15 fun little psychological tricks.

1. Friend-pleasing tip:

Whenever a friend tries to tell or show you something that you already know, it’s best to let them. It makes them feel good to show you something and for you to enjoy it. Sometimes if you say, ‘Oh, I already saw that, it’ll upset them a little bit.

2. The physical contact agreement trick:

Did you know that physical contact makes you more likely to say yes to a request?

3. Obtaining an item:

While talking to someone, ask through hand gestures for something the person is holding. You’ll probably get it.

4. Calming

If someone has a panic attack, start breathing really regularly and loudly. Even if it’s really obvious, the person that is panicking probably won’t notice. But they will start breathing in tempo with you. It’s something nurses do with ER patients when they can’t get themselves together.

This crosses over into rapport.

5. Make someone’s day

When you see someone you know, smile a little wider when you see them. It can brighten people’s day a little and make them feel like someone else is happy they’re around. It’s infectious, watch them smile back

6. Whispers:

If you whisper to someone, they’ll whisper back, even if there’s no reason to keep your voice down.

7. This popularity trick:

When a group of people laugh, they tend to look at the person they like the most.

8. Participation.

Getting people to contribute to an idea will make them be more likely to accept it. It doesn’t take that much involvement in the creative process to get people to take possession of a proposed plan. 

9. Giving compliments

Don’t be afraid to tell someone how nice they look or that they’re doing a good job, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the moment, it will make them feel a bit better and they will appreciate it.

10. The nervous / excited swap.

Nervousness and excitement have the same body reaction, so if you’re nervous for a speech for example, instead let yourself know you’re excited. You’ll give better speeches, too.

You can read more about this in our anchoring article.

11. This feeling-better tip:

The three minute rule: if it takes less than three minutes, do it and you will feel better. For example: making your bed, doing the dishes, etc. It makes you feel the tiniest bit better when you accomplish something small.

12. The ‘ear worm’

Try whistling a tune softly. People will pick up on it and you’ll notice people humming or whistling the tune themselves.

13. The ‘people-catching’ trick:

If you think someone is watching you, fake a yawn. Then watch them.

Another example of rapport in action, this time an example of leading.

14. This choice-giving hack:

Always give a person two choices. Give the non-preferred option first, including its negative effects. Pause. Then give the preferred option, shining light on its better effects.

This is a part of the agreement frame

15. Finally, this agreement hack:

Ask for something that seems small, but is related to what you really want. Then, once they’ve agreed to the small thing, just work up with slightly larger requests until you’ve achieved the desired outcome.

This is a part of the agreement frame strategy you can employ when selling your ideas to people.

I hope you have fun with these!

Low self-esteem can be the root cause of all types of problems. From eating disorders through to relationship issues.

How can we love others if we don’t love or value ourselves?

If we don’t love or value ourselves,if we have low self-esteem, it can lead us to feel that maybe there is no benefit in properly taking care of ourselves.

But it does not have to be like this.

Low self-esteem is something we learn how to do and, and if we can learn how to do it, we can just as easily unlearn it.

How do you know when to be confident and when not to be?

We may all, at times, experience a slight loss of confidence; perhaps if we have received a poor result in an exam or feedback from a boss that we hadn’t expected or missed a sales target or we are filled with unnecessary self-critical thoughts or just simply not seen the results we were hoping for.

Some people may be anxious, others may be shy. We all behave in the ways we do for a reason.

However, some reasons may not be very helpful and lead to low self-esteem and low self-confidence and these states are not helpful; they can lead to depression and ill health.

What can we do?

NLP offers an amazing set of tools that enable us to identify new ways of thinking and feeling, to provide us with new options that enable us to look at the world differently – confidently, and assured in our own ability to do the things we want to do and be the person we know we can be.

So for example let’s take self limiting beliefs. They hold us back and can seriously erode our self-esteem, but they can be easily addressed when we work with submodalities.

Or how about the feelings themselves, such as the feeling of confidence itself? We can use NLP anchoring techniques to allow us to manage our emotional states so we are working from a place of excellence rather than of limitation.

We don’t have to feel low, we can feel great!

To sum up

We can feel better about ourselves, even great if we want to!

Perhaps it’s not an instant process, but if we recognise we want to change, have the tools to do so and work at making it happen then the sky is the limit!

