods That We Employ

1-Modeling

It is a method of adopting behavior, language and beliefs of the others to build a model of what they do. If we get the same behavioral outcome from the person that we have modeled, the modeling has been successful. Modeling is not a therapy; it is applied to a wide range of learning. Understanding the patterns of one’s own behaviors in order to model is also an aspect of modeling.

2-Meta Model

It is composed of specifying questions and languages. There is a verbal pattern and its purpose is to facilitate the estimation of restrictive beliefs and thinking. By responding to the language patterns, the practitioner may aid the client to recover the information.

3-Milton Model

In order to contact the hidden things in the personality, there is a way of communication based on hypnotic changes as well as a way of using language called Milton Mode

Techniques

1-Anchoring

Neuro Linguistic Programming supporters say that the people make association between sensational and emotional conditions. If an individual is exposed to a certain stimulus in an emotional state, there will develop a connection between state and the stimulus. If this same stimulus for example occurs again, the emotional state will therefore be stimulated. So anchors can be created and stimulated to find a key to the target states.

2-Swish

This pattern is designated to disturb the pattern of thought from one that leads an unwanted behavior to one that leads to a more desired behavior.

3-Reframing

The function of perceiving is to metamorphosing the way of perceiving events hence differentiating the meaning. As the meaning differs, the optimal response and behavioral pattern will also differ due to the change of meaning. Reframing is the backbone of the most creative ways of thinking

NLP is used in conjunction within some industry association and has been utilized as an approach for some mental health officials. Neuro Linguistic Programming methods are built on modeling the medical practitioners who communicate with the patients successfully.

I trust this information has provided you with a greater insight regarding NLP and hope the content here has been both beneficial and informative.

By: Miles Jacobs

Can you remember a time when you met someone for the first time and it just seems to click? An instant bond between the two of you, an instant ‘like-ability’ or trust. You can literally FEEL, that connection!

That connection is called Rapport! It is the basis and foundation for every meaningful interaction between two or more people. Rapport is about establishing an environment of trust and understanding, to respect and honor the other person’s world. This allows the person the freedom to fully express their ideas and feelings and know they’ll be respected and appreciated by you. Rapport creates the space for the person to feel listened and responded to, even when you dis-agree with what the other person says or does. Each person appreciates the other’s viewpoint and respects their model of the world. When you are in rapport with another person, you have the opportunity to enter their world and see things from their perspective, feel the way they do, get a better understanding of where they are coming from; and as a result, enhance the whole relationship.

A 1970 study conducted by Dr. Ray Birdwhistle at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that 93% of our communication transpires non-verbally and unconscious. 55% of our communication is our physiology or body language, 38% is tonality or HOW we say our words, and only 7% is the content or words we choose to speak.

Researchers at the Boston University Medical School studied films of people having conversations. The researchers noticed that the people talking began (unconsciously) to co-ordinate their movements (including finger movements, eye blinks and head nods.) When they were being monitored using electroencephalographs, they found some of their brain waves were spiking at the same moment also. As the conversations progressed, these people were getting into a deeper level rapport with each other, and didn’t even have a clue to what was going on, this is because we communicate our ideas and concepts at this 93% UN-conscious level, but believe the words we speak actually hold the meaning to our communication.

NLP rapport skills teach us how to communicate at that unconscious level. Mirroring, matching, pacing and leading skills will enable you to become “like” the other person. Anthony Robbins stated: “People like each other when they tend to be like each other.” NLP teaches how to mirror and match that 55% physiology, 38% tonality and 7% predicates or process words.

The key to establishing rapport is an ability to enter another person’s world by assuming a similar state of mind. The first thing to do is to become more like the other person by matching and mirroring the person’s behaviors — body language, voice, words etc. Matching and mirroring is a powerful way of getting an appreciation of how the other person is seeing/experiencing the world.

Some people find the idea of matching another person uncomfortable and they feel that they are trying to fool or take advantage of the other person. To overcome this uneasiness, realize that matching is a natural part of the rapport building process and that you are doing it unconsciously every day with your close family and friends. Each day gradually increase your conscious use of matching at a pace that is comfortable and ethical for you. Matching done with integrity and respect creates positive feelings and responses in you and others. Rapport is the ability to enter someone else’s world, to make him feel you understand him, and that there is a strong connection between the two of you.

The purpose of the following exercises is to provide some experience with the basic processes and procedures of modeling. They primarily focus on the information gathering phase of the modeling process, and cover a range of modeling skills, including “implicit” and “explicit” modeling formats, and the use of multiple perceptual positions to gather different types and levels of information about a particular performance.

Mirroring Exercise

Mirroring is a method of building a strong “second position” with someone else. It is a fundamental skill for modeling another person and for developing intuitions about the person’s internal experience. To get a sense of the influence and effects of mirroring, try out the following exercise.

1. Choose a partner, or person to converse with. Do not tell the person initially that you will be mirroring him or her during the conversation.

2. Enter into a conversation with the person, asking for his or her opinions about various subjects.

3. As you are conversing, begin to subtly mirror the other person’s physiology (including voice tone and tempo). [Hint: This can be most easily done in the context of 'active listening'; that is, reflecting back statements the person has made, by commenting, "So what you are saying is....", and then stating your understanding of the person's opinion.]

4. When you are fully mirroring, you will be sitting in the same posture, using the same types of gestures, speaking at a similar speed and volume, and in a similar voice tone range, as the other person. If you are completely mirroring the other person, you may even be breathing at the same rate and pattern as the other. Notice how it feels when you have reached this level of deep rapport.

