Are NLP and mindfulness compatible?

Can they work together?

The answer is yes, and in this post I will show you how…

Mindfulness is a wonderful state of being to be in. being very much in the present moment allows you to be keenly present and aware. 

There is something about conscious awareness that brings immediate calming and healing effects.
This is of course something that has been known for thousands of years.

Mindfulness can be achieved in a number of ways, meditation, observant practice, music and chanting and dance are all gateways to the ‘moment’. Hypnosis is also worth mentioning as a great tool, trance states are really the ultimate in being ‘here and now’.

How does NLP fit into this?

NLP is the study of the structure of subjective experience and knowing NLP opens up an understanding of how your inner life works.

When we understand the principles of how our inner life is structured, we can then of course start to change things to make them even more effective.

What happens when you combine NLP and mindfulness?

With the precision awareness that NLP provides, your conscious attention can find its way into so much more of your inner world. This means that you can extend healing to areas of your psyche that have always been outside of your awareness.

How NLP and Mindfulness Can Work Together

NLP provides an excellent structure for mindful awareness.
When using NLP a state of mindful awareness is generated, which focusses the attention.

More specifically…

1. NLP teaches that we all process information in modalities. In other words our information is represented in visual, auditory and kinesthetic (see, hear, feel) terms. (You can read more about modalities in our article Primary Representational Systems)
Being aware of this allows you to focus in on a particular internal image, sound or feeling for keener awareness.

2. NLP language patterns, such as the NLP meta model, provide a deepening opportunity for mindfulness practitioners. For example, when you become mindful of your self-talk, you can use NLP inspired questions to deepen your self-knowledge and insight.

3. NLP Submodalities provide an amazing way to capture the unique details of your inner world. When you apply NLP submodality distinctions to your awareness, you will realize details of your experience that you have never considered before, which greatly expands your mindfulness potential.

These three points represent tremendous healing opportunity – and more potential to explore mindfulness than you’ve ever had – or could ever have – without NLP training tools at your disposal.

Are your self-critical voices running your life?

Are they driving you to utter distraction?

Learn how to develop the mindset to stop any negative self-chatter that may be holding you back.

We’ll explore how to stop self-critical thoughts with this NLP Mindset.

It doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re doing. If you tend to be too self-critical of yourself even the best day can be ruined.

The inner critic can be a source of angst. Below I’ll explore the mindset that heals self-criticism and can help to stop self-critical thoughts from taking over.

End Self-Critical Thoughts by Addressing your Inner Critic

Have you ever caught yourself in the following mind patterns?

• Thinking that if you do well, it’s still not good enough.
• Being convinced that if something can go wrong it will.
• If you’re in a beautiful setting, then you probably don’t deserve to be there.
• Thinking that if you speak up, you’ll sound stupid.
• Worrying that if you relax, something bad will happen.
• Being concerned that if you say no, people will hate you.

While that self-critical voice is wreaking havoc in our mind, most of us try to ignore it or distract ourselves, or override the inner voice with positive affirmations. If these tactics don’t work for you, then consider the following mindset.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a more positive experience? learn how to stop self-critical thoughts with this NLP Mindset with the following simple technique.

Using curiosity

If you become curious about your inner critic, you may want to learn more about it. What does it want, really? What’s behind the barrage of negativity? What if you allowed it to just keep talking? Would it go on forever?

Sound risky to see if it would? Well, the great news is…

It wouldn’t go on forever.

Try this little experiment: First, get curious about your inner critic. What makes it tick? Then, consciously listen to the sound of the critical voice in your mind. Listen with curiosity! Whenever it finishes a sentence, then talk back to it. Mentally repeat what it says and then reply with an “and…?”

For example:

Inner Critic: You’re going to fail miserably.

You: I understand. I am going to fail miserably, and…?

Inner Critic: And you’ll never recover!

You:  OK, and I’ll never recover, and….?

Inner Critic: Because you’re unworthy of success.

You: I get it. I am unworthy of success, and….?

