As a Transformational Coach and NLP Trainer with over 20 years of experience under my belt, I’ve had thousands of clients and students tell me that they feel stuck in one way or another. Sales people would say, “I know I need to do some prospecting, but I just can’t get started.” Overweight clients would say, “I know I need to eat differently and exercise; I just can’t get motivated to do it.” These are both examples of the difference between setting a goal and achieving a goal. All of us have had the experience of making New Year’s Resolutions only to discover that within a short time, if we started them at all, they were abandoned, yet when we make them we are pumped up. What happens between pumped up and actually taking action? How do we get “stuck”?
Let’s take a look at how the mind works to find the answer to this question. You have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. Your conscious mind is your goal setter; however your unconscious mind is the goal getter, generating the feelings and behaviors that will either move you toward or away from your goal. It is the jet propulsion system that moves you out of the “stuck” space and into action. Have you ever noticed that when you set goals and don’t achieve them it’s as if a part of you is pulling you away from the goal through behavior that sabotages your success? It’s is almost like having two teams of horses pulling in opposite directions. This occurs because the conscious and unconscious minds are not communicating effectively.
This is understandable since most of us have not been trained in how to program our mind to align the conscious mind’s goals with the unconscious mind’s feelings and behaviors. Most of the behaviors that we have are programmed by default, that is, we learned them unconsciously; unless they bother us, we simply take them for granted.
There are really only six things we do in our head to create emotional states and behavior.
We make pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes and we have self-talk. How we organize these in sequence creates behavior that either produces the results we want or self-sabotaging behavior we don’t want.
There are some distinctions in these things we do in our head, such as location of the picture, whether it is a movie or a still, up close or far away, etc. These distinctions are how we encode these internal representations of reality that create our emotional states and our behavior.
Take a moment to remember a time when you were extremely pumped up about something you wanted to do. Pick a single event and notice the picture you have, the sounds you hear and the feelings you have as you step into your body inside the picture. Notice how pumped up you are feeling! While you are feeling pumped-up reach up and pinch your earlobe and hold it until the pumped-up feeling begins to dissipate. Release your earlobe. Reach up again and give that same earlobe a pinch and notice how pumped up you feel now. If you do this with 3 or 4 more events from the past where you were pumped up you will have a button on your earlobe that you can fire off whenever you want to feel pumped up about an activity you need to perform. One of my clients, a sales person, asked me how to stay in an up mood when all the people around her are so negative. I showed her this technique among some other’s I have up my sleeve and her sales went through the roof. Test it out and share it with your friends. Spread excitement!