5. One way to test your degree of rapport is by “second guessing” the other person’s opinion on a couple of subjects that you have not yet discussed. Often mirroring will give you access to information that is being unconsciously communicated and received, and you will “pick up” information about the other person without being consciously aware of how you got it. This is why mirroring is such a powerful tool for modeling.

6. To get another sense of the influence mirroring and matching has on your interaction; try out abruptly mismatching the other person, in posture, gestures, voice tone and breathing. Both you and your partner should experience quite a jolt if you do this, and feel as if your quality of rapport has changed dramatically.

7. Before concluding your conversation and letting your partner in on what you were doing, make sure you have reestablished rapport by once again physically mirroring your partner.
One way to help rapport to develop is to mirror the micro-behaviors of those we wish to influence. Any observable behavior can be mirrored, for example:

Body posture

Spinal alignment

Hand gestures

Head tilt

Blink rate

Facial expression

Energy level

Breathing rate

Vocal qualities (volume, tonality, rhythm)

Key word phrases or predicates

Anything else that you can observe…

To mirror another person, merely select the behavior or quality you wish to mirror, and then do that behavior. If you choose to mirror head tilt, when the person moves their head, wait a few moments, then move yours to the same angle. The effect should be as though the other person is looking in a mirror.

To mirror a person who has raised his right hand, you would raise your left hand (i.e. mirror image). To match this same person, you would raise your right-hand (doing exactly the same as the other person). Some practitioners see a time difference between mirroring and matching. For example, if someone makes hand gestures while they are speaking, you would wait until it was your turn to speak before making similar (matching) hand gestures.

The fact that you’ve read this far means that you can see the benefits of increasing your rapport skills. Reading is sadly not enough – practice is the key to building skill, so do the exercises. When you first start the practice of mirroring, you may have to pay some conscious attention to what you’re doing. After a while, however, you will start to catch yourself doing it unconsciously. This is where you really begin to build rapport elegantly!

And at times when a gesture is idiosyncratic to that person or otherwise to obvious, you can do crossover matching. Meaning, if they adjust their glasses, and you don’t wear any, then just move your foot. When you crossover match/mirror, you match/mirror a portion of the other person’s body, with a different portion of your own body. This is best to do when you are matching someone’s rate of breathing. You can use your finger to pace the rhythm of their breath. When matching or mirroring someone’s voice, do that with their tonality, volume, and the rate at which they speak. And remember you don’t have to do all of these things, just one or two will be enough to create rapport in most cases.

Skilled communicators have a wide range of behaviors they can mirror to build rapport. You can find a way to mirror virtually anything you can observe. When this is done elegantly, it is out of consciousness for the other person.

• However, a few notes of caution are appropriate:

• Mirroring is not the same as mimicry.

• It should be subtle and respectful.

• Mirroring can lead to you sharing the other person’s experience.

• Avoid mirroring people who are in distress or who have severe mental issues.

• Mirroring builds a deep sense of trust quickly, so use it with responsibility.

Practice with friends and family members to start and begin to match different aspects of their posture, gestures, voice and words. Have fun with it and notice if they begin to respond to your matching. At work or social events, start by matching one specific behavior, and once they and you feel comfortable, begin to add on another. With people whom you already have a sense of rapport, notice how often you naturally match their posture, gestures, tone of voice or words, This is because matching and mirroring comes naturally. Your outcome then should be to create rapport with anyone at any given moment, having it become automatic whenever you wish to deepen that sense of rapport.

Exercise 1
Practice mirroring the micro-behaviors of people on television (chat shows & interviews are ideal.) You may be surprised at how quickly you can become comfortable as you subtly mirror the behaviors of others.

Exercise 2
Choose a safe situation to practice mirroring an element of someone else’s behavior. When you have mirrored them for a while, and think you are in rapport with the person, scratch your nose. If they lift their hand to their face within the next minute or so, congratulate yourself – you have led their behavior!

Exercise 3
Increase the range of behaviors that you can mirror, and introduce deliberate rapport-building into situations where it will benefit you and others. Use your common sense and choose low-risk situations to practice in.)

Exercise 4
During a conversation with another person; choose one of their behaviors (e.g. breathing rate) to cross-over match with one of your behaviors (e.g. speaking rate.) Notice how quickly the sense of connection develops!

Backtracking is another excellent skill to learn in order to maintain and deepen rapport. When you are in conversation with another person, whether it be business or personal, take the opportunity to recite back to the person the information you’re receiving. This lets the person know that you were listening and you understand without judgment. It also allows you a chance to ensure your understanding and/or ask for clarification. Backtracking is the thread that tightens and deepens rapport. Backtracking is repeating back the essence, not verbatim, of what the person is attempting to communicate. There will be times when you’re backtracking, and the other person will add on or correct you. Being corrected will only strengthen rapport because you’ll then backtrack again and have the person really feel you understand. There is also the possibility being corrected will cause you to lose rapport.

However, losing rapport is just like losing your balance. You falter, recover, and get back into it again. When you do lose rapport you’ll find a way to regain it. There may also be times you want to be “out” of rapport with someone. For example if it isn’t healthy for you to be around certain people, you are held hostage at a cocktail party or you are doing it for effect. Typically people think the way to break rapport is to be demeaning or disagree. Although that may work I recommend mismatching. This means intentionally mismatch posture, breathing, key words/gestures, and voice quality. Rely on mismatching the nonverbal communication and you will be out of rapport. For those of you who like experiments try this: Disagree strongly and maintain rapport. Or agree completely while breaking rapport. And all experimenting should be done in a non-critical environment without judgment.

