Neuro Linguistic Programming Quotes

Emotions make excellent servants, but tyrannical masters.

Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them back.

To strengthen the connection between your conscious and subconscious, is to gain access to a map and compass, as you travel through parallel worlds.

Why be your real self when you can be something really worthwhile?

To believe that someone else is responsible for your emotional state is to give them a sort of psychic power over you they do not have...we really do generate our own feelings. No one else can do it for us. We respond and are responsible. To think other people are responsible for our feelings is to inhabit a billiard ball, inanimate universe.

Questions are also interventions. A good question can take a person's mind in a completely new direction and change his life. For example, ask yourself frequently, 'What is the most useful question to ask now?

Life consists of what a man is thinking of all day.

A man who has control over his mind is able to realize its full potential. —The Sama Veda

When we believe something, we act as if it is true.

Why' questions have little value, at best they get justifications or long explanations which do nothing to change the situation.

Once a response becomes a habit, you stop learning. Theoretically, you could act differently, but in practice you do not. Habits are extremely useful, they streamline the parts of our lives we do not want to think about...But there is an art to deciding what parts of your life you want to turn over to habit, and what parts of your life you want to continue to learn from and have choice about. This is a key question of balance.

Thinking isn’t a passive process unless you do it passively. Thinking should always be an active process where you think in a way that gets you the results you want.

No one can consistently get everything wrong. Such perfection does not exist.

Free your expectation of the future from the grip of past failure.

True learning involves learning other ways of doing what you can do already.

As long as you believe it is impossible, you will actually never find out if it is possible or not.

Neuro-linguistic programming is to Neuroscience what Astrology is to Astronomy.

Reframing is also the pivotal element in the creative process: it is the ability to put a commonplace event in a new frame that is useful or enjoyable.

Any single person's viewpoint will have blind spots caused by their habitual ways of perceiving the world, their perceptual filters...How can we shift our perceptions to get outside our own limited world view?

In my experience, the biggest challenge people face is learning to get out of their own way. When you can see just how easy change can be, you can begin to take control over your life and make all the changes you want—but you need to take the action.

Without action, a goal is just an idea.

If doing something once makes you have fear, doing it over and over and over again is only going to reinforce that fear.

What happens to our thoughts as we clothe them in language, and how faithfully are they preserved when our listeners undress them?

We perceive and remember people, things, and events based on aspects of the experience:

Remember: the journey is the destination.

Creative geniuses are: 1.  Comfortable with uncertainty 2.  Able to hold seeming opposites or paradoxes 3.  Persistent

When you practice using your brain in this way, you will find yourself feeling really good a lot more often. Achieving personal freedom is all about developing new mental habits and skills and getting used to mentally running your brain the way you choose to run it.

Masha is a professional, qualified counselor and psychotherapist. Her techniques include cognitive behavioral therapy, neuro-linguistic program and hypnotherapy. Her background also includes teaching senior executives and makes them understand how to manage a major emergency.

We all have beliefs and expectations from our personal experience; it is impossible to live without them. Since we have to make some assumptions, they might as well be ones that allow us freedom, choice and fun in the world, rather than ones that limit us. You often get what you expect to get.

ONE OF THE MOST important aspects of what human beings do is build beliefs. Beliefs are what trap most people in their problems. Unless you believe you can get over something, get through something, or get to something, there is little likelihood you will be able to do it. Your beliefs refer to your sense of certainty on some of your thoughts.

When you persuade yourself that you “get to” do something rather than “have to,” you can find a silver lining. For instance, saying “I have to clean the house” implies cleaning is an unpleasant task. On the other hand, saying “I get to clean the house” reframes the labor as something you look forward to, emphasizing how important it is to have a place to live in the first place. A great strategy to change your perspective and enhance your mental health is to reframe the tasks you encounter in daily life with a positive outlook.

It’s not that fear is a bad thing. Fear moves you away from things; you shouldn’t touch hot fire. Even when children are young, they are born with only two natural fears: a fear of loud noises and a fear of falling. That’s why when children start to do something that’s dangerous, we yell at them. And that fear then translates so that, instead of having to stick your hand in fire, you feel fear as you reach toward it. This teaches us, and we generalize one fear to another till we learn “don’t cross the street until you know it’s safe to do so.

