Emotions

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place, from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from person or shape, from a spider’s web”. Pablo Picasso.
Hello. My name is John Cassidy-Rice and I have the pleasure to be your host for this session. And in this session you might have picked up, that we’re going to be exploring emotions. And one of the techniques that I think is exceptional within NLP is called a chained anchor where we train the brain to go from one state, go through a journey and end up in a different state. Now, it’s not that I want to teach you that technique in this session, but it’s a vehicle for talking about emotions. And what I’ll do, if you’re interested in that technique not only will I put a step-by-step process of how to do that technique in the resources of this section. I’ll see if I can find a video to put up, a link to the video within the resources sections as well.

Now what we’re doing of the chained anchor is training the brain, your neurology to go on a journey. So think of it. You are in one part of town and you go on a journey and you end up in a new destination. For example, when I was first starting to get interested in NLP I was attending some practice groups. I hadn’t done any particular training, I read some books, I was just fascinated with this NLP stuff. And at one of the practice groups, one of the guys there said “Why didn’t you take a practice group?” And I was like “Who, me? I don’t real know this stuff”. Cause you have to remember that time that I had low self-esteem, very little confidence, dyslexic learning issues, you name it, I had all going on. And he said “Now, you do it”. So I thought to myself “you know what if I’m going to put myself in a situation of being really uncomfortable, I thought I’d do something that I guess all out of our comfort zone. i.e. so that we’ll all in rapport. So, I thought I’d do the Mozart Strategy that Robert Dilts talks about in his book “Strategies of genius”, volume 1. And this is where you take a group of non-musicians and you compose, conduct and perform and notate a piece of music in about an hour and a half. It really gets people out of their comfort zones. And to my surprise, it went really well. So I had reasons to be pleased of it.

And a gentleman who attended the practice group said “Oh, I run a training company. Would you come and do that for one of my clients?” And I was like “Oh, you know I’m not a trainer?” Because I wasn’t a trainer at that point, and only just got into this NLP stuff. I was a musician but not a trainer. And he said “No, that’s fine. You just do exactly what you’ve done there, and that will be fine”. So I said “Oh, okay then”. And he said to me “How much do you charge?” At that point I’m playing in bands, I’ve got a part-time job pretty much on minimum wage, you know, this is the effect of this low self-esteem, learning issues etc. That NLP turned my whole life around and that work on international platform is just fabulous.

But at that point I had really had no confidence. When he said “How much do you charge?” “Well, I’ve got no idea”. And in fact I thought to myself, I’ll charge a lot so that he won’t take me up on it. Now when you’re on minimum wage that is where you’re basing your line of what’s too much and what’s too little. So, I’m not really sure. So I thought to myself “Okay, then”. I said “So who’s it for?” And he said it’s for the Financial Times. They got some up and coming stars that they really want to stretch and to accelerate their learning. So that really didn’t help. So I just pluck a figure out of the air and I said “a hundred pounds”. And he said “A hundred pounds an hour?” I was like “Oh, okay”. It did show that hopefully. And he said “Well, that’s too little for The Financial Times. They just want you to take it seriously, so I’ll be up in your feet, so I’m sure you won’t mind”. I was like “Okay, then”.

And I suddenly realized I have gone into this state of sheer panic because I have agreed to do this thing, way outside of my comfort zone at that point. So I was like “Okay, then”. Now to walk out in front of these people you would have to be confident. And I’m at a place of sheer panic. And a straightforward anchoring exercise tends not work that well so you build that confidence, because one of the things we have to remember is the strongest emotion in your neurology will always win out. So if you have a very high psychotic negative emotion, then what’s going to happen is going to override the positive emotion that’s not as strong.

So, I’m thinking to myself “I’m in sheer panic, and I’ve got to get to a place of confidence”. And that’s just too far from my neurology to leap. That’s a little bit like “If I’m on one side of a river and I’ve got to jump to the other side, I know it’s just that too far. When I jump, I’m going in the water. So, what could I do about that? So, I thought if I had stepping stones that took me one from one side of the river to the other side, I could possibly do that. So, sheer panic to a fear was doable. Fear took grounded is useful, I think I can do that. Now, grounded to curiosity is easy, curiosity to confidence makes it a lot easier.