The key element in establishing, building, deepening and maintaining rapport is your ability to pay attention to the responses you receive. One presupposition of NLP, or assumed rules is; “Communication is the response we receive back, NOT our intention given.”

Lastly; behind any technique there must be an authenticity of caring and real concern for the other person. (See “Technicians Need Not Apply,”Anchor Point 1987.) If you practice these skills and have no real interest in the other person, rapport will not develop. If you don’t pay attention to the other person it doesn’t matter how proficient you become in your NLP techniques. It is the responses you get in return and your own flexibility that hold the ultimate power in establishing, maintaining and deepening rapport.

John James Santangelo C.Ht. nationally acclaimed speaker, seminar leader, and success coach has been a guiding force in empowering individuals, businesses, and corporations to excel at peak performance. Working with companies such as Learning Annex, CSUN-Northridge University, Mary Kay Inc, Well Point, Xerox, RE/MAX Realtors, the Teamsters Union, and the US Army counter-intelligence team. Whether you’re looking to fulfill short-term goals, meeting planner events, or corporate sales/communication trainings, John can help you achieve a new level of success! He is the author of Asking The Right Questions…” For more information on How to develop and master “Dynamic Communication Skills,” email: John@JohnSantangelo.com or www.LAnlp.com

By: Steve Andreas & Connirae Andreas – NLP Trainers

Every pattern has many antecedents, and most patterns continue to be developed and refined after the first successes. Philosophers have thought about time for millennia, even before Heraclitus said, “You can’t step in the same river twice”, some two thousand years ago. More recently, Peter McKeller’s book ‘Imagination and Thinking’ (1957) included detailed illustrations of some of the different ways that people represent the flow of time as various kinds of lines or paths in space.

People have recognized for centuries that different people tend to be more oriented toward past, present, or future. Edward T. Hall’s book, ‘The Silent Language’ (1959) includes abundant examples – both individual and cultural – but without a hint of why these differences exist.

In the early 1980′s NLP training included the categories of “in time” and ‘through time” as aspects of a person’s relatively fixed “meta-programming” – again with no explanations of the underlying experiential structure.

The concept of submodalities had been part of NLP since the late 1970′s, but they were presented primarily as a way of enhancing experiences. Although association / dissociation was the key element in many of the more effective standard NLP patterns that had been taught for years, it was not clearly described as a submodality shift. It was only in 1983 that Richard Bandler explicitly began to reveal the structure of submodalities in general. He taught how submodality shifts could be used to change habits (swish pattern), change beliefs, and create motivation or understanding, and how submodality thresholds could be used to break locked-in patterns like compulsions, or to lock in new changes. In short, he outlined how submodalities comprise one way of understanding the underlying structure of all experience.

We were so impressed with the power and generativity of this approach that we immediately began to ask ourselves, “What else is there that we don’t yet know about”? We were convinced that submodalities had more potential than previously recognized in the field. We asked ourselves, “What would happen if we investigated the submodality structure of Meta-Program sorts? What about finding the underlying structure of time, and of being past-, present-, or future-oriented.

One way innovations occur is by taking two or more separate paradigms, putting them together, and finding out what emerges. That’s what we did with meta-programs and submodalities. This thinking led to the Criteria Shift pattern, and changing internal and external reference, as well as Timeline work. Putting “time orientation” with Submodalities had far more potential than we guessed in advance. We discovered that different people had widely differing Timelines, and that the shape of the Timeline in space not only determined whether a person was “in time” or “through time”, past-, present-, or future-oriented, but determined many other aspects of personality as well. We found that by changing this spatial representation of events in time, we could make profound and very pervasive and generative changes in personality and orientation – without changing the individual events located on the Timeline. We combined the patterns we had learned from Richard with these additional ones we’d discovered to form the first Advanced Submodalities Training in March, 1984.

In many NLP patterns, we had noticed that location is a very powerful “driving” submodality; it is significant in Timeline work, criteria change work, and belief change work, and in aligning perceptual positions. It was Robert Dilts who recently offered us an interesting way to understand this. He pointed out that all three major representational systems overlap; in location. Color, for example, is only in the visual system, pitch is only in the auditory system, and temperature is only in the kinesthetic. However, all sights, sounds, and feelings have some location in space. Changing the location of a representation is often more powerful because it changes all systems simultaneously. This is the basis for the powerful impact of changing the location of one’s perspective in association / dissociation, and its detailed refinement in physically aligning the three perceptual positions; Self, Observer, and Other.

At the June 1985 NANLP conference in Denver, Colorado, Steve made a three-hour presentation on Timelines, entitled “Just in Time”. Among the participants were Wyatt Woodsmall, and Leslie Cameron-Bandler, who commented at the time on the usefulness of this new approach.

In his VAK interview (Fall 1991) Tad James comments, “I learned about time line from Wyatt (Woodsmall)”. When Steve first met Tad in October 1986, we had been teaching about Timelines in public seminars for 2 1/2 years. At that time, Tad described to Steve his work with selecting individual traumatic experiences on the Timeline, and reorienting the person on their existing timeline in regard to those experiences in order to change the person’s response to them.

