As long as you keep your attention on the “where you desire to be” end of the rubberband you will naturally and easily snap yourself into that vision. However, if you start to feel doubt or in any other way lessen your attention and good vibration from where you desire to be, you are putting slack in your rubberband and essentially keeping yourself where you are.

To help you stretch your vision rubberband into your future, and keep it tight with good vibrations, I’d like to introduce you to a beautiful NLP guided visualization called Strategic Visioning.

You can download your audio version here:

http://www.catalize.com/catalize_strategic_visioning.mp3

(right click the link and select Save As to save it to your hard drive and play it from there)

In this guided visualization you step into all the details of your vision – seeing it, hearing it, and feeling it.  Then you step out of the vision, but keep a picture of you in it so you have a snapshot of that moment when you arrived and you can easily recall all the good feelings associated with your vision being realized.

Then you stretch your vision rubberband by floating up into the air, above the stream of time, and drop your energized picture into the future date when you wish your vision to be fulfilled.  And now you can relax and allow all the events and opportunities and people to flow into your life with perfect timing, knowing that your vision is complete.

I love this NLP guided visualization because you can use it over and over again, each time adding even more feeling and detail to your experience to keep strengthening the good vibrations of your vision rubberband.

Try it, and let me know how it works for you!

p.s. you may desire to use the Catalize Wheel of Life to help you create visions and intentions for every area of your life and then use the Strategic Visioning guided visualization for each area.  Sign up here for the Catalize monthly newsletter to get your copy of the Wheel of Life … or just follow the instructions on the audio recording for more information on how to create your inspired vision.

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Basically, Bandler and Grinder reviewed the transformational work of three very successful therapists:

• Virginia Satir, family therapist
• Fritz Perls, gestalt therapist
• Milton Erickson, hypnotherapist

Using their programming and language skills, Bandler and Grinder took the best methods from these three therapists and created standard, repeatable tools for people to change their neurological pathways into patterns that are more supportive of their desired outcomes.

It’s like magic. In fact, the first book to describe NLP is called “The Structure of Magic”. Most of the co-creators’ original books are out of print, but you can read my reviews of two of them here:

Frogs Into Princes

Using Your Brain for a Change

Personally, I’m one of those people who cares more about the application of a tool than all the many details of how it was created and when and so on. If you’re like me, read on. If you want all those fact-like details, try wikipedia.

What You Experience

A lot of NLP tools that I use are like a guided meditation. Most often I use NLP with a client because they have some stuck emotions or a limiting decision/belief that they created in response to a significantly emotional event from the past.

Using an NLP guided meditation, you’re more able to work with your unconscious mind (aka subconscious) to release the thought and feeling patterns that you created in the past to survive, but that are limiting you now.

When you release an automatic response pattern, you are freeing your naturally creative self to choose from many possible responses and resources. You may still choose to respond in ways you’ve responded in the past, but your response will be a conscious choice instead of an automatic, uncontrolled habit.

Another powerful NLP tool I use often is called “anchoring”. The mind-body connection is amazingly profound, and you can use it to your advantage by associating certain mental/emotional states with physical actions. We can use anchoring to help you associate positive, uplifting states with a certain action – like punching the air with success. Then, whenever you need to elicit that uplifting state (like when you’re feeling down), you can make the physical movement (punching the air) to immediately transform your mental and emotional state.

Anchoring is also key to an NLP tool called the Neurological Bridge that lets you automatically change your behavior patterns, such as from procrastination to energized motivation. I’ve even used this one on myself to move from nervous energy (like before public speaking) to grounded calmness.

These are just a few examples of the powerful NLP tools I use with clients. In all my coaching training, psychology education, and personal development work, I’ve not found anything so easy, quick, far-reaching and long-lasting as NLP.

Principles of NLP

Following are some of the principles behind NLP as I use it:

• You, the client, are always in control. You know what’s best for you and I listen to your intuition as I offer you creative solutions and resources.
• You don’t have to relive the past to heal it. If you are working with significantly emotional events from your past, I don’t have to know what the event is, and you don’t have to relive the experience in order to get the positive learnings and release the automatic response pattern you created then. NLP processes are generally VERY quick and easy.
• NLP will always generate more options for you. Whether you are removing stuck emotions and limiting beliefs or installing a new strategy, the process of NLP will never remove your ability to act as you want – it will only ever give you the ability to act with more variety, including and beyond your current habits. For example, if you are using NLP to remove a stuck emotion of anger, you are still able to choose to feel angry whenever you want … you just won’t automatically feel anger in those situations that are automatically triggering an angry response now.
• There are many ways to peel an onion. We’ll both use our intuition to determine what NLP process is best to use for your current needs. Often, once you’ve released one thought-pattern, another layer of your onion (life) reveals itself to be released. The great news is that with NLP the releasing is very quick and you can easily be discovering new resources and owning your brilliance within just a one hour session.

Other NLP Methods

There are lots of ways that NLP is used by many different kinds of practitioners. You may also hear about NLP in the context of sales, negotiation and influencing others. In these contexts you’re likely to hear about representational systems and what direction your eyes move when you talk about something (up for visual, sideways for auditory, down for kinesthetic or self-talk).

Though I’ve been trained in these NLP tools as well, my focus is much more on the uses of NLP to support transformational change in the context of results coaching. If you’re looking for NLP training or an NLP practitioner, make sure you’re getting NLP in the context you wish to use it … not all NLP is the same.

