A Practical Guide to NLP E-Book

Neil Shah

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Serie: Practical Guide Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 199

Beschreibung

An INTRODUCING PRACTICAL GUIDE to the therapy designed to help people have better, fuller and richer lives – as well as work far more effectively. By focusing on how we communicate – the words we use as well as non-verbal communication such as body language – NLP seeks to change our mental habits into those of more successful people. Whether you're a salesperson needing to close more deals, a teacher who would like to get through to your pupils more quickly, or someone who needs to negotiate between parties – this INTRODUCING PRACTICAL GUIDE is for you.

Leseprobe

First published in the UK in 2011 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2011 by Icon Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-184831-325-5 (ePub format) ISBN: 978-184831-326-2 (Adobe eBook format)

Printed edition sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Printed edition published in Australia in 2011 by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Printed edition distributed in Canada by Penguin Books Canada, 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3

Printed edition published in the USA in 2011 by Totem Books Inquiries to: Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP, UK

Printed edition distributed to the trade in the USA by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution The Keg House, 34 Thirteenth Avenue NE, Suite 101, Minneapolis, MN 55413-1007

Text copyright © 2011 Neil Shah

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Avenir by Marie Doherty

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

About the author

Author’s note

What is NLP, and How Can it Help Me?

1. Preface

2. About this book

3. What is NLP?

4. Where does NLP fit into traditional psychology?

5. Basic assumptions of NLP

Using NLP to Win Friends and Influence People

6. Communication

7. Creating rapport

The Language of Success

8. NLP and language

9. Meta programs

10. The meta model

11. Employing the language of success

12. Embedded commands

Creating a Toolkit

13. Goal-setting

14. Visualization

15. Anchoring

Integrating Your Learning

16. Modelling

17. Change

18. Modality check

19. Applications of NLP

Acknowledgements

Further reading

About the author

Neil Shah is a stress management consultant, success coach and motivational speaker. He also has a long-standing interest in hypnotherapy, neurolinguistic programming and strategies to promote well-being, and has trained extensively in these fields.

He is the founder and director of the Stress Management Society (www.stress.org.uk), one of the UK’s leading authorities on stress management and well-being issues, and managing director of the consultancy firm Praesto Training and Development (www.praesto.uk.com). He is a qualified practitioner in hypnotherapy and counselling and communication skills, and a licensed practitioner of NLP, having trained with Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna. He is a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, the General Hypnotherapy Register and the NHSTA Directory of Complementary and Alternative Practitioners.

He is a regularly featured media expert on stress, writing for newspapers and magazines including Men’s Health and Top Santé, as well as providing consultancy support to large corporations such as British Airways and Shell.

Author’s note

It’s important to note that there are many frequently used stories, anecdotes and metaphors employed in NLP. Where I know the source I will be sure to reference it, but my apologies to the originators of any material if I have overlooked them here.

What is NLP, and How Can it Help Me?

1. Preface

Over the years I have achieved tremendous success and I have also failed miserably. I had always put this down to chance, luck, fate and destiny. I was fascinated by how incredible people get incredible results and how amazing organizations achieve amazing results. Before learning about NLP I never realized that it could be easy to achieve the same results in my own life, simply by copying or ‘modelling’ the strategies of others who have already attained success. In fact, NLP helps you do exactly that.

Today I’m happy, healthy, calm and relaxed. I successfully run four companies focused on health, well-being and success achievement. I’m quoted as one of the UK’s leading experts in stress reduction and relaxation.

But it wasn’t always this way. Only ten years ago my previous company failed. I was stressed out, exhausted and depressed. I had lost millions and was ill and completely burnt out. I had lost my appetite and my sex drive. I was frustrated, lacking focus, and was struggling to keep my life together. I didn’t know how to deal with it, I felt helpless. I had lost my money, my car and even a lot of people whom I considered to be my close friends. I was in the lowest place I had ever been in my life.

I tried therapy – I visited my doctor, I visited a life coach, a counsellor and even a psychic healer. I read self-help books and at one point even tried anti-depressants – nothing worked!

Then I discovered Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), a set of concepts and techniques to understand and change human behaviour patterns. After attending an introductory session and reading a book on NLP, I made the decision that I needed to get back on top of my life and on top of the world, so I travelled to the Himalayas with the intention of climbing Mount Everest. It was life-changing experience – as William Blake said: ‘Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street.’ I learned much about myself and my capabilities – I had to radically shift my mindset to achieve this tremendous feat. This was my first experience with reprogramming my mind to achieve success, and I’m now committed to sharing what I discovered during this experience.