Often people speak of Timeline work as if it is one thing. However there are two very major types of timeline work, both very useful. One set of methods has to do primarily with utilizing the existing timeline. The method described above is one example. You can change a traumatic memory on the timeline by reorienting in time, or by adding in resources, etc. The “decision destroyer”, developed a few years later by Richard Bandler is another very impactful approach. These methods have in common that you don’t need to know very much about the person’s existing timeline to use them with full effectiveness.

An entirely different category of Timeline work has to do with changing the structure of the Timeline itself. In doing this kind of work, you find out in detail how a client’s Timeline is now structured, what he wants to have different in his life, and then reorient the Timeline so as to support the kind of person he wants to be. When the structure of the Timeline itself is changed, the person literally lives in a new relationship to all his experiences in time – not just the traumatic ones, or the resourceful ones, but all of them.

For instance, most people have their Timeline arranged so that the future is somewhere in the same quadrant as visual construct. This allows us to creatively construct alternative futures that are rich with possibility. However, some people see their future in the visual remembered quadrant. One typical result of this is that their future representations are relatively specific and fixed, because they have to use remembered imagery to represent the future. This can result in much disappointment, since future reality seldom conforms to the inflexible and constrained expectations of visual memory. If the past accumulation of disappointment is resolved, the person will feel better in the present, but will continue to experience that the future is rigidly fixed, because they are still seeing it in their visual memory quadrant. One man who had this kind of arrangement commented, “This makes perfect sense: “change history” was always really easy for me, but it never made my future different because that was still fixed”. Resolving past problems is no guarantee that they won’t recur in the future. However, if the future Timeline is changed to the visual construct quadrant, the person will begin to make future images that are more creative and variable, and more responsive to changes in the world around them, resulting in far more generative possibilities and far less disappointment.

Although it is quite easy to change a person’s Timeline, it takes some experience to know what kinds of changes might be most worthwhile to try out, and any changes need to be tried out very tentatively, with full attention to ecology. Changing a Timeline is literally reorganizing all a person’s life experiences, so it must be done with extreme care and sensitivity to be sure the resulting changes will be generative. For some examples of how to elicit an change Timelines, see our books, ‘Heart of the Mind’, ‘Change Your Mind and Keep the Change’, and Connirae’s new videotape ‘Changing Timelines’ (1992).

First Published in the VAK International NLP Newsletter Vol 10, No 1. Winter 1991-1992

© 1991 Steve and Connirae Andreas

by Karen Hastings, Hertfordshire

Changing the way you think in order to improve the way you feel, forms the basis of cognitive approaches to mental-wellbeing. Cognitive therapies recognise that our thoughts can affect our understanding of the outside world. Depressed people (i.e. people that practice depressed thoughts!) experience the world in a different way to others. For example, they may perceive colours less vibrantly, food can seem bland and unpleasant, and safe everyday situations can seem threatening. They often predict bad outcomes from actions and events where others would expect positive consequences. A depressed persons world is likely to be experienced significantly differently to a happy person’s. However, to an observer their circumstances could appear the same.

Cognitive therapy and related approaches such as NLP (neuro-linguistic-programming) are very effective at helping people recognise the thinking habits behind problems such as depression, anxiety, panic disorders and phobias. There are many cognitive techniques for testing negative thinking patterns and developing new more adaptive ways of thinking. If you are considering cognitive therapy, expect to commit to homework tasks and regular practise of these techniques.

Negative thoughts are usually fairly easily identifiable with the help of a therapist. In order to bring about a more global change, it’s often necessary to go beyond the thoughts we have to the deeper levels of our cognition – our beliefs.

Most people rarely think about their beliefs, how they developed, their role in guiding your life or whether they are helpful and supportive.

That’s because our beliefs have often been with us for a very long time. Very often we develop them in childhood. For example, a child may learn that ‘dogs are dangerous’ or ‘dogs are friendly’, depending on his experiences related to dogs. As that child grows up, it is likely that he will become more flexible in his belief about dogs, able to judge individual dogs for friendliness or dangerousness. This happens in most areas of our lives, as the more rigid beliefs from childhood, evolve and become more flexible as we develop.

However, this is not always the case. Sometimes negative beliefs develop due to trauma or consistent negative interactions or early life experiences. These beliefs often remain fixed in adulthood even though they hold the person back or negatively impact on their lives. Often they are taken as the absolute truth.

Beliefs form the core of your identity. Holding beliefs about yourself, your world and others that are unconstructive and not necessarily true, can be bad news for your self-esteem. Beliefs influence on your emotional experience and behaviour by colouring how you see the world.

Every belief you have is a generalisation or simplified way of viewing the world. Generalisations by their very nature are distortions. Often when I see clients for therapy it is possible to find a distorted belief behind the problem. For example ‘I am worthless’ is a belief, which promotes depression.

Your beliefs can actually determine outcomes. This is because your beliefs effect what you focus on or pay attention too. So for example, if you focus on being un-likeable, your unconscious mind will be on the lookout for examples of people not liking you and will find various ways to bring this to your attention. Whilst this is going on, you are of course ignoring evidence that shows you are in fact liked by all sorts of people.

I practice NLP, CBT therapy in Hertfordshire and I am also a hypnotherapist, Hertfordshire. People often come to see me with difficulties, which can be traced back to limiting beliefs e.g. “I am unattractive”, “I am a bad person”. Of course, it is not always obvious to them that they are holding onto damaging beliefs about themselves and their world, which prevent them from growing and developing or doing things they want too.

NLP and CBT therapy and Hypnotherapy, Hertfordshire has proven methods for empowering people to challenge and even eradicate illogical beliefs. The result can mean seeing the world in new and fresh ways.

