The problem with stress is that it closes up your focus so all you can see is the thing that is hard. It's difficult to access your best strengths or your best perspective from within tunnel vision. Use this exercise to open up better choices.

Use this exercise to get at more of what you need to overcome a challenge or solve a problem. Remember yourself through the eyes of someone who knew you when you were younger, someone who resisted you or competed with you, and someone who loves you. Image by Henrik Nordell from Pixabay

This is a short exercise we have been doing at NLP Canada Training to improve our connection when we are on phone or video calls or meetings. It was inspired by Patsy Rodenberg's work in The Second Circle.  Try this one before your next web meeting and feel a more direct, human connection with the people on the other side of the screen.

Confidence is . . .
Begin by thinking of a situation or a specific challenge that requires that you have confidence. Instead of saying, “I want to have more confidence when I’’m with clients,” pick one part of the process that regularly makes you wish you could speak and act with more confidence. Write that on a postcard.

As we hear the different situations where this team wants to act with more confidence, we understand that confidence involves a lot of different skill sets. It’s no wonder that it’s hard to feel confident before you’ve developed skill and experience. To speed up the process of building confidence, we need to understand how confidence shows up in our experience.
Here’s an NLP approach to confidence. Confidence is a state. A state is a word that describes how you experience the world and it includes: your physiology, your thoughts and beliefs, and your perceptions.

Confidence is
•a physical feeling of strength combined with
•a focus on something you want to be or to achieve combined with
•a heightened awareness of cues in your situation that will help you achieve what you want to achieve.

We can create a working model of confidence by remembering times when you have had each of these three experiences, and using a single anchor to trigger all three memories at once.
You can use a marble or other small object as an anchor for all three components of confidence.

This podcast features a version of a very old story, loosely based on the retelling by Hugh William McKibbon called The Token Gift. It uses this story of exponential growth as a way to think about our feelings about the math we hear as experts explain the probabilities of various outcomes. In a time when math is at the heart of a global crisis, it's important to recognize our emotional reaction to the math so that we can use both math and our emotions better.

We say that it's crazy to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. The truth is that it is also crazy to do the same thing and expect the same result. Change happens in and around us, often whether or not we choose it. So this is a podcast for people who have just been hit by a change. The most important question you can ask is not "how did this happen?" It is "What's My Next Step?" 

Asking yourself what you want while you are responding to unwanted change is difficult and it takes patience and persistence. So, given what just happened, what's your next step?

Relationship building with NLP is about more than rapport or influence. When you ask better questions about relationships, you move beyond biases and assumptions and get a clearer vision of the benefits and growth that happen in good connections. Three questions make the difference:

1) How am I better because of this relationship?

2) How is the other person better because of this relationship?

3) What can we do together that we could not do as individuals? How are we more than the sum of our individual strengths?

When we take this positive frame and look for the benefits of being connected, we end up with fresh information about how things are working and what we want next.

Most human behaviours - including yours! - are driven by automatic processing. We just do things. We do things repeatedly because we are getting something good or useful, even if we don't like how we are getting this benefit. In this exercise, I'll take you through identifying the benefit of a behaviour you want to change, testing three alternative behaviours, and then practicing the new behaviour so you are more likely to actually do it!

This is a short exercises to help you reach in and access the strengths, skills and capabilities you need to feel clear and strong in a new or challenging situation. Use this #freeNLP to clear your head and connect with your best self.

I was inspired by a conversation during a course to remind people to resist bad managers that insist that you look busy all the time. If you never sharpen your axe, you're not having your best ideas, and you're not producing as much as you could be.

Image by jackmac34 on Pixabay