A Useful Guide to Personal Development (PDF)

 A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 2 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 A Useful Guide to Personal Development Published by Pansophix Online 22 Torquay Road, Chelmsford, Essex, CM1 6NF, England Written by Stephanie Philp This edition published November 2011 (a) Copyright © Pansophix Ltd. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-906460-95-2  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 3 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 Copyright © 2011 Stephanie Philp and Pansophix Notice of Rights: All rights reserved. No part of this Useful Guide may be reproduced in any form, by photocopy, microfilm, xerography, or any other means, or incorporated into any information retrieval system, either electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the copyright owner. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact Pansophix at [email protected]. Notice of Liability: The information contained in this Useful Guide and on the Pansophix website is distributed on an “as is” basis, without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this Useful Guide, neither the author nor Pansophix shall have any liability to any person or entity regarding any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this Useful Guide.  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 4 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 Contents Contents Contents ................................................................................................ 4 Foreword ............................................................................................... 6 Get the most from this Useful Guide ........................................................... 7 Background and Introduction to Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) .............. 8 How Thinking Works .............................................................................. 15 The NLP Communication Model ................................................................ 17 Mental Maps ......................................................................................... 18 The Submodalities ................................................................................. 20 Let’s get some practice .......................................................................... 24 Taking Control ...................................................................................... 27 Your Mind and Body Connection ............................................................... 29 Silencing the Internal Terrorist ................................................................ 33 What’s meant by Positive Thinking? .......................................................... 35 The Eyes Have it ................................................................................... 38 Get in a Great State............................................................................... 43 Setting an Anchor for a Desired State ....................................................... 49 When Tempers Flare… (Say Goodbye to Anger) .......................................... 53 Summary ... ......................................................................................... 64 How to Set Compelling Goals .................................................................. 65 The 9 Traps .......................................................................................... 67 Afterword ............................................................................................. 81 Resources Section ................................................................................. 82 The Map is not the Territory* .................................................................. 83 Anger and Anchoring - 3 Ways to Stop People Pulling Your Strings ................ 86 “I understand what I think you said!” ....................................................... 88 Why English is Difficult to Learn ............................................................... 90  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 5 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 How Mind Reading Damages Your Personal Relationship .............................. 91 How to change that Negative Self Talk ...................................................... 94 Mood Management ................................................................................ 97 How Expectations Create Your Life Experiences .........................................100 How to Sabotage the Night Terrorist ........................................................102 Further Reading ...................................................................................104 About the Author ..................................................................................107  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 6 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 Foreword I have written ‘A Useful Guide to Personal Development’ for a variety of reasons ... I love using NLP in my own daily life and I saw an opportunity to create a multi- media interactive Useful Guide that would allow you to get direct experience of what you read through a series of audio links, stories, pictures and examples. A huge amount of extra value is created by the links to the other media on the Pansophix website that bring to life the text in the Useful Guide by providing real life examples that give firsthand experience. Because of this, A Useful Guide to Personal Development has advantages over a paper book. Some thoughts ... • I’ve seen the amazing transformations others have made by learning how their mind works. Once they feel in control of their mind and thus their behaviour they can easily make changes which lead to a happier life and greater success. • I believe understanding how your mind works and how to take control of it instead of letting it control you is a fundamental human right and essential to personal happiness and fulfilment. • This Useful Guide will give you a taste of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and some insights in to how it might be useful for you in your daily life. • There are so many books available on the subject of NLP that many people have told me they became confused because they didn’t know where to start. • I’ve got a vast practical experience in using NLP in business, coaching, training and therapy and I love writing and sharing what I know. Writing this Useful Guide is an opportunity to use this knowledge to provide you with some practical skills that you’ll easily relate to and that you can use immediately.  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 7 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 Get the most from this Useful Guide As you read through the material, you’ll notice hyperlinks (words underlined that link to resources on the Pansophix website) at various points in the text. When you click on these they will take you to links where you can explore examples relevant to the topic. Some links will take you to audio clips, others will take you to articles that contain audio clips. I recommend you click on them at the point you see them. Sometimes I’ll refer you to articles in the Resources Section at the back of the Useful Guide that illustrate the concepts being discussed. I’ll be taking you on an exploration of some aspects of your thinking processes that you’ve possibly not thought about consciously before. Then I’ll tell you how to harness these processes to really ignite your success. Where there’s a suggestion or exercise - please do it! There’s nothing like direct experience to enhance your learning. One of the best ways to learn something is to have a core question at the back of your mind. Questions enable you to link the information you’re learning to what you already know. This linking facilitates the growth of new neural pathways. You might ask yourself questions such as ... • Where can I use this? • Where else? • How does this information connect with what I already know? • How does this apply in my life? • Where does this apply in my life? • What’s an example of this?  