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.

This is an important and powerful experience, perhaps only matched by our Master Practitioner training. But what then?

Personally, I was immersed in the world of Anthony Robbins events and trainings. You might repeat your Practitioner or Master Practitioner training with the same trainer or different trainers to get a different perspective on things. You might also focus on applications of NLP – whether it be Robert Dilts’ session in Shenzhen on Sleight of Mouth in April, or Dr John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St Clair’s course on New Code NLP in Taipei in May. Or you might focus on reading, practising and enjoying living your life.

But what then?

For some of us, the next step is their NLP Trainers’ Training. For me, it was like doing my Black Belt grading – challenging, demanding, and exciting. There are many places that you can do your Trainers’ Training… but which one to choose?

One of those places has just released a short document outlining some things to consider, and one of the authors, Chris Collingwood, has just authorized me to share this with China NLP. It is quite objective, and whether you end up training with them in Sydney (as I did), or NLPU in Santa Cruz, or NLP Comprehensive in Colorado, or NLP Academy in Brighton (as I also did), or Richard Bandler in Florida, it could be worth having a look at. You can download it here.

Some suggest that subsequent generations will be led by those biased against students who might surpass them, and that the ‘next great leader’ will only arise when the talent of the leaders is so corrupted that they don’t even recognize superior talent. But let’s hope not.

Besides, I was curious as to what was so special about O’Sensei, rather than the excuses.

One of the observations made by this master was that at some point, O’Sensei had become “enlightened”. While somewhat cliched, it occurred to me that perhaps one difference was that whereas other Masters might gain access to a powerful state of being, O’Sensei lived there.

I noticed something similar while I was in Brighton last month. There were Trainers, Trainer Assistants, and Trainer Candidates who had access to NLP techniques, methods and strategies. But there were a precious few who lived NLP. Who didn’t “do” NLP sometimes and live ‘normally’ the rest of the time, but who just experienced NLP as they lived their life.

Perhaps this is similar to the “personal congruence” that John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St Clair so actively promote the New Code of NLP.

New Code NLP offers simplicity, understanding and powerfully elegant methods for creating excellence.

After founding NLP in the 1970s, Bandler and Grinder went their separate ways, offering different styles of NLP in their trainings.

Along the way, many people missed the point of NLP. They got lost in techniques and ‘magic phrases’ instead of continuing to explore the structure of magic. New Code NLP brings together the work of Dr John Grinder in directing NLP to where it belongs – the most powerful tool in the pursuit of excellence in the world today.

In two hours with Daniel Smith, you can learn some fun basics of New Code NLP, experience some “New Code Games” and the “New Code Change Format”.

Quick summary: In this session, we explored the Breath of Life, the Rhythm of Life and applied them to the New Code Change Format. We also spoke about the origins of NLP, and how New Code NLP focuses upon modelling, unconscious signals, state manipulations (rather than behavioural manipulations), using New Code Games and working content free.
Thanks for a wonderful night!

The same thing happens when we want him to open his mouth to eat – we open our mouth nice and wide, and he responds by opening his mouth. It’s like magic

A few weeks back, I taught my son to blow raspberries. It’s a simple thing – you just stick your tongue out and blow, but he’s really mastered it now. Though he hasn’t yet figured out that he shouldn’t do it when he’s feeding…

I’m in Hangzhou assisting with the New Code Coaching training led by Dr John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St Clair, and one of the topics that just came up was ‘mirror neurons’ (or ‘镜神经元’). According to wikipedia, a mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Mirror neurons offer the neurological basis for rapport and explain why we can connect with people by mirroring their body language, gestures, words and rhythm.

Another website describes them this way:

“Mirror neurons are active when the monkeys perform certain tasks, but they also fire when the monkeys watch someone else perform the same specific task. There is evidence that a similar observation/action matching system exists in humans. The mirror system is sometimes considered to represent a primitive version, or possibly a precursor in phylogeny, of a simulation heuristic that might underlie mindreading.”

If you’re interested in how to build stronger connections with the people around you, you might want to check out how our brains are wired to help us learn from other people, just by watching them.

Over the five days (14-18 May 2010), the students were sensational – full of energy, insight and a willingness to jump right into the experiences and adventures.

Here's a photo of the group on the last day. If you look carefully, you can see me there on the right of Carmen in about the middle of the second row...

Dr John Grinder and Dr Richard Bandler developed NLP together through the 1970s. They discovered (and created?) many fantastic skills and opportunities for change, learning and growth.

After Grinder and Bandler started working independently from each other, each explored the field further in their own way. Bandler created Design Human Engineering and more recently Neuro Hypnotic Repatterning. Grinder developed New Code NLP, first with Judith DeLozier in Turtles All the Way Down and more recently with Carmen Bostic St Clair in Whispering in the Wind.

New Code NLP brings together the latest developments from NLP co-creator, Dr John Grinder, and his partner, Carmen Bostic St Clair, and includes powerful yet easy-to-use processes for NLP change work and personal evolution. Even if you are familiar with “NLP” as a field, you will likely want to experience the latest and best through New Code NLP.

Inspiritive quote Grinder and Bostic (2000) to say that New Code is:

A description of NLP which uses a systemic approach to demonstrate and teach the patterns by providing a series of contexts in which they manifest spontaneously. In the New Code of NLP the unconscious of the client is explicitly assigned the responsibility for the selection of the critical elements-the desired state, the resource, or new behaviour. The unconscious is explicitly involved in all steps. There are precise constraints placed upon the selection of new behaviour, more specifically, the new behaviour must satisfy the original positive intention(s) of the behaviour to be changed. The manipulation occurs at the level of state and intention as opposed to that of behaviour.

You can read more about New Code NLP at Inspiritive and at ITANLP.

It was great to have Elsie and Marc able to attend the session with Dr John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St Clair a few weeks ago, and I’m hoping to post a review from them here shortly.

The training was focused on “New Code”. While there are many forms and styles of NLP training in the world, New Code is the one most closely associated with NLP Co-Founder Dr John Grinder. As highlighted by this article from Michael Carroll (from NLP Academy in the UK), New Code focused more on personal congruence and the connection with your unconscious mind, developing “high performance states” and “content free” work. You can also find more information on New Code with Chris and Jules Collingwood’s Inspiritive in Australia.

We had a session in China NLP in January focused on New Code, but after reading Michael’s article, I thought it was worth mentioning again!