Tag: Submodalities

Categories
Hypnosis and NLP

Changework with NLP Submodalities

Quick Introduction to Changing NLP Submodalities

One of the most useful techniques from NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is changing what are called visual submodalities. For this article we will be doing a simple exploration of how this works.

The technique you’re about to learn is something that I use a lot in the office (The Washington DC Hypnosis Center) when someone comes in with a fear for instance. Although it’s not the only technique we use, it tends to get rid of the emotional ties that are connected to memories (literally, the pictures we see in our heads when we think about something that happened in the past).

Have you ever gotten bad feelings from remembering something?

Now, chances are that if you’re human, you have memories of things in your life that didn’t turn out perfectly. If I ask you right now to think of something really not great that happened to you, some version of sadness, anger, guilt, or another less than positive emotion will probably come up.

This technique works wonders to wipe out those negative feelings from the memory. Once you have learned the lesson that was there for you to learn, there is no need to keep having yourself feel bad. But, for most people, they have no idea how to get rid of that feeling, and are being triggered by that memory — in a sense, they are living at the “effect” of life.

What we want to do is to shift this, so that you can think about whatever happened and instead of having the same reaction, you’ll be able to feel peaceful and in control. Got it? 🙂

The prerequisite to this technique is that you can see a picture, movie, or polaroid of the event, which most people can do well.

A quick and very effective NLP submodality process

  1. View the “problem” image that you don’t like
  2. Change it to black and white
  3. Push it further away from you as if putting it on a movie screen
  4. Now move your awareness a couple steps back, and look at yourself looking at that black and white picture
  5. Make the picture smaller and push it way back, so that it’s about the size of a postage stamp, way off into the distance
  6. Make it translucent or transparent so you can see through it
  7. Turn the picture upside down
  8. Start to fill in that postage stamp picture with your favorite color that makes you feel good
  9. Now see only the solid color that you like in that space, and zoom that forward into the place where the other picture used to be.
  10. Notice how you feel. Try to get back the same feeling you had at Step #1. Rinse and repeat if desired.

That’s It!

I highly encourage you to use this process often. It isn’t in any particular order, but this is the way I tend to use it. Once someone has the process down, they can usually do it very quickly. Have fun!

Share
Categories
Hypnosis and NLP

NLP and Hypnosis Belief Change Using Transparency

Engage the imagination, Change the belief.

Here is a belief change process that is quite cool that I came up with today. It hasn’t been coded yet into a “ready set and go” technique but for the intermediate to advanced hypnotists and NLPers out there, you will find a lot of great things to use in this. This is best done when you have already elicited the limiting belief, and the resourceful belief that they want to replace it with. Enjoy.

The Process

The setting is that your beliefs or thoughts are like a transparency that’s been put on a projector in a room… so that when you flip the projector on, it appears to light up kind of big on the screen, right? [Get them to agree, this is leading] It SEEMS real, right? [This is distancing them from it]

But you know that in reality that someone wrote those words on there, or put those pictures up there, and you could actually just erase them and start over. So imagine your limiting beliefs that you want to change being up there, and you know that since they are on a projector, that they have a bit of transparency to them, they are just light being projected.

Now these beliefs, of course, are very old, and dusty, aren’t they. [Tag question] Maybe they have fingerprints on them, or maybe the pictures are faded, or the words are partially erased from being written in that whiteboard marker that wipes off so easily.

And you know that at any time you could flip on the lights and that the projector would not be the only thing you would be focused on, and if the projector turns off, then you become aware of the rest of the room. And so up until now you have had those beliefs [Notice the changing of tenses here to put the beliefs in the past] up there, and they were up there shining pretty brightly and kind of taking over your attention … but you know at any time you can go ahead and flip on the lights in the classroom [Command], and realize that you are still learning.

Note: this is a metaphorical shift; we started off with a projector, then I added in that it’s in a room, then a classroom.

From being in a classroom we know we have the classroom lights and the projector lights, and if you turn on the classroom lights then it becomes obvious that the projector is no longer real. When we are in classrooms, we learn things. So I’m framing the whole process as a learning experience.