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 8 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 Background and Introduction to Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) Early studies In the mid 1970s there were many different therapies being developed and academics keenly studied how the mind worked. Many were focused on how people became mentally or emotionally unstable. A different focus Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the initial developers of NLP, were more interested in how people achieved success. They were driven to find out what was different about someone who was successful, compared to someone else who might have the same qualifications, background and experience and yet was not achieving the same success. They were initially led to study excellent communicators. People such as Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls. Virginia Satir was a highly skilled family therapist. Milton Erickson was a medical doctor who used his own form of hypnosis to help people make changes. Fritz Perls was a Gestalt therapist. Although using different modalities or methods, they were each enabling rapid and permanent change with their patients and clients. Bandler and Grinder didn’t just study what these brilliant therapists did, they also wanted to understand the values, beliefs and thought processes that underscored their success. The modelling of excellence Bandler’s and Grinder’s studies of these people paved the way for some remarkable discoveries in the field of communication and therapy. Not only therapy However, there was never any intention that NLP should remain solely in the therapeutic domain just because that was where it began. Bandler and Grinder continued to discover how excellence is achieved in many fields through the process of discovering and then modelling excellence. The Structure of Thinking They found that ‘thinking’ has a structure and as such it can be copied and used by others. It follows, then, that adopting the thinking styles used by successful people could enable others to have better, fuller and richer lives.  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 9 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 Some Definitions of NLP • The study of human excellence • The science of programming your own brain • The study of subjective experience – how people know what they know and do what they do. The question The question the developers asked themselves, to discover the structure of a person’s success was, “How is this possible?” They believed that if something was possible for one person then it was possible for others too. They wanted to discover how someone did something so they could use the skills themselves and/or teach the skills to others. They used the term "Neuro Linguistic Programming" to emphasise the connection between the neurological processes ("neuro"), language ("linguistic") and behavioural patterns that have been learned through experience ("programming") and can be organised to achieve specific goals in life. Some Applications of NLP • Learn to manage your emotional state so you can be your best more often. • Use the phobia/trauma cure to help someone who has been traumatised by a past event or who has a consistent and debilitating phobic response. • Help someone replicate excellent performance in other areas of their life. • Facilitate learning the spelling strategy or employ proven memory techniques for yourself. • Experience a more optimistic life by discovering and changing destructive beliefs. • Gain and maintain rapport with anyone. Rapport has been proven to be fundamental to your ability to influence and persuade others - yet it’s often overlooked. • Master the structure of thought and take control of your own life. • Learn and use processes used by healthy people or those who have recovered from major illness. • Adopt the thinking processes and tactics used by the world’s top athletes. • Set goals with a 98% chance of success. • Use a reframing technique to change someone’s point of view about a product or service.  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 10 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 • Enhance relationships by finding common values as a basis for co- operation. • Etc. Unlimited uses As increasingly more people become trained in NLP they develop new models that have even wider application. The uses of NLP are limited only by your own imagination and creativity - and even imagination and creativity can be expanded using NLP! Used in all fields People around the world recognise the ways in which NLP can assist them to achieve consistently successful outcomes in their lives, whether that be in business, management, education and training, health care, sport or their own personal development. In this Useful Guide you will learn processes, techniques and ways of thinking that will aid your own personal development and allow you to have more control over what you do. Read Neuro Linguistic Programming - Frequently Asked Questions (and the answers!)  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 11 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 How NLP Applies to You We’ve all been ‘programmed’ throughout our lives; by parents, teachers, the media and, of course, by ourselves. There’s nothing sinister about this, it’s just the way life is. Most of your programmes are extremely useful. Let’s face it if you didn’t have a programme for cleaning your teeth you would have to relearn the ‘cleaning your teeth’ programme every day. You wouldn’t have time to learn anything new because you’d be relearning everything from the day before! A ‘programme’ is simply a series of steps that leads to an outcome. Let’s use the analogy of a computer to illustrate this. If your goal is to create and save a document, there are some steps you would take to make this happen. The steps would be ... 