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?