Try it Out

I believe the best way to know about NLP is to experience it for yourself. If you would like to better understand my methods of using NLP in the context of life coaching, please request a sample coaching session from me following the instructions on this page:

http://www.catalize.com/introsession.html

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I have two things to say about all of this:

Wow! and Whew!

Wow! If you’ve not yet experienced the power of NLP for removing obstacles; for quickly and easily aligning your inner thinking and being pathways for your desired external results … now is the time.

In all the trainings I have ever experienced, including myprofessional life coaching training, I have never found a more powerful tool than NLP.

And, if you have already experienced NLP, I highly encourage you to keep using it – and keep searching for the “right-fit” practitioner if you haven’t yet had the break-through results you are looking for.

For me, I chose to study with Christopher Howard because of the sincere, authentic, open-hearted approach he takes to creating breakthrough results, using NLP and hypnosis. It aligns with my own coaching philosophy (that you the client are already naturally creative, resourceful and whole) and focuses more on what You choose to create than any idea I could ever have of what might be best for you. [Warning: soapbox area of mine ... I'll step down now before I get rolling too far]

Oh, and the Whew! is for “what a ride” I’ve been on. Long hours, breakthroughs for me and my colleagues, and my fresh commitment to bring my self-esteem and visioning message to larger audiences through public speaking as well as the internet. Look out world, because my self-esteem just got even bigger and there’s a whole lot more brilliance that I’ll be sharing with y’all soon!

What’s your brilliance that you are going to share with the world?

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OK, here’s the second Richard Bandler book on NLP I’ve read lately – a little better than Frogs Into Princes in readability and practicality.  This book is also a transcript of a seminar, but it’s geared more towards us lay-people rather than the many-years practiced psychotherapists.  If you were only going to read one of the two books, read this one first.

In it you’ll learn one of the main principles of NLP – helping you to release automatic, habitual responses and enabling you to create many, more helpful resources to use in those “habitual” situations that have been holding you back.  Read the book for some great examples of how NLP was used to quickly release phobic responses (like fear of driving over bridges).  The really cool stuff is how that same program used to release phobias can help you to release any habitual, automatic (and often emotional) responses to situations that keep you from creating the life you really want to live.

I’ve heard a variety of stories about Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the creators of NLP, and I particularly appreciated hearing from Richard’s own voice (in this book) the importance of releasing the automatic responses, but not eliminating the option of responding in those old ways.  Even when you release an automatic response of fear or rage or sadness, there are still going to be times in your life when it’s important for you to respond with those emotions.  It’s important that you have a full choice of options, resources, and emotions to choose from when you are responding to any situation.

If you can’t already tell, this is a bit of a soap box for me … I really dislike it whenever anyone tells me there’s ONE way to solve my problem (and they have that solution).  There are just so darn many approaches anyone can take to life – we are all highly creative, intelligent and resourceful beings.  I think because NLP often uses programs to model other people’s success strategies, some people have muddied it into a tool for controlling behavior – choosing what strategies are best for you instead of recognizing that you are creative enough to choose the best strategy in a given moment.  In my practice, and I’m happy to see that in some of the originator’s earlier works, the whole point of NLP is to release the stuck patterns allowing you, the naturally creative and resourceful individual that you are, to choose new responses from a large variety of options.

OK, I’ll get off my soap box for now.  If you’re at all intrigued by NLP, try getting this book from the library (it’s also out of print) or just take the practical approach and contact me for an NLP coaching session so you can see how it directly helps you in your life, wherever you are right now.  There’s nothing quite like a direct experience to know what feels best for you!

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This book is actually a transcript from a live seminar that Bandler and Grinder gave to therapists in the 1970′s (the book was first published in 1979, but I’m not sure the dates of the seminar). For me, I really like short chapters so that it’s easy for me to stop and digest a book while I’m reading it. So, this book was a format challenge for me as it was a a lot of small print with only three chapter breaks.

Nevertheless, there’s great content, great examples of NLP in action, and great NLP processes that you can use and adapt for yourself and anyone you want to do NLP with. It’s not nearly as complete as taking an NLP training course, but the book does relay the philosophical approach of the NLP founders, Bandler and Grinder. All in all, I’d say it’s a “get-it-from-the-library-book” more than a “have-it-on-my-bookshelf-book” (besides, it seems to be out of print, so a library copy is a much more efficient way to go).

So where do you start if you’re new to NLP and want to learn more?

Personally, I started with Chris Howard trainings because I experienced his techniques first-hand and really liked how much sincerity and heart he put into the process. He was also very honoring of letting me choose what I wanted to release and what new strategies I wanted to install. I’ve heard of other NLP practitioners who start to act a bit too much like “God” by telling you exactly what new beliefs and strategies you should have, instead of letting you choose for yourself what resources would be best for you.

The sad news is that Chris has postponed offering his Breakthrough To Success workshop in the US this year.

The good news is, I still have some CD sets of the workshop, so just contact me if you would like to purchase a set. The sets are $50 (including shipping to US/Canada) for 7 audio CD’s, 1 DVD, a workbook and a gift certificate for two tickets to the live event once they become available again. I have a limited supply – so first come, first serve.

I’ll let you know if/when I find a book that is a better introduction to NLP. In the meantime, consider just trying it out with a practitioner (I know a great intuitive coach who even offers free sample sessions over the phone). I’ve not found any better tool than NLP for quickly removing obstacles and empowering your inner resources so that you can easily create the life you want to live.

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