I got a great question on my Yahoo Groups eGroup [nlpskills]:

What are the steps in the time line process? I do time line a couple of ways. The first way is good because you disassociate your client (or self). The second way it to have my client (self) walk the time line. Note: I am only outlining the disassociated model below.

Presupposition: The Past is a Myth. It didn’t occur the way you remember anyway, so you can now change how you represent it to yourself.

1. Pick an issue to work on; an unresourceful life pattern that reoccurs; something you want different, better in your life and behaviors.

2. Elicit the time line. “Put you index finger in the air. If you could point spatially to where you experience your time line coming to you from, where would you be pointing?”
- A. You will imagine your past time line coming from behind through you in the present and continuing out in front of you. [In Time]
- B. The time line will be out in front of you, and extending to the right and left. [Through Time]

3. Rise up above your time line and see yourself and your timeline down below. If you are In Time, move out over the time line and orient yourself down below facing the future at least for the purposes of the exercise.

4. Mark orientation to the future so you can get back to it and turn facing the past. Notice if it is not a straight line, straighten it right out. If there are dark spots along the way, brighten them up until the entire past is a single brightness, and brighten the whole thing up a little.

5. Now float back along the time line to the earliest experience or starting place of the unresourceful pattern in life. Imagine you can pull that experience up like a movie and run the movie out in front of you. See the event the way it occurred.

6. Step off the time line and access the creative part of you. Ask the Creative Part of come up with resources that you did not have then, but do have now. You can change the events, colors, brightness, or change the people, make them bigger or smaller, make yourself bigger, etc. or you can change the meaning of the event. Do the change work. Many different NLP processes could be used effectively here.

7. Put the representation of the event back down in your time line below and go to an earlier time; a good time, happy time. Pull the event up and access that event as if you are in it above the time line. Keeping the good feelings turn and face the present noticing that all the other events along the way are shifting and changing as you float past the original event and other events back to present now noticing that the future time line is also changing in relationship to the changes you already made in your time line now.

8. Come back down into the present. Associate to the present moment allowing the changes to have occurred.

Bill Thomason
NLP Success Coach
Certified NLP Trainer
www.nlpskills.com
www.nlplifecoachphoenix.com

When I say ‘unresourceful emotional content’ it may include difficult memories, or even repressed memories. For example, something happened in a person’s life, like my Father beat me; there is an emotional content to the experience (past the time of the event), and typically I am now experiencing symptoms from living life over the top of the unresourceful emotion. It’s limiting my life and/or communication in some way. In the case of ‘Father beat me,’ I might be hurt and angry and take it out on my wife or in another manifestation, I might have low self
esteem and not stand up for myself. I complain that people take advantage
of me.

Tad James says that one of the Prime Directives of the Unconscious is to
repress stored emotion and further, to bring it back up from time to time for reevaluation. Better to release or discharge the emotion in the moment or at the time of the event. People tend to avoid thinking about certain things so they don’t have to go into feeling the backlog of stored emotion.

Most people also label this emotional content as ‘negative.’ Sometimes people become immobile or stuck. They may generalize their fear to a number of situations. From an NLP point of view this ‘unresourceful emotional content’ is not necessarily negative, because every behavior has a positive intent. Even unresourceful/negative emotion can be seen as trying to do something for you. Otherwise you would not have it. In a healthy system, you would discharge the emotion (resourceful or unresourceful) and move on with your life, hopefully having learned from the experience.

Occasionally I get a client who says he or she cannot make pictures when I suggest they imagine something. THis is particularly difficult with time line work when I ask people rise up above where ther are sitting and see themselves down below or to look back into the past and make sure it is a straight line and to check if there are any dark spots along the way. NLP processes are heavily weighted toward people who are Visual modality processors. A common response might be, “When I try to see into the past, it just goes black.” Or “It so dim I can’t make it out very well.”

I have some ideas and the question is what do you do when you run up against this?

One idea I have is: These are most likely to be people who are primarily Auditory. So, I ask them to “just make up a story to go along with the suggestions I am giving.” About half of the people will take a breath, relax, and just do it that way.

Some people are mismatchers and need to mismatch information. If I tell them to visualize, they do something else. Once a ‘mismatcher’ has made the decision they can’t visualize, it gets more difficult because they are likely to dig their heals in more deeply and continue to get the results. Better to give them something to mismatch. Use negatives. “You don’t not want to choose not to see in your mind’s eye what I am suggesting now, don’t you? Don’t close your eyes and imagine too quickly now, won’t you?

Another possibility is the symbolism or metaphor of ‘goes black’. I might wonder about how my client is representing ‘goes black’ and what that might mean. Number one, it is a visual. Number two, it might be connected to avoiding an unresourceful emotional content.

What are ways you might think of now to deal with client who have difficulty visualizing?

The NLP Model for coaching includes 4 Steps to Achievement:

1. Know where you are.

2. Know where you want to go,

3. Make a plan, and

4. Follow the plan.

The book The Future of Management by Gary Hamel with Bill Breen, calls for paradigm shifts in business management and the way business thinks about innovation. Hamel suggests old management models have been one of “…humanity’s greatest inventions” that allowed management to transform “…complex tasks, into small, repeatable steps.” But these benefits are increasingly maladaptive to economic ecosystems. The old model has run its course in the face of globalization, speed of change, deregulation and digitization and survival dictates innovation meet these new criteria: 1. Novel new management principles, 2 be systemic, 3. ongoing so that innovation builds upon innovation.