And I set that up for my neurology to run through those emotions automatically using the chained anchors that we talked about earlier, and I’m so pleased I did because I arrived to this mansion in the middle of nowhere, you know, just the most beautiful cars all parked around, so I hit my car and I felt the sheer panic start to emerge which triggered off this chain of emotions so I ended up being confident. And it went really well.

So the first time I ever did any training without being trained as a trainer was for The Financial Times. And what this got me thinking about was emotions. We often notice emotions as their peak. But do emotions go through a journey? I’m not like to explore that idea, because when you pay attention to emotions, because when you pay attention to emotions and understand how they link together quite naturally, if you’re doing once a month work with somebody you can design a process that naturally follows where the neurology wants to go and that accelerates the change work. It also enables you to track where somebody is likely to end up, starting up from one emotion. So, we’re going to explore that idea in this session. Do emotions go through a journey? And if we know about the journey, can we predict where somebody will end up and utilize that for ourselves?

So we need a starting point. Let’s start with procrastination. Now, if you do find yourself procrastinating, just put it off until later. Now, procrastination is a topic I get asked a lot about. So, what’s the natural journey that the neurology would go through to end up for somebody to actually take action in an area of their life? And we’ve all done it, haven’t we? We’ve all procrastinated and it gets to a point where is like “Ah, why am I putting this off?”

So procrastination is a useful emotion in itself. Part of it because if you put something off, a problem for example, it can resolve itself. Not always, but can resolve itself. From an evolutionary point of view why would we procrastinate? Well, as long as we’re fed and we’ve got somewhere to live and we procrastinate going out and hunting, we’re less likely to be killed by another animal, and the ones among us that were adventurous and went out were often the ones that got killed. So you can see it from an evolutionary point of view why procrastination will be a key emotion that a lot of us experience on a regular basis.

So, we’re thinking about this journey from procrastination to action. What would be the natural emotion that we’d move towards next? So, if you think about it. If you’ve been putting something off, you’ve been putting something off, you’ve been putting something off, what the body often needs is some energy. Because when we procrastinate we do one or two things. We feel like we have no energy or we dispersed the energy. So what the body starts to do is to spill that energy up for us. And you’ve been putting something off, you’ve been putting something off and then you start to become frustrated and in that frustration builds the energy. And as that frustration builds and becomes stronger and stronger it naturally moves us into another emotion, which is a very powerful emotion. And that emotion is anger.

Anger is wonderful. Anger is like dynamite. It can move a mountain in a moment, but it can also blow up in your face. Anger is a great emotion, because what does anger do to us? So we’ve been putting something off, we’ve been putting something off, become frustrated, we’re still not doing anything, that’s your body building the energy and then, the next level if you’re lucky, you go into this angry mode. Not angry in life, but angry about the situation. And I have purposely made people angry, not at me, but at the situation, just to get enough energy in their body. Once you’ve got all this energy and you think back to your life, there’s a point where you just got angry enough that you just went ahead and did something. That’s how incredible anger is. But we do need to be careful working with anger.

So, now that we build all this energy in the body, if it doesn’t go anywhere, and we don’t take action, we don’t do something, the danger is we don’t do anything, it explodes and it’s damaging to our system. But can we direct it? Now, hopefully, we want to keep the energy up, but we want to keep the momentum moving, so we can then start to control this energy that we’re calling anger and put it into a direction which we’ll call, let’s say, you’re motivated. You become motivated. Once you’re motivated and you point out in a direction, it leads you to action, which is just incredible.

So we can see there’s a natural journey from an emotional point of view that we go from being procrastinating to taking action. And if you were to design a process that enables someone to accelerate that journey we’ll get more done in less time.

Then also the reverse of that. Sometimes you’re in a situation where somebody is getting angry and we notice that anger is a really big emotion, if we don’t do anything with it, it can be dangerous. Anger, if we were to reduce it, would go to frustration. Then we go to frustration, we could go to grounded. And once we’re grounded, we could move into being in control. So that does seem to be a natural flow to emotions. So, a few years ago I started tracking emotions and see whether, where would they end up, both positive and negative. So if we think about satisfaction, for example, satisfaction will often lead itself to amusement, if you allow it to progress. And then as amusement builds, it moves into joy. And then joy lends itself to laughter. So that’s some of the positive emotions.

But what if we want to read somebody and maybe we’re starting to read some not positive states, but what we so-called negative states? And how we tracked these was through facial expressions. We spent a lot of time on the introduction and throughout the end I’ll be training, training you to read these signals. So, these are just some of my observations.

