Practical EQ

The Flip: how to start turning your life around right now

You will have seen this picture before. If you look at it one way it's a caricatured old lady - look, there's her chin at the bottom centre of the picture. If you look at it another way, it's a 1/4 profile of a young girl - the tip of the old lady's nose becomes the tip of her chin, and so on.

What's this got to do with turning your life around? Notice how you see one picture or the other, depending on where you put your attention. Focusing on certain features will trigger your brain's pattern-match for an old lady facing left, focusing on others triggers the pattern-match for a young girl looking away. Shift your focus and the picture flips from one image to the other, literally in the blink of an eye.

Notice how you can't see both at the same time. With a bit of practice you can defocus your eyes and just see a pattern of lines on the page, but that's about as close as we can get.

Similarly, we see patterns in our lives. Our brains try to form coherent narratives that make sense of our actions and the things that happen to us. We like to have a consistent sense of ourselves, otherwise things will seem incoherent and confusing.

These stories are self-fulfilling prophesies. If your 'story' as you see it is that of an unlucky person, who everything goes wrong for, every setback will reinforce the overall narrative. If, on the other hand, you see yourself as someone with goals, who has overcome many challenges, you would view the exact same event to deal with, and even something that makes you stronger. You will focus on different things and see your life (including what you expect to happen in the future, which influences the choices you make and the actions you take) as a completely different picture.

So how can you use these principles of pattern recognition and the desire for a consistent sense of self to start making your life better? It's easy.

Do something which is consistent with how you want to see yourself. If you want to become more of a caring person, do something which makes a difference to someone else. If you want to get fitter or healthier, do just a little bit of exercise or eat an apple instead of a chocolate bar.

The key is to start small. If the action is something you want to put off, it's too big. Make the action small enough that it's a no-brainer to do it now. It's not about how big the action is, it's about the kind of action and the narrative of yourself that it's consistent with.

Each thing you do that contributes to your story of who you want to be makes it more likely that you will take more positive actions in the future, because of the consistency principle. Yes, at first you may still be doing ten things from your old ways to each 'desired life' action - but if you focus on the positive actions, you will start doing more and more of them.

For all I know this method has already been given a name by someone else, but I think of it as 'The Flip'.

Start small - and keep going.

(Optical illusion from Wolfram Mathworld)

This Column Can Change Your Life

Oliver Burkeman's 'This Column Can Change Your Life' in Saturday's Guardian is an interesting and often witty dip into personal development books and workshops. I've found a few useful books through it.

Identifying and clearing limiting beliefs

My all time favourite method for clearing limiting beliefs is Time Line Therapy, or one of the now numerous descendants and variants of it (like the one we teach on our NLP Practitioner training). However, before a limiting belief can be cleared, the client has to recognise it as a limiting belief (unless it clears as a side effect of an intervention aimed at something else, which can happen).

Which opens the question of how do we identify limiting beliefs, and also how we define them.

For me a limiting belief is one that the client recognises as limiting - the client, rather than the coach, decides what's limiting. The issue is of course complicated because it may be that the client is not initially aware that some of their beliefs are holding them back - it's part of the coach's role to help them realise that.

How do we assist the client in identifying them? After all, if the client was aware of their limiting beliefs to start with, they probably wouldn't believe them any more.

One way can be the NLP 'meta model' (which has some overlap with CBT/REBT questions around how rational beliefs are). The meta model identifies generalisations, 'shoulds/musts' and so on and provides questions to help the client reconnect their belief system to their sensory experience (or 'reality' as most people would think of it).

Another very powerful method is the Option Process or Option Method, as outlined in Barry Neil Kaufman's book 'To Love Is To Be Happy With' (which Michael Neill recommended to me ages ago and I highly recommend) but also described out there on the web. This uses some simple questions to help uncover beliefs which the client may not be conscious of (probably formed ages ago and not thought about for years) which often don't survive the light of attention.

Limiting beliefs can also be overcome by having enough experiences which contradict them - as when someone becomes more confident by taking up martial arts, or just by spending time in the company of people with a more empowering belief system. I highly recommend Steve Andreas' book 'Transform Your Self: Becoming Who You Want To Be' as a guide to how people form their concept of themselves and how to change it.

