A Roadmap For Change

Have you ever had cause to just stop and consider if the life you are living is the one that you want or is it the one that you have? Do you feel that you have been totally responsible for creating the life you have now, did you simply end up with what you have by reacting to life without a plan or is the life you have a result of someone else’s actions? These are interesting questions indeed and worthy of provoking some deep and reflective thought.

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At certain, indeterminate times in your life you take stock of where you have been, where you are now and where you want to go and sometimes you decide that you need to change something in order to get to your desired outcomes. Change comes in many different forms. Perhaps you want to change behaviours like smoking or poor eating habits to improve your health. You may choose to change the way that you react to certain situations to reduce your stress levels or you may choose to change your part in a relationship. Change might mean moving into a different role at work or changing your career path entirely. It may also involve moving house, cities or even countries. Change can be large or small, whichever it is, change is a choice that is yours and yours alone. So you’ve made the decision that things need to change. The key question now is, as a human being, why don’t you just go ahead and change? Immediately stop smoking or lose weight or think differently? Anyone who has been through change knows that it’s just not that simple, is it?

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The issue here is that your behaviours are habitual and stubbornly installed at the unconscious level. You are often not consciously aware of how you generate your thinking or behaviour, you just do it. If you are not consciously aware of HOW you structure and mould your thinking, then how do you go about changing it? The second problem is that when you were born, you weren’t issued an instruction manual entitled, ‘How to use your mind and control your thinking.’ I have good news, that’s where Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) comes in. NLP is that manual.

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The way you accept and process information is complex, instantaneous and unconscious. Let me explain. The unconscious mind is the part of your mind that you’re not consciously aware of right now and it performs according to your instructions. Imagine for a moment that every second of every day, an enormous amount of sensory material is entering your neurology through your five senses; sight, sound, feeling, taste and smell. As an individual, you uniquely filter all the information that enters your neurology through a set of specific internal filters. The information that you accept, coupled with your conscious self-talk, forms your internal and unique representation of your highly personalised concept of reality. That internal representation creates your emotional state, which in turn directly affects your physiology and then produces your internal and external behaviour.

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To change behaviour, you are clearly required to make changes either to your unconscious filters or to the resultant internal representation. These alterations are the core elements of change with NLP. Practitioners of NLP know how to change their internal representations to change their behaviour and to change their emotional state. You begin by changing the properties of the internal representation that you have formed through the process of unconscious filtering. In NLP speak, we call these properties ‘submodalities’ and they are the fine coding or building blocks that come together to form your internal representations. It will surprise and delight you to discover that just by making some very minor adjustments to your submodalities, your behaviour can be modified completely and extremely rapidly.

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Sometimes, the behaviour is functioning at a deeper level and you are required to make adjustments at the level of the internal filter. This may require adjustments to your values and beliefs which may be causing a functional blockage and filtering in a way that causes you to produce unwanted behaviours. NLP allows you to firstly understand HOW you generate behaviour through your values and belief filters and then gives you clear instructions of how to adjust them in order to achieve your desired results.

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Other times, your behaviour is generated by something residing in your past that is as yet unresolved for you. Unresolved negative events which are charged with large amounts of negative emotion continue to reside within your nervous systems and can periodically or consistently impact on your emotional state and behaviour. To release that negative emotion, we have a wonderful technique called Time Line Therapy®. You can learn Time Line Therapy® techniques during your Enhanced NLP Coach Practitioner Certification Training. Time Line Therapy® shows you HOW to remove past negative emotion from your nervous system, how to remove limiting beliefs from your psychology and how to generate your desired future in a very brief period of time. By removing negative emotions and limiting beliefs from your past, you generate a positive feedback loop which, in turn, generates useful strategies for coping with anything that your future life throws up.  

People don’t change just because they are told to. This is what the majority of change managers working in corporate environments fail to see. Change, even in a corporate context, is about people at the end of the day and so they need to be supported in their change process. If an organisation decides to change its values and identity or even a key process or system, each individual employee is required to adapt to their new environment and for the reasons I’ve already explained, this is not easy for most people. This is the one biggest reasons why change projects fail, they forget about people and that people are not sheep, they are functioning individuals! What’s the answer to successful change projects? Ensure that there is an NLP trained change consultant on the project team!

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Change is challenging when you have no compass to give you direction or instructions to tell you what to do when you get there. With the right direction, a comprehensive roadmap if you will, you can make personal change very easy and very quick. Even the most deeply seated habits and behaviours can be changed without a great deal of pain when you know HOW. NLP is your roadmap for change.