NLP: The New Technology of Achievement

369 Pages·2011·2.23 MB·English

by  Steve Andreas

The NLP Comprehensive Training Team
N L P
THE NEW TECHNOLOGY
OF ACHIEVEMENT
Edited by Steve Andreas
and Charles Faulkner
CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS
Steve Andreas, M.A., Charles Faulkner, B.A.,
Kelly Gerling, Ph.D., Tim Hallbom, M.S.W.,
Robert McDonald, M.S., Gerry Schmidt, Ph.D.,
Suzi Smith, M.S.
Dedicated to
the joyful heart and soaring spirit
of every child
reaching for a greater world,
especially in yourself
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE: Changing Your Mind
CHAPTER TWO: What Is NLP?
CHAPTER THREE: Getting Motivated
CHAPTER FOUR: Discovering Your Mission
CHAPTER FIVE: Achieving Your Goals
CHAPTER SIX: Creating Rapport and Strong Relationships
CHAPTER SEVEN: Powerful Persuasion Strategies
CHAPTER EIGHT: Eliminating Your Fears and Phobias
CHAPTER NINE: Building Self-Confidence
CHAPTER TEN: Creating Self-Appreciation and Self-Esteem
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Securing a Positive Mental Attitude
CHAPTER TWELVE: Achieving Peak Performance
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The NLP 21-Day Unlimited Achievement Program
Biographies
Acknowledgments
A A
LSO VAILABLE
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
Permissions
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
Changing Your Mind
The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings,
by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects
of their lives.
—WILLIAM JAMES, eminent American psychologist
Entering a World of Change
T
his book will change your life. We know. What you’re about to read
has already changed ours. We are the trainers and consultants of NLP
Comprehensive, an organization of individuals dedicated to helping
people reach their unlimited inner resources. The accounts of personal
change you’ll read in these chapters happened to actual individuals. In
many cases, their changes took place in the same amount of time it will
take you to read about them. These transformations, which include
changing fear into confidence, despair into desire, and worry over the
past into goal-oriented action, are the result of specific and learnable
techniques. We’ve taught them to counselors, consultants, coaches,
managers, engineers, athletes, entrepreneurs, executives, and parents—
all kinds of people interested in effective personal and professional
change. Collectively, we have edited or authored almost a dozen of the
key books on this transformational technology, and produced more than
three times that many audio and videotape programs.
Over the last ten years, through our books, tapes, and training
sessions, we’ve introduced this new possibility for living to over a
million people in situations ranging from corporate boardrooms to a one-
room schoolhouse, from packed auditoriums to a cancertreatment
hospital room.
We didn’t start here. We set out, probably very much like you, with
little more than our sincere desire and hope that deliberate change was
possible. We spent years searching across the fields of psychology and
personal development for ways to implement change that works. From
university educations to the school of hard knocks, and from expensive
training seminars to silent selfexamination, we measured what we found
by the results it could produce.
A number of us spent more than a decade searching for the keys to
real and lasting change before we found them. Our motives were
personal as well as professional. We wanted to assist our clients in
transcending their past difficulties and self-imposed limitations, so they
could get on with the adventure of their lives. We wanted to affect the
bottom lines of businesses and the people who work for them, to
increase their productivity, profit, and professional satisfaction. And we
wanted something for ourselves. As agents of change, we wanted skills
that could enhance those who were already achieving and increase what
was already excellent. For our own satisfaction, we wanted to be able to
move beyond fixing problems to creating possibilities. We’ve always
believed we could do, be, have, and become more, and that you can too.
Now, more than at any other time in human history, many
approaches, old and new, are pointing toward improving human
potential and increasing possibilities. Some of them are well known,
with names like positive mental attitude, visualization, affirmations,
inner child work, goal setting, and personal power. You may even have
tried one or more of them at one time or another. If your experience was
like ours, sometimes they worked and the results were truly marvelous.
At other times, though, they didn’t. And when they didn’t, no matter
how much we wanted or needed them to work, they wouldn’t. It was
these erratic results that kept us searching even further for the real roots
of change. We knew we were already part of the way there. We wanted
to produce results consistently. We wanted to know the difference that
made the difference between an occasional or temporary relief and a
deep, lasting change. We wanted to be able to deliberately facilitate
transformational change and teach others to do it for themselves as well.
Creating Change
Before we guide you into creating new possibilities of thinking,
feeling, and acting for yourself and those you love, we would like to take
just a moment to introduce ourselves and let you know a little bit about
what we do and how we work.
Steve Andreas, M.A., NLP Comprehensive cofounder, trainer, author,
and NLP innovator, sits listening attentively to a woman as she describes
how a shameful incident from her past resurfaces on occasion. She
describes how this recurring memory has limited her feelings and life
choices. Steve gently interrupts her story and asks how she would like
things to be. She brightens and talks about a new career idea and a
different kind of life. He asks some unusual questions about the first
experience and then the second. At least she thinks they’re unusual. No
