Maybe the smell of freshly baked bread?
Or the sound of your mother’s voice?
Perhaps the sight of old friends?

Sometimes things happen that trigger us into feeling good – or even great. Yet sometimes things happen that “make us” feel bad. While it is great for us to take responsibility for how we feel it still affects us in our everyday life, doesn’t it?

While those things that happen to us (those sights, sounds and feelings – we call them “anchors” in NLP) might continue to impact us, you can learn how that happens, and to use that process to your advantage.

Join us for an evening with Master Practitioner of NLP Mikko Lehtinen, and explore how anchors are a natural way for our brains to work. Then you might be able to setup your anchors so you are triggered into feeling good more and more often, and maybe to experiment with collapsing some old anchors that have been getting in your way

Anchoring with Mikko Lehtinen
Friday, 4 May, from 7pm in Central Shanghai

Space is limited so please register below:

[contact-form-7]
There is a charge of 100RMB to cover the venue.

About Mikko

• Finn who has lived all over and now in Shanghai for 4 years
• Got sucked into the science and art of communication since an early age. Master Practitioner of NLP, and mainly using those and other experiences in personal development and business life of managing people and projects.
• INTP and yet act like an ENTP in public: Extroverts have more fun in life!
• My aim to bring value by sharing and hopefully spark some added insights for myself as well.

What comes to mind when you think about “broccoli”?

A green vegetable? Healthy eating? Maybe one time that your mother forced you to eat it before leaving the table? Nothing at all?

When I discovered that broccoli is one of the healthiest vegetables we can eat, I had a problem: I didn’t like it! As one comedian phrased it, “Broccoli’s a side dish, folks. Always was, always will be, OK!”

I wanted to like broccoli. To crave it the way that I craved chocolate. But there just didn’t seem to be any way to change it. Until I discovered submodalities.

Through exploring submodalities, I discovered that the way that I thought of broccoli was very different from the way I thought of chocolate. And that by changing those submodalities, I could change the way I felt… so much so that I came to love broccoli, and still do today!

What are submodalities? I’m glad you asked! Submodalities are the attributes of our internal representations. If you could imagine an imagine, maybe of someone or something you like, you might notice: Is the imagine in colour? Is the image straight ahead or off to the side? How large is the image?

Beyond broccoli, I used submodalities to change how much sugar I wanted to have in my coffee. How I felt about memories. Even how I felt about people – just imagine if the person that used to annoy you and get in your way could suddenly be someone you felt neutral about? With submodalities, I helped a young woman put traumatic experiences and painful memories into the past instead where they belong, instead of continually getting in the way.

With submodalities, you can powerfully and directly change how you think and feel about almost anything. They’ve been around since the early days of NLP, with Richard Bandler being particularly well-known for using them.

We are going to explore how submodalities affect us, and some simple ways that you can change use them to create changes immediately.

Exploring Submodalities
in Beijing with NLP Trainer, Daniel Smith

5 June – from 7pm - 100RMB

Please register below for further details:

[contact-form-7]

What comes to mind when you think about “broccoli”?

A green vegetable? Healthy eating? Maybe one time that your mother forced you to eat it before leaving the table? Nothing at all?

When I discovered that broccoli is one of the healthiest vegetables we can eat, I had a problem: I didn’t like it! As one comedian phrased it, “Broccoli’s a side dish, folks. Always was, always will be, OK!”

I wanted to like broccoli. To crave it the way that I craved chocolate. But there just didn’t seem to be any way to change it. Until I discovered submodalities.

Through exploring submodalities, I discovered that the way that I thought of broccoli was very different from the way I thought of chocolate. And that by changing those submodalities, I could change the way I felt… so much so that I came to love broccoli, and still do today!

What are submodalities? I’m glad you asked! Submodalities are the attributes of our internal representations. If you could imagine an imagine, maybe of someone or something you like, you might notice: Is the imagine in colour? Is the image straight ahead or off to the side? How large is the image?