What typically happens after several rounds of this kind of inner dialogue? The inner critics does one of two things:

It either goes quiet and disappears or It begins to offer encouragement or positive remarks.

When it feels like our inner critic is out of control it’s usually when we get a negative statement, we then feel bad, and because we feel bad we try to ignore it. Trouble is it counters with another negative, usually unrelated to the first, and it all starts up again….

So how to turn it around

By respectfully acknowledging your inner voice you can see that the negative suggestions that it sometimes comes up with really don’t lead anywhere after all….

In a matter of minutes, you can turn your inner critic around!

No need to ignore it. No need to distract yourself and no need to get upset. Just become curious, listen consciously and talk back to yourself

Remember – your inner critic is just trying to protect you, to point out where you could do better. It’s just sometimes the voice sounds harsh and isn’t particularly helpful. It’s still your voice though and ignoring it is just going to make it feel it needs to speak louder for you to hear.

I love the phrase “be nice to yourself…..”, and it really works!

So – what’s the secret about how to feel good all day?

With this simple to-do list can you quickly learn how to feel good all day long.

Doesn’t it feel great when you accomplish a task, it’s so satisfying to get things done.

Why is it sometimes though that we just can’t seem to finish things off? Sometimes it’s our inspiration to get up and going and keep on at it that just falls short and never quite kicks in.

How to inspire yourself to feel good all day.

If you want to really make progress with that nagging to-do list then the best place to start is with how you’re feeling, a real infusion of positive feelings is going to set you up just right. Feeling good is going to keep you feeling inspired all day and your productivity will really start increasing.

We know this from the workplace as well, In the Harvard Business review Rob Markey wrote…

“It’s one more sign of the growing recognition that happy, engaged employees are more productive and generate better outcomes for their companies.”

Here’s the thing:

It’s not enough to wait for positive feelings about your accomplishments to show up on their own.

When you’re getting your daily to-do list ready, take a lesson from NLP and program them in!

The tips below will give you the perfect formula for success,

Remember the old phrase “To fail to plan it to plan to fail”?

It’s all in the setup….

Five Steps to Feel Good All Day Long

So – what’s the secret about how to feel good all day?

Have a look at the following five steps to set yourself up for success. As with everything in life, it may take a couple of goes to get the process working the way you’d like it, but once you have things then become much more automatic and less systematic. Don’t just take my word for it, give them a go….

1. What positive feelings do you want to feel during your day?

Be deliberate and intentional. Think of feelings you want to feel as you accomplish each task during the day and write them down.

Complete the sentence- “I want to feel _____________ today.”

Here are some examples:

• Proud of yourself
• Responsible
• Relieved
• Excited
• At Peace
• Self-Assured
• Grounded
• Balanced
• Joyful
• Inspired
• Worthy
• Calm
• Love

2. Take each task on your to-do list and attach a specific feeling from your list

Go through and identify specifically how you will feel when you’ve completed each task.

So for example:

Take out the rubbish: I will feel responsible
Complete the proposal for (so-and-so): I will feel excited
Finish doing my taxes: I will feel relieved
Take some exercise: I will feel proud of myself

Setting yourself up in this way and attaching a specific positive feeling the items on your to-do list programs your mind and body to actually feel those feeling at the appropriate time.

This is a huge step toward living a conscious and intentional life.

2. Dip your toe in the water.

The imagination is a powerful tool.

Imagine the completed task and getting a sense of the positive feeling in your body. Why not have a quick go now…..?

How about this, imagine finishing a task that you’ve attached to a feeling of peace. Do you feel the slight sense of peace in your body? If you do you know you’re doing it thoroughly.

When you imagine something well, your body responds. For example when you’re getting ready to order at a restaurant, your mind goes through a similar process. You’re imagining the foods you’d like, and your body responds to the thought of that food. You may even salivate.

Imagining your task being completed and prime your emotional pump. Feel that slight hit on the positive emotion that is sure to come. Your level of motivation will increase just through this simple visualisation.

4. Pat yourself on the back.

Take a moment when the task is done. There’s no need to be overly self-indulgent but you do deserve to feel good.