one has ever asked her if her memories were black and white or in color
before. He then guides her through what seems to be a simple
visualization, only at the end, tears have filled her eyes, not of sorrow,
but of joy. She feels released from her past. Less than thirty minutes has
passed. She remains free of the memory.
Charles Faulkner, trainer, author, and expert modeler, finishes his
interview with the company’s best financial decision maker. Here is a
man whose thoughts and opinions affect the movement of millions of
dollars a day. Charles points to the notes he has made on the board. In a
language of pictures, words, and feelings, he describes the details of this
decision maker’s strategy in easy-to-understand terms. The members of
the assembled team begin to realize that they can use these same steps
to dramatically improve their own decisionmaking abilities. The rest of
the morning is spent applying their new skills to a wide variety of
problems and opportunities.
Kelly Gerling, Ph.D., corporate trainer and leadership catalyst, enters the
conference room and takes in the scene. He can see the tension and
despair on their faces. The company’s direction is at stake, and the board
has been deadlocked for weeks. He begins by asking for each executive’s
perception of the situation. As he acknowledges their concerns, he asks
them to talk about their values. The feeling in the room begins to shift.
No one has talked with them this way. They can sense some change is
stirring. Two days later, they are designing their new strategic plan. A
year later, the values expressed at those meetings have spread
throughout the company, improving morale, and transforming them
back into market leaders.
Tim Hallbom, M.S.W., trainer, author, and health-applications
researcher, had just learned from NLP innovator Robert Dilts that
allergic responses are comparable to a phobia of the immune system.
While there’s no real danger from the outside, the body’s immune-system
reaction is so strong that it becomes the danger. Tim mentions this to
some seminar participants, and one of them announces he’s allergic to
everything. It turns out he has so many food allergies he’s spending over
two hundred dollars a week on a special diet. Applying Robert Dilts’s
procedure for reducing allergic responses, Tim guides him to neutralize
the food triggers for his allergies. Following extremely cautious and
conservative testing, the participant finds over the next few days that all
his allergic responses have vanished. They never return. Several years
and thousands of successful cases later, Tim is participating in formal
clinical studies at a Vail, Colorado, medical facility to scientifically test
this new approach.
Robert McDonald, M.S., trainer, author, and healer, believes that the
deep connections of our lives are our relationships. The estranged couple
before him wishes they did, too. Beginning with one and then the other,
Robert draws them out. He helps them divide their disappointments
from their dreams and rekindle what first brought them together. He
then assists them in literally separating themselves from old co-
dependent patterns and gaining a new sense of wholeness in and for
themselves. Finally, he invites them to participate in a healing ritual in
which they bring the fullness of each other together in a living, loving
relationship. Tears come to Robert’s eyes as well as to the couple before
him. Their marriage not only survives, it thrives.
Gerry Schmidt, Ph.D., teacher, trainer, and psychotherapist, waits for the
well-dressed executive to compose himself. It has been a year since he
was blindsided in an automobile accident, yet he still finds himself
panicking any time a car comes at him from that angle. He knows it’s
not rational, and he’s only here on the recommendation of a friend.
Gerry asks him where it happened, and how it might have looked from
across the street, or the cab down the block, or from a traffic helicopter.
Pretty soon the two are laughing about it, and without understanding
why, the executive finds himself making up a joke about the incident. He
drives home from the single one-hour session with ease. His fears never
return.
Suzi Smith, M.S., trainer, author, and health-applications researcher, has
thought of herself as a lot of things: wife, mother, teacher, corporate
trainer. Somehow, though, the idea of being an international authority
in a new field had never come up, and it didn’t feel natural. As she
traced her feelings back to their origin, she found a much earlier life
experience. She realized her feelings belonged more appropriately to a
student in her teens who was insecure in her knowledge. This was
clearly not who she is now. Since this self-limiting belief would only
hold her back from delivering the important discoveries that she and her
colleagues have made, she decides to change it. Drawing to mind a
memory of when she felt confident and competent, she literally uses
those qualities to transform her old childhood memory into a resourceful
one. She completes the process in less than ten minutes.
These accounts probably seem like overstated, and unlikely incidents, or
barring that, miracles. When we first heard similar accounts, they
seemed like nothing less than miracles to us, too. Now, after ten or more
years as NLP practitioners, trainers, consultants, and counselors, we
know from the thousands of personal experiences like them that rapid,
deep, and lasting change is a reality. As the contributing authors to this
book, we know that NLP defies the usual expectations of what’s possible.
It seems so grandiose and unlikely that some people will use that as an
excuse to never examine it closely.
Yet if you were to look back over this century of change, you might be
surprised to discover that the airplane and the automobile are both less
than 100 years old. The idea of sending voices and music through space
to distant places without wires was thought impossible and therefore
unworthy of serious investigation. Then radio was invented. Modern