My success did not come by chance. I simply took the time to understand the route I needed to take, and now I have the roadmap to take me to success – directly and effortlessly – without having to worry about getting lost. NLP can be described as a GPS system to take you to fulfilment and achievement. When I started to study NLP I quickly realized that as long as you follow the system carefully, the conditions are correct and the same process is followed, you are guaranteed to get the same results every single time. This book is a practical introduction to that system.

I will start by introducing you to NLP and its basic principles, ensuring that you have a clear idea of what you want. Then you will learn how to learn, before we explore how you can ‘win friends and influence people’. The next step is to understand yourself, as we explore how to apply what you’ve learned and incorporate it into your life. This book is bursting with practical exercises to ensure that you learn experientially.

I would add that even though NLP is a fantastic tool, it’s simply one tool, and you can’t fix a car with just one spanner. Other guides in this series cover areas such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Emotional Intelligence and the Psychology of Success, all of which can be used in conjunction with NLP. In and of itself NLP is a useful and powerful intervention. However, when coupled with other tools and techniques it can form part of a formidable toolkit for personal success or well-being.

2. About this book

Neurolinguistic Programming has been described as a popular psychological approach to enable people to have ‘better, fuller and richer lives’. Unfortunately the world of NLP has become filled with jargon, technical expressions and buzzwords that just confuse people and actually prevent them from making use of simple methodologies that can have a profound impact.

The first step is to decide what your goals are. A new job? A healthier body? A better relationship? This book will help you to unlock the power of your mind and learn how to use it for your own benefit to achieve your goals!

Inside you will find:

• How to use NLP to set and achieve dreams faster, using platinum goal-setting techniques

• How to attract opportunity with a powerful new mindset

• Failsafe ways to get 100% out of your day

• How to improve your communication and negotiation skills

• How to take control of your thoughts and feelings, your state of mind, your moods, and in turn your life

• How to change negative behaviour and beliefs easily and quickly

• How to learn approaches to ensure that you fulfil your potential

• How to accelerate your ability to learn and retain new knowledge and information

• How to face your fears and phobias and overcome them rapidly

• How to remove the unconscious limiting beliefs that hold you back from success

• How to recognize some of the key robbers of energy and vitality, and how this untapped energy is available to you in great abundance if you just learn to access it

• Why it is that most people are actually not running their own lives but are responding to the beliefs and energy that they have picked up from family, friends and peer groups.

This is a practical and fun introduction to NLP and accelerated learning techniques and is written in a style that allows you to apply what you learn in real-world situations immediately.

Please bear in mind that the most effective way to learn about NLP is to experience it yourself, so be sure to have fun with the activities and exercises throughout this book. Some of them may feel unusual or strange, as they are so different from your usual way of doing things – but please just approach all the exercises and ideas with an open mind. If you don’t like them or they don’t work for you, then there’s no need to ever do them again. However, being open to them means that you may just find something that could radically change your life.

You are limited only by your beliefs, so change what you focus on, and thereby create the life you deserve! It’s time for you to fulfil your potential!

Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

Napoleon Hill

3. What is NLP?

Neurolinguistic Programming. It’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? What does it mean, and what can it do for you?

If you’re looking at this book, you’ve probably already heard enough about NLP to make you curious, to make you want to know more about its potential and just why so many people are talking about it. Most of all, you might want to know how ordinary people have been using it for nearly 40 years to achieve extraordinary results.

NLP is such a wide-ranging discipline that it’s difficult to encompass all its branches and applications in a short definition. However, perhaps as a start we can call it a set of techniques and guiding principles that allows us to identify, model and replicate outstanding performance in any given area – guaranteeing us outstanding results. Using NLP we can eliminate or modify our existing behaviours, if we are not satisfied with them; or internalize new, more beneficial ones.

NLP isn’t about dodgy new-age mantras, it isn’t about hugging trees to get in touch with your inner self, and it definitely isn’t about selling you snake oil. NLP is based on sound psychological principles. NLP is not a spiritual or esoteric approach, it’s an effective and rapid form of psychological therapy, capable of addressing the full range of challenges that we’re likely to encounter in our lives, such as phobias, depression, negative habits and even learning challenges. It’s a wonderful tool to improve our effectiveness personally and professionally.

While traditional clinical psychology is about describing and analysing problems to find out their causes, NLP, in contrast, focuses on possibilities and how the mind works to produce results. If NLP could be summed up in one phrase, it would be ‘people work perfectly’. Our specific thoughts, feelings and actions have produced what we are today. By changing these ‘inputs’ you will get different results – a different you.

NLP is an attitude, a sense of adventure and curiosity, a desire to learn what kinds of communication can influence ourselves and others. It’s looking at life as a fascinating and rare opportunity to learn and grow.

