More often than not, I’m faced with a blank or enquiring face when I’ve answered people with “I’m an NLP Master Practitioner” when they’ve asked me what it is that I do. So…. to clarify for those who don’t know what NLP is….it’s Neuro Linguistic Programming. Clear as mud, isn’t it?

Neuro – this is how our brain works, it sends and receives messages to and from all the different parts of our bodies.

Simple things like blinking our eyes and thinking a thought, all pass along our neural networks to and from our brain. The more we use a neural network the stronger it’s signal, the less we use it, the weaker it’s signal gets till it stops working altogether. The good news is we can start new ones or re-kindle old ones.

Linguistic – this is our language. Only 7% of the language we use is made up of words. Yes, that’s right, only 7% !!! The rest is made up of body language and that is broken down into posture, facial expressions and tone of voice. So 97% of our language is: that look someone gives you, that either makes you smile or frown (more body language), that relaxed posture when you feel comfortable or the tense posture when you don’t. The blush you feel rising up your face when you feel embarrassed, it’s all language and we all use it to make judgements in everyday situations, sometimes correctly and sometimes we completely misjudge someone simply by their body language and our interpretation of it.

Programming – this is how we do things….repeatedly. Basically it is how we form habits. How do you know when you bend your knees to sit on a chair that you won’t collapse in a pile on the floor? Because you’ve done it so many times before and haven’t done so , and unless someone pulls the chair out from where it is, you won’t do so now . How do you know it’s time to tell yourself you can’t do…. whatever? Because you’ve done something like this before and it didn’t turn out how you’d wanted.

So….all that is very well, how can it help us in everyday life?

Well, the bad habits that you’ve formed over the years and find impossible to stop, NLP can help you stop and do so within a matter of hours. The beliefs and attitudes (be they our own, or taken accepted from someone else) that hold us back from doing something we really want to do in/with our lives, NLP can dissolve them, again in a matter of hours. NLP not just about getting rid of bad/restrictive habits, attitudes and beliefs that hold us back, NLP is also about installing useful/helpful habits, beliefs and attitudes to replace the old ones, thus making your life much, much, more fulfilling, successful and happy.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “be careful what you ask for, you might just get it”? When we hear someone saying that we tend to dismiss them as pessimistic and superstitious fools. But there is more to it than that. We all have a conscious mind and an unconsious mind. Some of you may call your unconscious mind your sub-conscious mind or your ego. In NLP we call it our unconscious mind because it is something we are not conscious of until we are made conscious of it, hence un-conscious mind. The unconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between imagination and reality. It has no concept of negativity either, our conscious mind looks after that aspect of things for us.

So…..consider this, you spend years telling yourself that you don’t want to be sick and poor. Now, your unconscious mind as previously stated, doesn’t process negatives, so the first thing it does is remove them, so your phrase now sounds like this: you want to be sick and poor. Your unconscious mind, being as obliging as it can, goes and gets you just what you asked for:sickness and poverty.

So how can we overcome this? Think positively! Instead of thinking negatively change your thinking to positive

thinking. Now, I know this can be difficult, for years I struggled with this dilemma, how on earth can I think positively when my life is a mess, I’ve no money and am miserable and depressed? But it can be done. Take one aspect of your life and choose to change that. What are you grateful for with that aspect of your life? Every morning when you wake up make a mental list of three things you are grateful for that day. As the days go by and you get into the habit of being grateful increase your list to five things, then ten. You’ll soon start to notice that you have a more positive attitude at the start of the day and that will spill over into the rest of your day. Do you ever notice happy people tend to attract people to them without seemingly trying? Like attracts like, so if you are miserable and sad you will tend to gravitate towards and attract miserable and sad people who help to validate your misery and sadness. So instead of saying to yourself I don’t want to be sick and poor anymore, say I want to have a healthy and wealthy life. Then start to make plans on how to get it.