Make it smaller, darker, and in black and white; move it far away from you until it’s a dot and almost invisible. You may want to imagine send- ing the image up into the sun and watch it disappear in a solar flare. In this way, you experience yourself destroying the hold the memory previ- ously had on you.
Changing the memory doesn’t mean that the event didn’t occur. It does, how- ever, prove that you have a choice over how the memory affects you now and the impact it has on your future.
You See It Because You Believe It
Imagine that you’re among a group of people who witness a robbery. The chances are that everyone gives the police a different account of the robbery.
This situation arises because people receive the data that create their reality through their five senses (visual – eyes, auditory – ears, kinaesthetic – touch, gustatory – taste, and olfactory – smell). Your senses, however, bombard your brain with so much data at any one time that, in order to maintain your sanity, you process only a very small fraction of the incoming data. Filters – combinations of who you believe you are, your values and beliefs, and your memories – dictate what your brain accesses. You can pick up more about these filters in Chapter 5.
Just as your filters direct what you perceive, they also affect what you proj- ect out into the world. Maybe you find yourself surrounded by angry, self- ish, or jealous people. If so, perhaps you’re harbouring unresolved anger, believing in a win–lose scenario because there isn’t enough in the world to go around, that somebody else can only do well if you don’t, or feeling jealous of someone else’s success.
One of Romilla’s clients, Mary, was extremely unhappy at work because she was being bullied. Her supervisor, along with the departmental secretary, ganged up on Mary, being very unpleasant and extremely petty.
Romilla helped Mary to recognise that the supervisor was a very lonely woman who had no friends and was very unpopular at work. Whenever Mary looked at the supervisor she imagined that the supervisor was holding a plac- ard saying: ‘I feel I’m worthless and unlovable.’ Mary started to replace fear
with compassion. She realised that her own self-esteem needed a prop and began standing her ground – she discovered how to challenge her colleagues whenever they were unpleasant to her.
Although the process was difficult in the beginning, Mary not only raised her own sense of self-worth, but also became less troubled by the supervisor’s behaviour. Changing her thoughts about her own positive qualities increased her own confidence, which in turn led to a change in the behaviour of people around her.
One way in which you can change things around you is by examining and changing yourself, and you can achieve this aim by taking responsibility for your thoughts and actions, and overcoming obstacles such as blaming others.
Focusing on blaming others
Blaming others for your misfortunes is a lot easier than taking responsibility for putting things right yourself. You can have difficulty recognising that by blaming someone else you’re handing over your power to that person: you’re adopting the role of victim and perpetuating the problem.
Mary complained that her boss refused to give her a pay rise, which was true. However, Mary was overly modest about her achievements at work, and because her boss wasn’t the brightest penny in the purse she was unaware of Mary’s good work. Romilla made sure that Mary prepared well for her next appraisal, and Mary confidently presented a list of her successes since her previous appraisal as well as areas for improvement. She talked about her goals for her job and suggested ways in which she planned to work with her manager to achieve these aims.
In NLP terms, when you focus on something you give it a ‘frame’. For example, by focusing on the problem, ‘I can’t get my leaking roof fixed because I don’t have the money,’ you put yourself in a problem frame. Blaming someone else for your problem – for example, ‘I don’t have the money because my louse of an ex hasn’t paid me my settlement’ – is putting yourself in a blame frame. The problem frame and blame frame are closely linked because of the tendency in both to blame someone or circumstances for a problem, and putting frames around experiences like this limits you to thinking within a box. By reframing the experience, however, you think differently and can break out of constrain- ing thought patterns.
Mary switched away from the blame frame – in which she blamed her lack of a rise on her boss – and moved to taking action herself. When she realised her boss’s inability to recognise her strengths, Mary showed the flexibility of
a master communicator by changing her behaviour to get the response from her boss that she wanted . . . and yes, she did get a pay rise and a promotion!
In order to bring about positive change for yourself, you need to step away from the problem frame and take actions to secure what you want.
Getting stuck in a problem frame
As a gross generalisation, because our culture is focused on solving prob- lems, you tend to look backwards when something goes wrong in order to analyse what didn’t work. One of the nasty side-effects of this tendency is to lay blame. The difficulty with the problem frame is it keeps you trapped and stops you from taking the following positive actions:
✓ Moving forward
✓ Thinking about the real results you want
✓ Examining previous successes and modelling them for future use ✓ Learning from what worked for other people and emulating their strategies
✓ Resolving an issue
Instead, when you keep returning to analyse why things didn’t work as you wanted them to, you tend to focus on the following negative aspects:
✓ What’s wrong?
✓ How long have you had this problem?
✓ Who’s to blame for you having this problem?
✓ Why did this problem occur?
✓ Why haven’t you done something about the problem?
Constantly asking ‘why’ is a negative approach and forces you to go even deeper into the problem, become defensive, and move farther away from finding a positive solution. A more constructive approach is to ask what you hoped to achieve by doing something, or what your purpose was behind doing something.