If you’ve set your to-do list up right, you’ll feel positive. Take a few moments to acknowledge and enjoy the feeling before moving on to the next task.

5. Let it all snowball.

By following this easy formula, you will arrive at genuinely positive feelings and start to really experience how to feel good all day.

Let it work, let the effects snowball. Before you know it the process will fade into the background and you’ll just wake up in the morning with positive expectations of getting stuff done and feeling good throughout the day.

When you anticipate what you have to do, you’ll see the positive feeling potential. You can then work from positive feeling to positive feeling all day long.

Are you not willing to accept each opportunity to feel good?

If you’re in a rut of feeling bad, the prospect of feeling good all the time might be intimidating. So intimidating, in fact, that you might very well avoid positive feelings altogether and continue feeling down instead.

One study published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research suggested that a primary cause of depression was the act of suppressing positive feelings. The positive feelings were there. People just found ways to avoid them.

Suppressing positive feelings? – now that may sound strange. The thing is sometimes we find ourselves in a spiral and land in a rut, and that rut, although unpleasant, can feel strangely comforting in its familiarity.

If this is you, there may be no more important goal than to learn to embrace positive feelings. After all, what are your goals in life if they don’t involve feeling good?

So, imagine feeling your best every single day. What would happen?

Here are some common responses from people in a rut

• It would never last, so why bother?
• I’ll be setting myself up for bad news and disappointment.
• People will expect too much of me.
• It doesn’t feel like me.
• I don’t deserve to feel that good.

And so we manage to talk ourselves out of feeling good. If you think about it, it’s a form of self-sabotage.

Such negative self-talk can, unfortunately, become a habit, and after a while, you may not even notice doing it to yourself! Such an ingrained habit that you might actually need to train yourself to tolerate feeling good!

If that’s what you need to do, then do it. The following steps will help you along the way.

1. Identify the pattern.

This is a pattern – a habit – of avoiding positive feelings. See it as a pattern. In order to reduce feeling rejected, take a mental step back and consider several examples of the pattern over time. The first step to breaking a pattern is to know it is there.

2. Consider how you learned to do this.

When you want to unlearn a habit, sometimes it helps to identify how you learned it in the first place. Where and when did you learn to avoid positive feelings? Have you ever suffered because you expressed positive feelings?

Chances are that regardless of when and how you learned this pattern, it is no longer appropriate for you, right? This is important to understand as you move forward.

3. Reassure yourself.

You need to counteract any of the negative messages above by reassuring yourself. Here are some examples of how to counteract the above-mentioned negative self-talk.

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4. Be nice to yourself.

You’re in training now. You’ve identified a pattern and are beginning to reverse it. If you’ve been in the habit of avoiding positive feelings to keep feeling rejected, then it may take some time to retrain yourself. However, you’ll get better and better at this. Be patient with yourself as you learn these new skills.

5. Make it a personal practice.

Don’t expect perfection. Both positive and negative feelings are inevitable. All of us experience a range of emotion and not every day is full of bliss. Don’t expect it to be. Just keep working at and your practice of feeling good will develop.

Follow these simple tips and take the opportunity to feel good, you deserve it.

Why is it that we sometimes make good decisions and sometimes we make bad decisions? Is it impulsiveness? Impatience? Pressure?

In this article, I’ll give you a few tips about how to learn to stop making bad choices from now on.

Analyzing and understanding the differences in our decision-making process can make all the difference moving ahead in your life with confidence and without regrets.

So, where do we start? Well, we start by looking at the NLP VAK process

No idea what the VAK Decision Making Process is? 

VAK stands for Visual, Audio and Kinesthetic modalities (See more about modalities here in our article Primary Representational Systems). So in NLP when we refer to VAK, we are referring to the way a person processes information using these modalities.

You may have heard about people being more receptive to learning if they learn using their preferred modality. In other words, some people learn better with visual information, some are more suited to auditory information, and for some people their preferred system is kinaesthetic (or physical / felt if you like)

Decision making when using VAK is a similar sort of thing, the basis is the same but with some differences. Let’s get into a bit more detail to understand how to use VAK to stop making bad choices.

