Author: Brian Cullen

The JALT 2010 National Conference was held in Nagoya again for the first time in 15 years. It was wonderful to have this major teaching conference in our area again. The theme of the conference was “Creativity: Outside the Box”, so there were a lot of presentations which drew on the findings and resources of NLP. Of particular interest was a lovely presentation by Francis Bolstad and Tim Murphey which looked at the use of chunking up and chunking down as a creative tool. Another great session involved five speakers who were talking about positive psychology in the language classroom (Marc Helgessen, Bill Synder, Curtis Kelly, Ben Blackwell, and again Tim Murphey who was mighty busy at this conference). The speakers were all emphasizing that learners learn more effectively when they are engaged and happy. They backed this up with stories, activities, and summaries of the latest neurological studies.

Marc Helgesen has a page with EFL activities that take account of research into positive psychology.

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
As a musician and songwriter, I follow the Seven P’s of music that I came up with to help me remember all the things that I want to do. I mentally run through the list each day before I sit down to practice so that I’m sure of my musical goals for that day. Recently, it occurred to me that the seven P’s may be equally valid for many other areas of life. For example, as an NLP coach and trainer, the same pattern works very well very me. Below, I have listed and explained the seven P’s of music. In a future article, I hope to revisit this topic and give more explicit examples of how they can be relevant for an NLP practitioner. In the meantime, you might like to simply consider music as a metaphor and begin to see how the seven P’s can be relevant in your life.

The Seven P’s of Music

1. Prepare

Before every one of the other steps, I prepare – making myself ready by entering into what NLP would term a resourceful state. I allow my breathing to slow down, let my body relax, and recall previous times when I was in flow and able to call on all my conscious and unconscious resources to help me fulfill my musical goals.

2. Plan

Know exactly what you want to achieve in as much detail as possible. It is very useful to consider how you will know that your goal has been achieved. In other words, what is the final step that you have to reach before you can say to yourself, “Wow, I really did it!” Sometimes, it is good to chunk your goals down into smaller goals that are more achievable in the short run. Once you succeed in a few small goals, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you’re progressing towards some bigger goals. So instead of saying, “I want to have a hit record”, it may be useful to set smaller goals such as “I want to complete this song” and then “I want to record a simple demo” that I can share with the band. Once you have achieved these small goals, you can set your next small goals which lead to your big goal. Some examples of useful question that you can ask yourself in the Planning state are given below:

• Are there particular skills that you want to learn on your instrument? In 1 year, what would you really like to be able to play very easily?
• Who do you want your music to reach? Do you want to get paid for it? How?
• Do you want to record in the near future? Which songs/tunes?

3. Practice

Most people have heard the old joke about the man asking for directions and he is answered by a musician.

Man: How do I get to Carnegie Hall?
Musician: Practice, practice, practice.

Like most jokes, it is funny because it is true. It is important to build up your skills over the long-term. It may be frustrating each day as you feel like you’re getting nowhere, but over the long-term, you’ll be amazed at how much you improve if you practice just a little bit each day. Of course, it’s better to practice more each day, but the important thing is to be steady. Make sure that you spend at least a few minutes each day at your instrument. Spaced learning (learning in multiple sessions rather than single concentrated sessions) has been shown in research to have the most powerful long-lasting effects on improvement.

4. Play

In the Seven Ps of Music, Play doesn’t just mean “play your instrument.” It also means just “play” as in “having fun”. Play as if you were a kid, really having fun and enjoying yourself with your music. Have fun every day as you play. It is sad, but true, that not everyone will reach Carnegie Hall, and not everyone will have a hit song on the radio. But what is certain in every case is that music can bring a huge amount of joy to your life. Make sure that you experience a little bit of that joy every day. Play some songs and tunes that you enjoy yourself. Get together with other fun musicians. Listen to some inspiring music and play along – even if you can’t follow at all and are just playing air guitar or air clarinet!