NLP is a methodology based on the idea that all behaviour has a structure and a process. Those structures and processes can replicated, learned, taught and even changed.

NLP has evolved into an innovative technology, allowing us to organize thoughts, ideas and information in ways that allow us to achieve results that are otherwise out of reach.

NLP is the art and science of personal excellence. Art because everyone brings their own unique personality and style to what they do, and this can never be captured in words or techniques. Science because there’s a method and process for discovering the patterns used by outstanding individuals in any field to achieve outstanding results.

This process is called modelling, and patterns, skills and techniques discovered in this way are being used increasingly in counselling, education, sport and business for more effective communication, personal development and learning.

Have you ever done something so elegantly and effectively that it took your breath away? Have you ever had times when you were really delighted at what you did, and wondered how you did it?

NLP shows you how to understand and model your own successes, so that you can have many more of those moments.

It’s a way of discovering and unfolding your personal genius, a way of bringing out the best in yourself and others.

NLP is a practical skill that creates the results we truly want in the world, while creating value for others. It’s the study of what makes the difference between excellent and average.

It also leaves behind it a trail of extremely effective techniques for education and business.

Neurolinguistic Programming refers to the three most important facets in creating our human experience: neurology, language and programming. The neurological system regulates how our bodies function, language determines how we interact and communicate with other people, and our programming determines the images and models of the world we create. NLP describes the relationship between the mind (neuro) and language (linguistic) and how they impact on our body and behaviour (programming).

Neuro – the nervous system through which a new experience is received through our five senses and processed.

Linguistic – the verbal and non-verbal communication systems through which neural representations are coded, ordered and given meaning.

Programming – the ability to organize our communication and neurological systems to achieve specific desired goals and results.

Where did NLP come from?

NLP originated in the mid-1970s, when Richard Bandler, a maths student at the University of California with a strong interest in computer science and psychology, working together with one of his lecturers, linguist John Grinder, began leading weekly therapy meetings that involved copying the content and style of psychotherapist Fritz Perls, who had founded the Gestalt therapy movement. This attempt to replicate the results of another person by adopting their behaviours and methods (including the moustache, chain-smoking and German accent – which eventually were deemed unnecessary!) ultimately led to the discipline of ‘modelling human excellence’.

They then went on to study Virginia Satir, who developed conjoined family therapy, and Milton Erickson, who is the father of modern clinical hypnotherapy.

One of Bandler and Grinder’s early books was entitled The Structure of Magic, and as Arthur C. Clarke once said: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Many people have drawn similar conclusions regarding NLP. This mind science has swept across the world over the last 35 years, and using its techniques people have freed themselves of long-standing fears and phobias in a matter of minutes, or rapidly reduced the impact of the memory of a horrible experience that may have hindered them for many years.

We are led to believe that meaningful change takes time. We have all been introduced to the philosophy of ‘no pain, no gain’, and when a new and contrary idea is introduced, we often find it hard to believe. NLP is the kind of practice that seems ‘too good to be true’, which means that it has attracted both advocates and doubters, many of the doubters being among traditional psychologists whose work derives from Sigmund Freud. Let’s look at how NLP differs from traditional psychology.

4. Where does NLP fit into traditional psychology?

NLP has been described as part of the next generation of psychology. However, it has not yet been accepted by mainstream academia, and is not seriously studied as a branch of psychiatry or psychology.

Traditional Freudian psychology and psychotherapy requires a large commitment of time as the client tries to uncover unconscious processes that determine conscious behaviour, sometimes having to go back to relive painful or traumatic experiences.

Counselling is a shorter process, usually undirected by the counsellor, who helps the client to explore feelings and behaviour around a specific issue such as bereavement.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is task-centred work that identifies a problem behaviour and how the mind thinks about it and therefore behaves in regard to it. CBT literally refers to how thoughts/mental processes (cognition) affect behaviour. CBT then aims to alter those beliefs and thought processes, so influencing the behaviour towards a positive state for the client.

NLP has its roots in the field of behavioural science, developed by Ivan Pavlov, B.F. Skinner and Edward Thorndike. It uses physiology (physical and biological states) and the unconscious mind to change thought processes and therefore behaviour.

How is NLP different from psychotherapy?

NLP is based on ‘modelling’ rather than ‘theory’. A model is a description of how something works, without any commitment regarding why it might be that way. NLP and psychotherapy have different underlying assumptions about the human mind and its connections with the body as a whole. NLP and traditional psychology have different methodologies, different measures and different concepts in practice. Major differences include:

• NLP is not a model of psychopathology (study of mental illness). NLP makes no diagnoses about a person’s mental health or illness. Its focus is purely on results. It proposes that people are not broken – they work perfectly to produce the results they are getting even if the results are not desirable. If a person doesn’t like the results they are getting, NLP provides tools to help them get the results they desire.