Beyond broccoli, I used submodalities to change how much sugar I wanted to have in my coffee. How I felt about memories. Even how I felt about people – just imagine if the person that used to annoy you and get in your way could suddenly be someone you felt neutral about? With submodalities, I helped a young woman put traumatic experiences and painful memories into the past instead where they belong, instead of continually getting in the way.

With submodalities, you can powerfully and directly change how you think and feel about almost anything. They’ve been around since the early days of NLP, with Richard Bandler being particularly well-known for using them.

We are going to explore how submodalities affect us, and some simple ways that you can change use them to create changes immediately.

Exploring Submodalities
in Shanghai 31 March in Beijing 5 June with NLP Trainer, Daniel Smith
(100RMB venue charge)

Please register below:

[contact-form-7]

One of the challenges I’m having is in the area of closing in business… how does (present) a context that is comfortable and not overly aggressive (but that still gets the deal done)?

And it is a challenge for many people. What do you think?

You might try putting yourself in their shoes. Deeply connect with everything you can about them – their mannerisms, their attitudes, their style of thinking, even their posture as they are distorting your proposal. Then step back and ask yourself, “If I was , what would have to happen in order for me to ?”

There are likely to be emotional and rational issues to consider; Reasons to act and reasons not to act. This could help you better frame your proposal, respond to their concerns and position yourself regarding the key issues.

You could then consider: How can you offer precisely the solution that they need? If the ‘problem’ isn’t acute, you might find it useful to emphasize the pleasure lost or pain experienced as a result of them not taking action now. We tend to underestimate long term, compounding effects and overestimate short term costs. You may be able to help them remember and recognize the whole situation in it’s proper context.

There are always “magic” phrases that you can add to amplify the impact of the above, though they aren’t much use if you don’t get the above issues sorted out clearly!

If the issues run deeper, you might take on understanding this situation as an opportunity to get really curious. Recently, I was coaching an expat who was finding that he had a group of leads who never seemed to buy. They “liked” him and appreciated what he was offering, but would neither buy nor reject their offering. And this went on for years! While he might have just written off these leads after a period of time, instead he recognized that they represented a valuable data set for research, who could offer useful insights if he went even further in trying to understand rather than just lamenting the past failure.

Sometimes it takes a bit of focus to really understand what is going on. Yet, sometimes the best fruit is on the highest branches, isn’t it?

The first night was hard. It took several hours before he dropped off to sleep, only to awake again around dawn. The second night was also hard, though he more quickly came to understand that he was going to be sleeping in his own bed. The third night? We’ll find out tonight

My son’s feelings are largely an effect of his experiences. If I throw him up in the air, he’ll laugh. If I feed him some ice cream when he asks for it, he’ll smile. But even at this early age, it’s not a simple cause-effect relationship: If he’s in the ‘wrong mood’ and I throw him up in the air, he’ll still be crying when I catch him, and he won’t always want ice cream.

As we grow older, the relationship between how we feel and our experiences becomes more and more complicated. While one of the common presuppositions of NLP is “the meaning of communication is the response that you get”, if someone is angry with you for making fun at them, telling them that it’s their decision to feel bad or their fault that they are angry with you might not help you very much!

But you do have a lot of choice about how you feel, don’t you?

And if you want to change how you feel, you can, can’t you? I love playing music to ‘manipulate my state’ – there are some songs that I can listen to that will transform how I feel in just moments. Smells are powerful triggers too, as are seeing people or even just remembering something.

In NLPese, we talk about anchoring: Triggers that are used to access particular states. These triggers – these anchors – can take many forms, go across sensory systems, and powerfully affect our subjective experiences.

If you ask someone, “How satisfied are you with your life?” on a scale of 1 (terrible) to 10 (ideal), you will get a score that is one of the most widely used measure of life satisfaction. Amazingly enough, your mood determines more than 70% of your result!

Most of us aren’t taught how to choose how we feel.

But we can learn.

We can learn to use a negative experience to trigger a resourceful state.

We can learn to harness difficult people and confronting conversations.