5. Produce

Unlike painting, sculpture, or fashion design, music disappears as soon as it is produced. The energy of the sound waves die away and the music is gone for ever unless you preserve it in some form. Recording technology is so cheap that you can easily preserve your music and that helps you greatly in the next step – promoting it. And I would advise you to produce on an ongoing basis, rather than waiting for a big recording date. Your unconscious mind needs to get into the habit of producing things on a regular basis. Once you signal to your unconscious that you want something, it will start to produce it easily and quickly – make sure that you honour its intention by writing it down or recording it in some way.

6. Promote

One thing that is likely is that nobody cares about your music as much as you do. So go ahead, and work to get your music out there in the world where people can listen to it. Of course, this implies that you want other people to hear your music, but for most musicians that is the case. From prehistoric times, music has been something to share with the community. People got together and played and listened to each other.
Whether you’re trying to promote a concert, a CD, or an online video, the principle is the same. People won’t know about it until you tell them about it in some way. There are so many ways to promote now – using Facebook, email, YouTube. If you make something that you think is good, get the opinion of someone that you trust, and if they agree that it is good, get it out there for people to share. That’s what music is all about – sharing.

7. Perform

While selling CDs and making money is a wonderful thing, for me personally and for most of the musicians that I know, it is the live performance in front of an audience that is the highlight of my musical life. That is the time when I am really in flow – pushing my abilities of musical skill and audience rapport to the highest level. Whether you’re performing in front of three friends or at Carnegie Hall, performing is the ultimate reminder that music is a physical phenomenon, the passing of waveforms through the air from your instrument or voice to the ears of the listeners, and the response in your audience’s movements, words, applause, and smiles.

Conclusion

It’s so easy to get caught up in one stage of music. I used to find that I’d get so involved in promotion that I would forget to actually practice or really enjoy the music, or alternatively I used to get so caught up in learning a new piece or skill that I completely forgot to promote my shows. They are all important and the Seven P’s has been useful to help me keep them all in mind. I hope that it will be equally useful for you – in your music, in your NLP work, or in your life.
And to be sure that you remember the Seven P’s:

1. Prepare
2. Plan
3. Practice
4. Play
5. Produce
6. Promote
7. Perform

You can also download a simple colour wallchart for printing.
Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
—
NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com

An interesting article in Science Digest seems to indicate that younger children have not developed the neurology which allows older children and adults to see the world from other people’s perspective. Children aged six to nine have five areas in the brain which become active separately, whereas they seem to work together as a unit in older children and adults. The researchers believe that this causes younger children to see the world only from their own perspective (NLP’s first position) whereas older children can consider the world from other people’s perspectives (NLP’s second and third position).

Right from the beginning of Bandler and Grinder’s work, NLP has been focused on increasing choices available to people. They were very interested in human potential and began to model how successful communicators like Milton Erickson and Virginia Satir managed to achieve excellent results that others were not capable of. Erickson was capable of creating incredible hypnotic trances and Satir was able to resolve family disputes that other therapists could not emulate. In both cases, the results seemed incredible because the structure of the expert’s communication was not understood. The genius of Bandler and Grinder was to be able to “model” these people’s behaviour, to carry it out themselves, and to teach these techniques to other people.

Today, when people hear the word NLP, they often take it to mean the “techniques” that were modelled from these experts, and this trail of techniques is certainly a valuable result of the NLP founders’ work.

However, there is something much more important that can easily be overlooked. Bandler and Grinder were interested in the extension of human potential–giving people more choices in how to think and how to act.

Increasing choice lies at the heart of NLP. NLP began by modelling therapists before it became widely used in business, education and other areas, and it is useful to consider how it compares with some other models of therapy. The circles at the top show how some forms of therapy attempt to remove the “bad” behaviour. This essentially creates a person with less choices. NLP is fundamentally based on the idea that we should increase a person’s choices–giving them more ways to act and to think.

While this model was highly influenced by the therapeutic applications of early NLP, the same rationale can be applied to any sphere of life. Below, I give an example from my own experience in education.

