Tom MacKay’s NLP Blog

Tomorrow on BBC2 is a show ‘The History Of Surgery’, which I will be on. The theme of the show is methods of pain management – before anaesthesia there were many different alternatives. One of these is hypnosis. In the show I hypnotize someone to increase their pain tolerance – hypnosis can be extremely effective in this. I used to work in a chronic pain clinic, helping patients manage their pain where traditional medical interventions may not have been effective.
Part of hypnosis involves changing where you focus your attention – in pain management if you can take your attention away from the painful area and focus on other things, you lose awareness of the discomfort.
More about this in the next blog…

Have you ever woken up and thought ‘today is going to be a great day!’ and bounced out of bed full of energy!
Maybe you have had the experience that seems to be more frequent – the alarm goes off, you struggle to open your eyes, feel the warmth of the bed and close your eyes again thinking ‘just another hour….’.
What is the difference?
Getting out of bed and feeling great involves a strategy. Strategies are the order and sequence of internal and external representations that lead to an outcome. All of our life involves strategies, and understanding strategies allows us to change what we do to get outstanding results.
People can learn all about strategies on our NLP Practitioner training.

As it goes when you run a business, as soon as I have a day off, I need to handle all sorts of things! I am finishing organising our NLP Master Practitioner training which will run later in the year, and there is certainly a lot to organise. Right the way from room hire to organising all the logistics. I remember when I first went on an NLP Practitioner training and I never considered the amount of planning that must go on to organise a training.
The most important thing is to provide an environment where students can learn most effectively – running an NLP training is not just about going through content but providing the most effective accelerated learning environment possible for the students.

I finished running an NLP Practitioner training on Sunday. I have been training for 10 days without a break! Sometimes I have trained for 40 days without a break! People often ask me how you can train for so long without a rest.
Well for me when I am running trainings, it really energises me. Working with people and helping them transform their lives is a real privelege and rather than draining energy, gives me energy.
That isn’t to say that I really enjoy a good break – spending time with my family is great.
Now I have a few days away from training – but not a break from the business!

Today on the NLP Practitioner training we have been teaching anchoring. This is all about emotions that get linked to triggers.
For example, have you got a piece of music that whenever you hear it it makes you feel a certain way?
Or maybe every time you smell a particular perfume it puts you in a certain state?
Neurologially we link things together – so whenever you are in an intense emotion, if there is a specific stimulus presented at the same time (like a piece of music, or someone’s expression), the two things will get linked up and the next time you see, hear or feel that stimulus, then you will tend to get into the same state.

I am currently running an NLP Practitioner training. Being just a few days through the course, it is great to find how people are challenged in their current beliefs and become aware of how they can really achieve so much more in their lives. Most people have never experienced the possibility that they can change quickly – they tend to assume that the things they believe are ‘real’ and cannot be changed. However within a few days of the training, people start to realise that it is possible to change beliefs that limit us and create the life we want to.

As discussed in the previous blogs, the key point is to avoid the meaning being too obvious in the metaphor. Not that is has to be completely obscure, but avoid the conscious connection to the story. So how do you do this?
A really useful way is to focus on what the problem is an example of. For example, someone who constantly behaves in a disruptive way could be an example of wanting attention, so the story would want to be around the theme of a demand for attention and the conscious content would be based on something of interest to the client.

In the last few blogs I have been talking about metaphors. In the last blog I talked about the journey from present state to desired state. This is the underlying basis of NLP.
In terms of metaphors one of the most important things to consider is creating a story that doesn’t directly relate to the client’s experience – if there is conscious connection, then the meaning will be obvious and the person may just take the story as advice.
So the metaphor needs to be isomorphic, where the characters and situations are displaced with characters in the story that symbolise the issues with the client.

Continuing the theme on metaphor – how do you make an effective metaphor? Once you have found out what the client wants (their desired state) and you have found out where they are now (present state), you also want to find out what resources they need to get to the desired state, or what is stopping them.
The extent of the perceived problem grows larger the bigger the gap between present state and desired state is. A good question is to ask ‘what is stopping you from having the outcome right now?’.
On our NLP Practitioner training we go into a lot of depth about how to elicit well defined outcomes.

So how do you create a metaphor? Metaphors when they work best will operate largely at an unconscious level. In order for this to work, you need to engage the conscious attention and help the client access resources at an unconscious level to help them achieve their desired state. So metaphors are an ideal way to do this.
We tell an engaging story to the client’s conscious mind and embedded within the metaphor is a journey to help the client discover the resources they need to make the change they want.
Metaphors may help the client access resources, reframe a situation, install a strategy and many other things also.