How do we do Behaviour?

Have you ever wondered how is it that you do what you do? In my experience and doing what I do, most people really don’t know how they do what they do. In fact they don’t ever have awareness that they are doing stuff!! If asked they can recall, but as things happen they are quite unconscious about their behaviours.

Now how different can you imagine your life could be if you had a level of internal awareness, and exercised choice and control about how you felt when “stuff” happened?

So let’s see what our behaviours are made up of!!??

Think of a time when you recently had something happen and you felt either very good or very bad. Go back to that memory now!

Now ask yourself: how is my body right now? Am I frowning, smiling, what are my muscles doing? Are they tense or relaxed? What else am I physically feeling? Keep going and keep asking 'til you have no more answers.

Then think of what memory you are bringing up at that moment. In other words how is it that you are able to think of this specific memory? What pictures are you making? Or as we would say in NLP terms, what internal representations are you making? So what are you representing to yourself again internally through the access of memory? Could you compare this to the “Darling buds of May” or the famous “Friday the 13th” movie? Are you thinking of good stuff or scaring yourself to horror? You laugh, but think about it. No one is doing this to you, but yourself. So look at this picture and now ask yourself: Is this a movie or a still picture (like a photo)? Is it in colour or in B&W? Is it near or far? Is it big or small? Now if this is something good, keep it like it is or even better enhance it and notice how much better you feel right now! If it is not something good, drain the colour away, and then shrink it, put some distance between you and the picture, keep pushing it away from you 'til you have no emotional response to it. Now notice how much better you feel!!

So the third thing to notice is that internal dialogue we have. Yes the voice in your head. What are you saying to yourself? Are the words empowering and encouraging, making you feel fantastic, and confident, or are they putting you down? What is the tone of the voice? What is the tempo…fast or slow……..soft or loud? Again keep asking yourself until you have full understanding of what it is that you are saying and how you are saying it. And again, if the voice is not kind and encouraging change it and make it either funny or comical. Move the voice around, even put it on your thumb and hold your hand straight forward!! How does it feel now? How does it feel when you move it and you change the tone of the voice?

So in conclusion, whenever you are not feeling as you would like to feel, STOP!

Ask yourself 3 questions:

What am I doing with my body?

What pictures am I making up?

What is the voice in my head telling me and how?

Change one, if not all three, and you will not be able to do that behaviour and feel the way you did.

Yes it is that simple and the more you do this the easier it becomes.

Try it and let me know. I would love to get some of your feedback.

As this is my 1st Newsletter, I would like to thank you for your time to have read this and if you know of someone that would enjoy reading this, please let them know about me and ask them to sign up for one of their own.

Are you over-generalizing?

Now, generalizations are something we do very instinctively. Once we learn to do something it becomes an unconscious act and so it feels like an instinct, as we don’t pay too much attention to what we are doing. If we did not have this process, we would have to re learn everything over and over again each time we would want do something.

So lets go back in time, right now. Imagine that you are 6 months old or so, lying in your bedroom, and you see there is something that you have not noticed before....something that later on you find out is a door. It has been there all the time but this is the first time that you have registered it consciously. And this something has an object to the one side in the middle....later on you will discover it to be a door handle. So there you are sitting merrily on a pillow or a mat and you notice that your family move in and out of rooms using this something. As time passes you eventually figure out that this is a door and this is a handle and if you use the handle you can open the door and go through it. You would be very conscious in doing this, the first time in your life. That would be the first experience, and which ever way it works out, you achieve a result that would turn into a strategy, which in turn becomes a belief. This could be a positive or a negative result. In truth, it is just an event that you will uniquely label.

Now if you did not generalize this experience into a strategy you would have to learn what a door is, what a handle is and what to do with them every time that you come across them. So to make life easy we generalize … all the time. We do this with everything, so that we don’t have to re-learn things in our everyday lives. However, we also tend to do what we call over generalization of events in our lives, with little evidence of the truth in our belief. How would you know you are doing this? Have you ever hear the words “every time, always, all, never, ever,” in a sentence? Well, these usually indicate the use of generalizations.

I have heard someone say to me that they were too scared to start a business that they truly believed in because everyone would think that they were crazy. That she was entertaining yet another crazy idea. I asked who everyone was. Through our discussion together, we narrowed down everyone from the whole planet to just 3 people! And those 3 people she didn’t care much about! Her over generalization scared her to the point of not being able to move forward! After I showed her and talked her through what she was doing, she was able to let go. She was able to feel the difference.

What generalization trance are you imprisoning yourself within? What are you not doing as a result of a generalization that you have not thought through? Take note of what you are saying or what the people around you are saying and how generalizations are being used continually!!! Once you have noticed your over-generalizations, now challenge them by asking yourself if they are true.

Take care

Regards

Vicky