In education, teachers sometimes talk about discipline problems such as students talking out of turn, not listening to the teacher, or sleeping in the classroom. These are all behaviours that are labelled as “bad” in some way, and the teacher is suggesting that the elimination of these behaviours would be helpful in the learning environment. However, this is not always true, for either the individual student or for the whole class. It may take a bit of thought sometimes, but offering the “bad” student an alternative behaviour may often be more beneficial.

At a teachers’ meeting at a high school in Japan, I was surprised to hear that other teachers were all complaining about a student called Hajime.  They said that he was constantly talking out of turn, often shouting out answers to questions. Ironically, that was exactly why I liked Hajime. In Japan, it is often difficult to get students to respond to questions or to make contributions to classroom dialogue. As far as I was concerned, Hajime was acting as an excellent role model for the other students by giving unsolicited answers. In NLP terms, this can be viewed as a content reframe, and it is the teacher’s response to the situation that makes a difference.

To take another example from education, I occasionally have students who fall asleep in class, especially when the weather gets really hot and humid in July and the air conditioners haven’t been turned on yet. I used to get angry with these students until a fellow teacher gave me a tip. He always wakes the sleeping student gently and asks them if they are feeling sick. When I tried this out (and it has become my regular method), I found that the student invariably woke up quickly and became involved in the class again. By again employing a reframe, suggesting to the student that I was worried about their health, it immediately changed the situation.

Both of these examples show how increased choice in the teacher’s behaviour can change a situation. One final example from my classroom shows how increasing student choice can be equally or more powerful. I had a student called Rika who was not doing her homework and was quickly heading for a failing grade. I talked to Rika after class and realized very quickly that she was a smart person, but bored by the content of the textbook. She was expressing this boredom in the self-destructive manner of not doing her homework. I asked her if she would prefer to do an alternative form of assignment instead of the regular homework. Rika was really surprised because the education system in Japan tends to be quite rigid. After a few minutes discussion, she said that she was very interested in the Harry Potter series. So I gave her two options. The first option was to carry out the regular homework assignments. The second option was to read two Harry Potter books and give a presentation on each to the whole class. From an objective viewpoint, reading the two Harry Potter books was many times more work than the regular homework and the presentations were an extra workload, but Rika chose the second option and went on to inspire the whole class by giving very interesting presentations.

Choice is a good thing – whether it is in therapy, education, business, or another sphere of life. People won’t always take the hard option that Rika took, but simply having another choice shows people that we respect them, and sends the message that life has many paths.

To conclude, I’d like to paraphrase a remark that I heard from John Grinder.

If you have only one choice, then you really have no choice. You have to do it. If you have two choices, you are forced to choose between them and you have a dilemma. It is only when you have at least three choices that you have a real choice.

I discovered something interesting about WordPress today. According to this very useful post, pages and posts play quite different roles. The architecture of WordPress had led me to believe that they were pretty much the same and I had been using pages for most of the content of the Standing in Spirit website.

However, this is not the case at all. Some important differences are:

1. A Page is not viewed in search results, categories, archives, or other multi-post page views.

2. Pages do not appear on the feed from the webpage and so cannot be syndicated etc on other sites.

3. When you publish a Page, access is only through the list of Pages in your Theme’s sidebar, typically in alphabetical order, possibly grouped by Pages with subPages. They do not appear on the front page of your blog as a post, nor on categories, archives, or other multi-post page views on your blog.

If this all comes as a surprise to you (or is vaguely interesting at all), I suggest reading the original highly informative post. Thanks to Lorelle!

Worry is a useful signal. It’s like a telephone call from your unconscious mind. So it’s good, of course, to notice the call and answer it. That allows you to make the proper response. I mean, you don’t want the phone to keep ringing. Once is enough. So just make the appropriate response immediately and then the ringing will stop.