• Traditional psychology and psychotherapy patients complain that their sessions lack structure: they go in, let their thoughts wander for 50 minutes, and leave without any sense of progress; then they repeat this ritual for an indeterminate amount of time, sometimes ten years or more. Often, after years of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis or psycho-pharmaceutical treatment, while problems may have been explored and brought to conscious awareness, and even treated to reduce their effects, a person is still left with ongoing patterns that resulted from a particular situation or experience. Resolution is often left unfinished. This is not to say that traditional psychological models are useless or unhelpful. Many people have been greatly helped by them, and I would encourage anyone to explore them if that is their interest. But there’s so much more that can be accomplished in far less time. For those who have already invested in psychotherapy for a number of years, NLP can be an important finishing or resolution process when psychotherapy has concluded or reached a point of diminishing returns.

• NLP is non-exclusive. In NLP we encourage people to make the most of any resource they wish to use. NLP works well either as a primary or complementary means of self-exploration and change. It doesn’t take an adversarial position to psychotherapy, traditional medicine, or other alternative approaches, and clients are free to pursue any and all other avenues while exploring NLP. Some psychotherapists are equally non-exclusive and work well in cooperation with NLP coaches and therapists.

NLP and the parts model

Traditional psychology divides the mind into three essential parts: the id, the ego and the superego. While not all branches of psychology ‘buy’ this tripartite model, it remains the central and most widely used model in psychological literature and practice.

NLP also has a ‘parts model’, but it’s metaphorical, positive and extensible. NLP proposes that internal ‘parts’ should be understood and used metaphorically rather than as literal fact.

The NLP parts model

In the NLP model, each of us has a non-predefined multitude of identity ‘parts’, some prominent at one time, others prominent at other times, all interacting with each other in some way – even if that interaction is characterized by silence or opposition.

Most of us have heard the expression, ‘Part of me wants to do this, and part of me wants to do that.’ In NLP this is called ‘parts incongruity’.

No part of us is considered dark or evil in NLP. Every part has a positive intention and a useful purpose, even if it’s presently trying to fulfil its intention in a problematic way. Additionally, new parts can be created as needed and old parts can be changed or merged with ease.

Parts can form teams, and teams of parts can move through any number of processes for a given goal or purpose such as emotional support, creativity, healing, reality-checking, planning, critiquing, approving, action, etc.

Other features of NLP

• NLP is non-Aristotelian. This means that NLP is process- and structure-oriented, not classification-oriented. NLP proposes that putting people into categories of personality type or psychopathology promotes their getting or staying stuck, rather than assisting them to grow, change and heal.

• NLP is post-Newtonian. This means that NLP is firmly based on late 20th-century advances in physics, which observe that the universe is made up not of a collection of objects or things but of patterns and processes.

• NLP is not reductionist. NLP considers reductionism – such as the belief that our thoughts, feelings and experiences are ‘just’ the result of genetics or chemical processes in the brain – to be the result of linguistic confusion.

• NLP is not objectivist. NLP doesn’t recognize 19th-century objectivism (a belief in absolute objective reality or the belief that ‘subjective’ equates to ‘invalid’).

• NLP is not linear. NLP doesn’t limit itself to linear cause – effect thinking. It prefers whole systems thinking. Whole systems tend to be self-organizing and too complex for useful linear, cause–effect analysis.

• NLP is efficient. NLP doesn’t pursue unresolvable cause – effect, question–answer sequences such as, ‘Why? … Because … Why? … Because … Why? … Because …’ ad infinitum, since for every answer to ‘Why?’, the question ‘Why?’ can be applied again. There is literally no end to such cause–effect sequences, and thus no satisfying resolution. With a few very specific exceptions, NLP prefers to ask more useful questions such as, ‘How? What? When? Where? Who?’ NLP considers that taking long personal histories from clients for causal analysis is essentially an expensive waste of time. NLP does work with personal history when appropriate – directly, as it’s presently coded in a person’s mind. NLP has powerful tools that a person can use to make positive changes in their ongoing experience of personal history and its meaning, patterns developed as a result of life experiences, and other factors connected with their past – without drugs, hypnosis, or years of analysis.

• NLP is not statistics-based. NLP observes that statistics cannot measure or predict a particular person’s subjective experience, since subjective experience is understood by internal, not external sensory experience. NLP is the first science based on internal sensory experience.