NLP is Neuro Linguistic Programming
What is that you ask? NLP is the way you think and feel about things.
The word Neuro linguistic programming can be broken down to three distinct words:
neuro
linguistic and
programming
Neuro refers to the brain and neural network that feeds into the brain. Neurons or nerve cells are the working units used by the nervous system to send, receive, and store signals that add up to information.
Linguistics refer to the content, both verbal and non-verbal, that moves across and through these pathways.
Programming is the way the content or signal is manipulated to convert it into useful information. The brain may direct the signal, sequence it, change it based on our prior experience, or connect it to some other experience we have stored in our brain to convert it into thinking patterns and behaviours that are the essence of our experience of life.
Our experiences and feelings affect the way we react to external stimuli. Let us illustrate from one of our consultants points of view. “I am afraid of spiders. The impulse I get if I see a spider or know that one is around is a feeling of total fright. This is because, I was born in an area infested with several deadly spiders.
One day a boy from across the road came to my house. He knocked on the door. I opened the door. He had a spider in his hand. He wanted to show me the prize catch he had. He was holding it like we hold a pet cat. For him it was a pet. So, it gave him lot of joy to hold one. To me, it gave a migraine headache!
Both myself and my neighbour boy saw the same thing. The same signal was passed to our brain. It was the picture of a spider. However, our brains interpreted the implications of the spider entirely differently. In processing the information, our brains used our experiences (good and bad), our biases, our opinions, our value systems, etc. to convert it into useful information that we can use.”
This is exactly the same process and way of thinking that smokers have when they have a cigarette. As an example, this is also one of our consultants’ point of view.
“When I started smoking at 13, I thought it was cool and I wanted to fit in. Back then, it made me feel like one of the crowd, a feeling of being rebellious and doing something that wasn’t allowed, so made me feel important and accepted as one of the others.
Cigarettes in my mind represented feeling good!
Yet many years later whenever I smoked a cigarette, even though I hated the way it made me feel physically and smelt like an ashtray, I continued to do it because it was a feeling of comfort to light up a cigarette.
The problem was, that feeling from my childhood, and feeling cool, slightly rebellious and fitting in was emblazoned in my subconscious mind and my subconscious mind had no way of knowing that cigarettes were actually bad for me.
So when I initially tried to give up, my conscious mind where my will power is, was fighting with my subconscious mind, where my behaviour pattern had been set, sort of like the Angel on one shoulder and the Devil on the other.
It was only through an introduction to hypnotherapy that allowed the minds to be aligned to think and feel the same way, to never smoke another cigarette again, because I wanted it to happen so badly. It actually made sense to me. No wonder I had so much trouble giving up cold turkey.
This whole process made it so easy to walk away with no cravings or desire to ever have a cigarette again, as both my minds were finally in alignment.