During 1999, a very bizarre fear and worry filled the newspapers every day. It was called the Y2K problem. The year 2,000 sounds a little ominous, of course, and people may have been looking for it to have a special meaning or even to mark the end of an era in a really obvious way. Or perhaps, Y2K was a serious fear for people.

It’s interesting to consider how this problem began before we look at its more interesting consequences today. Back when computers were first invented and developed, computer memory was really really expensive. And so programmers would try to save bits and bytes wherever possible. So when a programmer was entering the format for the date, he decided to use “55″ instead of the longer “1955.” By doing this, he could use half as much memory to encode the data. Saving two bytes may not sound like much, but when a program used a date in hundreds or thousands of places, this could add up to big memory savings.

Of course, the programmer didn’t imagine that the computer and his program would still be in use in the year 2000. Back then, people imagined the year 2000 as having flying cars and amazing anti-gravity devices. Although the world has progressed enormously, it is amazing how some things can still stay around much much longer than people imagine. And that’s what happened with the code that the programmer wrote. Just like a person can keep snippets of memory from long long ago, in the same way, snippets of code can stay around in newer systems long after could be imagined.

And of course, those snippets continue to play an important role in the system. So in the year 1999, people began to worry very much about the effect of all these old snippets that remained in the system. Because what would happen when the two digit representation of the year 1999 changed into the two digit representation of the year 2000? What the programmers had never imagined – 99 would change into 00 right at the first stroke of the clock in the year two thousand.

Let’s think about this to show what it could mean. Supposing a bank is calculating your interest according to how many years you have had it on deposit. For example, let’s say that you deposited $100,000 in the bank at a simple interest rate of 4% per year.

Interest = (99-60) * 100,000 * 4% = $156,000

So far, so good. But let’s look at the calculation when “99″ changes into “00.”

Interest = (00 – 60) * 100,000 * 4% = -$240,000

Yes, that’s right, instead of being ahead by about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, your account is suddenly going to be massively depleted and you’ll be in the red by two hundred and fourty thousand dollars. That’s an overall loss of almost four hundred thousand dollars. For any investor, that is going to rate as a pretty bad one-second loss.

So it’s clear how financial institutes were worried by Y2K. But everyone else started getting worried, too. A lot of the old American military systems were also using very old snippets of code. What would happen if a nuclear missile computer got the date wrong. If the distance of a potential incoming missile were to suddenly become a minus number, would that mean that an attack had already occured and automatic retaliation was required?

Y2K was the worry of the decade and it showed. People started stocking up on food. They bought guns and gas masks. They expected World War Three, an earthquake, a famine, and a tornado to all hit simultaneously.

All the computer experts got paid huge sums of money that year to sift through these old snippets and to find any potential problems. People even worried that programmers might introduce new problems as they tried to Y2K-proof old code that was difficult to understand.

And at midnight 1999, many many people were very scared and very worried. What happened?

In a word – nothing.

Worry is a useful signal – a way of helping us to check that we have done things right and that we are prepared. But most of the time, nothing happens. The horrors that we can dream up are generally far worse than reality. So the next time worry comes to you –  remember that it is like a telephone call to your unconcious mind. Go ahead. Answer the call. Check that things are ok. Make the appropriate response and then move on to a new exciting era.

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
—
NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com

I looked at the moon through the tall buildings of the city. And the moon looked back at me, not a full moon – just a crescent – and the beauty of that moon in the center of the city lifted my spirits for a few moments before the reality of the ugly buildings returned to my mind.

Yes, moon, I can see you. You’re a beautiful thing in the middle of all this barren concrete, but you are so away from it all, and I am stuck right in the middle of it.

And the moon looked back at me and spoke gently.

The difference between you and me is indeed one of perception, but perhaps not one of distance because I am just as far from you as you are from me. And perhaps I see the ugliness of the city as much as you because I can see it as it spreads its cold concrete upon the earth.

Rather than distance, we differ in another way; you see only the bright side of me – the face that I show to the world illuminated by the sun and full of beauty. Yet I know and accept that a full half of me is hidden in darkness from you. I accept that dark half of me because it is part of who I am.