We can learn to respond to difficulties and obstacles with tenacity and determination.

We can learn to accept reality rather than fantasizing that things were different.

You can learn to choose how you feel.

How you feel profoundly impacts how you live, relate and work. After all, if you can change how you feel, you can transform your state of being. What if you could learn to put yourself into the driver’s seat rather than being a victim of circumstances and outside influences?

Here are a few strategies that can help:

1. Rhythm: Think about a challenging situation, relationship or context. Maybe someone that you work, or when you are at the gym, or even when you’re trying to sleep. You might notice what sort of rhythm that context seems to have; Or maybe it’s so erratic that it seems to have no rhythm at all! Then create a rhythm – something simple or something complex – that seems to “make sense” for that situation. Even something very simple to start with can make a huge difference. Take on this rhythm, maybe by clapping or even dancing, and maintain this rhythm as you start to think about the challenging context. When you lose the rhythm, just pause and regain the rhythm before going back to the context.
2. Music: Listen to a piece of music while you think about the context. You might even try a few different styles of music, noticing what difference each makes to how you feel. Some of us have specific states that are really useful for us – these “high performance states” can be really powerful; you might try getting access to those states in situations when you need them.
3. Modeling: Some people can do things that you wish that you could do. One of my past clients was intensely self-critical – and even self-critical of being self-critical – and he asked me how other people who were less successful than him could still be ‘content’ while he was feeling inadequate. So I asked him to study them. Get to know them and find out, how do they do it?
4. Questions: Ask yourself about how you could feel how you want to feel. For example, if I want to feel “grateful”, I could ask myself, “What do I feel grateful about right now?” And if you can’t think of anything, you can change it to, “What could I feel grateful about right now?” And of course, you can just replace “grateful” with any other emotion that you like – excitement, joy, love, delight, passion, peace or anything else you would like to feel.

We are surrounded by teachers in the world around us. I was once told that when I met someone who was excellent, that I should recognize what it was in them that was excellent, and strive to emulate or copy that, and upon meeting someone with had a character failing that bothered me, that I should strive to amend that defect in myself.

Being able to choose how you feel – what Carmen Bostic St Clair refers to as State Choice – is one of the most direct ways to upgrade your performance. You’ll be amazed at how easily you can start to notice the change.

As I replied, the most important ‘secret’ is to know what you really want.

In other words: Know your outcome.

It’s the first step of the old USF (Ultimate Success Formula) or NSF (NLP Success Formula) – Know your outcome, Take massive action, Notice the results and Adjust until you get your outcome. It’s also one aspect of OPA (Outcome-focused, Purpose-driven, Action plan) that Tony Robbins advocates: Know your outcome, Connect with your purpose, and Take action.

And not just the surface of what you want, but your intention.

Nobody just wants to lose weight, or get married, or make more money. Instead, they want what they think they’ll get from having those outcomes and goals – to be more healthy or more attractive, to feel more security or love, to have more fun or adventure. Someone with intense focus on what they really want is immensely powerful because they align themselves behind that outcome in negotiations and in daily decisions, while being far more flexible in finding alternative ways to fulfill their intention and get what they’re after.

Without knowing your intention, it’s easy to get lost or fixated on obstacles. Connecting with your intentions, mission, values and purpose help you remember “why” you are doing something, so that when those obstacles arise, you can enjoy more resilience in overcoming whatever challenges come your way.

So as you prepare for the annual “New Year Resolutions” when you can review the year that has been and the year ahead, I’d encourage you to pause for a moment to reflect, and connect with your intention. And what you want that intention for – not “why” you want something, the reasons, explanations, stories and excuses, but specifically what you think it will give you.

And if you can focus on what you really want, you just might get it…

A few NLP techniques that are relevant here include: Grinder’s Outcome-Intention-Consequences, n-Step Reframe, Well-Formed Outcomes, Core Transformations, SCORE/ Emergent Discovery, Timelines, Outcome Accelerator Pattern…

It got me thinking about how often we find ways to justify our beliefs and validate our doubts. Even when all evidence is against us!