Words are anchors for sense experience, but the experience is not the reality, and the word is not the experience. Language is thus two removes from reality. To argue about the real meaning of a word is rather like arguing that one menu tastes better than another because you prefer the food that is printed on it...To come to believe that the external world is patterned by the way we talk about it is even worse than eating the menu - it is eating the printing ink on the menu. Words can be combined and manipulated in ways that have nothing to do with sensory experience.

Instead, it is always better to make a decision based on self-interest alone.

Actually, beliefs are so strong that when you have a belief, it starts to alter what you perceive. Now all these external stimuli coming in have to get through these belief filters. Your mind doesn’t really get the raw information. It doesn’t get to choose anymore.

You must realize that there is no single version of truth for everyone. Each person has a different view of reality, and it being different from yours doesn’t make it any less true than yours. They are all just different versions of reality, like a map of a territory, which is different from the real territory. ·          People will always react to their internal version of reality and not exactly what they feel with their senses only.

Xyrophobia - fear of razors.

Your thought process while you experience your everyday reality is far more important than the actual

The easiest way to stay super-focused is to be well rested and not do any multi-tasking unless you absolutely have to.

We are changed from animals into humans through the acquisition of invented language, and this transforms our nervous system and brings it under thoughtful, conscious, cultural control and frees us from the animal instincts that imprison all other animals.

Consciousness – knowledge – transformed humanity. Experience did not. Stone Age humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years without consciousness, without knowledge. They had plenty of experiences, but no knowledge. They were just like the animals … until consciousness arrived, and then they ceased to be anything like animals and became the masters of the world.

Humans are conscious because they have knowledge – via reason, logic, language and conceptualization – while animals are not because they lack reason, logic, language and conceptualization. Here we have an astounding difference. For rationalists, animals cannot be conscious. They can be sentient (have feelings, sensations and experiences), but without consciousness. For empiricists, animals can and indeed must be conscious because they have feelings, sensations and experiences. Rationalists distinguish between sentience and consciousness. Empiricists say they are the same thing. The differences between rationalists and empiricists appear everywhere, and basically create two competing worldviews, but which are often force-fitted together.

Humans aren’t born conscious. They become conscious. Consciousness is acquired via language. Consciousness is the adaptive modification to the nervous system that results from the application of language to it. Never forget, consciousness = neuro-linguistic programming. It concerns how we program our nervous system via learned language.

Consciousness is the result of neuro-linguistic programming. Language programs the nervous system to operate in a different way from that of instinctual animals. Language reprograms the nervous system, transitioning it away from fixed biological instincts to variable cultural ideas, leading to a staggering degree of change in the pace of mental evolution (but not physical, biological evolution – the body remains stubbornly the same). Language is what stands in greatest need of explanation. Once we fully understand language – not biology, not matter, not faith, not spirituality – we will understand existence fully. Existence itself is language – ontological mathematics – and manmade languages are possible exactly because they originate in a language-reality, not a material or spiritual reality. The fact that existence revolves around language means that language can answer what existence is. It means that existence has an exact answer, and that existence is fundamentally mental, intellectual and teleological. The science of consciousness should become the great new science. It will totally transform the human race. As humanity expands its consciousness, the quality and excellence of the human race will grow exponentially, and the culmination will be the divinity of humanity. Are you ready to join the gods?

Any one-level theory of objective reality that ignores the separate reality-tunnels in which these people are living existentially has no validity in psychology, and, with a little analysis, it is obvious that no such one-level theory has any general validity in sociology either. To understand human behavior, we have to understand human evaluations (neuro-linguistic programs) and modern social scientists of all schools increasingly recognize that human evaluations (internal reality-tunnels) depend on both the external environment (setting) and the internal environment (neuro-linguistic programs).

The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our communications. How we communicate with ourselves creates our personal experience and how we communicate with others determines the way we are treated throughout our lives.

The most effective way to turbocharge your life is to learn to move in harmony with your values.

neuro-linguistic programming

But a second, equally prominent, emphasis of the early days was learning to navigate without fixed maps; that is, to learn at an unconscious level. As I soon discovered in doing trance work, a hypnotic induction is a set of communications that de-frames or dissolves fixed maps, thereby allowing new experiences unhindered by the map bias. From this naturalistic view, virtually my entire time spent with Bandler and Grinder was a hypnotic induction – the core spirit guiding the work was dissolving all fixed views (in ourselves and others), so that both laughter and significant new realities could emerge. To me, the revolutionary spirit of early NLP came from a beautiful combination of these two levels of (1) learning without maps (i.e., unconscious learning) and (2) learning via maps improved by meta-modeling principles. The former provided a deep well of original ideas and possibilities, while the latter offered a means to refine and formalize these possibilities into teachable and replicable models.

