Can People Change?
by Bill Thomason, NLP Executive Coach, Certified NLP Master Trainer
How is it possible for people to change?
This question has driven a large part of my work and thought over the years. It is certainly a central theme of human potential inquiry. Perhaps you know someone who suddenly started to live a very different kind of life than they had before; someone who had experienced a ‘profound life change.’
As NLP pioneer and developer Wyatt Woodsmall points out, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) developed from a technology called Behavior Modeling. Children learn from ‘modeling’ the behaviors of others, especially parents and other primary caregivers.
The co-founders of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, sought out the most successful people from various fields to model their behavior.
They wanted to discover the structure of ‘expertise.’ They developed Behavior Modeling and then went about finding out how specifically people do what they do well. Richard Bandler was a student of computer information and mathematics. John Grinder was a professor of Linguistics.
Since they were both interested in therapy, the first experts they modeled were therapists including Fritz Perlz, the Father of Gestalt Therapy, and Virginia Satir, the foremost Family Therapist of the time, and Milton H Erickson, MD, who brought Hypnosis out of the dark ages into modern medical practice.
Richard and John started to systematically elicit and then ‘model’ or ‘copy’ the behavior of these experts. Although there are some exceptions, it was said that if anyone can create any achievement in life, and if you can get enough “quality information” about how they do it, you could produce similar results.
People Experience Profound Personal Change
So, what are the common elements among people who have experienced ‘profound personal change?’ It seems that profound personal change is typically preceded by some traumatic event. Sometimes it is a near death experience, like an auto accident, or a doctor telling you, “Get your affairs in order; you have 3-6 months to live.”
It may be that someone you know went to church on a Sunday and, while in a deep emotional state, decided to re-dedicate his or her life. From that moment on, that person lived differently.
Everyone knows someone who has had a ‘profound life change’ experience? But how can we ‘model’ or reproduce profound change in our own lives?
And, can it be done without the trauma? It is thought that by age 4 or 5, most people have almost all their deep-level, core programming in place. This deep programming operates at an unconscious or other-than-conscious level and it drives a person’s behavior for the rest of his or her life.
With regard to modeling excellent behavior, when we ask experts how they do what they do, they most often say, “I don’t know how I do it; I just do it.” However, when information is elicited effectively by a practitioner of NLP, we find that the person does know at some level.
People who have had a profound life change experience report they were in a state of ‘deep emotion’ at the time of the change. Deep emotion is one of the key ingredients of how new core decisions get in place.
Core level decisions are expressed with specific language, in specific ways, including body language and gestures. People are expressing their core programming all the time in everything that they do and say.
With this information a number of approaches may be facilitated by your NLP Success Coach including:
– Core Decisional Repatterning(c) is a 9-step process that finds the original limiting decisions and installs a new decision at a deep emotional level to replace the unwanted programming. Change is fast, effective and permanent.
– ReImprinting is an NLP process based on Robert Dilts study and utilization of Konrad Lorenz’s work with ducklings who imprint the first thing the see after birth as ‘Mother.’ The ducklings followed where Lorenz would go in his boots. In a similar manner people get their core programming as ‘imprints’ very early in life, usually by age 4 or 5 years.
– Change Personal History – the basic idea is used in several NLP patterns
–Time line or Expanding Folded Time(c) Patterns is a valuable technique that can pull old emotional ‘Gestalts’ or patterns of limiting behavior that tend to start with some event and recur again and again through life until they are unhooked.
What if you simply could not find guilt, anxiety, sadness, or angry past feelings and limiting decisions any more?
Contact Bill at 602 321-7192 to set up NLP Coaching sessions and experience your own PROFOUND LIFE CHANGE!