If you’ve ever had moments (or entire days) when your actions seem infected with klutz-itis, you might find this helpful.  If you ever feel stuck in an emotional response that you know is counterproductive, you can try this out.  On those times when you can’t seem to “get it right” it’s a good time to hit the RESET BUTTON.  This is a quick strategy in three steps that will help you get back your A-game.

 A friend of mine introduced me to this idea which he developed after he found himself repeatedly engaging in heavy political conversations at work and realized that he was wasting valuable time in an unrewarding way.  His idea was a simple pattern interrupt, initiated whenever he began feeling stressed out.  In other words, without knowing a thing about NLP, he managed to link the stress of incongruity with an intervention that resets the system back to a configuration that works better – a reset button!

 After playing around with it, I’ve added a couple of things to make it more robust.  These three steps are nothing new to those familiar with NLP, and can be practiced easily by themselves.  For simplicity and ease of execution, I express them in the form of three questions:

•  What am I perceiving right now? (a quick uptime trance)
• • start with foveal  vision, then peripheral
  • add auditory channel
  • add kinesthetic info about the environment, such as temperature, air movement, vibration, pressure, etc.
• How do I feel right now? (an internal congruity check)
  • Congruity means what I’m doing is what I want to be doing.
  • Incongruity is the gap between the present state and the desired state.  As such, it can serve as a guide and motivator, leading to…
• What do I want in this situation? (an outcome frame)
  • this flows naturally into an evaluation of resources and obstacles and…
  • mobilizing internal resources to begin closing the gap between the present state and the desired state.

 To be useful, this strategy needs to be connected with context – the events and situations where it will help.  I started connecting this up by remembering times in the past when I thought it would help, getting the feelings of frustration or whatever and linking them with the first step (uptime trance) by practicing the sequence: stress leads into uptime trance, which leads to congruity check, etc.  After this initial linking and some future pacing, it’s becoming a habit, generalizing into more and more contexts.

 And, sometimes the uptime trance alone will be enough to transform the pattern into something more better.

 By the way, NLP Boot tomorrow night (Monday May 10) at 7pm at my place.

 Cheers,

cabot@telus.net