VAK in Decision Making

What’s going on in your mind when you make a decision? Try this little exercise to get an insight.

Think about the best decision that you ever made. How did you come to the decision? Did you talk to anyone about it (auditory)? Did you form a picture in your mind of what you wanted (visual)? Did the thought of having or doing it make you feel good (kinesthetic)?

Now, think of a bad decision you made, one you regret. How did you come to that decision? Did you get input from others (auditory)? Did the idea make you feel excited (kinesthetic)? Were you swayed by the way something or someone looked (visual)?

By reviewing your good and bad choices, you can see what areas, or modality, you focused on when making the choice. To make a good choice, according to NLP, you must include each modality – Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic.

How was the process different for the good decision vs. the bad decision?

To drill into this a bit further. For a decision to be one that has a chance of being a good one it’s not just about what needs to be there (V / A / K) but also about what might also be missing.

Every student I’ve worked with says that the process of decision making and making good decisions rests on having an auditory component. 99% of the time a missing auditory component was the recipe for a bad decision.

So, we can see that the formula for a good decision is:
V + K + A = good decisions

And the formula for a bad decision is:
V + K – A = bad decisions

Examples of the visual component could be liking the look of something you want to buy, seeing yourself in the environment you want to move to, or seeing the beautiful person you want to marry.

An example of kinesthetic could be the feel of a new car’s leather interior, a feeling of happiness when you are around that certain someone special, the excitement of starting a new relationship. Kinesthetic can be an external touch or an internal feeling.

An example of auditory could be talking your decision over with someone or talking to yourself.

Now, when you have implemented all elements of VAK, technically, it should result in a good decision, right?

Not necessarily true!

So, we have on the face of it the chance for a good decision. We have the V / A / K components in place. Great!

Let’s break it down a little further so we can really understand how to stop making bad choices

V – Visual – You like the look of it.

K – Kinaesthetic – You like the feel or the feeling

A – You have heard something.

Now the key to me is in making sure that all of the elements are positive. Remember I said missing the auditory part is going to have a high chance of leading to a bad decision? Well, here’s the thing. The auditory part can be present, but if it’s bad it’s not going to be helping much.

If it is auditory external (in the form of someone talking to you) make sure it’s helpful to your goal. And that doesn’t just mean what you want to hear!

Think about when you were a teenager. Your parents would try to tell you not to do this or that. You would say, “You know what, I know best. That’s all very interesting but……”

Or, you would tell your friend an idea and he would encourage you to do it, but it was really a stupid idea and he was an immature as you.

It’s all too easy to seek self-supporting advice, to ask someone who you know will give you the answer you want, rather than the answer you need.

Slow down the decision making process!

Impulsive decision making usually does not turn out well. Impulsive decision making is always missing the audio component. The audio takes too long and who has the time, right? I want it now!

Even if you do have an auditory component is it helping form a good decision?

You might say that you did talk to someone about the decision. However, they may have been a partner in crime, they might have been the fiancé, the salesman, your buddy. They may simply have been too close to the decision you were trying to make, It may be that you knew this all along and were just looking for validation rather than advice!

When we want what we want, and we don’t want to persuaded against it, we either don’t want to hear advice we don’t want, or we just don’t listen!

So, the real challenge with the VAK decision making process is choosing the right auditory tactic and listening, no matter what. Easier said than done.

There is only one reason we don’t do this. We don’t want to be persuaded against what we really want.

Let’s be honest, we know when we are acting impulsively!

 Listen!

To make a good decision and stop making bad choices, you must choose a neutral person to talk with. Ask them questions, listen with an open mind. They don’t have the kinesthetic or emotional connection to the outcome like you do so are going to be impartial.

Then, after incorporating that audio portion into your decision, if you still kinesthetically feel the same way about the decision, go for it!

VAK is a great technique to keep in mind, and by implementing it, you will make much better and clearer decisions.

Try it out, it really helps!