Two interesting things happened over the past week to remind me of the power and beauty of NLP. I was at the Telstra Women in Business Awards on Tuesday night and Layne Beachley was the keynote speaker. She was wonderful. Her message was about her journey from self sabotaging thought and doubt, to using the power of language, and visualisation, to focus on what she wanted and achieve it – achieving 7 world surfing titles!
The other wonderful experience I had was teaching a three day NLP for the Workplace program to the AFP. I was working with the police negotiators who are a very impressive and dedicated group of professionals commited to achieving the best possible outcomes they can, under some pretty extraordinary conditions, and make a difference. In all of my trainings and my work I use NLP in some form or another. What I really enjoyed about the 3 days was moving back to fundamentals and the “purist” NLP and working directly with that. NLP provides such an empowering set of skills to utilise that truly make a difference in how we do what we do and the outcomes we can achieve.
As I have written about before, NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is a way of thinking about how the world works. Neuro stands for the brain and nervous system, linguistics is the language we use to give meaning to what we experience through our senses, and programming looks at the consistent way we think or behave that produces a result.
It is the study of excellence and the practical strategies that can be learned to achieve it. NLP is derived from modelling people who have already achieved success in many different areas. The belief is that behind the achievement of outstanding results lies a method, process and structure.
If you want to change the results in your life you need to change the language you use.
The four rules for success are:
- Know what you want – begin with the end in mind and focus on what you want, not what you don’t want.
- Take action to get it – begin to take steps to achieve the desired outcome
- Be flexible – if you are not getting the results you want – do something different! (Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result!)
- Be aware – using data from your environment ask – is it working? Am I being effective? Is there something I need to change? This is also about reading other people moment to moment and being able to accurately determine how a situation is occurring from them.
Layne Beachley said “There are so many people put there who will tell you that you can’t. What you’ve got to do is turn around and say “Watch me.” To develop this wonderful belief and confidence in ourselves we sometimes need a bit of help and realignment – Layne and I have both found that NLP is one method that can provide these great results. Such a good reminder!
There are many great books and products that support the learning of NLP. It has been one of my more valuable learnings and I am truly grateful for having the knowledge and skills to utilise it in the work I do, and in my life. I would encourage anyone who is committed to excellence to be curious and begin to explore the world of NLP with all its possibilities!