Making better decisions with NLP (8) - Notice how you make decisions

Compare your ‘strategies’ for reaching a good decision with how you arrived at a bad one. There will probably be significant differences. Much of your processing may be unconscious so you will get better results working with a skilled NLP practitioner.

Check what kind of mental images you are using in your decision-making process. NLP therapist Andrew T Austin suggests (in this video, about 10 minutes in) still pictures lead to bad decisions, moving pictures to better ones (because it’s easier to see the consequences of the decision).

Remedy: If your mental pictures are largely still, try making them into movies.

Making better decisions with NLP (7) - Turn off mental chatter

Meditate or use peripheral vision to still your mind before making important decisions. When you clear some space, what is really important to you has a chance to emerge. For guidance on how to use peripheral vision, visit www.practicaleq.com/peripheral.html.

Making better decisions with NLP (6) - Learn from mistakes

If one of your decisions turns out bad, review how you went through deciding. Notice any obvious flaws. If things don’t turn out the way you want, ask yourself “What do I need to learn from this?”

Making better decisions with NLP (5) - ‘Reality Tunnels’ and Groupthink

We filter incoming sensory information in line with our beliefs – evidence that supports an existing belief will be amplified, while information that contradicts it will be downplayed or ignored – leaving us in our own ‘reality tunnel’ which may be quite different to someone else’s. Consequently we may miss useful information if it doesn’t support our belief system.

This tendency gets worse with ‘groupthink’. We are influenced by other people, and if we only have contact with people who believe the same as us, our filters get even stronger (‘social proof’ in Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion).

Remedies: talk to people with different beliefs. Read a newspaper with a differing political point of view to your own occasionally. Actively look for evidence which counters your own beliefs. Ask yourself, “How would I know if this wasn’t true?”

Making better decisions with NLP (4) - Check your feelings

All decisions are ultimately emotional (see Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman and Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio). Your unconscious mind, which notices more than you are consciously aware of, communicates with you via feelings (see The Gift Of Fear by Gavin de Becker).  If you don’t feel 100% positive about an important decision, this may be a sign that you have missed something important.

As well as checking your feelings, keep your feelings in check! If you are in the grip of a really strong emotion (positive or negative) it pretty much shuts down the thinking part of your brain. “Strong emotions make us stupid” – neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux in The Emotional Brain. To detach (or ‘dissociate’ in the NLP jargon) from the emotion, imagine floating up above it.

Making better decisions with NLP (3) - Values: what’s important to you

Values are the abstract concepts which motivate us, and are also the criteria for deciding if our actions are right or wrong. Focusing on your values around a decision before you take it will help you to focus more on consequences, and give you the persistence to persevere if things get tough.

The following exercise will work better if you get someone else to ask you the questions - that way you can give your full attention to your answers.

Relevant questions: What’s important to you about <decision>?
What else is important to you about <decision>?

Keep asking until you run out of answers - then ask "What else is important to you about <decision>?" again, as this may unearth some more values that you weren't consciously aware of.

If any of the answers are in the form of things or activities, rather than abstract concepts, ask "What's important about <answer>?" until you get to an abstract value.

Also check for values clashes, which can lead to dilemmas, being ‘stuck’, or inconsistent actions. In extreme cases, a  ‘parts integration’ session with a good NLP practitioner may be helpful to resolve the clash.

Making better decisions with NLP (2) - Ecology – checking for knock-on effects

Focusing on the consequences and broadening the scope of your attention in space (how will this decision affect other people and the wider systems of which I am a part?) and time (what may be the longer-term consequences?) helps to minimise unintended consequences.

NB "ecology" as used in NLP refers to looking at the relationship between you (and by extension what you do, the decisions you make and the goals you set) and the wider systems of which you are a part. These would include other areas of your life, your health, your family, people you care about, your job or business, community, and the environment as a whole.

So someone might decide to really focus on making their business a success. A year later, the business is a success but their health is wrecked from all the late nights they've pulled, their marriage is in a mess, they have no friends left from trying to sell them stuff they don't want, and their weight has ballooned from no exercise and living on junk food.

If that person had taken into account the knock-on effects of spending so much time on the business to the detriment of everything else, they could probably have found ways of having the business success that didn't damage every other part of their life.