Examples include Dave Whitman’s program at Whirlpool, Whole Food’s committment to team and hiring of employees, the shunning of hierarchy by Bill Gore at Gore-Tex in favor of a latticework organization, and Google’s allowing up to 20% unstructured creative time for employees to experiment with new products.

These examples point to a ‘new management’ where management trusts its employees and allow local decision-making, and Hamel suggests ways to start on new innovation modle that is focused on revolution, but implemented in an evolutionary manner with small initial steps so that people acclimate to change.

The implementation is consistent with NLP Business Coaching model that has clients,

1. Evaluate present practices – Where are you now?

2. Refocus through ideals – Where do you want to go?

3. Make a plan – include new technology and social media incorporate “You Tube” video, and collaborative “wiki” web sites, for example. Find low cost ways to experiment, and look for systeminc roots to problems so you are dealing with real issues and not symptoms, and don’t force people to participate and don’t discard old models too quickly.

4. Follow through on the plan – take immediate and decisive action in the direction of the new behaviors you have identified.

by Bill Thomason

Conflicts in Values

Values are described as those things that we will expend time, energy and effort to either move toward or away from in life. A primary skill from my NLP Practitioner Certification program is learning how to elicit values. Values are elicited anytime you ask the question, “What is important about ‘X’?”
I often say the ‘all conflict’ in a person’s life is conflict with values. People will do things when their values are out of whack that they would never do otherwise. When a parent or grandparent dies for example, siblings tend to squabble over seemingly silly things and the tone of the arguments can get outrageous even among people who generally like each. Each individual in going to be in a conflict between their own self interest, the interest of the family, protection of their own spouse and children, and feelings of inequity between other family memebers involved.
Coaching clients often complain about life situations that can be unhooked when you the coach can facilitate awareness and make a new plan around how to deal moving values back to their proper order.
Some values are Core Values. In other words they are even more closely held and deemed sacred. Other values tend to fit up inside the core values.

A next way to understand a person is to elicit what is meant specifically by the words they use to describe values and core values. Language is imprecise and we cannot expect to understand until we have asked what is meant. Lots of miscommunication occurs around the asumptions that we know what someone else means when they say, ‘security,’ or ‘family,’ or any other value being expressed.

The next step in helping a person unhook values conflicts to elicit a Valued Heirarchy. The question is, “If you had to choose between value A and B on your list, which would you say is more important A or B? A double check question is, “If you could not have vaule A, but could have vaule B, would that be OK?”

Next time: What to look for with regard to eliciation problems. NOTE: Just getting the information above will be geneerally self explanatory about what to do and how to use values. Lots of things will be clearer in your understaning of the person (or yourself) and it will be unusual to run into difficulties.

By Bill Thomason

A comment from an NLP social media group referenced a trainer who chastized a participant for doing a hypnotic induction with his partner in an exercise instead of the specific exercise requested.  Was the instructor guilty of stifling creativity?  The answer is:  I don’t know; I was not there.  However, it has me thinking about training.

From the point of view of being an NLP Trainer, it is a challenge in any group of people with varying levels of NLP experience. To create value, I really have to find a point in a room where I can focus my training that does not lose the beginners and keeps the seasoned NLPers learning something new.  This is an art form. I think I am really good at this and I get positive feedback most of the time. ‘There are no resistant students; only inflexuble trainers.’ I want to include or ‘utilize’ (Ericksonian) any behavior that comes up in my classes to move the group towards the learning I am going for and be open enough to include or harvest additional learnings.

Having said that, I find it is better in the debrief from an exercise when everyone in a class does generally the same exercise.  I had a guy in an NLP Practitioner class who really was ADHD (forgive me for labeling). He had trouble sitting still. Since he knew some NLP already, he was running Bandler’s spinning exercise in about half the exercises (about 3 years before Bandler’s new book introduced the spinning technique). I still feel bad about having to censure my student, but it was necessary.

That wasn’t what we were doing at all and it was out of context for novice participants who partnered with him. Some things actually interfere with the learning of others.  Let them learn the basics first.  Although I tend to jump around a lot (options style) I want students to be able to make as many connections as possilble at each learning level and order makes a difference (procedures) in allowing that to occur. “Wax on; wax off” if you remember the training methodology from Miagi in the Karate Kid movie.

Was I being inflexible or controlling?  If anything, I am more often criticized for being too permissive.  I actually like a little chaos in a room.  It adds a sense of excitment and adventure and often leads to new learnings. What do you think?

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When you know someone’s values, you can take them anywhere.

Hi I am just back from training the 10-Day NLP Practitioner and Coach Certification in Sedona Arizona.  We had some beautiful sunny days and got a few hikes in and we had some rain and snow, but not enough to slow down the learning.  Thanks to those people who came up from Phoenix on the weekends to learn and support the ongoing training participants.  The training was a great success.  Contact Bill for the next NLP Practitioner Certification at 602 321-7192.