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Having
narrated the background in which I place NLP through
the last three articles, now, we proceed to learn
and use NLP.
NLP proposes three steps to achieve what you want:
1.
Know what you want to achieve.
2.
Find where you are.
3.
Bridge the gap between where you are and
where you want to be.
We now proceed straight to the fist step in NLP: Knowing
what you want!
KNOWING
WHAT YOU WANT
Imagine
you are starting off on your car/bike to your home,
from your office. You are on a familiar road. And,
today, you have a companion traveling with you –
a friend, or family member. And you start chatting
along the way…and the vehicle keeps moving on.
After some time you have reached where wanted
to: your home.
Probably,
much of your driving was done by your unconscious
mind! You were engrossed in a conversation. But the
inner mind was busy calculating every move of yours,
as well of others on the road. You may not be
consciously aware of how many times you stopped on
the road for signals, or how many turns you made, or
how many vehicles you overtook and so on…
You
accessed the enormous power of your unconscious mind
to reach you home – by
just thinking of your destination and wanting to
reach there…. And your unconscious mind took
up the task of taking you home, safe!
You
not only knew where you wanted to reach, but you
knew it in such a way as to access your own inner powers to reach there with
ease.
How
wonderful it will be if you can reach every
destination in life with such ease! If you can model
the way drive unconsciously to your home, and
use that model to reach other destinations, you can
certainly achieve things, with ease and efficiency.
Remember, NLP is a science of modeling efficiency!
And we will learn to look at destinations and
motivate ourselves today.
Where
you want to be in next five or ten years?
You
may know where you want to reach in the next few
days, or months. But, often, you may not know where
you want to reach in the next five or ten years.
Hence, there is a risk that you may not be doing
today what will be useful to you in the long
run.
Particularly,
with a lot of changes constantly blowing in the
wind, the danger of one’s skills and services
becoming redundant is very real today than
anytime before. Hence, while doing well what one is
doing now, one also needs to keep a watchful eye on
emerging changes, and keep moving towards a world
that is yet to manifest itself.
Similarly,
you could think of other areas of life: what will my
health be like, in the next few years? Am I my
burning myself out with the present task so much
that when I have struggled hard and scaled great
heights professionally, my health will fail and ruin
all my achievements?
What should be my weight in next five years? How physically fit I would like to be then?
You
will also appreciate the need to plan for the
development of your relationships! Of what use will
it be if you got so absorbed with your mission that
you forgot your family? Coming home every day only
to retire, you may be missing the active life that
should be going on with your spouse and children!
Are you striving to have a deeper bond with your
growing children? Or, will they be getting estranged
as time goes on, with your not paying sufficient
attention to them now?
There
are areas you would do well to think and plan for,
now! The beauty in planning is that you take control
of your life – to a great extent! Your energies
get canalized, and your resources get used to the
maximum.
In
the NLP context, you will be able to access a lot of
unutilized resources and energies that have been
lying buried in you.
Be
focused on the destination, not so much on the
steps!
As
much as you can have a pleasant journey forward to
your destination, talking to a companion traveling with you in the car/bike, your development can be
also pleasant journey ahead. It will be less taxing
on you, if you can entrust much of the tasks to the
automatic pilot: the unconscious mind!
You
only be focused your destination…And deeply want
to reach there…And then, relax… The unconscious
is good at taking care of routines or what you do
repeatedly.
That
is, it is more useful to visualize the joy of
reaching your destination and move forward than be
counting the steps you have to take to reach your
destination. If your mind is fixed on the goals, and
is able to taste the joy of reaching the goal, now
itself, there is a tremendous surge of life and
energy that will guide you.
Take
this example: If a mother thinks of every bit of
work she has to do before dashing off to office,
item by item, even before she would get out of her
bed, she might feel depressed! There are any number
of things to be done. Washing, cooking, getting
children ready to school etc.
But
if she should see a cinema of her children eating a
good breakfast, and happily going to school, and
growing to become adults very soon, she may feel
enthused to get up and start work, and suddenly
realize the work got over in no time!
She
was immersed in the cinema of children eating and
growing, which is what she is aiming to achieve: The
destination of all her efforts. By focusing on the
destination, she can release a lot of energy. And
her routine work, like driving, can be easily done
by the unconscious mind.
Some
mothers are very efficient: They can finish their
work in no time; and besides, feel a lot of energy
too, after doing the work! There are others who feel
overwhelmed by the same tasks and feel
exhausted.
The difference between the two, probably, is this:
one is focused on the tasks; the other on the
destination. |