But a second, equally prominent, emphasis of the early days was learning to navigate without fixed maps; that is, to learn at an unconscious level. As I soon discovered in doing trance work, a hypnotic induction is a set of communications that de-frames or dissolves fixed maps, thereby allowing new experiences unhindered by the map bias.

Next, find out where in your body the feeling starts and where it goes. Discover the direction it spins inside your body, and spin it faster and faster and, again, notice your feelings intensify. There lies the control you have over your brain to create powerful feelings inside of you.

Once they have a choice, people always make the best choice. The trouble is that people don’t think they have one.

Then I had him close his eyes and go inside and take the feeling of fear in his body and spin it once again a little bit faster and then turn it around and spin it backward until it softened. I told him to relax and to be comfortable and to open his eyes and look at the flexibility of the wing and to hear the sounds of the engines. I told him to see himself being able to fly smoothly, to look off at the clouds and realize that flying’s one of the safest things you can do. You’re more likely to be hit by a car crossing the street, so it was a good thing he wasn’t outside the plane. Instead, inside he was safe. Even if we hit a little clear air turbulence, it just meant that the plane was bouncing up.

Over the years, I’ve eliminated fears, phobias, and anxieties of many kinds. The exercises that we’re laying out for you here show you different ways to deal with fear and anxiety. Now, if you go through each of these and you do it this way and do it that way and do it a third way, you’ll be able to find the best and quickest way to get rid of your own fears.

We learn the fear that snaps us away from touching fire, from stabbing ourselves with scissors, from poking ourselves in the eye, and we learn things that move us in the right direction. When our fears become too grandiose and too generalized, we become afraid of the wrong things. One of the things you should never, ever, ever be afraid of is your own thoughts. When you think things that scare you, you just need to think about them differently. You need to put in different sounds. You need to shrink them down. You need to learn that you are in control of how you think. This includes how you think about your past.

Being able to play these memories forward with circus music and backward with silly music allows the feelings to become separated from the images and the memories will no longer haunt you. The purpose of memories is to learn from them or to enjoy them or to use them as guides for your behavior, and it doesn’t help to relive trauma. Over the years, I’ve helped many, many people whose lives had been crippled by traumatic experiences to get away from the memories.

I know that I’m fond of saying this repeatedly, but the best thing about the past is that it’s over and when it’s not over something is amiss in your mind. It’s not the original event or perpetrator that’s making you remember—it’s you, inside your own mind, holding on to terrible memories. None of us are exempt from this.

Whenever people have trouble letting go of good things or bad things, it’s because they are associated to the memory. It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s just like being there. If you’re holding on to bad memories, it’s now time to look at them and shrink them down.

Another thing to do is to freeze frame the memory. I know that sounds crazy at first, but the best thing to do then is to jump to the end, freeze-frame it and literally grab a whiteness knob in your mind and turn it very quickly so that it goes blank-out white, phhhhhp. Very quickly, so the whiteness literally replaces the memory so you can’t see it.

Look at the last image and then run it backward to the beginning so that people walk backward, so that the sounds are like playing a tape recorder backwards. In fact, if you can, spin your feelings in the reverse direction.

It may take a few tries at this because habits develop over years, but over time it will be effective. For years and years, this particular woman who was raped had run the same life-size movie in her head over and over again. It became a habit. What she needed to do was to break it up. If you can make the image small enough or, if you can, white it out often enough, that will make a difference. If you can run it backward enough, that will change the feeling. You can also disassociate it. You do this by putting yourself in the picture and pushing it off into the distance. Then you can go inside your mind and replace it with something else because it’s not enough to get over the past, you have to start to look at what you want in the future.

Next, go back to the first bad image. Not the life-size one but the little one and push it off into the distance and suddenly pull up the new picture in its place and then make it life-size. Look at how you want to be, and you end up replacing your fears with your desires.

This will instruct your neurology which direction to go in. There is a tendency for some people to look at the past over and over again. Even in therapy, people going through it over and over again instruct the neurology that this is what they want. Until you start to look ahead with desire, it’s very hard to get away from the past. The more you look at the bad things, the more you relive the bad things, the more familiar it gets.