You, too, have a dark half and you try to learn more, to see further, so that you can push the darkness away from yourself. But just like me, the darkness is a part of who you are. You can adventure in the darkness and try to extend your light, but as you extend your light you will find that you also expand your darkness. As knowledge and understanding grows, so its shadow grows alongside.

I still did not understand and asked the moon “And should I then simply live in the darkness for it shall always be part of me?” The moon replied:

As you grow and learn, the things that you do not know and understand will grow alongside. But the world cannot see your darkness anymore than it can see mine. Although your dark side is an invitation to learn more and to expand your wisdom, it is your growing light that shines. You shall always be half in darkness, but you shall truly be a greater light for the world.

A passerby saw me gazing and talking to the moon and muttered “another beautiful moon and beautiful lunatic.”

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
—
NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com

A few nights ago, I had a dream about a mirror. Very strange vivid dream in which I was looking for a mirror. And then the next day, as so often seems to happen these days, something related to my dream took place – I met a friend who was carrying six small mirrors. They were beautifully made in a hexagonal form. I told him about my dream and he immediately gave me one of the mirrors. He had just had them made, and he figured that one of them was meant to be for me.

Mirrors are amazing things. They remind people what they look like, and in this case the mirror also reminded me of a story – an old Irish story about a monk called Kevin who set up a monastery called Glendalough in the remote hills of Wicklow. Kevin, or Saint Kevin, as he is known today was a very pious man who believed that the first step in loving God was to love yourself. He didn’t mean for people to be arrogant in any way. He simply meant that you should respect and love yourself, accept yourself as a wonderful creation of God’s love. Once you are able to love yourself, then you can choose to show your love for others through devotion, and finally you can begin to truly love God.

The monastery of Glendalough is in a beautiful setting, surrounded by woods inhabited by the native red squirrels and the bluebells that dance among the trees. Kevin originally went there as a hermit to live alone and to worship God, but slowly stories of his piety attracted many monks and the monastery grew and grew until it became the structure that lies in ruins today, with the round tower acting as a beacon for more pilgrims and travellers in the Wicklow hills.

One of these monks who caused problems was a man called Tomas. Tomas believed himself to be a pious man, but often when night came, he would creep out of the monastery and head for the local tavern where he would drink during the night and engage in rather un-monklike activities.

It wasn’t that Tomas really planned to go out and do these crazy things. It was just that sometimes he forgot himself and slipped out, thinking that it was just this one time and that no harm could possibly come of it. And so he would go out and do things that aren’t really suitable for a person who loves himself or herself.

When the man returned to the monastery, bloated and tired, he would always have to sleep down by the lake because Kevin always locked the monastery at night to ensure that everything was safe and the integrity of the monastery would not be threatened in any way. And when the man awoke by the lake in the bright light of morning, he would realize that he had done it again and be disgusted at what he had done, feel very guilty and head back to the monastery. Sometimes, he even thought of just quitting the monastery because he thought that he couldn’t live up to the goals, but eventually he would always go back – knowing that he might fail again.

Now, Kevin knew all about Tomas’ antics, even though he pretended that he knew nothing at all. Because whatever we do, people always know about them somehow. And there are no real secrets in a monastery. Each part of the monastery eventually is influenced by every other part.

So one morning, Kevin went down to the lake and saw Tomas sleeping there, tossing and turning with guilt in his dreams in the midst of all that fabulous scenery. For Glendalough is a truly beautiful place where even today people take long walks in the mountains and woods and walk from the higher lake to the monastery at the lower lake. Kevin hid himself carefully in a tree where Tomas would be able to hear his voice but wouldn’t be able to see him, and he called out to Tomas who was still sleeping. Kevin spoke in a beautiful soft voice like an angel.

