Click here to download pdf: NLP Podcast 32

Female: Welcome to the NLPcourses.com show where we push past the height and pull back the velvet curtains of creating a successful life with NLP. Dive in into physiology, neuroscience and linguistics so that NLP becomes a practical tool at home and in your career moving beyond the techniques that you can make a name, make money and make a difference. Tune in weekly if you care more than others think twice as we set out on our quest to uncover the secrets of successful people from all walks of life. Make sure you head over to NLPcourses.com to subscribe to receive our newsletter and receive free transcripts of each show. Here’s your host NLP Master Trainer John Cassidy-Rice.

John: Hello. Welcome to this week’s NLP podcast. My name is John Cassidy-Rice and I have the pleasure to be your host for this session. One of the things I often talk about is if you take control of one area of your life, you’ll feel more confident in that area of your life. And if you feel more confident in that area of your life, you come across as being more confident to other people. And when you come across as being more confident to other people, opportunities seem to open up for you. So what are some of the things that we can do? Let’s say our life is a complete mess, everything we hold be going wrong and when that happens is it’s strange how little energy you have and how difficult it can be to achieve our goals.

All right then. I guess if you listen to this, your life probably is not completely out of control. Maybe just a little out of control. What’s some simple things could we do to really make a difference? Well, one of the things I would suggest, start small. Now, if you find your whole life is a mess, we said it’s probably not, but let’s say it’s probably a whole mess, what simple thing could you do to start to take control of your life and feel like things are starting to be tidied?

Well, tidy it up might be a good thing to do. And if you have a quick look on Amazon there’s a whole range of books that tell you about tidying up your life and sorting your life out at the same time. Well, we probably don’t need to buy a book to tell us to tidy up but it is a good thing to do for many reasons. Even if you decide the only thing you’re going to keep tidy is your bed.

You’re going to make your bed every single day. In doing that, you have taken control of an area of your life. And because you’re keeping it clean and well-made, we as human beings are meaning making creatures and we process information often in story-form and if you want a longer explanation of how we process in story-form, go back to the first three or four podcast which is all about storytelling and how it affects our neurology.

Now, consider the metaphor that if you really take control of just one area, that making your bed and it’s nice, clean and tidy, and you do that consistently then what starts to happen is that little story, that seed of an idea starts to grow and not overnight but over a period of time it will start to sharpen other areas that you like and you will start to feel more in control. It might start with this.,Aa you’re making your bed, you feel like, wow, I’d like to keep my bedside a little bit more tidy, so you tidy up that, and then the floor starts to bug you so you start tidying up the floor and keeping that clean and tidy and lo and behold you might even start hovering.

And then you start cleaning other places that you like and they just start to clear out that clutter. You’re starting to feel better about yourself and it turns to your health and you want to start to look after yourself and instead of having a huge pizza every night maybe you’ll have a side salad as well and maybe you have that one piece of fruit and you start to drink less alcohol, let’s say, and you start to drink water and you’re feeling healthy, you go for a running. Wow, all that has come from just making the bed.

Could it possibly? Well, for some people, yes. This idea for me started when I was reading a book called “Steps to Ecology of Mind” section six and, by Gregory Bateson and that section six was, until I thought, ecology and inflexibility in open civilization. And one of the things he talked about ther,e if you always do the same things, you will always get the same results. And we hear that quite from I think it’s Albert Einstein, you can correct me if you like. Where he said the definition of insanity was doing the same things but expecting different results.

And that’s not a new idea by any means. So, basing quotes of Japanese Master when he says “To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing.” So if we started to change little things about our lives, would our lives indeed start to change? And Gregory Bateson offices a whole range of tools and ideas to make little changes so that we get different thoughts, different behaviors and different ideas. So let’s explore some of those.

Okay, so what about sleep? What can we do differently when we’re sleeping? We can sleep on the other side of the bed. You could turn your alarm clock off and trust yourself that you’ll wake up on time. You can make changes in your eating and drinking. So eat more slowly, really savor every mouthful, maybe chew every mouthful for at least 20 times. I remember someone saying that is a good thing to do. Eat something different for breakfast every morning. Instead of having a main meal, have salad. Eat only when you’re hungry. How outrageous an idea is that? Rather than eating by the clock, eat only when you’re hungry. Have a different drink every day, a different flavor.

Okay, so what about body skills? So what do you do? So cross your arms the other way. Give it a go now and notice how strange that feels. Take phone calls from your other ear. Does it affect the way that you process? If you wear a watch, one of the smart watches, wear it on the other wrist. Breathe more deeply, sigh and smile. Breathe very differently, what happens? And the next time you go to a hotel, maybe actually use the gym. What else does Gregory recommend that we can do? In fact, I’ve got a hold of this list. So let me go through the list just to give you some ideas of the different things we can do and I would love to hear your feedback of how it just changes your day in a little way. Because like I said I think by changing little bits of our lives, we have different thoughts and if you have different thoughts you’re going to get different results in your life. Just like when you take control of an area of your life, you start to feel more in control in all areas of your life.

Okay, so personal appearance and hygiene. Clean your teeth with your other hand. Use a different brand of toothpaste. Cover up all the mirrors in your house and don’t look at yourself for a moment.

