Friday, August 28, 2009

Self Managment

Your mind can defy the laws of the universe in one crucial way. It can go backward. Time can’t, nor can events – but your mind can. Let’s say you go into your office, and the first thing you notice is that an important report you needed was not written. The incomplete report tends to put in a less than resourceful state. You feel mad. You feel frustrated. You’re ready to go out and scream at your secretary. But screaming won’t produce the result you want. It will only make a bad situation worse. The key is to change your state, to back up and put yourself in a state that will allow you to get things done. That’s what you can do by rearranging your internal representations.
You are a sovereign, being in control, running your own brain. Now you are seeing the way to do it. In just some few exercises one can see that one has the ability to totally control your own state. Think what your life would be like if you remembered all your good experiences as looking bright, close, and colorful as sounding joyous, rhythmic, and melodic; as feelings soft, warm, and nurturing. And what if you stored your bad experiences as fuzzy little framed images with almost inaudible voices and insubstantial forms you could not feel because they were far away from you? Successful people do this unconsciously. They know how to turn up the volume of the things that help them and turn off the sound of the things that don’t.
It is suggested you ignore problems. Some things need to be addressed. We all know people who can go through a day in which ninety-nine things worked out right and come home totally depressed. Why? Well, one thing went wrong. They may have turned the one thing that went wrong into a big, bright, blustery image and turned the others into small, murky, quiet insubstantial ones.
Lot of people spend their whole lives like this. There are people who keep telling, “I’m depressed”. They almost say it with pride, because it’s become so much a part of their world view. Well, many therapists would begin with the long, arduous task of unearthing the causes of that depression. They’d let the patient talk for hours about his depression. They’d rummage through the patient’s mental garbage bin to uncover seminal experiences of gloom and past emotional abuse. Of such techniques are very long and very expensive therapeutic relationship s made.
No one is always depressed. Depression is not a permanent condition like losing a leg. It is a state that people can pop into and out of. In fact, most people who are experiencing depression have had many happy experiences in their lives – may be even as many or more than the average person. They just don’t represent these experiences to themselves in a bright, large, associated way. They may also represent happy times as far away instead of close. Take a moment now and remember an event that happened last week and push it far away. Does it seem as recent an experience to you anymore? What if you bring it closer? Doesn’t it now seem more recent? Some people take their happy experiences of the moment and push them far away so they seem like long ago, and store their problems up close. Haven’t you ever heard a person say I just need to get some distance from my problems? You don’t have to fly to some distant land to do this. Just push them far away from you in your mind and notice the difference. People who feel depressed often have their brains filled to capacity with big, loud, close, heavy, insistent images of the bad times and only thin, gray wafers for the good times. The way to changer isn’t to wallow in the bad memories; it’s to change the sub-modalities, the very structure of the memories themselves. Next, link what used to make you feel bad to new representations that make you feel like taking the challenges of life with vigor, humor, patience, and strength.

The way to do this is through a process we call the swish pattern. It can be used to deal with some of the persistent problems and bad habits people have. A swish pattern takes internal representations that normally produce states of un-resourcefulness and cause them to automatically trigger new internal representations that put you in the resourceful states you desire. When you find out, for example, what internal representations make you feel like over eating, with the swish pattern you can create a new internal representation of something else that is more powerful and would cause you, if you saw or hear it to push food away. If you link the two representations, whenever you think of over eating, the first representation will instantly trigger the second and put you in a state of not desiring food. The best part of the swish pattern is that once you implant it effectively, you do not have to think of it ever again. The process will happen automatically, without any conscious effort. Here is how the swish pattern work.
Step # 1: Identify the behavior you want to change. Now make an internal representation of that behavior as you see it through your own eyes. If you want to stop biting your finger nails, imagine a picture of you lifting your hand, bringing your fingers to your lips, and biting your nails.
Step # 2: Once you have a clear picture of the behavior you want to change, you need to create a different representation, a picture of yourself as you would be if you made the desired change and what that change would mean to you. You might picture yourself taking your fingers away from your mouth, creating a little pressure on the finger you were going to bite, and seeing your nails perfectly manicured and yourself as well dressed, magnificently groomed, more in control, and more confident. The picture you make of yourself in that desired state should be disassociated. The reason for this is that we want to create an ideal internal representation, one that you will continue to be drawn to rather than one you feel you already have.
Step # 3: Swish the two pictures so that the un-resourceful experience automatically triggers the resourceful experience. Once you hook up this triggering mechanism, anything that used to trigger biting your nails will now trigger you into a state where you are moving toward that ideal picture of yourself. Thus, you’re creating a whole new way for your brain to deal with what in the past may have upset you.
Here is how to do the swish: Start by making a big bright picture of the behavior you want to change. Then, in the bottom right hand corner of that picture, make a small dark picture of the way you want to be. Now take that small picture, and in less than one second, have it grow in size and brightness and literally burst through the picture of the behavior you no longer desire. As you do this process, say the word “wooosh” with all the excitement and enthusiasm you can. Most individuals may realize this may sound a bit juvenile. However, saying “wooosh’ in an excited way ends a series of powerful, positive signals to your brain. Once you’ve set up the pictures in your mind, this whole process should only take about as long as it takes to say the word “wooosh”. Now in front of you is a big, bright, focused, colorful picture of how you want to be. The old picture of how you were has been smashed to smithereens.–

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