If you find yourself repeating disruptive or destructive behaviour patterns and reactions to situations, or drive yourself mad with overthinking, ruminating and even irrational thoughts that blow reality out of all proportion, you may be a candidate for Neuro Linguistic Programming, says human behaviour expert and NLP coach ANITA TOMECKI.
Do you ever wonder how your mind works? Where your feelings come from, those sometimes irrational thoughts that you drive yourself crazy with?
Those happy thoughts, as you imagine into the future. Or those thoughts of frustration when recalling an incident from the past, memories of days gone by, anxiety about the days to come.
What would it look, feel, sound like to really be able to understand how these thoughts and feelings occur and how we as human beings create them?
Would you like to live a life free of these anxious thoughts and feelings? To be present to each moment rather than in a world of internal self-talk? How can we be fully present, in the moment, when we live in today’s world of busy-ness and constant distraction?
Not so easy perhaps for those of us who aren’t able to spend our days meditating on a mountain!
How would you like to be able to understand how we make meaning, how we attach meaning to words, to language, and how we delete, distort and generalise reality and memories and continuously project into the future? How we create and actualise our thoughts, making real the not real …
Well let me introduce you to Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).
WHAT IS NLP?
It is truly a model for self-realisation, for understanding the mind, how it runs, how we allow it to run us! It helps us to see how we program ourselves through the language we use and the meaning we attach to words and then run this on repeat so it becomes programmed into our mind and neurology.
We therefore experience the world through the language learned and the meaning we have made of it. This meaning is then programmed by us and becomes coded.
It is important then to know we were gifted much of these meanings in childhood. To know this is, then, to know that we don’t have to hold on to these meanings now we are no longer children.
Through this programming we also learn how to attach labels to feelings.
An example of this is: How do you experience excitement arising in the body? And then, how do you experience anxiety? How do you know to call it excitement or anxiety? Because you were gifted this.
And, actually, do you experience these feelings in your body in the same way, butterflies in the stomach perhaps when excited? Butterflies in the stomach when anxious?
So how do we know to call the feeling arising in our body “anxiety” in that moment? Could it not be excitement? To understand that we have choice in how we label sensations, we now have the opportunity to reframe these in our mind and to see what is really true versus what has became a habit.
Emotions are simply energy-in-motion. How we label them is how we experience them.
LOOKING FURTHER INTO ANXIETY
This is when people are living in the future in mind and playing out worst case scenarios of what may happen. As this plays out in mind, sensations may arise in the body.
Anxiety therefore is to be in fear of what hasn’t happened but what you are imagining will happen. The more emotion a person is experiencing, the further away they are from the present moment. The future is made up and most of the time what we fear does not actualise.
When we are not “present”, this is when we will react. Reacting is re-enacting something from the past – for example getting angry. It is not necessarily true right there in that moment. We simply know how to do anger so well that we bring it into situations where it is not even true for us rather just the habit of us replaying.
EXTERNAL EVENTS
NLP offers the opportunity to see when we are in the face of an external event, how we take this in and make meaning of it through our programmed mind rather than simply seeing it for what it is.
We don’t see reality as it is, we see reality as we are.
Have you ever had a conversation with someone recalling an event which led to a debate over what “actually” happened?
The reason you were unable to agree is because you have both made your own versions of the event based on your own filters. This can be likened to a game of Chinese whispers, which starts off as a set of words spoken by one person and by the time this has been passed from person to person ends up with the final one having a distorted version of what was originally whispered.
Until we can see this, we are simply living in our own version of “reality” and not understanding why people don’t see things in the same way they themselves do. It is not the situation that is the problem, it is the meaning we bring to the situation that can cause us to get into unresourceful states.
All that we are doing by spending our time in the past and future is missing out on this moment, not fully engaging all of our senses in the moment and therefore missing out on the now. The potential of you is now, where none of the constructs of past and future exist.
Your power is not in the future outcome or in the past memories, it is all here for you if you choose, anything else is an illusion created in mind.
FINDING THE FREEDOM
NLP helps us to understand how we map our sense of reality, how we make meaning of language, how we live in the past and future and how the past and future are not a true representation but simply a construct of our mind. It provides tools to refine and transform the experience of our reality. It provides opportunity to understand how we run ourselves by bringing the unconscious to our conscious awareness, enriching our relationship not only to self but the relationships with those around us and our overall experience of life.
Through the work of starting to see how thoughts and personality have been constructed in childhood and run on autopilot, we have a chance to change what is no longer working for us.
Through a newfound awareness it is possible to trust in the unfolding of life. This work is a process and so takes time. The more kind you can be to self through this the easier it is.
Self-development is a beautiful process which can be challenging and confronting as we start to really get to know ourselves and no longer be a prisoner to the past and project horror movies into the future.
And there’s a whole lot of freedom from mind, and peace available at the other side.
BIO
Anita Tomecki is an NLP Master Practitioner, human behaviour expert/coach and workshop facilitator. Anita has many years of experience working with both women and men on making changes in their lives, having spent over a decade on this process with herself. Experiencing first-hand the power of fully understanding her own mind and body’s programming, Anita works with people on a daily basis to firstly understand themselves and then make the necessary changes to live a more free and present existence. If you’d like to get in touch, go to LinkedIn: Anita Tomecki or Instagram: Anita Tomecki.
