Teaching Your Unconscious Mind to Work for You.

 A friend asked me recently how I manage to do so many things – and not appear to get stressed.  Good question… How do I do that?  Maybe I always have done lots of things.. maybe I suit it?  Or maybe I have learnt how to do lots.. easily.

Getting Your Unconscious Mind to Work for You.

A great way to manage lots of things to do is to prime your mind to work on them unconsciously for you when you are doing other things.. A bit like having a virtual assistant helping you each day.

If I have a list of deadlines.. I begin the work and then let it go for a while.  I might start a file and put down what is needed, some initial ideas and the deadline then close it for a few days.  An then not think about it.

 This way my unconscious mind can keep working on it while I am doing other things.. This way I come back to it with ideas and more clarity.

 This works because our unconscious mind likes to make sense of things, and behind the scenes will work on confusion, foggy thinking and ideas until some sense is made of it.  Coming back to things gives time for that to be sorted out.. and suddenly the floodgates can open and ideas can pour out. When stressing about ideas or needing clarity – walk away.. then come back later.

 Another Way of Looking At it….

I also love lots of variety, and I love interruptions.  So it appears that I am not stressed by these things.  It is all about learning what your personal programmes are – i.e. Your personality preferences and default positions and working to them. This decreases stress, increases pleasure and makes what we do flow better.  

So, if the opposite is happening in your life, and you are stressed by lots of variety, and hate interruptions, then maybe the job you are doing is not right for you… alternatively you can learn to move towards the other programme sort – by practicing it more.

These are the sort of things most of us don’t know about ourselves. How we see time, how we deal with change, how we filter information, what we naturally do and what we naturally don’t do.

Here is an example of how people filter information differently:

A group of friends and I go for coffee each week.  Sometimes someone comes in with a new haircut, or new glasses or new shoes or have just had their teeth whitened! .. and there are people who notice these things and those who don’t.  Those who do notice – have a natural propensity to notice difference.. first. Those who don’t notice changes have a natural default position of noticing sameness.  Neither is right or wrong. Its just the way it is.   

To expand the natural default position, takes intention and self awareness.

To learn more about these types of programmes, what makes you the individual you are, or to find other ways of doing things or saying things or seeing things then NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) courses can help with extending your experience.

Zoe Wilkinson is a Master Practitioner in NLP, Trainer, Coach and Therapist - and teaches NLP Classes at Tauranga Boys College, New Zealand each term.  In 2007 she was awarded an Exceptional Adult Educator Commendation for this work.  Contact Zoe on zoew@xtra.co.nz  

Gently Changing Children’s Behaviours – While they sleep!

One of the most frustrating things I hear about from parents – is the helplessness they feel when confronted with a small child’s challenging behaviour. It may be anything from a 2 year old biting people, a 7 year old sucking their thumb, a child new to school not using the bathroom… the list goes on. 

One of the most helpful, and gentle ways to change these behaviours is found in the use of “Sleep Talk”.  Sleep talk is where the parent reads a customised script to the child while they are asleep – repeating it over 5 nights.  The script is short, loving and caring, and impacts on their unconscious mind while they are asleep.  The result is usually an end to the problem behaviour, and an increase of confidence in the child. 

A recent case – a young 2 year old was biting people at the childcare centre, and at play with other children.  The parents also had a new baby to contend with and this newly emerging biting behaviour was causing a lot of stress, and a lot of irate caregivers and parents of the children this little chap was biting.

Putting any reasoning about the ‘why’ aside,  I created a personalised script and the parents were given the simple procedure to follow over the next 5 nights.  The result was that he stopped biting all together.  

Another case – a young girl had recently begun school and was soiling and wetting her pants as she didn’t want to use the school toilets.  A personalised script was created and the mother went about reading it to the daughter.  On the second day the girl, unprompted said to mum “I will be ok at school now mum, I can use the toilets.. I’m ok” and that was the end of it!  One night of the script had done the job.  A few months later the mother again approached me, and we created another script around taking risks, and having a go – the daughter was showing perfectionistic tendencies i.e. expecting to do something once and being great at it.  This script was also successful.  I also discussed with the mother how children model behaviour on parents fears and imprints, and suggested she work on her own self esteem so to model some great coping and learning strategies to her daughter.

I learned this process and modality from Sleep Talk, by Lois Haddad – and I recommend this book or you can contact me for personalised scripts for your child’s challenging behaviour. zoew@xtra.co.nz   Sleep Talk by Lois Haddad www.sleeptalk.net  

 

 

From Where I sit

Nothing like jumping headlong into the world of blogging… and not a moment too soon!

So what interests me? Observation and analysis of people, their language, behaviours and idosyncracies is what fascinates me! 

My key areas of application of these interests are in the area of NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) and Face Reading.  These two areas work especially well together to give insights into people, and makes them appear a lot more 3 dimentional.  Face Reading helps with seeing people deeper at a glance and then NLP kicks in when they open their mouths and reveal their beliefs, values and motivaions by their words.  Their consequent behaviours which either support or clash with their linguistic utterings are what makes it all so fascinating and useful.

Its not about judgement so much as analysis and awareness.  The very questions people ask you often will expose their biases, beliefs, and limitations – and this can useful as a therapist.   Learning NLP also helps develop a very interesting sense of linguistic humour!