About the Author

Karen Hastings, has a degree in Psychology and is also a Mental Health Occupational Therapist, Master NLP practitioner, and Hypnotherapist, in Hertfordshire.Karen has NHS and private practice experience of using cognitive approaches to support people in overcoming a range of problems. Karen is based in Hertfordshire. For further information visit http://www.karenhastings.co.uk.

By: Jordan Matthews

Everyone who wants to learn NLP should start with an NLP workbook or a seminar where you can learn about the wide range of applications that NLP has for your daily life. The NLP workbook will give you the methods, and the seminar will allow you to practice. But with this article, I will give you the NLP workbook, and all you need to do is practice this belief changing NLP system and put it into action.

Richard Bandler starts off almost every lecture and seminar in the same way. He works with a person’s inner beliefs about themselves, and the world around them. He has a philosophy that anything is possible as long as you believe it is. Working with NLP, or Neuro Linguistic Programming, is no different. This science, or art, if you so choose to see it, has proven to be inexplicably beneficial to people, changing lifelong patterns in a single instant. But to most people, regardless of the results they can see before them, this is an impossible task. Many times, it can seem almost like actors at a magic act, and they simply sit waiting for Mr. Bandler to pull a rabbit out of his hat. It’s not magic, and it does work, but only if you believe it to be so. If not, you’ll convince yourself to find a way to return to your old habits, and all will be for naught.

So, of course, the first thing that one must do is to work on a positive, optimistic outlook. This does not come easily for everyone, but some people may feel that they already have a positive attitude and can skip this step.

Using NLP techniques on yourself requires the use of submodalities, which you can read about in my article on the Basics of NLP. For a quick rehashing of the main topic, submodalities are the distinct qualities of your mental images, voices or feelings, that help you to subconsciously differentiate between good experience and bad. Things like the tone of voice, the direction it comes from, and the volume, would be examples of auditory submodalities.

Since most people are visual learners, and since everyone relates some part of their experience through visual images, it is typically most useful to think in terms of pictures to begin with. They are also the easiest to manipulate, so it is a good way to learn.

The first step in changing your beliefs, and in working almost any NLP techniques within your own experience, is to compare and contrast the differences in submodalities. First, imagine a really powerful, and really good memory. It can be of anything. Watch that movie play out in front of your eyes.

Now, do the same thing with an unpleasant memory. Play it like a movie, and begin at this time to notice the differences in the movies. The location where you look to see these two movies is often the first noticeable difference, but look to see if one is larger than the other, or if one is more colorful than the other. Do they both play back with sound? Write all of these things down on a piece of paper if it helps. Remember, it’s the differences that matter, any similarities you may find are not particularly useful.

Knowing this information, you’ve now figured out how to create a happy and pleasant memory. Play back that bad memory once more, and notice how you feel. Now, rewind it to the beginning, but this time, before you play it back, shift that movie screen to the same position where your happy memory was. Stretch or shrink the frame of the picture to be about the same size as the pleasant memory, and add color or sound if necessary. The idea is to look upon that unhappy memory as if it were a happy memory.

This can take some practice, and working alone without a guide, it may take a few tries to get it right. You may find that you have no idea what I’m talking about with these different submodalities. If this is the case, take it slower, one step at a time, and look closer into what is going on inside your head. For most people, this can be very difficult, and may require a lot of practice. If you get it right, you should be able to play back that unhappy memory in happy-vision, and notice that you have a much better feeling about the experience. Best thing about it? This technique will work for almost anything you want to do. If you want to boost your confidence, examine the differences in your memories. If you want to stop doing something, manipulate the submodalities of the memories.

Once you get used to the technique, you’ll notice some startling differences. First and foremost, you’ll begin to feel better about your past experiences, and most people find that this alone is good enough to make them more confident and feel better about themselves. But as you build up on the good experiences, and those that you have manipulated to help yourself feel better about them, you’ll notice that you begin to automatically assign new experiences and new memories the same, beneficial submodalities that you assigned to your first memory. By changing the past, you’re effectively changing the future.

Go ahead and try this. There’s nothing to lose except for feeling a little silly at the idea. But, if it works for you, there’s much to gain from the experience.

About the Author:

My name is Jordan, and I am a certified NLP trainer who believes that these techniques should be made available to everyone. Because Bandler’s books are so expensive and hard to find, I recommend that for any further NLP work, you should check out the NLP toolbox or Forbidden Patterns.

Do You Believe You Can Stop Eating?

Think about your belief in your ability to break this simple habit. The habit of eating when you’re not hungry. The habit of needing to feel stuffed to be satisfied. You can break the pattern, even if you don’t believe you can. It happens when you first simply stop eating a little sooner. You may still have over eaten, but your level of stuffed can be qualified, and you know when you’ve had enough, too much, or way too much. Start by learning to leave one bite on your plate. (Even a smear counts, whatever it takes to leave a teeny bit, it’s a start).

I know, that idea may seem radical, but it’s a great way to discover how you’ve eaten everything on your plate because it’s a habit to do so. Even if you only leave one pea, leave something on your plate. Secondly, just because there is more on the serving plate, don’t think you need to take more food. Wait a few minutes. Settle in. Get comfortable with the feeling of satisfaction. Get in touch with your hunger levels.

Do You Recognize Hunger Signals

I remember learning to recognize my hunger levels and the shock (and dismay) when I’d realize I’d had enough but half my food was still on my plate. I learned to ask for a doggy bag, take it home and eat in the next day. I learned to sometimes fix myself less food. I learned half a sandwich is sometimes enough. I learned a piece of fruit can satisfy my greatest hunger, for now, while I wait for dinner to cook. I learned, and so will you, when you just start to pay attention.