“Tomas, why are you here?”
Tomas heard the strange voice of the angel calling and startled up, thinking he was having a strange dream.
“I must return to the monastery,” he said to himself aloud. “Oh my God, I have done it again. I hate myelf for what I have done.”
But then the angel’s voice came again, “But Tomas, if you return to the monastery without learning to love yourself, you will do this same thing again and again.”
Tomas looked around again to try to see who was calling and realized without a doubt that he was in the presence of an angel.
“So what should I do? Should I leave this monastery?,” he cried, truly upset because he really did want to achieve his goal of being close to God.
The angel said, “If you really want to be close to God, you know that you must do as Kevin has said and learn to love yourself.”
“So what should I do?,” asked Tomas. “I really do want to achieve what I set out to do.”
Then the angel said, “Go to the lake and look at the place where you see yourself in the water.”
For the lower lake of Glendalough is truly a beautiful place, one of those mysterious waters where you the surface of the lake is almost like a mirror in the still cold mornings of the Wicklow hills.
The angel continued, “Go to the lake and gaze upon your own face in the reflection of the mirror of the lake. See and know yourself. Look at yourself and say ‘I accept and love this person.’ And each morning at this hour, return to the lake and once again gaze upon your reflection in the mirror of the lake and learn to love yourself so that you can love others and learn to love God.”

And the monk, Tomas, did just as the angel had said, and he gazed upon his own image in the lake and new understandings came to him. He began to understand and respect the person that he truly was in new ways. And each day as he returned to look upon his face in the mirror of the lake, he began to change his way, to develop a true love and respect for himself, and the more he truly respected and loved himself, the more he was able to devote himself to his true purpose and respond to his true calling.

And as the years went by, Tomas became the abbot of the monastery of Glendalough and was known far and wide for his resourceful wisdom and lore, but above all for his love. And when he was asked for advice by the novice monks, he always replied, look upon yourself every morning in the mirror of the lake and learn to love the face that you see. For when you look upon your face, you can see the greatness of God himself.

***

And when I told this story to the friend who gave me the gift of the hexagonal mirror, he laughed and said “perhaps you will remember this story when you see this mirror and remember that you have many more sides than the six sides of the hexagon.”

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
—
NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com

The most powerful tool in the world is the human brain, but most people don’t know how to use this amazing tool effectively. NLP is like the user’s manual for the brain. It allows us to use our brains in the most useful ways to achieve powerful outcomes in our personal and professional lives.

Fundamentally, NLP is the modelling of excellence. When you look around, you can see some people who really excel at what they are doing. Whether it is business, education, sport, social interaction, public speaking, or any other realm of life, NLP allows us to model these successful people to find out how they are doing what they are doing so that we can do it ourselves or teach it to other people. NLP is all about identifying and adopting the difference that makes the difference.

NLP even allows a person to model himself or herself. For example, you can remember a situation where you achieved success. NLP will show you how to enter back into that state in order to achieve the goals that you really want in your life. By understanding how your mind works, you can change it so that is always working for you and improving your life and the lives of those around you.

As well as being a way to model excellence in any field, NLP can also be understood as the underlying attitude of curiousity and the trail of useful techniques that result from this modeling.

If we look at the word more closely, NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. This name contains three important words that are useful for describing human experience: neurology, language, and programming. The neurological system regulates how our bodies function. Language determines how we interface and communicate with other people. Our programming determines the kinds of models of the world we create. So NLP describes the  interaction between mind (neuro) and language (linguistic) and how this interaction affects our body and behavior (programming).

One of the co-founders of NLP, Richard Bandler, coined this definition for the Oxford English Dictionary.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a model of interpersonal communication chiefly concerned with the relationship between successful patterns of behaviour and the subjective experiences (esp. patterns of thought) underlying them.

… and a system of alternative therapy based on this which seeks to educate people in self-awareness and effective communication, and to change their patterns of mental and emotional behaviour.

