April 28, 2025
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Today, I will reveal the art of changing thoughts, behaviours, and unhelpful strategies.
When you look closely at the moments that truly altered the direction of your life, you’ll notice a common thread. It’s change. Here at Quest for Success, we will teach you how to take control of this powerful force, not by waiting for things to happen to you, rather by creating the momentum yourself through the art of the pattern interrupt, using purposeful disruption to create resourceful change.
What Is a Pattern Interrupt in NLP?
Imagine your mind like a vinyl record. Remember them? Your habits, thoughts, and emotions play over and over like a familiar song. Some of these patterns serve you beautifully. Others, if you're honest, hold you back by having you repeat the same mistakes, reactions, or behaviours even when you desperately want a different result.
A pattern interrupt is like taking the needle off the record. It breaks the automatic loop, often suddenly and dramatically, forcing your mind to stop, re-evaluate, and choose a new, more resourceful neurological pathway.
In the profession of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), a pattern interrupt is a deliberate technique designed to disrupt an existing mental, emotional, or behavioural pattern, making space for new learning and change. You’re interrupting an unconscious sequence before it completes, giving yourself a chance to rewire old, well-trodden neural pathways and get in control of what happens next.
When you use a pattern interrupt intentionally, you take charge of your neurology. You take charge of your outcomes.
Before you can break a behavioural pattern, you must understand why patterns form in the first place. Your unconscious mind loves efficiency. It creates habits of thought, feeling, and action to save energy. These patterns are like well-worn paths through a forest. The more you walk them, the deeper and easier they become to travel along. This is fantastic when the pattern leads to something you want, like confidently speaking up in meetings, waking up early, or feeling calm under pressure. What about when the pattern leads to procrastination? Overeating? Fear of failure? Self-sabotage? Those patterns are just as strong, until you disrupt them.
Think of a pattern interrupt as a mindset reset button. When you interrupt an automatic pattern, even briefly, you create a moment of cognitive dissonance, a kind of mental ‘glitch’, the jump when the record is scratched, where your mind doesn't know what to do next. In that space, you are no longer reacting to old patterns of thinking, you are creating choice.
This moment of interruption is powerful. It opens the door for you to install a new, more empowering pattern. You can stop being at the mercy of old wiring and start consciously designing your own chosen responses. In NLP coaching, we use intentional pattern interrupts to accelerate this process with structure and purpose.
Here are a few examples of how you can initiate a pattern interrupt:
• Asking an unexpected, powerful question, the more quantum the better!
• Changing tone, posture, or breathing pattern.
• Using a shocking or surprising statement.
• Interjecting into an explanation of a problem at an unexpected juncture.
• Physically moving (standing up, clapping hands, stepping to the side).
• Reframing a situation in an unexpected way.
• Shifting the environment (e.g. going outside, changing rooms, even changing seats).
The key is to do something unexpected enough that the old pattern can’t run through to completion.
Your thoughts create your states (feelings). Your state creates your behaviours. Your behaviours create your results. If you want a new result, you must start by interrupting the thinking that leads to the old one.
Here’s a short process to experiment with this week:
1. Catch the Pattern Early
First, become aware of the patterns that aren’t serving you. Notice when you're slipping into old habits like negative self-talk, procrastination, anxious thinking. Awareness is 80% of the solution towards winning the battle.
2. Interrupt the Sequence
When you spot the pattern beginning, interrupt it immediately. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You might:
• Utilise a powerful resource anchor.
• Say something out loud (“something different this time!”)
• Stand up and change your posture to something more powerful.
• Take three deep, focussed, sharp breaths.
3. Install a New Thought
In the space you've created, choose a better thought. Something you find empowering like, "I'm capable and resourceful." or "I act now and succeed."
The new thought becomes the foundation for a new behaviour, and ultimately a new result.
In NLP, a strategy is simply the sequence of internal processes you use to achieve an outcome. You have strategies for everything, making decisions, motivating yourself, feeling love, avoiding pain. Some of your strategies are excellent. Some are outdated and ineffective. When you have a poor strategy (e.g. you motivate yourself through fear instead of inspiration), pattern interrupts become your best friend. A poor strategy is just a pattern, a predictable sequence of triggers, thoughts, feelings, and actions. Interrupt the pattern, and you dismantle the strategy.
Here is an example. Let’s say your strategy for starting a new project is:
1. Think about everything that could go wrong.
2. Feel overwhelmed.
3. Procrastinate.
If you wait for that sequence to run, you’ll stay stuck. If you spot the first step (worry) and interrupt it immediately, maybe by laughing at the absurdity of your catastrophic thinking, standing up, and saying, “I choose excitement over catastrophising!”, you break the chain. You prevent the overwhelm before it starts.
From there, you can install a new strategy:
1. Visualise success vividly.
2. Feel excited and empowered.
3. Take the first small action step.
This is how real change happens. Not by pushing harder against old patterns, by interrupting them and choosing something more resourceful.
Pattern interrupts are powerful because they create immediate awareness as you notice the unconscious process at work. They then offer a choice point, meaning you are no longer trapped in autopilot. Breaking the pattern engages a different neurology, shifting your physiology, emotions, and thoughts at the same time to strengthen new neural pathways.
During our Enhanced NLP Coach Practitioner Certification Training, we teach you to integrate pattern interrupts into your daily life, so change becomes not just possible, it becomes inevitable.
Like any skill, pattern interrupts get stronger with repetition. Celebrate each successful interruption. Over time, you’ll rewire yourself for success.
Mindset mastery is not reserved for the lucky few. It’s a skill set and one you can master. Pattern interrupts are one of the most powerful tools you can add to your toolkit. They give you the ability to disrupt what’s not working, rewire your thinking, and build strategies that truly serve you. You are not your patterns. You are the master of them.
Change doesn’t happen tomorrow. It happens now in the choice to interrupt what’s automatic and create what’s intentional. Are you ready to take control of your patterns and unlock your greatest potential? Let’s start your Quest for Success today.
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