Holding onto beliefs despite contrary evidence can be useful. Believing that you can succeed in the face of setbacks is the basis of resilience.

But there are sometimes that it can get in the way. Such as when the woman above believing that she had failed, despite her father’s encouragement and assurances of support! One of the easiest tools that you can use to give yourself more choice about how you feel about the past is the NLP technique called Reimprinting.

While seeming as complicated as it was powerful initially, you can learn to use it quickly.

Bruce Willis demonstrates the pattern in movie, The Kid, reliving a painful memory from his childhood. Initially he changed his responses to the events themselves. But when that didn’t work, he transformed his thinking by giving himself a gift of wisdom, understanding, and ultimately forgiveness. And that gift changed his life from that day forward.

We might not be able to change the past, but we can change the way that we feel about it. And we can certainly change the way that the past affects us today.

Note: Reimprinting can also refer to Change Personal History and Timeline Therapy-based techniques – different trainers can give the same techniques different labels or different techniques the same labels though the basis of the techniques is much the same in my experience.

Goals are powerful and useful. They can help move us forward and create a whole new world. Yet they only give us fulfillment to the extent that they are congruent and aligned with our highest intentions.

One study mentioned by Pink explored college graduates. Some set out into the real world in the pursuit of extrinsic rewards – to become wealthy or famous. Others wanted more intrinsic rewards – to improve their lives and to grow.

Two years later, some of those who wanted to be rich and famous had succeeded. Yet they only enjoyed the same level of satisfaction, self-esteem and positive emotions that they had while at university, while suffering from more anxiety and depression. Those who succeed in their quest to improve their lives and to grow not only enjoyed even higher satisfaction and subjective well-being, but lower levels of anxiety and depression.

Connecting with purpose is a powerful thing. One quick yet powerful way to explore our sense of purpose and connect with intrinsic motivation is the Outcome, Intention, Consequences process.

But haven’t you noticed that some people can pick up amazing details that other people miss?

In a very early NLP training John Grinder referred to an exercise to help enhance your abilities in this domain leverages the Cocktail Party Effect. Here is a quick description of some steps:

1. Find yourself at a cocktail party, cafe, restaurant, on the subway or even alone in nature.
2. Deliberately direct your attention to aspects of the sensory experience. Notice what happens when you attend to a conversation at the adjoining table. Or the next table over. Notice what happens when you focus right in front of you, then shift that focus to something that is happening across the room, then broaden your focus so you can notice an increasingly large panorama of the scene.
3. Once you can notice the limits of your deliberate attention, start to stretch yourself. While carrying on a conversation with one person, match or mirror the body language of another person – or match some of the body language of one person, and some of the body language of another person. For instance, you might adopt the rhythm of the person in front of you, fold your legs like the person to your right and play with the napkin like the person to your left. Then take on the gross posture of someone else across the room. All while maintaining the conversation.

NLP has powerful skills, though it’s important to do the practice. Just learning the theory is great fun though if you don’t do the practice enough to habituate the skills (some call it getting it ‘in the muscle’), you risk being stuck having to think so hard about the technique that there’s no extra attentional capacity to allow for artistry.

1. Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well… The three things need not be earthshaking in importance… but they can be.
2. Next to each positive event, answer the question: “Why did this happen?”

Simple process. And you can try it out yourself pretty easily.

According to his research, you’ll be less depressed, happier and addicted to this exercise six months from now.

They’ve been working to bring this style of thinking into classrooms. I wonder how different my school would have been if my teachers had asked each morning, “Children, what went well last night?”

BTW I refer to this exercise as “What Went Well – and Why?” (WWW+W). While this exercise is a useful tool to direct attention towards “positive” events, I think that a valuable part of the exercise, that broadens and deepens the impact, is the process of asking ‘why’.

Please note that this is one of the only times that I will ask “why?” In fact, most of the time, we don’t want to know ‘why’ – we want to know ‘what for’. But that’s a topic for later!