How do you manage to do that?

Everything we do, however we react we have learned. Sometimes we take years to acquire the skill, but once we have refined it we use it when ever the right triggers are given. I sat on the train the other day and watched as a beautiful woman screwed up her face whilst in deep thought; her facial features contorted as if in pain she considered whatever it was on her mind and then opening her eyes she shrugged and looked out the window. Another person had been holding their shoulder in tension for so long it appeared to be permanently held in that position even though it was placing unnecessary strain upon his spine and hips. We all do it, to a lesser or greater extent, these learned ticks we develop, as an outward sign of internal processing.
So what ‘ticks’ do we have in our minds?
The ones that have grown up with us which facilitate certain thought processes; the ones we may have put in place when we were very young and because they appear to work we have never updated?
Imagine then, a person who is terrified of failing, imagine this person has been learning this skill for many years and has now perfected it to be triggered when ever they feel they are being put into a position where they might fail. How do they react, what are the learned behaviours which have been successful up until now which have kept the fear at arms length?
Whilst teaching I came across many children who were learning these skills and if we were able to get to them before they refined the skill, we could avert its inception. A child I remember would get really difficult and argumentative when ever she felt threatened by a piece of new work. It would lead her out of her known comfort zone and take her into that realm where she might not know the answer; the real issue here.
After a while it became apparent I had to provide her with skills which meant she could take that step with confidence and tackle new pieces of work without the over-whelming sensation of failure before she began.
Another would start the new piece of work then throw the book shouting and screaming it was stupid, pathetic and he wasn’t doing it. In my head my answer was ‘so its difficult is it and you are stuck, ok, let me help you find the way through.’
In both cases they were learning strategies for not doing something because of the fear of failure.
Stop and think for a moment; if you were worried by the prospect of new things and getting them wrong, what behaviours have you learned so as to support yourself in finding the correct excuses not to do it?
Children struggle with many things; let’s face it, for them, many of the skills they tackle are for the first time and being true sponges everything they watch, everything they hear and everything the do, they believe in with a conviction, which, in some cases can be un-shakeable. So let’s take this a step further.
A mum learnt when she was young to recoil and panic when ever she saw a spider. The little sponge alongside her absorbs that behaviour and learns, by modelling mum, to do exactly the same thing. Watching a child learn a new phobia is always interesting because they take on the person they are modelling’s actions and check they have it right by stopping and observing. They haven’t initially imported the feelings which go with the movement that comes later. Eventually they get the skill right in their eyes and develop the phobia in their own style.
Clever huh?
OK, so let’s think about another skill they could learn; how about shouting. If a child grows in a home where it is usual to shout at your partner then guess what they presume is normal—yes, shouting at your partner and they will go out of their way to find someone suitable to shout at and wonder why they are no happier than their parents.
What I am saying is two fold here,
• What you model when you are a child becomes the building blocks of what you use when you are an adult.
• How you react in a situation, whether it be emotional or physical, you have spent time learning how to do and as a consequence it can be broken as well as encouraged.
• It is our choice whether we maintain the ‘skill’ or not and our excuses of why we do things are the very stories we use to justify it.
• People can develop almost heart stopping pain to avoid doing something they really felt threatened by and end up on various medications as a consequence.
• Pain and suffering does not always mean there is a physical basis to it, the body may just have created the pain/illness as an outward sign of a mental pain.
• Placebo medicines in this area are very successful at alleviating the medical condition but not the under lying cause.

So returning to the original question; think about a habitual response to a given situation you have which irritates you now and you would like to start reviewing its necessity. Answer these questions as fully as you can and watch how the process you have used up until now begins to change. If the stories are very convincing (both to you and your audience) you may have to work on these first;

What skill are you thinking of which you would love to change your response to?
How did you learn it, and when did it start?
• What is it that this behaviour is protecting you from? (Remember this is probably something which happened when you were young so needs to be thought about through the eyes of the child not the eyes of the adult.)
• What did you have to do to learn the responses you gave and how successful were they at avoiding what it was you wished to avoid?
• How long did it take to become good at avoiding the issue?

• When did you refine this skill and how long have you spent nurturing it to this state of excellence that it happens automatically?
• What stories do you tell to justify the skill? Do they justify it and how? What set of excuses have you created?
• How do they make you feel?
• What is it you gain from still running the skill?
• Do you wish it to continue in its present form or do you want to change it?
• What have you learned about yourself from this experience that can support you in finding new strategies for coping in those situations?