I think it is well worth bearing in mind a few of the ideas that are covered in the presuppositions of NLP…

• Everyone is doing the best they can with the resources they have available.
• People have all the Resources they need to succeed and to achieve their desired outcomes.
• Every behaviour is motivated by a positive intent.
• You are in charge of your mind, and therefore your results.

How to see the true nature of things

Have you ever caught up with an old friend and gone over old memories? You know “You remember that time when….” type of a thing. You’re reminiscing and enjoying the memories and they say something like “oh yeah, and you remember that Bill dropped his ice cream” and you think – was Bill even there that day?

Sometimes it can feel like you’re talking about two different times, you’re seeing the experience in completely different ways.

This is not at the experience level only. Sometimes it can be seen as something amusing and once your memory is jogged you come to remember a bit more clearly. However, this difference in the perceptions can destroy relationships and business partnerships, just because people don’t understand themselves and how they perceive the outside world.

so, how to see the true nature of things?

Your nervous system

OK, let’s start trying to understand things a little better by taking a brief look at how the nervous system works.

What about when we see things? The optical image of things falls on the retina and is then transmitted to the brain.

Now the question we should ask ourselves is, are we really seeing what we are looking at?

We filter information and this means that we perceive the external world in our own way, in the way we have already learnt how to perceive things. The brain perceives the external world the way it is already programmed to.

Sounds a bit odd doesn’t it? Let’s dig a little deeper into what’s happening.

Information delivery across the brain networks is transmitted chemically and electrically through brain cells called neurons. These cells are connected together forming a pathway through which electricity can flow.

During the process of storing information, chemicals are released and stored in our neurons.

The brain is composed of many networks between neurons. The structure of these networks can be modulated by the environment over time. The brain function can be reprogrammed through the modulated network structure, allowing humans to have the ability to learn and grow autonomously.

These programs also have the possibility to drift and this can cause stresses, addictions and false perceptions.

Think about it. The human brain contains 100 billion neurons and each neuron has about 10 to 15 synaptic connections. You can begin to see how much information our brains process daily. It’s huge!

Now let’s talk about the most interesting part, the experience.

Experiencing is just the phenomenon happening merely at one level, or layer if you like. This layer of the brain is what is called the subconscious. This is where all the experiences are installed and recalled in a very deep way. The subconscious processes are actually what determines how we experience and consequently perceive the world.

Through learning and development, neural pathways form within neural networks. Pathways across the networks run the function of the brain. Over time, certain pathways become more dominant because they are being reinforced with similar experiences.

Unfortunately, over time, habitual behaviours cause our neurons’ plasticity and pathways to become inflexible. In other words, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

So, as we form our own structure of thoughts, we tend to have our own interpretation of the things and see the world accordingly.

Each individual is likely to have a different perception of things and that is why the philosophers said that we can never see the true nature of things. We can only see the pathways we have been trained to see.

So, will we ever be able to see true reality?

If we regard reality as a purely subjective experience then, of course, we are seeing the true reality all the time. It’s your experience after all…

However, if we wish to experience reality in a more objective manner, more ‘accurately’ if you will, we will not be able to see the full reality unless we can understand our past very well.

What we have seen or done in the past strongly influences the way our memories are recorded. This also has a bearing on how we encode new experiences.

We will have to understand how our beliefs systems were formed and how they are controlling our thoughts, actions, language and perception.

How can I do that?

In NLP there are many tools we can use to help understand our dominant pathways and consequently the way we see life.

If we start with our internal world we can start by understanding our limiting beliefs and how we can go about addressing them.

From here there are many methods we can use to help us see the full picture. We cover these on the  NLP practitioner course and they include Association / Dissociation, exploring submodalities, NLP perceptual positions and many other techniques that can help us see ourselves and the nature of things in a new way.

In short, to be able to see the nature of things in a better way, we can follow these steps:

1. Understand our belief system and our past experience
2. Link the current experience to a similar past experience
3. Observe our feelings
4. Identify a root cause for our feelings
5. Decide to change our feelings
6. Give new meaning to the experience

In conclusion. By following these steps, we can discover a new way of seeing things. This should help build new pathways to a better understanding of reality.

Cool eh…..