The strongest instinct in human beings is not survival. Virginia Satir said something to me that has resonated with me for forty years. She asked, “What do you think is the strongest instinct?” Like a robot I responded, “Survival.” For me, it had always been the strongest instinct. She said, “No, Richard. The strongest instinct in human beings is the need to look at the familiar.” People are terrified of the unknown. In fact, sometimes people will rather kill themselves than look at new things.

The techniques I’m describing to you aren’t techniques that you just do once, but things that you run over and over and over in your mind till they become familiar, to move away from pain and move toward hope. The more you move away from pain and white out your pain and see yourself in your pain—and the more you look at yourself doing the things you want to do—the more you’ll begin to change your direction.

Laughter releases endomorphins. If you can’t laugh at your past, you’ll never get free of it. So it’s time to start laughing, even if it’s artificial laughter at first. Put a little circus music in, add a little chaos, and move things backward. If they start to move forward, blank them out with white and then pull up an image of something you really desire. Put your hopes and dreams in front of your nightmares and your terrors and your problems. A psychiatrist may call this repression. I call it planning. You should too.

The trouble with long, drawn-out deaths—in fact, all deaths—is when people remember the person who has died, they make life-size images and they see those images as if they’re happening now. It’s very difficult to get through the pain of death. When people look at good memories, they’ll see themselves in the good memories, but they’ll remember the funeral. They’ll remember the death as if it’s happening now. In other words, they’ll be associated with it, and this is simply backward. The process of flipping pictures is how people come out of grief when they stop remembering the tragedy of death and start remembering the good times vividly and associating with good memories. I

The best thing about the future is that it’s in front of you. The best thing about the past is that it lies behind.

Nothing wears off, because as long as you think differently, you will feel differently.

I did not look for “what went wrong” or the “whys.” I did not look for cures. I looked at what worked, no matter how. If a few good therapists “fixed” anybody, I looked at what they actually did. When people got over problems on their own, I looked at what had happened. The result is what is now called Neuro-Linguistic Programming—that is, a series of lessons that teach what others have learned that works.

If you can help people to think differently and actively, they can change their lives.

If you’re looking for difficulties, you’ll always find them. If you ask the question, What can go wrong? then something probably will. On the other hand, if you’re asking the question, What works? then you can find it and, in this case, I did.

People have been talking about feelings in the field of psychology for a long time. When I started, I saw all kinds of counselors, all kinds of therapists, and all kinds of psychiatrists working with patients. What always amazed me was the number of times somebody would be asked, “Well, how do you feel about that?” and they would say, “I feel frustrated.” They would ask the same question again instead of finding out what that meant. They failed to stop and see the word that had been turned into an event was actually something the person was doing.

When people say they’re frustrated, it’s actually a verb. When people say “I have doubts,” they’ve turned the verb into a noun and made it so that it becomes an event or a thing. When people say, “I have frustration,” they don’t actually have a bucket of frustration. They’re in the process of being frustrated. That is an activity. When you turn it back into an activity, you can find out so much more about it.

ONE OF THE MAIN focuses in my work has been discovering ways to help people achieve what I call “personal freedom”. Personal freedom means having the freedom to be able to control your thoughts and to manifest the kinds of feelings you want in your life.

Think of a time when you felt really good. Now, step inside that time and see through your eyes, hear through your ears, and feel the really good feeling all the way through your body. Make the images bigger, brighter, more colorful, and you’ll probably find yourself feeling even better. Make the sounds louder and crisper, and if there are no sounds, add sounds. Start to intensify the good feeling.

As soon as we believe in something, we search for ways to prove it’s true. What we are looking for here is to learn to doubt your limitations and be more certain of what is possible for you.

In order to change beliefs, we first need to learn a way of finding out the qualities of beliefs.

Take that feeling of certainty. Look at that picture in your mind and double it in size. Typically, when you do this, your feelings will grow stronger. When they do, notice where the feeling is in your body and which way it’s moving. By doing this, you are beginning to pay attention to the submodalities of a strong belief.

Look at your problem in the same place that your belief was and the first thing to do is to look at it and say, I’m tired of this. Over the years, I’ve discovered that the moment people really change is when they simply decide that enough is enough.

The first thing we want to do is to take a look at what you want to get rid of and what you want to add. You want to get rid of your self-doubt and add more belief in yourself. You want to get rid of your fears and add more confidence. Whatever it is, when you think about your problem, you probably believed you were going to have it for the rest of your life.

