The art of mentally ‘living’ your desired state — or, the state of positive confidence is in you, not outside.
Picture this. Why is it that you can speak quite easily, and freely, to some people, but not others? Answer: it’s all a question of your communication style, or a matter of knowing your approach, that is necessary to building your ‘connect’ for better and more effective exchange of ideas, or interaction.
One ideal concept for achieving such communication skills is Neuro-Linguistic Programming [NLP]. NLP is a systematically proven, alternative method of ‘ordering’ your thoughts, attitudes, feelings, behaviour and, most importantly, language. It is just as much as responding effectively to other people, as much as understanding and respecting their views, opinions, and needs. Its goal is focused — to giving individuals a multitude of choices in their range of responses.
NLP is based on a logical premise: that the unconscious mind is far more powerful than the conscious mind and that all of us already have, within us, the resources to achieving excellence.
The ‘neuro’ part of NLP refers to the concept that all behaviour results in sensory stimuli — sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and feeling. This explains why NLP provides us the facility to getting in touch with our senses, and be able to ‘read’ thought processes in others through eye movements, subtle changes in breathing and skin tone, besides preferred language choice. ‘Linguistic,’ of course, reflects how we all use language to formulate our thoughts — to communicate to others our opinions, ideas, emotions, and needs. ‘Programming’ explains how we organise our behaviour to produce results. It goes without saying that what you say, or do, influences the other person.
NLP involves the examination of the entire system of feedback and response — behavioural and biological — occurring in the interactions between a human being and other human beings and also the environment. Reason? All of us have internal ‘feelings’ and a sensory system responsible for processing a set of characteristics about our immediate environment. According to NLP, these characteristics are unique to every individual.
Though practice makes perfect, most of the techniques, used in NLP, may need professional coaching, or training. However, the fact remains that a few of them — and, the most important — could be mastered, subject to one’s own requirements, over a period of time. NLP practitioners contend that NLP behaviour is not just external, observable behaviour, like walking, but also activity in any sphere.
Example: you’ve just jumped out of the way of a speeding car, seconds before it might have mowed you down. In such an event, you’d probably experience the symptoms of mild clinical shock. When you recount the story later, similar symptoms may recur, because your mind ‘triggers off’ a physical reaction.
The fact is — the way you react to imagined, or remembered, events can be altered, from a negative to a positive experience, through NLP. This applies equally well to your workplace situation, where you think that one of the projects, you are presently working on, isn’t shaping the way you’d want it to, and you are quite nervous about it.
In order to come out of the ‘negative’ situation, which may largely exist in your mind, you would do well to dwell on all the things that did not work — in a plan earlier — and, allow the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy syndrome,’ as NLP practitioners put it — or, in simple terms, the negative images — to come into action.
Next, you should replace your apprehensions, with positive feelings, or patterns. Once you do this, the self-fulfilling prophecy will work for — instead of against — you. The outcome will be all the things you wanted them to be.
NLP is based on the fact that each one of us is unique, yet composed of similar physiological, biological, emotional, and spiritual, parts that are intrinsically linked. NLP captures the language aspect, style, usage of unspecified nouns, verbs, comparisons, or judgments, including generalisations, presuppositions, cause and effect, not to speak of the intuition to ‘reading’ a person — to the extent possible. The rest is up to you — of how well you cultivate your thought and thinking processes for better results.
Whatever the complexities of any technique, it is there in all of us. You’d only need to apply certain pointers, as cited earlier — to ‘anchor,’ or clasp, a positive feeling, such as confidence and self-confidence
How, you may well ask, again. Answer: by mentally ‘living’ your desired state, or, the state of positive self-belief, that you can do it well.
— First published in India First
