NLP Resources Austin

Last time I told you about my friend Jim and how we helped him get back on track with his project and find the motivation to do what he needed to do.  You can read that article here if you missed it.

The "This & That" technique I used with him is a very cool linguistic pattern originally modeled by John McWhirter from the UK.  I learned it several years ago from Steve Andreas and it works like magic to help a person change from a negative state to a positive one strictly using conversation.

When I started this little piece with Jim, I recognized that he was very stuck.  When we feel intense negative emotions it is difficult to get ourselves unstuck.  This is because negative emotions cause cerebral cortex to focus narrowly only on those things that will help prepare us to fight or flee.  Our flexibility and creativity go out the window which handicaps our ability to think straight or solve problems.

Jim is a colleague and occasional coaching client.  He gave me permission to tell this story.

When I started the following piece with Jim, I realized that he was in a seriously stuck mental state.

Often times when people are feeling intense negative emotions we get stuck and find it hard to get ourselves out of them.  This is because when negative emotions come up, the cerebral cortex begins to shut down.  Most of the mental processing moves to older parts of the brain in preparation for the fight and flight response.  We literally loose access to much of our creative and problem solving abilities.

Jim was feeling depressed about how often his organization’s management above him has kept changing directions recently.  He sounded depressed on the phone so I invited him to go to lunch.

Jim was in this situation whenever he was at work, or even thought about work.  But he wasn’t in a place to quit, or slack off, or even look for another job.  He needed to get to a place where he could feel good enough again to at least take care of some immediate business.

On the way back to his office he confessed that he had a lot to do but was so overwhelmed with it all that he hadn’t really been able to get himself to do what he needed to do for the past few days.  He couldn’t take a vacation, but he also couldn’t keep sitting at work doing nothing.  Deadlines were creeping up on him quickly.  His project was seriously behind schedule.

“My head is pounding, I can’t hardly think straight it’s throbbing so bad.”  Glenn was trying to finish his day’s work but had been hurting since lunchtime.  He had already taken three aspirin to no avail.  Under pressure of the deadlines for his project, he had taken a short break for lunch, thinking that getting some food might make his headache go away.  No such luck.  Now it was 4:30 and it was hurting him more than ever. 

I asked him if he wanted it to go away?

– Joy changed her life with NLP.  Now she is changing the lives of her family, loved ones, and community.

When we first met Joy Zahlen, she was a successful businesswoman.  But her family life was a mess.  Her abusive husband was having an affair.  Her teenage kids were yelling all the time and being violent.  Joy was not living up to her name – she was anything but joyful. 

In fact she was confused and what NLPers call incongruent.  On the outside she was clearly trying to hold it together and present a professional image.  But the turmoil on the inside was leaking out in her behaviors and in the way she spoke. 

If I could give you a pill to make you healthy would you take it?  Sure you would, wouldn’t you? 

What if I told you it had no active ingredients and it was just a placebo?  Most people today probably wouldn’t take an inactive sugar pill.

But new research suggests that even when people know that they are taking a placebo they still get positive effects from it.  

I know that this sounds incredible, but NLP has recognized for about 25 years that there is a certain powerful effect that occurs when people set an intention and take responsibility for the results that they are producing.  Just doing something, almost anything different than what you have been doing is often enough to effect the

I wrote this article several years ago (1996) for Austin NLP, the Neuro-Linguistic social and learning club for Central Texas.  It is simple, but it is still a very useful NLP tool to learn.  So with the NLP Practitioner Course coming up, I wanted to share it with the new people who might be interested in learning NLP tools, techniques, and skills.  It works like a charm and people will think you are a wizard when you help them painlessly and fearlessly get rid of their hiccups. Enjoy!

~ Keith

Kelsey, a 19 year old, UT Student had been hiccupping all morning.  It was ruining her Saturday outing with her friends to Austin’s new Blanton Museum.  Not that the hiccups were so painful, they were relatively mild so she was putting up with them.  But they were beginning to be chronic and several hours of continuous convulsing was beginning to make her muscles ache. 

She had tried all the regular remedies, holding her breath, swallowing a glass of water with her head between her knees.  Her friends had tried to frighten her when she wasn’t expecting it.  She had even tried eating a spoon each of sugar and peanut butter, but nothing seemed to work.  She just kept hiccupping.  And it was getting rather annoying and she seemed to be out of options and resigned to live with it until it went away. 

I noticed her hiccuping plight.  As a stranger (there are few people stranger than an NLPer on a mission) … as a stranger, I would have to be quick with rapport and in defining her outcome.  I jokingly asked if she had been suffering long?  “Do you want them to go away?”