When you look at the belief that it is going to be here for the rest of your life, I want you to do a few small things with it. Literally, push the picture off in the distance and move it over and pull it up into that place of uncertainty so, when you look at it and think, Am I gonna be stuck like this forever? You say, Ehhh, maybe yes, maybe no.

In order to make it stick in any other position, it’s important that you do this very, very fast. To make it so you can place this old, limiting belief inside your uncertainty, you have to take a hold of the image and do something with it. You have to push it all the way off so that it’s twenty feet away, move it across your midline, and pull it up on the other side into the submodality qualities of uncertainty so that what was a strong belief becomes uncertainty.

Then you need to do the opposite. You need to take the image of what you want to believe, such as that you will be free from this problem and happy and well in the future, and push this image out twenty feet, move it over, and pull it up into the position and submodalities of your strong belief.

Most problems we face in life, as I have said already, happen in our minds. Furthermore, problems generally exist in our concept of the past and the future. The past and the future don’t exist except in our minds.

Getting over things is often about helping people to learn how to get their minds to let go of things. It means that you put your problems into the past where they belong.

THE FIRST THING TO put into your past and keep there are the bad suggestions others have shared with you.

When you want a guide to changing your behavior, you’re looking for quick ways to make quick changes.

I elicit the submodalities of that just as we did in the inventory part of this book earlier. Stop now and think about something you no longer want to believe. Just like Myra, I want you to go through your list and find out first, where is the voice? Where is the picture?

When you find the difference, I want you to take the thing you no longer wish to believe and push it all the way off into the distance, then move it over and pop it up on the other side so that when you look at it you know it’s a lie and you’re angry about it.

Then it’s time to build a new belief. What would you like to believe? If you build a belief that you, like every other human being, are entitled to be happy, and are entitled to make friends, that will be much more useful. You still have to have a reference structure. You have to look at yourself and see yourself the way you’d be if you had grown up with this useful belief.

I’m going to say that over and over again. This is because through the years, I’ve gotten people to believe the best thing about the past is that it’s over. When they look at it, they may be angry about how silly they have acted and about the beliefs they had—how they learned them and who taught them—but this is still not going to help them to go into the future. What helps you go into the future is to leave the past behind and to create such strong desires that you want to move toward them.

When you can take on board new, positive suggestions and disbelieve the old, limiting suggestions, you will be ready to tackle the rest of your problems, especially your fears.

People think they are afraid of these things, but they are not. It’s not the object. It’s not the height that makes you afraid, it’s your brain. We know this because other people can be at the same height and they don’t get afraid. The question becomes: what is the person who feels fear doing inside his head and, even more important, what is the person who feels calm or confident in those situations doing inside his head?

After interviewing hundreds of people, I found out how people got over phobias. They all reached the point where they got fed up with being afraid.

If you run through all five and go back to the beginning and run through all five again and go back to the beginning and run through all five again really, really fast, what will happen is that you’ll begin to feel fed up. There’ll be a point where something inside you says, Enough is enough.

The next thing you can do is to make a still image of yourself in the situation where you’re afraid. Imagine you are sitting in a movie theater with the still image on screen. Then imagine floating out of yourself in the chair so you can look down and watch yourself, seeing yourself being afraid. Then start the movie. It’s like you’re in a balcony watching yourself in the theater and you’re in the film. Now as you look at yourself being afraid, I want you to stay in that third position and in your mind looking at yourself being afraid and say to yourself, That’s ridiculous. As you look at yourself being terrified, watching yourself being terrified, something inside you will feel different.

Run all the way to the end of the episode, float back down into the theatre, float into the movie, and then run it backward so everybody walks backward and talks backward, and throw in a little circus music so it’s as ridiculous as it could be. Then, clear your mind for ten minutes and then go back and think of what you were afraid of. You will be amazed to discover that your fear has severely diminished if not disappeared entirely.

My policy is, why wait? If you’re going to look back and laugh, you might as well start laughing.

Laughter produces endomorphins that are an important part of changing your mind. The more you laugh at what you’re afraid of, the more chemicals go into your body. Even if it’s artificial laughter, it doesn’t matter. If you can stop now and look at the same picture in your mind that scared you and not be afraid, then you’re ready for the next step. So, get up from your chair and go out and test it and test it and test it and, bit by bit, it will simply disappear.