This month I want to talk about the importance of perseverance.

Life is full of challenges and opportunities. Just when you think you have everything sorted, often you'll find yourself facing the most challenging of difficulties. Just when you think everything has gone wrong and all hope is lost, along comes an opportunity out of the blue.

Happiness in Ireland is a concept which has started to provoke interest in the media over the last couple of years. It is about time that the focus was put on happiness instead of depression. So many people suffer from depression and what few realise is that the more 'depression' is a problem, the bigger it will get.

When I first started learning NLP I heard Richard (Bandler) say over and over again... state is the key. It's from the right state that you make the best decisions. Now that never made enough sense to me because although I reasoned that if I was in a bad state my decisions would not be always that clever, I figured that if I was delirious then I would be more likely to make mistakes as much.

It's only in the last year I have realised certain things about my experiences with making decisions and communicting with people. I began to understand that so often I would get myself in a bad state by communicting with others while in that state. My decisions to talk and about what to say were based on what I felt and NOT on what the most useful thing to do was. Now it took me a bit of time to be really aware of how I was doing this and I soon learned something remarkable.

Wrong side of bed in the morning!!! One of those days!!! I just woke up pissed off!!! How many times do you feel this way or hear someone describing things like this? My guess is too many. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, we just feel bad… we can’t explain it, it just happens. There is no rationale or reason… but that still doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about it.

Our physiology has a large part to play in the way we feel. It’s not simply our thoughts that control what we feel from day to day. It’s also the condition of our bodies. Whether we exercise, are getting good sleep and are eating healthily will all have a large impact upon how we feel at any given moment in time.

What problem this poses is that it affects our bodies and neurochemistry at the same time. It’s not just how we stand or sit or whether we smile or frown that affects our feelings, it’s also how we are treating our body in general. Now before you get worried, I am not about to prostatise to you that you must only eat vegetables and sleep 8 hours a day and exercise regularly.

What I will say on that matter is that it is important you a) get a good amount of sleep as regularly as possible and get into a routine b) exercise regularly and get into a routine and c) eat healthy foods more of the time.. and we all know what are healthy and what aren’t!!

Now, the main thing I want to point out here is that if you’ve found yourself not in the best states these days and yet believe that you are using NLP successfully in changing the way you think more positively and usefully, here’s the secret that you have been missing. The art is to BECOME MORE AWARE OF THE STATE YOU ARE IN and STEP OUT OF IT. Now, I know it sounds easy than it’s supposedly done, but you’ll be surprised.

What I’m saying is to pay attention to how you feel and instead of giving yourself a real hard time about it and feeling worse for feeling bad or trying desperately to change it, simply acknowledge it and be aware of any behaviours and decisions that you might have to make and resolve NOT to make them while you are in that state.

If you know it’s a state that you are going through temporarily then you can avoid snapping at people or making stupid decisions because even when you are in that state and your thinking is distorted, when you make yourself conscious that it is a state… you can make much more rational decisions!!!

Normally we act on impulse and although that’s great when we are on a roll, it ain’t so great when we are feeling exhausted or irritable. So when you’re body isn’t in the best state, while you know your thinking is affected, you get to step outside of the state you are in to make the decisions that are rationally speaking the cleverest for you… that way your outcomes in life don’t suffer from your state and you avoid the biggest trap of NLPers… feeling bad because with NLP they shouldn’t be… when you simply don’t give a shit because you know THIS TOO WILL PASS…. Then you get to make good decisions and do great things no matter how you feel and give yourself lots more reasons to feel wonderful!!

Developing the Laughter Filter
 
Imagine one simple secret that could help you deal with any situation in life more resourcefully and effectively than ever before. Well it comes from humour. You think I’m joking? Don’t make me laugh.

When I modelled Billy Connolly and Eddie Izzard a few years ago, one of the things I became fascinated with as I watched many other comedians, was the ability they had to turn ordinary experiences into hilarious laughter. I realised what great performers actually do. In a nutshell, Great performers take the ordinary and make it extraordinary.

Most comedians I watched had, what I called a ‘Laughter Filter’. A ‘Laughter Filter’ turns ANY experience you are having at any given moment in time into a humourous incident. The art is when you are going through a situation in which you would have felt angry or stressed or disappointed or frustrated to ASK YOURSELF “How would I tell this story as a stand up comic?”