If somebody starts some sternness what emotional journey is it likely to trigger if you allow it to run its full course? And let’s acknowledge. Not everybody will run a full course of emotions. They’ll maybe only get to a certain point.

Let’s take sternness. Where does sternness next start to move to? If we allow sternness to grow and to build on itself, it will move into indignation. And if we allow indignation to start to build on itself, it can move into this anger. And if you allow anger to build and it’s headed in an active place, it tends to move to rage. Let me give you practical applications of where this is very useful.

Several years ago now, I was working in London and I happened to be working in London on my birthday. And the venue that we were holding this event at had a comedy night. And some of the students invited me along to the comedy nights. So I thought to myself “Yeah, why not?” That should be a laugh. So we attended this event and the comedians were good, but the group was small in the room. So it wasn’t a lot. And the comedians were testing out new material. Now, we had this one comedian who apparently was the big name of the event, I’ve not really heard of him, but he’d been on TV etc. And he was good, but one of the people in the audience happened to be a little bit more funnier than him. And you could see this banter going back and forth until the comedian did a put down and his expression of sternness started to come over this audience member’s face. And now I’m observing this and I’m thinking to myself “I think I can guess where this might go”. And the comedian did a bit more and directed some more insults at this guy, and he moved into this indignation. And I thought to myself the signals are here, that was quite likely to happen is… that something is going to trigger and they might end up even fighting which means the police may be called and it could be one or two o’clock in the morning before I get back to my hotel room.

So I tried to indicate to the rest of the people I was with that this is the time to leave. But none of them were interested, so I bid them good-bye and wished them well and off I went. And the next day, the students said to me the banter between the audience member and this comedian got worse and worse until unfortunately the comedian bobbed this person on the head with the microphone, which caused this quite big guy to stand up and they started to have some physical contact. Well, the police were called, the comedian ran off, and they had to find him, and it was two or three o’clock in the morning before my students got back to their hotel rooms, because apparently this comedian who had a couple of drinks had left the building and went for a walk, the police got hold of him and they couldn’t question him because he’d been drinking and they had to wait to a sober, so he ended up a night in jail, this comedian. My students ended up at two or three in the morning, giving statements and having to wait around for all this to resolve itself.

So I’ve been able to read emotions and understand why one emotion triggers another emotion is very useful. It enabled me to get to bed at a reasonable time. So, think of all the applications in social situations, with your boss, your colleagues and your family, that if you’d read the emotion early on, you could have taken a different course of action. And this is one of the reasons I got interested in one emotion triggers another emotion.

So, a couple of more examples. The stain as it builds will move to aversion. And then aversion tends to move into disgust, which moves into revulsion. Probably you went to see that one a lot. So, what about more common emotions, like concern? Concern can lead itself to an anxiety and that leads itself to fear and that triggers terror. So, these are just my own observations and I’m sure you have some observations also. So, in this session we’ve covered a lot. Are you aware of just how much we covered and how valuable this potentially can be?

So, let’s have a quick recap. We started off talking about a chained anchor. And, like I said, I will put instructions for doing a chained anchor in the resource notes and if I can’t find a video of the chained anchor being demonstrated– we talked about emotions triggering one emotion and if we were to design an intervention for somebody who helped somebody built resources, we could utilize how emotions naturally flow to be able to design a process with them and for them. But also I’ve been able to read emotions can be very useful. We talked about procrastination and the natural journey it takes to get into action. And now that we know that journey, potentially you could speed the whole thing up. We pointed out some pitfalls and that anger can be wonderful if used in the correct way. Then we started to look at some other examples and where I’ve been able to read those emotions, enabling me to have a good night out and not have to spend most of the night talking to the police. We looked at some other examples that observe what one emotion triggers another emotion.

So if you’ve got any questions, if you’ve got any of your own observations, please do share it, leave a comment below. And also if you’re interested in emotions you probably come across some that got emotional intelligence. Well, at the release of this Podcast, we’re doing a promotion. If you feel motivated to book on to our NLP practitioner or NLP Master practitioner we will give you as a gift an emotional intelligence course. This is an online course, you’ll have immediate access to it. So I suggest you go straight to that page and I’ll put a link in the resource section here and find out what’s it’s all about. Well, until next week, have a wonderful week and I’ll talk to you soon.