You can still have it all, but maybe you’ll eat half now and half later, and that’s okay.

Small Shifts Equal Big Change

Small shifts in your beliefs about what you can accomplish may take a bit of time, but when you do make the shift it will seem sudden and it will be permanent. Ask anyone who’s lost a lot of weight and kept it off, and they’ll tell you, “I don’t know, something just suddenly clic.ked.” You can experience this sudden shift too.

Start today by noticing how much food you’re being offered when you aren’t hungry. Can you take some and save it for later? Just because the holidays are here is not an excuse to eat everything in sight. Thinking you’ll start your diet in January is a cop-out. Why put it off until then? Why not get started right now?

Get more in tune with what you do day-to-day and you can let go of the fear of either suffering through another diet or gaining more weight, or losing it and then regaining it. You don’t have to choose between stuffing or starving. You can learn to eat good food, enjoy it more, and melt into the shape you truly are meant to be.

~~ Kathryn Martyn, Master NLP Practitioner, EFT counselor, Weight Loss Coach and owner of One More Bite Weight Loss is the author of “Changing Beliefs, Your First Step to Permanent Weight Loss.”

Learn to use Kathryn’s One More Bite Approach with The Daily Bites: Mini lessons in using EFT for weight loss http://www.OneMoreBite-WeightLoss.com/getnews.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kathryn_Martyn,_M.NLP

Assembled by Steve Andreas

Placebos

First, here are some very interesting findings in relation to placebos:

“Asthmatic patients have been shown to exhibit bronchoconstriction after inhaling a placebo described as a bronchoconstrictor and brochodilation after inhaling a placebo described as a bronchodilator (Luparello, Lyons, Bleeker, & McFadden, 1968; McFadden, Luparello, Lons, & Bleecker, 1969; Neild & Cameron, 1985; Spector, Luparello, Kopetzky, Souhrada, & Kinsman, 1976).

“Placebo morphine is considerably more effective than placebo Darvon, which in turn is more effective than placebo aspirin (Evans, 1974). In each case, the placebo is about half as effective as the pharmacologically active drug. Similarly, placebos produce more pain relief when given after a more potent drug than they do when given after a less potent drug (Kantor, Sunshine, Laska, Meisner, & Hopper, 1966). Thus, the effectiveness of a placebo pain reliever varies as a function of its believed effectiveness.
“Placebo and active analgesics are more effective when presented with a well-known brand name (Branthwaite & Cooper, 1981).

“Placebo injections are more effective than placebo pills (de Craen, Tijssen, de Gans, Kleijnen, 2000).

“The color of a placebo can influence its effects (reviewed in de Craen, Roos, de Vries, & Kleijnen, 1996). When administered without information about whether they are stimulants or depressives, blue placebo pills produce depressant effects, whereas red placebos induce stimulant effects (Blackwell, Bloomfield, & Buncher, 1972). Patients report falling asleep significantly more quickly after taking a blue capsule than after taking an orange capsule (Luchelli, Cattaneo, & Zattoni, 1978). Red placebos seem to be more effective pain relievers than white, blue, or green placebos (Huskisson, 1974; Nagao, Komia, Kuroanagi, Minaba, & Susa, 1968).

“Finally, the magnitude of the placebo response has been shown to vary as a function of the dose that the person is asked to consume (de Craen, Moerman, Heisterkamp, Tytgat, Tijssen, & Kleijnen 1999; Kirsch & Weixel, 1988).”

A wide variety of studies over the years has shown that the rates of positive responses to placebos have been increasing over the years (Probably as a result of better experimental design, including active placebos that provide a detectable response unrelated to the problem, and double-blind studies that the subjects cannot penetrate). As one commentator remarked, “The increasing effectiveness of placebos raises the bar toward an impracticably high level for any treatment to demonstrate its effectiveness.” (Perhaps more research should go into designing especially powerful placebos, rather than psychoactive drugs.)
Antidepressants

“The Emperor’s New Drugs: An Analysis of Antidepressant Medication Data Submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”

Abstract (quoted from the article) ©2002 American Psychological Association.

“This article reports an analysis of the efficacy data submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval of the 6 most widely prescribed antidepressants approved between 1987 and 1999: fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Paxil), sertraline (Zoloft), venlafaxine (Effexor), nefazodone (Serzone), and citalopram (Celexa). These represent all but one of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) approved during the study period.

“Approximately 80% of the response to medication was duplicated in placebo control groups, and the mean difference between drug and placebo was approximately 2 points on the 17-item (50-point) and 21-item (62-point) Hamilton Depression Scale. Improvement at the highest doses of medication was not different from improvement at the lowest doses. The proportion of the drug response duplicated by placebo was significantly greater with observed cases (OC) data than with last observation carried forward (LOCF) data. If drug and placebo effects are additive, the pharmacological effects of antidepressants are clinically negligible. If they are not additive, alternative experimental designs are needed for the evaluation of antidepressants.”

In shorthand, the antidepressants were found to be only very slightly better than the placebo control group (and the placebos were NOT designed for maximum effectiveness as described at the beginning of this summary!). This confirms what many of us have long suspected–that the drug companies are getting rich on drugs that have only minimal effectiveness. And if the drugs are only minimally effective, the dangers of stopping the drugs are probably also minimal, despite many warnings to the contrary. Still, someone using such drugs would be wise to taper off these drugs slowly, just to be safe.

