REFLECTIONS FROM NLP TRAINING: DAY 1 - SPIRALS
The biggest lesson from the first day of NLP training was that our unconscious creates our reality. I already believed this to be true, but wasn't expecting so many examples to appear as reflections in other people. Peek-a-boo, I'm in you.
Also, I'll share a couple low-key mentions of some exciting new projects. See if you can spot what they are?
But first, let's talk about the unconscious mind and how it's such a control freak.
Creating our reality is part of the unconscious mind's job. To keep the assembly line of our body and behaviors running smoothly and predictably. Thank you unconscious for doing so much. You are very powerful. I don't want to change you but maybe if you did this one thing a little differently.
Changing the unconscious mind can be like catching wild hogs. They won't willingly walk into a fully built box trap. Hogs are too wily and cautious for that. But if you slowly build a trap over time, they get used to the changes. Before they know it, you've got a wild hog in an box...
Anyway, today I learned that in any given moment there are 2 million bits of information coming in. However we can only consciously process 126 bits. The rest is filtered by the unconscious.
It's in this filtering that we consciously recognize what the unconscious deems as safe and expected. Like buying a new car and suddenly seeing that model everywhere. Where attention goes energy flows.
Emotions, however, can quickly override the conscious mind's control. This is when the flight or flight (or fawn or freeze) response kicks in. It's like when Taiichi Ohno introduced the Andon cord at Toyota, he revolutionized the assembly line by giving the ability for any one worker to pull a lever to stop the entire line. When they did this accidents went down, safety and quality went up, and the soul of unborn Elon Musk shook his head at the lost productivity and started wondering how to use robots instead.
Emotions, when heightened, can pull a lever to stop the usual flow of control and set us into unconscious behaviors. That is unless we practice using our emotional muscles and strengthen our nervous system so that the unconscious mind doesn't freak out so easily.
Luckily we don’t have to be at the mercy of emotions and the unconscious and its programming. Through practice and tools we can reprogram the unconscious and treat emotions as the magic they are. Once we do this it’s amazing what happens.
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I showed up to this training at a hotel after signing up months ago really just to learn NLP to help with my own mindsets and for coaching. Turns out I was surprised to be served a buffet of exactly what I needed.
It started literally at the hotel buffet. I hadn't eaten breakfast so I asked the server if I could have an apple. He asked if I was staying at the hotel to which I replied no. Inside I was screaming that the jig is up, but without missing a beat he said...go for it. Yay, free apple!
Recently I got the idea to teach a workshop on emotional expression. I'm getting such positive feedback when I share the concept, but will save details for a later time. The point here is that several of the presentations contained info I'll repurpose, like a metaphor for the baggage we carry around - which also appeared in a recent tantra event, hello again - and mention of a study that proved anger can lead to heart disease.
During this past Monday night coaching call someone mentioned how most diseases, even the physical ones, are caused by mental and emotional issues. This is something I know to be true so I started wondering if there was a study or percentage that supports this. Well, today during a presentation the speaker quoted from the book The Divided Mind that 99% of disease is psychosomatic, which means involving body and mind/emotions.
Last week a friend reached out to me to see if I would be interested in co-authoring a book with him. My answer was an immediate yes. Without going into much detail it's about the different parts of the mind. Fast forward to today and an entire presentation was about the three parts of the self. And the course material has tons of info I can pull from to create different scenes for the book.
On the lunch break I went outside and took the highway sidewalk South to eat. On the way I bumped into the only other person walking alongside IH-35. Go figure, even at lunch hour there aren't a lot of people walking alongside the highway. He was also at the NLP conference so we had that rapport going for us.
He’s originally from Israel and now lives in LA. It turns out he’s thinking about moving to Austin. Being from Austin I was able to share a lot about the city and possibly convince another person from California to move here...So I gave him a tour through the shopping center parking lot to a food trailer. Turns out we had a lot in common and wonderful conversation, and he’s still thinking of moving here.
A woman I sat next to for most of the day did a goals exercise sharing with me. She too is looking for her tribe. Now maybe it's in vogue these days to be looking for your tribe, but that wasn't all we had in common.
When I mentioned the goal of having the WAE of Emotions as a bestseller she revealed she also is in to emotions. She recently created an art exhibit based on the Atlas of Emotions that had 4,000 visitors in one day. We also talked about the anger of young boys, how difficult it can be to have no control of what happens when they are in school, how much social conditioning plays a role and what we as parents can do about it all.
In another exercise half the group went outside the room and was told something secret. The secret for who remained in the room was to mirror and match whoever sits next to us to practice building rapport. In walked a woman from Dallas who sat down next to me and began telling a story.
I tried my best to cross my legs as elegantly as she did and thought she might catch on to what I was up to. Afterwards she said she was trying to mirror me, so we ended up holding the same pose for most of the time which wasn't exactly not comfortable.
Her story was about a solo trip to Hawaii for a Deepak Chopra conference. Just a couple hours before that I had written down Deepak Chopra as it was mentioned he proved the mind body connection (aka psychosomatics, hello again). The woman said she teaches yoga so I brought up that I'm studying to teach Kundalini yoga. Turns out she teaches Kundalini yoga too, which often involves holding poses for extended periods of time. So I'm not sure if we were both mirroring or practicing or what really happened there.
Wow. That's a lot of synchronicities for one day. Mind, body, emotions. All in one big spiral increasing in frequency as I dive deeper into it. Now I'm so curious what will happen next on days 2-4 (and beyond).