And if before those old beliefs start to fade away the lights turn on [Command and leading language], then you can grab the old transparency of those old beliefs and spray it with some solution to remove all the dust and grime, and maybe some of the old beliefs start to smudge as well, or maybe they wipe off all at once. Then find the trashcan and throw away that transparency, and take a new one out of the pack that is completely clean and free of smudges.

Now if you take the time to think about what would be better things to believe, notice if it is something where the better images immediately pop into place on the projector and you believe it just as strongly, or if you need to first dim the lights before the new images come up and they start to entrance you. [Double Bind]

So make sure that the new beliefs are just the way that you want them, and then you can dim the lights and start to play the pictures on the projector. Maybe they are moving pictures and you start to dream about how nice it is to believe these things, having had made these changes [Hypnosis Language Patterns]

Notes and Comments

If you wanted to you could easily make this into a more action-step type of process. The way I discovered this was by talking one of my clients through a changework process in which they had wanted to change some beliefs. They wanted to use a submodality swish, but they didn’t seem to be having much luck with it, so I came up with a new metaphor: the transparency on the projector.

There are lots of other things you can play with in this. I purposefully picked a transparency, because one of the visual submodality shifts is whether or not an image is solid or transparent. So if the client wasn’t quite getting it, I could easily go back to making the old beliefs transparent. And if I wanted to concrete the new beliefs, I would have them go back to being completely focused on the projection of the transparency, and have them step into it, making it real and solid.

By changing the context of what is happening, I make a shift between “old beliefs” (transparent / projector) and “new beliefs” (real and solid) … there’s also some great stuff in there about how they are always in a classroom, which means they are always learning, and so if they are learning then they can’t possibly have old beliefs (which were just written on a transparency with magic marker) to be somehow “stuck” there… instead we can spray solution on it, erase the old beliefs, smudge them, and do whatever to do them, because they are only a transparency…

Get the structure? 🙂 I really like this one. Try it out and leave a comment to let me know how well it worked for you!

Share
Categories
Personal Development

Mastering your internal voices

I’ve worked with many people on eliminating the inner voices they have. In a recent talk that we did, we had 20 people sheepishly raise their hands as they admitted that they too sometimes didn’t say the nicest stuff to themselves.

What happens when you take that voice and move it to a different location? Really tune in to where it is and just move it. See how it works over there and what the change is. And is the voice a deep tone, or is it high pitched and scratchy?

Basically, map out all of the submodalities. Is it near or distant? Are you awake or are you starting to become drowsy? Take that sound and imagine that you are putting it in a sound-proof box, and before you close the lid make sure that you can live without it for a couple seconds. And close the lid and see what that feels like.

And maybe that voice is very powerful. Maybe it has you think about things. And if it is that powerful, why not put a different set of words for the voice. Change it to a happy tonality. And find out if you can turn this into a positive experience.

Now… forget all of that… and lets go for an adventure.

Imagine your eyes are closed and that your hearing can become more sensitive and you may remain conscious of your breath and remain unconscious of another part. And I want you to start out with some very loud bass drums with a steady beat, and feel them in your body. Notice what happens when you move the drums closer to you and this sounds good.

Now. Add in some sound effects from mother nature – an earthquake that your unconscious can step into the big screen to fully immerse yourself in this experience. And since you feel that powerfully you can begin to feel the adrenaline of being faced right in the wake of the tornado, and the deep-seated rumble from the belly of a giant thunder storm.

Hear the CRACK of the lightning and how it impacts you… and do you remember when you could figure out how far away it was by counting the seconds? Until your trance, feel that beginning and if you could see the sunshine and the sound of some birds.

Notice what that’s like … and this should be your every moment experience.

Take control of your voices, crank them up, and change them however you’d like. Hear what Yoda would sound like inside of your head. And then hear Goofy, giving yourself all that bad advice.

The basic process is to elicit your own submodalities (find a list of them and go through how your own voice relates to that), figure out if the voice is positive or negative and if you want it, throw it in a box or in someone’s pocket. And do all of this in a sufficiently deep state.

Since you have attained that by now, you may have already started to make these changes. 😉

Suggestions for new YouTube videos?

Share