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John: [background music] different styles and colors in the clothes that you normally wear. We could even take this idea to special occasions. So sit in a different chair at meal times when you’re watching TV. Change the route you take to work on a regular basis. Drive in the slow lane at the motorway more often. Okay. I think I might have gone a bit further but you get the idea. Shop in different shops. Go somewhere else. What about communication? Could you remain completely silent for one day? Wow. A quick detour. Many years ago somebody said to me, “Oh, do you want to go and do this course?” And I said, yeah, okay then. I didn’t really know what it was. It was a meditation course, vipassana, and it was on the outskirts of Bath so you turn up to this event and what it was, you agreed to stay on site for 10 days and the first three days, sorry, the point of the story is this, that for 10 days you’re completely silent. There’s no communication and that means nodding, that means a wink, waving

 

. I mean no communication, not just verbal communication. In the first three days, we spent just being aware of the breath coming into our nostrils. For me, I’m sure for everybody else it was a breeze, but for me that was a long three days. And then they gave us something else to do and what they gave us to do is to scan our body starting from the top of our heads and scan all the way down so you become aware of your forehead, your eyes, your nose, your ears, your jaw, your lips, your teeth, your neck, your shoulders, you get the idea, all the way down your body. And we spent seven days doing that.

And something happened for me that was quite magical. I felt very lucid and rather than feeling stiff while we were sitting down all day, suddenly all my body went loose and felt fluid and I was having this kind of a wonderful time and yeah, one of the people in the place where we’re sleeping, he stopped attending the meditation meetings. He stayed on the side and on the 10th day we start to kind of communicate again just very slowly and I did say to him, where did you disappear from? What happened? And he said, every time he close his eyes, he felt like hands are grabbing him and pulling him down into the depths of the earth so he could not meditate at all and I did think to myself, wow, I thought that was really hard and I was feeling wonderful.

Anyway, a slight digress, rather than being silent for the day why not speak gobbledygook? Just make up words. [inaudible] now rather than e-mail or phone somebody, why don’t you go old school and write a letter? You could even do things like avoid reading any newspapers for a week which I think we spoke about before. Maybe not watch any TV for a month or listen to no music for a week. Wow, some radical ideas. You could change the way you utilize time. Go to bed at a different time. Get up earlier. Maybe get up at five am for a couple of weeks and there’s lots of people proposing that’s a golden hour in the morning to get a lot of things done. So when somebody leaves you a message, refrain from getting back as soon as you get the message. Allow it to sink in and think about it for a while. Maybe you’ll complete one task from start to finish without doing any of the tasks. That will be absolutely outrageous.

What about relationships? Maybe if you do a lot of things in groups, do it completely alone. Maybe say no to invitations that you would normally accept. Yeah, like dinner with friends, going out for the evening. Maybe say yes to things you wouldn’t normally accept. How about spending time with somebody you’re avoiding? Or maybe you could express your love to your family in a different way than you have done before. So if you’ve not told them, go and tell them.

So if you don’t tell jokes, tell some jokes or maybe for me I should stop telling jokes for a while. Have a beginner’s mind. Take something that you know really well and have a beginner’s mind. What would it be like to know nothing about your subject? Maybe throw a party for your colleagues at work for no reason at all and we could do a little bit more practice of random kindness. If you haven’t done a jigsaw puzzle, go ahead and do a jigsaw puzzle.

Also, which I think is quite good for us is to listen to music you wouldn’t normally listen to. So if you never listened to any classical, grab some classical music and listen to that. If you’re not a big fan of rap and you haven’t been listening to any rap, find some rap and listen to it. It’s poetry some of it. Maybe learn to read music, play a musical instrument, take singing lessons. Oh, wouldn’t that be fun? Learn another language. Become a storyteller. These are all great things we can do and building on that, we could learn to dance the salsa and rock n roll and maybe learn to juggle, go ice skating. There’s lots of things we can do to shake our world up to make changes. To write a poem or sing a song. Read poetry. Learn a poem by heart. Two roads diverged and I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference. Robert Frost.

A wise man and a great poet for NLP Practitioners. A must practitionist to read, partly because Robert Frost poetry works a multiple levels just like Milton Erickson language patterns. Maybe learn to meditate. Allow yourself to make mistakes and enjoy those mistakes. And travel. Maybe live in another country. Learn a different culture. Spend the day being someone else. What do we mean by that? Spend the day being someone else. Well, if you’ve never worked in a hospital, go and volunteer in the hospital and find out what it’s like to spend a day there with people that are poorly,  that’s not something you would normally do. Or if you have not experienced the world, go down and spend the day at one of the race tracks and hang out and have a lovely meal even if it costs you a month’s budget to do so. Go and experience something different.

Right. I’ve got to go now. I’ve got some things to do that I’ve never done before. I’m feeling the urge to be adventurous. Do let me know what you get up to. I’d love to hear your stories. And can you track how doing this changes your life? Yes. Small things matter. I think I might go off and read some poetry. Okay. Until next time, have a wonderful week and I’ll talk to you soon.

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