NLP Lesson - Learn to change content

Chris Harrison - July 2007
©2007 PlanetNLP Ltd

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Exercise 1:

Imagine someone who makes you feel uncomfortable, or someone who makes you feel small and insignificant, someone who you have trouble dealing with, or someone who you find difficult to communicate with, or someone who always seems to hold the upper hand, and restricts the ways in which you can respond.

I think you get the idea.

Now think about dealing with them at some point in the future.

Right, now in your mind you’re probably making a picture of that person.

If not, or if you have trouble creating an image in your mind, then just imagine a picture of them instead.

So what kind of image do you make?

Think for a moment, if this image was real what element of it would make you feel uncomfortable?

If the person in the image is much larger than you, then that would be scary for instance.

If they are very loud, that would be scary.

If they have a nasty facial expression then that would be scary too.

Imagine if a boxer, prior to a fight, imagined himself fighting his opponent, but imagined his opponent as being 12 feet tall.

I guess his confidence wouldn't be very strong and his chance of winning the fight quite slim.

Usually there is something unrealistic in the image you make - something that in real life would be scary.

There are a number of ways to change the way this representation makes us feel, and we will be coming to many of them later on in the Submodalities Lesson, but for now we’re going to concentrate on the 'content' of the memory.

So as a first step, think about some time you are going to be dealing with that person who bothers you, and notice what is unrealistic about the picture and make it realistic.

For example, if you imagine them as being unreasonably tall, shrink them down.

One by one, change all the unrealistic elements in the image to make the picture more normal.