1. Turn on the computer 2. Find the word processing application you want and open it 3. Select ‘new document’ 4. Key in information 5. Save it with a logical title 6. Save it somewhere so you can find it again. You have to follow the steps Creating a document in this way sounds really simple - and it is once you know how to do it. Yet, if you change the order of those steps - let’s say you did step 4 before step 3 - you wouldn’t achieve the goal. If you don’t do step 5 and save it with a logical title, you might never find it again and it you don’t do step 6 and save it where you can find it all your time will have been wasted - or you’ll waste time in future trying to find it again. A recipe example A programme is also like a recipe; if you follow the process exactly as the recipe says you’ll end up with something that looks like the picture in the recipe book. If you don’t - you’ll get something different. You might improve on the recipe by adding in your own variations or you might mess it up completely! Our automatic programmes In a similar way you have many recipes or programmes that you run automatically in your head. As I mentioned earlier, the programmes are mostly useful and get you the outcome you want. For example you probably have a, ‘tying your shoelaces’ programme, a ‘having a shower’ programme and a ‘locking the door’ programme. You’ve been running these for years and are  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 12 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 particularly skilled in performing these activities. So by now the chances are they’re unconscious. They are also useful. The teeth cleaning, shoelace tying and locking the door programmes are useful and no longer require conscious thought. Sometimes they are so unconscious you might wonder whether you’ve actually done them at all. If you have you ever gone back to check that you locked the door because you didn’t remember doing it, you’ll understand what I mean! Some programmes are not so useful You might have other unconscious programmes running that are not very useful at all. Sometimes, you might have a programme running that results in you feeling anxious, nervous or unhappy. Let’s face it, you wouldn’t deliberately set out to make yourself anxious! Most of the time you’re not even aware that you’re in the middle of one of these programmes because you’ve run it so often. You’re only aware that you don’t feel good. So how do you change something that’s unconscious? That’s a very good question! The first thing you need to know is that it is possible to get control of an automatic programme and then change it. Here are a couple of examples. Example One: Driving a vehicle Let’s say you drive a manual car. When you were learning to drive a car you may have thought it was going to be difficult. You might have wondered how people could drive and listen to the radio at the same time. Let’s face it, driving a vehicle is a complex task; you have to use your eyes, your ears, both hands, both feet and of course, your brain. You need to use mirrors inside and outside the vehicle and you need a good awareness of what other drivers are doing. The individual processes involved in driving a car have to be undertaken in order; putting the car in gear before putting your foot down on the clutch won’t do you or the car much good. And pulling out into traffic before you’ve checked your mirrors and indicated could well cause an accident. So your whole mind and body needs to be co-ordinated and the processes done in the right order for the car to move safely and smoothly. Once you’ve passed your driving test you might start to feel more comfortable. Some of the individual techniques, such as changing gear, become automatic. With more experience you can drive, listen to the radio and eat your lunch - all at the same time! (Not that we recommend this!!)  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 13 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 You’ve become unconsciously skilled at driving a vehicle. In other words you’re driving on auto-pilot. All you have to do is focus on where you’re heading. Now, imagine someone comes along and says, “Will you teach me how to drive?” How easy do you think it would be? Your, ‘driving a vehicle programme’ is no longer under your conscious control. You would really have to think about it before you could competently teach someone else to drive. This would involve consciously assessing every step in the driving process and breaking it down into manageable chunks that could then be taught to someone else. It is possible to do this and it will require conscious thought to ensure what you teach is accurate and follows a logical sequence. Example two: Making Lasagne. Let’s say you’ve been making lasagne for years. Everyone loves your lasagne. You’ve made it so many times you could do it with your eyes shut. You don’t have a recipe written down, it’s all ‘in your head.’ Someone asks you to show them how you make it. So you start … “Well, first you need minced beef.” “How much?” asks your student chef “Erm, I’m not quite sure - maybe a pound or half a kilo?” “Then you need to chop some onions.” “How many onions?” “Err, maybe a couple.” “Big ones or small ones?” By now you might be starting to get annoyed and your student is frustrated. You’re not trying to be difficult, it’s just that you can no longer say how much of each ingredient is needed, you just ‘know’. And this isn’t easy to explain. Your lasagne making ‘programme’ is now so refined you don’t weigh ingredients. It doesn’t matter how much beef you’ve got you just ‘know’ how much onion, garlic etc. is needed to make it perfect. “It’s Just Natural.” Have you ever asked someone how they do something you are unable to do? Often they might answer by saying something like, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just natural.” The problem is, if they believe, “it’s just natural” what do you think the chances are that they will be able to teach you? The answer is, none. If what they’re doing is ‘just natural’ how on earth can they teach you? What they will  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 14 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 do is teach you what they THINK they do. They will be perplexed when you’re unable to perform the skill that they now do ‘naturally’. See the Driving and Lasagne Making examples above. Success can come in various forms While you may think of success as the achieving of a desired outcome, this is not always the case. People have a unique ability to be successful at all manner of negative outcomes; continuing to smoke or drink when they don’t really don’t want to, getting depressed when all they want is to be happy, repeating unwanted behaviours that they’ve tried to stop or getting anxious without knowing why. The problem The reason people can’t change these negative strategies and behaviours is because they are now automatic. They no longer know, consciously how they do them. NLP will give you the tools to change and could well be the way forward, giving you back the conscious control you need to change any negative programming so you feel better and achieve your goals. And that’s exactly where we’re heading. Summary • We all run automatic programmes for the activities we do every day. • Mostly these programmes are useful and save us time and energy. • Sometimes our automatic programmes prevent us being happy or reaching our goals.  A Useful Guide to Personal Development Page 15 Confidence through Development www.pansophix.com T: 0845 260 2820 How Thinking Works You Think Using Your Senses (Modalities) Let’s start with the basics. You’re thinking almost constantly. Yet you may never have really thought about the thinking process itself. Thinking often involves all your senses - or modalities. However, you often don’t differentiate what type of thinking you’re engaged in - all the senses get put together and referred to as ‘thinking’. Visual: Remembering visually (in pictures) things you’ve seen before, as you saw them. Imagining things you haven’t yet seen. Auditory: Recalling sounds and conversations you’ve had and calling up sounds and conversations you haven’t yet had. Kinaesthetic: Feeling emotions and/or tactile sensations you’ve experienced before and getting a grasp of what certain things might feel like in the future. Olfactory: Recalling or imagining smells. Gustatory: Remembering or imagining tastes. Self Talk: Talking to oneself (Also called Auditory Digital. Although this isn’t really a sense, it is a modality or means of expression.)