Dad's demands

Sitting at the pool watching the mothers and fathers with their youngsters, I watched as one of the men became progressively more and more angry at his son.
The son wanted to play, the father wanted to teach his son swimming, the son wasn’t listening and wandered off to the toddlers pools to play on the crocodile slide. The father’s threats became more intense to the point of ultimatum; you either come here and learn to swim or I am getting out and going home! I guess from the child’s reaction this was a common threat so he took no notice and left the father to get on with it knowing it would all blow over soon.
What I hadn’t twigged was the woman sitting on the next table was the mother. She tried to get dad to realise swimming was fun but by this time dad was so blinkered he could only see his way forward. Mother could still see the whole picture and tried in vain to convince dad to go and have some fun.
Reluctantly the father went over to where the boy was happily playing; the boy got down on his belly and showed his father an excellent combination of arms and legs action which would propel him through the water if he chose. I get the impression this was one step too far for the father who took the boy to one side and ‘told him to get in the other pool and learn to swim’. Yet hadn’t he just demonstrated the skill to his father already?
Amazing how entrenched we can become when we have a bee in our bonnet. After watching this I understand the phrase make so much more now. Irritated by the situation the thoughts became like stinging bees and the father was pushed to the point of exploding just by the internal rows he was having with his own expectations. The son was aware of how far things could go and had already chosen to ignore the protestations of his father which, I suspect would escalate as he grew. Mother was able to see the whole picture and could appreciate value on both sides but knew this was a recurring theme she had learned to ignore.
The question is who won?

Floating high

There has been so many occasions where parents have been teaching children to swim recently but a common core seems to be emerging; do it my way as I tell you and keep those floats on your arms because I am scared you might go under and if you do you might not like it and I know you wont because I didn’t when I was young… the list goes on but one thing became very apparent, we make the assumption we know best, we presume the child will be able to do it exactly as we expect.
Mm, but do they?
One Sunday the pool was heaving with such situations and I watched as one proud dad taught his daughter to swim; the only problem was the arm bands physically prevented her moving her arms in the way she needed to gain forward propulsion and the float suit kept her legs down so she didn’t get the feel of kicking with her legs. In fact she didn’t use her legs at all. The dad was getting progressively more frustrated as she failed to do as he was saying but what was the gain for her, she was already floating, was within two inches of her dad and was as safe as houses.
I turned away only to be greeted by a three year old splashing its way from the edge to its dad, dad close enough to pluck her out of the water but far enough away to give her that independent feel. Goggles and grins, splutters and whoops she doggy-paddled with gusto landing in his arms with a happy cry. Bounces and laughter as she slipped under the water only to surface again and splash her dad for letting her get her hair wet again. The difference was amazing and as a direct result of the way the child had been presented with learning new things; one protective and away from anything which could be new and frightening and the other towards the newness with excitement it is new, and the pleasure of working it al out.
Who, I wonder would be the one in the classroom who would have ago at something just to find out if they could do it and who would be the one who would sit there and get the teaching assistant to do it for them?

If I could wave a magic wand

If I could wave a magic wand over anything for you, what would it be? If I could wave the magic wand and change something you really don’t like, how would you feel? What would you be able to do once, whatever it was, was out of the way and you could just get on, move forward or do whatever I was you wanted to get done?
If there was such a wand and it could be waved how much would it be worth? Would anyone believe it to be true? Yet when we were young we believed in magic wands, we believed it could be magic’d away, at least for a little while.
We would go to our mothers and she would be able to wave her magic wand over the problem or the hurt and, applying her special ointment, she would make it all better. The words, ‘there, there’ and ‘its all OK now, mummy kiss it better’ are still in use today, upturned, tear-stained faces innocently look up into the wonder they call mum and the belief and trust is there for all to see. It may still hurt, but the wand is waved and the hurt eventually goes away because the wand says so and so does mummy.
The children then play house together and if you listen one will also carry the magic wand, and solve the problems in the house; its only as they grow they begin to doubt the magic wand because hurts get bigger and they don’t seem to be able to wave it in the right way any more the stop the pain. They turn t their friends to be told how to think and they have lost control of the wand too, it is thrown to the floor not to be believed in.
Yet, the wand exists
I watched a film the other evening starring John Travolta, called Staying Alive. In that he loses confidence in himself and begins to hate what he stands for and what he has turned into, so he walks back to mums house for a piece of pie and some good old fashioned advice. Well needless to say it makes everything better and he goes back to conquer the world.
How many of us, I wonder, still speak to our mothers to sort out a problem for us, even now? Yet, can they solve it, or is it we find their words the most trusted words? And what happens if your mother wasn’t there for you when you were younger, do you turn to them now, or do you find someone else to confide in? Maybe a best friend, an ex-lover, a sibling—but, do we get the wand waved the way we want, or are we getting a reflection of what they see and not a reflection of what we are feeling?
Interesting.
Richard Bandler, one of the founding fathers of NLP is considered a magician when it comes to getting people to let go of their problems. His magic wand is his ability to use words and the skills to communicate with the unconscious mind, giving it permission to let go of problems which stop the person moving on. To him, there are no problems, just memories which have for some reason been left running when they should have been terminated years before.
I say a problem is a memory which is still running because we haven’t taken the learnings from it so we are ready to close it down and it is these memories which keep the therapists, councillors and the alternative therapists in business.
So let’s get back to the original question, if I could wave a magic wand; what would have to change to make the change, and how would the changes create the change within you which you did so you could make the changes and hence move on?
Re-read it and let the concept slowly sink into the unconscious mind. What changes did you make and how did they change the changes you wanted when you started reading this article?
How much clearer or lighter do you feel about something or are you at the really confused state which comes before something suddenly makes perfect sense?
In waving the magic wand what things have surfaced and what memories can be watched, learnt from and then put on the shelf marked completed/done.