This one simple question has produced MASSIVE CHANGES to my experience of life. Now, what kind of things are useful to bare in mind when you think about doing stand up comedy. Firstly, lots of stand up works on EXAGGERATION. Take whatever situation you are in and exaggerate some aspect of it.

For incidence, imagine if you are waiting in a queue at a bank and getting impatient. You might use this as a parody for how slow they are. It is almost like they were doing it on purpose. You could imagine a situation in which they wouldn’t or couldn’t be slow and imagine them being slow anyway (for example, as firemen and women in a burning building). It’s in changing the context of some behaviour and exaggerating it, we find humour apparent.

Another suggestion, think about the situation in relation to how aliens would react to it. For example, consider the disappointment from not going up and talking to a person you would have liked to.. (oh, I should have asked him that question; god, why didn’t I ask her out?). Now, what would aliens say if they came down and saw your goal was to chat to the other person and your strategy was to go inside your head and imagine them rejecting you. It’s the hilariousness of looking at the ridiculousness of our behaviour as human beings sometimes that can change the way we feel about it.

One more example, take a situation in which you have gotten angry. Now, some of the best skills comedians have, are their ability to take situations that make them angry and describe them comically. Through using sarcasm you can take situations that make you feel pissed off and turn it into an event that is hilarious. Consider your boss or a customer screaming abuse at you for some unfair reason. Imagining how you would relive the experience in a sarcastic way. For example, imagine taking their abuse and going over the top apologising like you apoligised really sarcastically as if you said how so, so, so sorry you were, crying like a little school girl… the more over the top you go and the more ridiculous you make it, the more the event makes you laugh. This way you get to control how you represent the experience and it turns from aggrivating to liberating…

So, these are some clues of how to use the ‘LAUGHTER FILTER’ to turn your problems into jokes. As Richard (Bandler) says “People often say one day I’ll look back at this and laugh, I always ask: WHY WAIT??”

NLP: Educating the Skeptics & Cynics

When I first got into this area of NLP, I was a cynic totally and completely. In no way did I believe that a phobia could be cured so quickly, that you could feel really good most of the time or that you could change your beliefs so easily. Ireland, I believe, is quite a cynical nation and many of the people who I have met have been very sceptical about NLP like me when I first began exploring the area.

What I have to say is not to convince the sceptics or cynics out there that NLP has all the answers or indeed that it is the solution to most of your problems. It is only a different way of thinking. It is a way of thinking which challenges the alternatives. There are lots of different ways about looking at the way we think or behave and the way we do things. NLP shows us ways of looking at these things, which are, by their very nature, useful.

The art of using NLP is to begin being more cynical about all that, which made you feel bad and more open to what works for you usefully. We all have choices. If we choose to look at NLP as a cult or as a pop psychology movement filled with hype then we could but we would be missing what it is truly about. We would be missing all the things we could get from it. We would be missing all the tools we could learn which could help us in our lives. We would be missing out on valuable learnings because we prefer to ‘feel right’ than we do to help ourselves.

I still think that there is a need for cynicism and skeptisism but it’s vastly overrated. I am still cynical about certain things but only until I gain and experience in it. When I experience something myself that’s when I will judge if it works or not, if it’s valid or not.

In the world we live in, distinguishing what is real and not, what is true and not, what is right and not, is not an easy task. For every scientist you can give me to prove one side of some argument I can give you another who can prove the exact opposite. We all live in these models of the world and from them we have certain views, certain ways of speaking about things, different feelings about things.

Some of our models hold us back from being effective and some of them allow us to be effective. If we believe we are good learners, that will open up our learning channels and allow us to take in information more easily. If we believe we are bad musically then our belief will hold us back. We will use it as the blueprint for our efforts in music and we will work to fail.. it’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

My training is as a researcher, a scientist, but I’ve always preferred getting my hands dirty and practising in the real world. The fundamental flaw I’ve found in science was not that they didn’t accept things were true until they got proof, it’s the type of proof that they are looking for.

I won’t except anything as true unless I have proof and the proof I’m talking about is an experience. According to the scientific method in all cases proof exists according to certain rules that must be followed for standardisation yet most of the time standardisation simply restricts the ability of the experiment to work properly.