For the entire article, including several commentaries by others, go to:
http://www.journals.apa.org/prevention/volume5/toc-jul15-02.htm

By: Kris Hallbom

Before he passed away, someone asked an ailing Gregory Bateson, “Who will carry on with your work, once you’re gone.”

Gregory, being the great philosopher, anthropologist and systems thinker that he was replied, “A man by the name of Humberto Maturana out of Santiago, Chile. He has been doing some very interesting research that compliments my work.” (Ruiz, 1997)

Bateson and Maturana, both contemporary philosophers and systemic thinkers, spent a good part of their academic careers searching for the “Patterns of Life”. Both men have strong backgrounds in cybernetics and were colleagues of the great cybernetician Heinz Von Foerester, who originated the legendary Macy conferences in the 1950′s in which cybernetics developer Norbert Wiener played a great part in. Bateson and Maturana found each other in the same circles over and over again throughout the years, which probably prompted Bateson to make such a powerful statement about Maturana in the final months of his life. One would think that it was Gregory’s hope that someone as brilliant as he, could continue on with the genius of his work.

Humberto Maturana, a neuro-biologist and professor, co-developed the Santiago Theory of Autopoiesis with his student and colleague, Fransisco Varela. Together, the two men developed a theory for living systems that is very similar to the work of Gregory Bateson. While Bateson’s work concentrated on the overall “meta pattern” that connects all living things, Maturana and Varela’s work focused on “Autopoiesis” the pattern to be found inside of all living systems.

Autopoiesis has to do with how systems create, sustain and generate life while maintaining their overall structure and organization. Autopoiesis explores the internal occurrences that happen within a system and the parts that make up the system; the relationships between those parts; the boundaries that surround and contain the parts; how information emerges from the system via cognition; and how external information triggers the structure of the overall system.

The Greek meaning of the word auto is “self” and refers to the autonomy of self organizing systems. The Greek poeire means production or creation, such as poetry and refers to the ongoing creative processes that exists within all living systems. Thus autopoiesis means “self creating”. I remember the first time I came across the word autopoiesis. I was fascinated with the promise that this concept offered for understanding not only the systemic nature of human beings, but also the possibility of becoming attractors for what we want in life through the process of “self creating”. Autopoiesis is important to the field of NLP because it offers us a deeper understanding of the structure and organization of our human experience on this earth.

According to Maturana, the “organization” of a living system represents its identity, while the “structure” represents the components that make up the system. A system may change its structure without loss of identity, as long as the organization remains the same. An example of this autpoietic principle can be seen in the art work of 16th Century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who created portraits of faces which were composed of fruit, vegetables and seafood. The organization of the portrait is represented by the image of the face, while the structure of the face is composed of food. No matter what kind of food or element Arcimboldo made his faces out of, the organization/identity stayed the same. It was the structure that changed by simply changing the components that represented the image of the face.

A person’s life is organized around their identity, yet the structure of their life is always changing. The pure essence of who they are will always be the same, it’s the structure of their experience that changes. Moreover, the actual process of creating structural changes is as important as the changes that take place, for the process represents ongoing relationships between the components that form the structure of the system. It is the nature of these relationships that demonstrate the various patterns of organization which constitutes the structure of the system’s identity. (Maturana and Varela, 1987)

The central characteristic of an autopoietic system is that it undergoes continual structural changes while preserving its web like pattern of organization. The components of the network continually produce and transform one another, and they do so in two distinct ways. One way is through the process of “self renewal”. Every living organism continually renews itself. When you clip your nails, they grow back. If you cut yourself, the wound will heal. When you trim your hair, it grows back. In spite of this ongoing change, the person maintains their overall identity or pattern of organization.

The second type of structural changes in a living system are changes in which new structures are created, thus new connections in the autopoietic network. These type of changes occur because of environmental influences or as a result of the systems internal dynamics. A living system interacts with its environment through “Structural Coupling”. Moreover, the environment only “triggers” the structural changes, it does not specify or direct them. (Capra, 1996)

According to Maturana and Varela, structural coupling establishes a clear difference between the ways living and nonliving systems interact with their environments. Kicking a stone and kicking a dog are two very different stories, as Gregory Bateson was fond of pointing out. The point that Bateson was making is that when you kick a stone you can predict exactly how far it will go by calculating its weight, it’s mass, the pressure exerted on the stone by your foot and so on. However, when you kick a dog, it will be a totally unpredictable event. You will have no idea where the dog will go. For every dog might have a different internal response to being kicked. Some dogs might run, others will howl or bark, and others might wag their tail with excitement because they like being kicked.

Our experience of life is truly an internal experience. Maturana says that the map is the territory. Ultimately, the structure of our internal experience of reality is the only map we’ll ever know. Beyond that, it’s all perceptual illusion. External occurrences may happen outside of the self bounded system and may trigger an internal response, but given the structure and organization already in tact; the experience will ultimately be determined or distinguished by the history of the organism and how it chooses to represent reality through its perceptual filters. The structure of the internal response is what determines the experience for the living system.

References:
Ruiz, Alfredo, The Contributions of Humberto Maturana to the Sciences of Complexity and Psychology, Santiago, Chile; The Institute for Cognitive Therapy Abstract, 1997.
Capra, Fritjof, The Web of Life, New York, NY; Anchor Books, (A Division of Bantam Dell Publishing Group, Inc.) 1996.
Maturana, Humberto & Varela, Fransisco, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Boston, MA, Shambhala Publication, Inc., 1987.
Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, New York, NY; Ballentine Books, 1972. _________________________________________________
Kristine Hallbom is the co-director of the NLP Institute of California and is a professional writer. She is a long time student of NLP and Systemic Thinking, and holds a degree in Psychology and Languages.

