Do this for me. Think of an experience that makes you feel great, or terrible. Something that annoys or excites you. Do this now. Anything you feel strongly about. Good or bad – but please, nothing traumatic.
When you’ve settled on something, and felt the flutter of response, review what it was you saw in your mind. A short film or mental picture would undoubtedly have appeared, triggering that emotion. One of
the more sensible tenets of NLP is that the way you represent this picture or film will affect the way you emotionally respond to it. To test this, try two things: first, enlarge the picture and make it brighter and more colourful. Turn up the sound and turn it into a sharp, high-definition image. Zoom in on it. Changing the picture in this way is very likely to increase your emotional response. Now try the opposite. Make the image smaller, and let the colour run out of it. Make it rather fuzzy and darker. If this is something you were witness to, shift the ‘camera’ to a third-person perspective: see yourself in the picture rather than viewing it out of your own eyes. Pull the black and white picture away from you until it feels far away. Doing this can cause your emotional response to dwindle away almost to nothing at all.
Here you are consciously controlling variables that your mind naturally finds for itself. You really can’t feel strongly about anything unless you represent it vividly to yourself, which normally means large, close-up images seen through the first-person perspective. Equally, it’s hard to get excited about something you think of in a far-off, fuzzy way. Compare what appears in your head when you think of a great time you recently had with a person – pause; do that now and note what comes to mind – with imagining going out and buying some jam with a work colleague who doesn’t particularly interest you (now do that). At a guess, I’d say you saw the first image from your own perspective, right slap in front of you, clear and sharp and detailed. The second image of preserve shopping probably included you in it (i.e., was seen from a third-person perspective), was vague and difficult to pin down, maybe greyer, smaller, somehow further away, somehow not right in front of you like the first one.
By changing those variables – the size, shape, colour, brightness and position of the image – you can play a lot with how you naturally react to the content of it. One very useful idea if, say, you want to feel more motivated about a task is to look at how you picture something that does motivate you, then shift the problem task so it looks and feels the same as the one that naturally gets you all worked up. In fact, if you trick yourself into representing it in exactly the same way, you really can’t not feel that buzz of motivation. It’s a fascinating exercise. It can become a quick way of making yourself feel better about anything. If something is bothering you, shrink it down, desaturate the colour, move it away and shift to that third-person perspective; if you want to feel more excitement, make the picture big and buzzy and colourful, bring it in close and make sure you see the scene through your own eyes.
If you do find that making these shifts doesn’t quite do the trick of changing the feelings, the chances are you haven’t made the changes correctly. For example, take your image of the activity that motivates you and makes you feel good. Pinpoint something where you feel very motivated and focused. You wish to use this as a template to make your internal representation of a ‘boring’ activity more exciting. If you have difficulty succeeding in this, break the process down into the following steps:
1. Bring up the ‘motivated’ picture. You should have no problems thinking about it. If you do, change to another one. Hold the image in your head, or, if it plays like a film, loop it around a few times while you ask yourself these sorts of questions about the picture:
i. Is it a movie or a still picture?
ii. Is it in strong colour? Desaturated? Black and white? iii. Is it close to you? At arm’s length?
iv. How large is the image?
v. Do you feel inside it, as if it were wrap-around? vi. Is any movement fast or slow?
vii. Is the picture in front of you? Are you looking up or down at it? Notice its position. viii. Are you in the image, or looking out of your own eyes?
2. Now look at the ‘unmotivated’ picture of the task you wish to feel differently about. Ask yourself the same questions and see what’s different or the same about the two pictures.
3. Now place the ‘unmotivated’ or ‘boring’ activity into the position occupied by the ‘motivated’ picture and make it look and feel like the latter. Change all of those variables and let it fall into place. Don’t hold back, just let it feel like the motivated picture.
4. For good measure, put a bit of ‘sizzle’ into this new picture. Intensify it a bit more; give it more of what you’ve given it already. Sometimes it can be fun to imagine a theme tune in your head which captures the spirit, and play that as you have the new image burst with vitality. It might help to imagine a pressure sensation against your back, pushing you into the image. Play around with these things and you’ll soon get the idea.
All well and good, but you now need to make this re-formating happen naturally. Because we tend to do what’s familiar, the key now is to tell the brain to represent the picture in this more exciting new way rather than the boring first way. This you can do by repeating the action of moving the image from the old place into the new place, and bringing in all those changes. Literally start with it in the old, boring position with all its tedious qualities, then shove it into the new ‘motivated’ position, with all its colour and vibrancy. What’s important here is that you only make the move one way: you’re telling your brain ‘Not this . . . this!’, and you don’t want it confused as to which way to make the change. So do the change quickly and forcefully five times or so in a row, ‘clearing the screen’ between each change so that you can begin each time with the picture in its start position.
Then test it. How do you feel about the old task? Unless there are other major issues that need to be looked at, you should notice an immediate improvement in your reaction to the task, in a way that feels quite natural and organic.
What appeals to me about these techniques is that they are just re-creating what you would naturally do anyway if you came to feel the new way about the task. As we don’t have to insist on NLP or any other particular approach, we can safely assert that what becomes important is not a special technique but an attitude, of being able to shift your mind into a more positive gear through thinking in terms of process without always getting bogged down in the logistics or content of the problems at hand.
There is an intriguing physical correlative of this process: changing your physiology can make a marked difference in your emotional response to a troublesome thought. Find something else that makes you feel bad inside when you think about it. Something you know wouldn’t be a problem if you were able to feel more confident in the face of it. Let your mind run with it a while, and you’ll probably notice that it affects how you sit: you start slumping, or your head drops a little. Now do this. Stand up, put your shoulders back, straighten your back and look forwards and upwards. Try to feel bad about the same thing. You can’t really, can you? Making physiological shifts like this are often a quick, easy way of getting your emotions to follow suit. If you need to do an extra set of particular exercises in the gym, or to walk into a room of people when you’re feeling anti-social, or if you find yourself mulling over a problem and making yourself feel bad, try these sorts of shifts. Act as if you’re in a more resourceful state, adopting the relevant posture and very often you’ll soon find that your emotions follow suit.