Paraphrasing what world renowned NLP motivation speaker Anthony Robbins once said about NLP state management,
“To achieve success in any endeavours of your life, there’s almost nothing as essential as learning how to manage your emotional or mental state.”
Two Approaches to NLP State Management
Today, we will be discussing two NLP strategies of managing your state using NLP. The first way of changing your state is by means of changing the way you act and the second way is by changing what you choose to focus on in life.
- Change the way you act: First and foremost, you have to realize that our body and mind are really one. Just as your emotion has the ability to affect your body, you too can use motion to influence your emotion.Recall a time in your life when you were feeling joyful? If you could just spend a few moments to return to the past, what were you seeing, hearing and feeling while you were experiencing joy?Notice the way your body responds when you are feeling joyful. Are your shoulders feeling relaxed or tensed up? Are your jaws feeling relaxed or tensed up? Are you breathing deep or shallow? Were you frowning when you were feeling joyful?As you can see, there’s a need for you to “act” in a certain manner in order to feel in a certain way. You can’t possibly feel joyful when you are frowning, can you?Thus, one of the fastest ways we teach in our NLP Practitioner course to change your state is to change the way you “act” and adopt the physiology of excellence.
In NLP, the physiology of excellence refers to a way of using your body or “acting” which enables you to feel and perform at your best. It usually involves having you to stand or sit with your spine held erect, breathing deeply and evenly from the abdomen, limbs relaxed, and your heads tilted slightly upwards.
- Change what you are focusing on: The second way in which you can manage our state is by means of changing your focus.In NLP, we can accomplish this by changing the internal representations about anything that we make up in our mind.Most people tend to link up everything they experience in life with pictures and images in their mind. For instance, if I were to ask you to recall a past when you were feeling excited about your life, do you have a picture? Is the picture that you have formed up in your mind in black and white or in colour? Is the picture large or small?Does it or does it not intensify your feeling of excitement whenever you turn the picture from Black and white into colour? Does enlarging the picture intensify the feelings? What about the distance? What will happen if you could just bring that picture even closer to you? Are you now feeling more excited than before?I am sure you would have felt the difference for yourself. The way in which we represent any experience in our mind can change how we feel about the situation.
After you have mastered the ability to change the internal representations of any experience in your life, you can now take charge of your state at any given moment.
So if I may invite you… to go all out for the next 7 days in taking charge of your state. Change the way you act, change what you are focusing on, and you will experience the power that proper utilization of NLP state management can do to your life!