Tom MacKay’s NLP Blog

Sometimes limiting beliefs can hold someone back from making a change in their lives. On our NLP trainings, we constantly see people make incredible changes which transform their lives. However, some people do not seem to change so easily. It reminds me of the old joke

How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? 1, but the light bulb has to want to change…

At the end of the day, people have to want to change for anything to work. It doesn’t matter how effective the technology, you can ‘take a horse to water, but you can’t MAKE it drink’

People often get a lot of what we call secondary gain from their problems – for effective change, this needs to be explored and dealt with. More in the next blog…

In this blog I though I would talk about changing beliefs. Changing beliefs is an important part of our NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner trainings. One way to work at changing beliefs is through finding enough counter-examples. When we are presented with enough evidence to the contrary of something that we believe, we tend to loosen our grip on the belief itself.
For example, there was a lady who once visited a well known therapist and she thought she was ugly because she had very large lips. The therapist asked her to do some research on certain cultures in old National Geographic magazines. In the cultures she was exploring, having large lips were deemed to be of the highest beauty. Also when she started looking in details at various fashion magazines, she notices a lot of models with large lips.
She began to see this feature as something of beauty, rather than ugliness.
More in the next blog…

We all have dreams. Making these dreams reality is one of the most rewarding things we can do. However many people have dreams but never do anything about them.
What is it that stops people from achieving their dreams?
There are different things that stop people from making their dreams reality. One major factor is limiting beliefs.
We all have beliefs about ourselves, other people and the world. These beliefs may be enabling or disenabling. Disenabling beliefs are those which somehow limit us. Beliefs such as “I could never be successful / I am too old / I am too young…”.
As Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can, or whether you think you cannot, you are probably right…”.
An important part of our NLP training looks at changing limiting beliefs – more in the next blog…

I started running an NLP Practitioner Training on Saturday. It is always exciting to work with a new group of people wanting to transform their lives. I must have run over 50 or 60 Practitioner trainings, and at the beginning of the training I always encourage students to set clear outcomes. To learn most effectively, it really is important to have clear outcomes in mind, and for students to realise their benefits from the training, having a clear evidence procedure for knowing whether they have achieved their outcome is essential.
When you set an outcome, you need a clear measure to let you know if you are getting closer or further away from your outcome. For example, if you were laying down a train track, if one track was laid down at a slight angle away from the other track, you might not notice it for a while, but miles in the distance, there would be an extremely wide gap between them.
The sooner you take action on the feedback, the better.

Yesterday I talked about NLP and leadership. One of the qualities of a great leader is to inspire – one of the reasons I believe NLP is so important in education.
So how can NLP help with the ability to inspire?
Emotional intelligence is something being talked about all over the business world. Being able to be aware of your own emotional state and being able to control it and being aware of someone else’s emotional state and being able to influence it.
NLP is all about communication – with ourselves and other people. When we change the way we communicate we impact our own emotions and the emotions of others….

Yesterday I wrote a blog about NLP in education. Today I am thinking about the role of NLP in leadership.
What qualities make a great leader?
One major factor can be summarised with “To lead is to inspire”
Many people think that leadership is simply a matter of telling people what to do, however have you experienced good and bad leadership in your own life at some time? What really made the difference?
When talking about education yesterday, a great teacher is a good example of great leadership.
Great teachers are ones that inspire their students to learn and to want to continue learning and developing.
In my own life, NLP offers some of the most profound techniques to help inspire and lead…

NLP – Neuro Linguistic Programming basically could be defined as:
Neuro – involving the sensory input that comes into us – what we see, hear, feel, taste & smell
Linguistic – how we linguistically encode that within us
Programming – the patterns that are behind everything we do
On our NLP trainings, we sometimes define NLP as the art and science of using the language of your brain to consistently achieve your desired results.
Another definition of NLP is that it is the User’s Guide To Your Brain

As well as communicate with other people, we also have to communicate with our selves. We have a way of representing all of our experience to ourselves. Words are one way that we do this. Other means are through pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells. So the language of our minds are not just words, but a full multi-sensory experience. One major focus of our NLP trainings is in exploring and taking charge of this internal experience, so that we can get more of the results that we want.
In a similar way, when we use NLP in coaching we help clients take charge of their mind and emotions so that they can achieve the results they want.

NLP in education is a very important area for me. With a young child myself, getting the best possible education possible is of key importance to me. However, what constitutes good education and what are the uses of NLP in education?
First, when I see my young son, I can tell that he is basically learning all the time. An average walk around the house constitutes countless opportunities for curiosity about everything going on. This spirit of curiosity is one of the driving forces in learning.
Often, when education is focused so much on exams, this causes a great deal of tension, which itself is the major enemy of learning. Tension inhibits our ability to learn.
With children being examined from the earliest possible age, stress starts early.
In NLP we constantly reinforce that the Map Is Not the Territory – using NLP in education we can see that a major factor in learning is that we all have very different learning styles, and teaching in the same way to everyone will not work in practice. If a student is not learning, then the question is how can the teacher change their approach to help the student learn. Unfortunately there is not the time to do this always, however as more teachers learn NLP, we can see major changes happening.

I was talking yesterday about how rapport in NLP in Sales and Business is of critical importance. Another area that NLP can make the crucial difference in Sales and in Business is in the use of language. One important principle is in saying what you want and not what you don’t want.
This is particularly important in setting outcomes. Whatever area you are working in, whether it is NLP in Sports, NLP in Business, NLP In Education or NLP in Therapy, setting a clear outcome is critical, and the first stage is to say it the way you want it.
Many people know what they don’t want, but not what they want. For example, someone could say ‘I don’t want to keep getting stressed in traffic’. This is very different from saying’ I want to be calm and in control in traffic’. Try them both out now and notice the difference in how they feel. In one, you have to think about stress in not to do it and in the other you focus on the outcome.
A little like carrying a tray of drinks into a room and someone says ‘Don’t spill them ‘ and suddenly you start to wobble.
So the important thing is focus on what you want and not what you don’t want.

In the last blog, I introduced NLP In Sales. We talked about Rapport, so lets go a little deeper this time. Using NLP in business or NLP in sales gives you tools for building rapport beyond any other system I have come across. The basic principle is built upon the technique of matching and mirroring, where you essentially behave and communicate in similar ways to the other person.
Some of the things you can use when you are building rapport in any context, whether it is NLP is sales, business, education or any area include:
Matching physiology – standing or sitting in a similar physiology to the other person
Gestures – when you talk using similar key gestures to the other person
Key words – if the other person uses certain key words or phrases, then using them as well can help to build rapport
Content – the classic way to build rapport is to find something in common with the other person and talk about that
Breathing – matching the other person’s breathing – something tricky to do, however can be exceedingly effective
The most important things to do is to do these things gracefully – the most effective way is by learning them on an NLP training.
More about NLP in Sales in the next blog…