By: Kris Hallbom

There is a presupposition in NLP which states that you already have the resources that you need to be successful. NLP developer, author, and trainer Robert Dilts has taken this presupposition one step further on the evolutionary path of NLP, by developing a process called Generative NLP.

The concept of Generative NLP is that if you focus on your resources and how you can enrich them, instead of focusing on your problems, you’ll automatically attract the resolutions to your problems at an unconscious level because you’re operating from the resolution space to begin with. Hence, you can prevent and solve problems before they even come into your conscious awareness. Essentially, what Generative NLP does is it gives you the opportunity to unveil, release, and strengthen your latent capabilities and resources by making them more holographic and systemic.The following interview took place in 1994.

Kris: What is Generative NLP and how do you see it fitting into the future of psychotherapy, health and well being?

Robert: One of the ways that I see it is that solutions and problem solving come from having resources, and the purpose of generative NLP is to take something that is a resource and to make more of it, to expand it and to enrich it. So I think minimally, what Generative NLP does is it allows people to “build” resources instead of trying to select or rely upon resources that they had in the past or something that they have in the present. They can actually take something in the present and expand it.

Secondly, I think that there is a possibility of using Generative NLP itself as an approach. The idea of it is if you build a strong enough resource, that resource will attract the problems of the symptoms that are ready to be solved by that resource. So in that sense, by developing resources, problems become solved. But not because you have to go out and seek a problem and then solve it, but because the resource is available. It’s now able to solve the particular symptom or problem.

Kris: How did you begin to develop this process?

Robert: There are several influences. One is that I was thinking about the ways that I use NLP with myself. Because when I think about using NLP, I think in terms of mastery and modeling. I don’t just use NLP and say “OK, where are my problems and how do I solve them?

Whenever I discover a new thing, then I immediately ask, “What can I do with this? If I had it even better than this, what would happen? If I did this, what would happen?” It wasn’t a problem solving approach; it was more like an exploratory approach to see how things would work out.

Some of the other influences have to do with also being more and more involved with integrating systems and systemic ways of operating in NLP and the particular influence that was bringing it together was the influence of self organization and taking very seriously that systems self organize and self develop. If we really took to heart the belief that NLP purports, that people have the capabilities that they need and the only reason that they are not already using them is that they need to be mobilized, drawn out or activated, then certainly one of the most important things we can do is to have tools and ways of activating and developing those resources.

Kris: The concept of time seems to play an important role in Generative NLP. What is your concept of time in general, taking into account Aristotle’s and Einstein’s view of time, and how does time relate to the generative process?

RobertAristotle thought that it was interesting that people were so caught up with time. Aristotle said, “that time is made up of all the things that use to be and aren’t anymore, and the things that aren’t yet and may never be.” So time is made up of things that are not and yet we get all involved in it. I think Einstein basically perceived time as a construct. And certainly I perceive the perception of time as a tool.

In the same way that we want to use all of our representational systems, we want to have many ways of approaching time. Not to find the right map order, but to think of time as a tool that can actually lead us to punctuating our perceptions of things differently.

One of the generative NLP processes involves stepping into the future and asking, “How would this resource change?” And when the person can feel the change in their body as their future self, you then say:

“Well of course, the feeling that you’re having in your body really isn’t in the future, that’s really in the present. Take that future resource and realize that this resource should really be the present state, not the future state because it’s really in the present.” And so you’ll begin using the “conceptions” of time to change that person’s future resource experience into their present first position. Speaking of conception, there is another place you can explore, like preconception. A lot of times people limit themselves to their perception of time and to their memories of their own life and of course, time is not only limited to our own personal memories. We can create spaces for perceptions by using time. Like the idea of the preconception place which allows you to view your life not just as perceiving time as a line, but as a landscape of possibilities. Because a lifetime isn’t a line, it’s more like a landscape and a particular life is a pathway through a very broad landscape that has many choices.

Kris: If there is one thing that you would want readers to know or one thing that you would want to emphasize regarding Generative NLP, what would that be?

Robert:The thing that comes to mind is number one, that the basic form of change in NLP is that you bring a resource into some problem space. But the whole crux of change is not which technique you use, but which resource you are able to activate. The focus of change, rather than on the problem or even the goals, needs to be on the kinds of resources that we have and the tools of NLP.

To me, the real value of the tools of NLP is like a lot of my recent books such as Skills for the Future or Tools for Dreamers instead of changing beliefs, fixing health, or whatever. It’s no so much the problems that you solve; it’s the resources that you have that are available. The time that we spend in developing our resources is what is going to really make the difference in the future. In that sense, part of the message of Generative NLP is that past and future are constructs. The whole purpose of change history is to “enrich the present.” The whole purpose of planning the future is to “mobilize resources from the present” so that we can live life from first person presentáand the rest of it is always bringing resources to that ongoing experience because that is the way we move to the future ˆ it is from being as fully ourselves and bringing as many past and future resources as we can into the present.

Kris Hallbom is the co-director of the NLP Institute of California. She has been writing professionally for 15 years, working as an editor and staff writer for various newspapers, magazines and journals. She holds a degree in Psychology and Languages and is a long time student of NLP and Systems Theory.