Think of a time when you were so stuck in a problem that you were unable to see any solution. Maybe you’re having such a problem right now. Ask yourself whether you’re positively focusing on the result you want or getting too tied up negatively in the emotion of the moment to have clarity.
Help is at hand in the form of the outcome-frame process, which we introduce in the following section, and the well-formed outcome process (described in the later section ‘Becoming smarter than SMART: Creating well- formed outcomes’).
Shifting into the outcome frame
The outcome-frame approach is a smart, constructive process that suggests a different way of thinking about your problems and issues, a process that helps you to identify and then focus your mind on what you positively want.
When you add in an efficient goal-setting process and monitor each step along the way, you can correct any deviation from your plan to attain the desired results easily and promptly.
Often, you can find yourself experiencing the same sorts of problems time and again. In our experience, this cycle usually indicates that you have some- thing to take on-board.
Keep asking yourself, ‘What’s the lesson that I need to learn so that this prob- lem is no longer an issue?’
One day, after asking this question for a while – or perhaps even instantly – the answer comes to you. Strangely, after you fully experience that ‘Aha’ moment of realisation, you can find that you no longer notice the problem recurring.
Perhaps the change comes about because you stop investing emotional energy in the problem or because you move on to tackling another set of les- sons. Whatever the reason, the process worked!
The Path to Excellence
Your brain is a learning machine that needs to be kept occupied. If it isn’t, it can start to dwell on the negative and get you into all kinds of trouble. As a human being, you need to use all your ingenuity to direct your brain towards helping you to achieve your goals. If you can create a compelling, irresist- ible future, your brain helps to align your behaviour in a way that moves you towards your desired outcome quickly and easily. The first step is working out what you want.
Knowing what you want
Alice (in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll) asks the Cheshire Cat, ‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?’, with- out having any clear idea of where she wants to go, she just wants to go somewhere. The Cheshire Cat responds that Alice is sure to get somewhere if she just walks long enough. Like Alice, imagine what would happen next time you go to a train station and ask for ‘a ticket to somewhere’.
When you’re trying to move forward and achieve your goals, life is so much easier if you become very clear about what you really want. So often in life, you get caught up in what you don’t want and spend an awful lot of energy, both physical and emotional, in avoiding the undesirable result.
To figure out what you want and put your energies towards achieving it, sit down and write your own obituary. You can then decide on the legacy you want to leave to posterity and the actions you need to take to fulfil that legacy. For more information on this technique, head to Chapter 3, where you can discover that your unconscious mind is a wonderful ally in assisting you to achieve the goals you want.
A client, Denise, was trying to ‘escape’ from her second marriage. One of her first statements was, ‘I’m bad with relationships.’ On working through her issues, we discovered that she had lost her much loved grandfather as a very young child. The trauma of this particular event had gone very deep into Denise’s psyche, and her fear of loss had been driving her to end her relation- ships before she had to experience the pain of loss again. Because Denise was focusing, at a subconscious level, on what she didn’t want – the pain of loss – her unconscious mind was assisting her in maintaining behaviours that made her avoid the pain. Unfortunately, this approach created other problems.
For her to get the relationship she craved, she had to think about and design exactly what she wanted in a relationship, and then focus on creating that in her life.
One way to discover what you really want is to go way into your future.
Imagine that you’re a grey-haired grandparent. You’re sitting on a rock, under the stars, with a roaring campfire in front of you, and your grandchildren are at your feet demanding another story about your life. Would you want to tell them of the time you missed the chance to fulfil a dream because you were too scared or too influenced by someone else’s ‘you can’t’? Or would you want to tell them that, despite all the odds and in keeping with your values, you did something spectacular?
Fast-forward through the years and look back at your life as it is now. Make a list of the dreams you’d dare to aim for if you had all the money and influence in the world and knew you wouldn’t fail.
You may decide that you want material things like a huge nest-egg, a big house, and nice cars, you may want a home and family of your own, or you may decide you want to be influential in the political arena. Your life is your choice. Working through the following section, and flicking to Chapter 5 to read about values, helps you to discover the reasons why you want the goals you do and find the hot buttons that drive you.
Becoming smarter than SMART:
Creating well-formed outcomes
SMART goals were all the rage a few years ago in the corporate world.
According to the SMART model, goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timed (hence the acronym). This approach is a great discipline so far as it goes. NLP, however, allows a better way forward by adding sensory-specific information, which can help you modify your behaviour or seek help in the form of extra resources, including guides and mentors.
NLP makes SMART goals even smarter by helping you work out what you want using the well-formed outcome process. NLP builds on the SMART approach by making you use all your senses to design a goal, and to fine tune it to be more than just Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timed.
This process requires you to answer a series of questions that really help you explore the hows, whys, and wherefores of your desired outcome. By fol- lowing this process you begin to understand your true motives for wanting your goals, and you can weigh up the pros and cons of success versus failure!
A fairly common example of a well-formed outcome may be to want a better paid job.
When your desired outcome meets the following criteria, NLP says that it satisfies the well-formed conditions. For every result you want to achieve, ask yourself the following seven questions: