In the previous posts, you learned about Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and why change is so hard.
Before we move on to how we can reprogram our own subconscious patterns and operating system, I want to touch on Internal Representations and the NLP Model of Communication.
Have you ever found yourself wondering about these scenarios:
Why we can see an event and have a completely different view, interpretation or reaction than the person sitting next to us?
How, you and a colleague can read the same document and both had an entirely different idea about what it actually said/meant?
How siblings can grow up together, in the same household, with the same parents, go to the same schools, and have a completely different view of their upbringing?
How when you hear a news story one friend reacts in anger and another is indifferent?
How some adults can live a happy, healthy, and productive life after experiencing child abuse and others let the experience impact their life in a negative way, blaming the event for everything that goes wrong in their life.
How some people easily move on from a relationship that ended badly and others hold on to the anger and allow the experience to impact future relationships?
Each one of us has their own Internal Representation, which is impacted by many factors such as our values, beliefs, memories, experiences, and so on.
Your subconscious sees and hears everything around us and stores all of our memories, but like a dam that can only hold so much water, our conscious can only take in and process so much information at once.
For example, when you walk into a room, your subconscious retains and stores everything it sees, but when asked to describe every detail of the room, consciously, we can only remember a few details.
When there is more water than a dam can handle, it overflows, right?
As our conscious can only handle a limited amount of information at once, so it does three things; it deletes, distorts and generalizes information based on factors such as values, memories, and so on.
Think about the volumes of emails you receive in a day. Reviewing and responding to them could be a full time job in itself, right?
So, what do you do?
You typically view them at a glance, see who they’re from, determine what’s important to review now, you categorize some and put them in folders, (which you may/not review later), and you also delete what appears to be junk without even opening. And think about it, even the ones you do read, you may interpret the message differently from its sender’s intent, based on your time restrictions, stress, and so on.
You’re filtering your emails, based on your experience, the importance you place on the sender, time factors, and so on.
Your conscious also has filters which goes through the process of deleting, distorting and generalizing information based on various factors such as our values, beliefs, memories, and experiences. This is a reason the interpretation of an event can drastically vary from one person to another.
Based on our filters, our internal representation of an event can impact our mental state and our mental state can impact our physical state, and in turn can impact our behaviors.
You can change anyone of those and impact another state the other (e.g, change physical state & impact mental).
Let’s take an event of losing a job.
We can choose to interpret losing a job as a devastating event based on past limiting beliefs such as ‘you must not have been good enough if you lost your job’, or ‘your job is your identity’, or 'if they valued your work, they would not have let you go', and so on.
In turn, you feel down, feel exhausted of energy, you decide to become inactive and stay in bed and loaf around, complain about what happened, and not take any action to look for another opportunity.
Now, you can always change your internal representation or state, for example:
You can change your physical state by immediately jumping out of bed in the morning, exercising or doing incantations. This in turn will help change your mental state and in turn change your behavior/actions.
You can change how you are looking at the event. Instead of seeing it as the worst thing that has happened to you, see it as an opportunity to move toward something you’ve always wanted to do but never made time for, spending time with your children, you can focus on your personal development, learning a new skill, or transitioning to a new career.
You can also update or reprogram your values and beliefs.
The bottom line here, because there are 8 billion subconscious programs walking this earth, and an infinite number of ways to interpret an event, all based how we delete, distort and generalize information based on various factors such as our values, beliefs, memories, and individual experiences, we have at least 8 billion different views or internal pictures of any one event or situation.
The good news is that we all have the ability to update our subconscious programs!
I talk more about this in the next video /post.
In the meantime, to learn more about change or how a Personal Breakthrough Experience can help you take back control of your life and help you achieve your goals, click here or go to: www.liveyouryellowbrickroad.com/coaching.
Transform Yourself, Transform Your Life!
Joanne
Live Your Yellow Brick Road
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