At your best!

When we are at our best we feel as if anything is possible; things fall into place and we complete tasks effortlessly. The days seem brighter and time passes quickly; everything is as if happening automatically and we are just piloting this from one point to the other.

An athlete would call this ‘being in the zone’; a point where the mind, body and spirit is working in unison and everything we have worked for unfolds before us.

Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to access that state whenever we wanted and stay there for as long as was required? In fact wouldn’t be lovely to stay there forever?

Well we can if we choose to.

If we strip back to the basics, the way we think is in our control, the effect the outside world has is taken on board by choice. I know, I can hear many of you protesting at this point, but it is true; the outside world is invited in by the way we observe and sense it (be that feelings, sights and sounds or even tastes and smells).

Nice things that happen give us our happy memories and those warm feelings when we smell a certain perfume or take a sip of a drink or even see someone who triggers off a distant thought. They take us to a memory, a state which we stored, sometimes many years ago, and we are accessing it, and it’s as if it happened only yesterday. We assume the age we were and sense the experience through those eyes, those ears, those feelings; we are no longer our chronological age, we are a combinational age of when we laid down the thought and hindsight, where we are now. These are the nice times, the times we are pleased to have a memory of, and organised in the way it is.

Conversely, we store not so nice things and they are triggered in exactly the same way and we experience them as if they were yesterday, and again through that mixture of ages which could take us way, way back. Same system, same response, but different experience. I worked with a client who discovered one of her pet fears had been laid down when she was two and the fear was nothing really to an adult but massive to that two year old.

So how can we be the best of ourselves? How can we sit in that state for as long as we wish and use it for the good of our progression? It takes practice and recognition.

First we have to recognise how the body and brain does us at our best. The way I suggest to my clients is they think of a time when they felt really on the ball, really functioning well and they felt great about it. I get them to describe it in as much detail as they can give me; how they feel, where the feelings are manifesting in them, what type of feelings (are the warm, hot, cold, tingly, mobile or static) can they hear anything and how is that experienced (is it an internal chatter, a quiet softness, a loud cacophony, or maybe a hum) and what do they see, not necessarily as a cinematic picture in full Technicolor but what images do they sense and how are they shown (are they framed, in colour, is it clear, fuzzy, is there contrast) and as they build up a picture we construct a list of what makes the emotional state. This is called, completing a ‘sub-modality analysis’ of the construct of the feeling, and by doing this we are aware of how this has been created within us and if needs be can change it.

Once we have one memory analysed, we would then think of four more and create a fuller idea of how the brain is storing the state being the best of me. By doing this we can build a generalised blue-print as used by that individual and believe me it is different for each person.

As we remember when we experienced these situations, we begin to realise the memories and the way they have been stored, is through the eyes of the person at the age of the memory.

Say you had experienced the loss of a puppy when you were, say, six years old; this is going to be laid down in your memories in the way a six year old would experience it. And here comes the rub, once it is laid down that is how it stays unless we up-date it. And if we don’t update it, but just keep stacking on different experiences which created a similar feeling then we become tied into the feelings of a 6 year old even when we are in our adult years. I have had many a client discover they were at the mercy of something they felt when they were young and which hadn’t been updated because they didn’t realise it was there! And why di we hold onto to these experiences? Because its learning, it’s learning by experience.

So, the way we react to something is dependant upon not only how we experienced it, but when we experienced it and how we have stored subsequent instances which fall into the same category.

The skill of identifying these memory patterns then becomes important if we want to change the way we perceive things as an adult.

Many a time I have worked with clients who have experienced something when they were children and that incident and that age is still running that aspect of them even though they may now be in their forties or even fifties and sixties.

So back to the exercise, how to be the best of me. Once we have identified what the experience was which created the state, the best of me and how to do it, we would then start practising making that state at will.

Like anything, the more you practice the better it becomes and the easier it is to retrieve and recreate it at will. It is like any well trodden footpath, the more it is followed the clearer the path becomes.

This method can be used to un-train the mind in holding some emotions which are no longer useful, such as sadness whenever you see a certain type of dog, or feeling angry whenever a set of words are said in work or perhaps that feeling of frustration which builds within you.

We are the sum total of everything we have learned and we have chosen to hold them within our memories in the way we have. The way we respond then, is as a direct result of that. Once we have learned how we have stored the memories, we have a greater opportunity to be the person we wish to be, at any time we want.

‘Your vision will become clear only when you

look into your heart.

Who looks outside, dreams.

Who looks inside awakens!’

Carl Jung