Another really interesting course at the weekend: Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) for Hypnotherapists. A full day of learning a new approach and set of techniques to help me in supporting my clients.
Although it comes with a fancy title, the key take away from the training was the concept that how you think about something hugely influences how you experience it.
Broken down into its parts:
- The term Neuro relates to our thinking process and how we use the information that we receive from our five senses to understand the world around us.
- The term Linguistic relates to our use of words and body language in coding, organising and giving meaning to the information that we learn about our world
- Finally, the term Programming refers to how all this information is processed and consequently how this then dictates our behaviour.
Making changes to the programming part enables us to make positive changes to the way we think and behave.
As humans we are continuously receiving information about our world through our senses. This information is then filtered both consciously and subconsciously with bits of information being deleted, distorted, altered, generalised, and pitched against our past experiences, beliefs and values. We then create an internal map of the information that’s left, and this becomes a representation of our experiences. The map can be affected by how we are feeling both emotionally and physically, but in turn the map can also affect how we think and feel.
The whole process of filtering, the production of our internal map, and our emotional and physical states then become our behaviours.
So what happens when a person wants to make a change? To behave differently? To feel differently?
Making changes can involve working on each of these elements – challenging unhelpful thoughts, challenging unhelpful feelings, challenging unhelpful patterns of behaviour, before moving towards new patterns of thinking, more positive feelings and behaviours that align with the desired goal or changes.
As a Hypnotherapist, clients have the added benefit that I am able to utilise the new NLP techniques whilst they are in hypnosis, so that the work being done is at a deeper, longer lasting, subconscious level, making it even more effective and natural.
In the words of Henry Ford:
‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got!’
Repeating old habits will bring no new results, and so if you are wanting to make a change, or have a desire to experience life differently get in touch.