Monday, December 03, 2007
The Inherent Excellence of Human Beings
My clients never cease to amaze me with their results.
It is a well known NLP philosophy that we believe people have all the resources they need to succeed, that our role as a practitioner is guiding them to re-discover these inherent resources. It is something I remind myself of before every session. Even so, some of the results people get still amaze me and it comes from their own tenacity and determination to change themselves for the better.
I have had two lovely examples of this recently. I have a client who has been coming in for coaching - to be a better person in the workplace and at home too. Mainly what we have been doing is developing tools and techniques to manage internal thoughts and internal communication to produce good feelings instead of unwanted feelings. We have used some very simple NLP techniques for this, one of which is anchoring - a very simple trigger and association response set up for experiencing good feelings at will. He came in last week and reported that this had worked really well for him being able to turn on motivation when he wanted it. He also had gone away and in between sessions taught himself to stop smoking as well!
How? Well, he used the principles of this anchoring technique and applied it to smoking too. So that every time he was tempted with a cigarette he set up an internal response which was "I choose life" which, when triggered, completely wiped out any previous craving for tabacco. I told him I was going to steal his new technique and teach it to others - which I will! Amazing.
The second example of my clients surprising me with their internal resources and determination to do what it takes was another male client of mine who has been coming in to develop strategies to deal with a recent diagnosis of M.S. He wanted to be dealing with it better and do the things which were good for him instead of the resistance that was there, stopping him from doing that. We have only had 3 sessions together over about 3 weeks and things have completely changed for him. He has taken the stuff we have done together in the session and applied it straight away and in ways which I didn't expect. He is now communicating honestly, doing the things he wants to be doing and describes the result as "changing my approach to living". I know what an amazing gift he has given himself by doing that. Once again, astounding strength and tenacity. It blows me away.
It is a well known NLP philosophy that we believe people have all the resources they need to succeed, that our role as a practitioner is guiding them to re-discover these inherent resources. It is something I remind myself of before every session. Even so, some of the results people get still amaze me and it comes from their own tenacity and determination to change themselves for the better.
I have had two lovely examples of this recently. I have a client who has been coming in for coaching - to be a better person in the workplace and at home too. Mainly what we have been doing is developing tools and techniques to manage internal thoughts and internal communication to produce good feelings instead of unwanted feelings. We have used some very simple NLP techniques for this, one of which is anchoring - a very simple trigger and association response set up for experiencing good feelings at will. He came in last week and reported that this had worked really well for him being able to turn on motivation when he wanted it. He also had gone away and in between sessions taught himself to stop smoking as well!
How? Well, he used the principles of this anchoring technique and applied it to smoking too. So that every time he was tempted with a cigarette he set up an internal response which was "I choose life" which, when triggered, completely wiped out any previous craving for tabacco. I told him I was going to steal his new technique and teach it to others - which I will! Amazing.
The second example of my clients surprising me with their internal resources and determination to do what it takes was another male client of mine who has been coming in to develop strategies to deal with a recent diagnosis of M.S. He wanted to be dealing with it better and do the things which were good for him instead of the resistance that was there, stopping him from doing that. We have only had 3 sessions together over about 3 weeks and things have completely changed for him. He has taken the stuff we have done together in the session and applied it straight away and in ways which I didn't expect. He is now communicating honestly, doing the things he wants to be doing and describes the result as "changing my approach to living". I know what an amazing gift he has given himself by doing that. Once again, astounding strength and tenacity. It blows me away.