The other co-founder of NLP focuses much more on the modelling aspect of this technology:

There are people who are recognized as being particuraly adept in their performance. NLP is the bridge between being jealous of these people and admiring them… it gives a third way … a set of strategies to unconsciously assimilate precisely the differences that make the difference between this genius and an average performer…. It is an accelerated learning strategy, a mapping of tacit to explicit knowledge … a program that allows you to explore one extreme of human behaviour – namely excellence.

(Transcribed from YouTube video of John Grinder).

In essence, all of NLP is founded on two fundamental presuppositions:

1. The Map is Not the Territory.
As human beings, we can never know reality. We can only know our perceptions of reality. We experience and respond to the world around us based on our ‘neuro-linguistic’ maps of reality – not reality itself.

2. Life and ‘Mind’ are Systemic Processes.
The processes that take place within a human being and between human beings and their environment are systemic. Our bodies, our societies, and our universe form an ecology of systems and all of these systems interact  and mutually influence each other. When we want to change one part of our life, it is important to consider the ecology – what effect will it have on other parts of our life or on the people and world around us?

In the belief system of NLP it is not possible for human beings to know objective reality. There is no one ‘right’ or ‘correct’ map of the world. The people who are most effective in this world are the ones who have a map of the world that allows them to perceive the greatest number of available choices and perspectives. NLP is a way of enriching the choices that you have and perceive. One of the co-developers of NLP, Robert Dilts, says: “Excellence comes from having many choices. Wisdom comes from having multiple perspectives.”

On this website, you can find details of NLP coaching for personal or professional life. You can also find out how to train in NLP so that you can incorporate these valuable skills and create a life that is richer in every way.

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen
A key word in using NLP effectively is state. A state can be understood as a particular pattern of mind and body. In everyday language, we can describe people as being in a happy state or a relaxed state or an upset state. Other common states are motivation, curiosity, or love. This article is a brief introduction to state management and the powerful COACH state.
Clearly, some states are more useful than others when we are trying to do NLP work with other people or with ourselves and these useful states are called resourceful states. For example, a motivational state is generally more useful than an agitated state when we want to focus on getting something done. Similarly, a relaxed state is often more useful when we want to do access the unconscious mind. Robert Dilts talks about two states called COACH and CRASH. These are summarized below.

CRASH State

A CRASH state is generally unresourceful and not useful in achieving our goals. This state is generally provoked by meeting something fearful or unknown or getting caught in a loop where our thinking is paralyzed. The CRASH state can be seen as a reversion to survival strategies of fight, flight, or freeze, and can result in confusion, conflict, difficulty in letting go and inertia.
Contraction
Reaction
Analysis Paralysis
Separation
Hurt and Hatred

COACH State

In contrast to the CRASH state, the COACH state is a highly resourceful state that we can enter in order to carry out NLP work effectively.
Centered
Open
Attending with Awareness
Connected
Holding

State Management

Deliberately accessing a useful state is called state management and being able to control your own state is vital in effective NLP work. Because one of the main presuppositions of NLP is that mind and body form a single system, state management also consists of two components:
a) entering the physiology of the desired state
b) using the mental representations of the desired state

Physiology

When someone enters a panicked state, the people around them often say things like “take a deep breath,” and this is a good example of a suggestion to  adopt a more useful physiological state. Here is how one writer describes the benefits of deep breathing:
Deep breathing benefits the body by taking in the correct amount of oxygen which in turn lowers blood pressure and relaxes muscles. It also relaxes the brain and causes the heart rate to slow down. Deep breathing helps our body to release more carbon dioxide. Amongst the many health benefits of deep breathing are its cleansing properties for the lymphatic system. We know that the lymph surrounds all the cells in our bodies, correct breathing technique removes the toxins from these cells through the lymphatic system. Deep breathing is known to release endorphins which, in layman’s terms are called feel good hormones. These are natural pain killers in the body and help relax the muscles and nerves. Deep breathing is also known to help people who are depressed. Asthmatics also benefit a lot from deep breathing as it makes the abdominal muscles stronger and improves the lung capacity. Shallow breathing leads to the flow of insufficient oxygen in the body which leads to muscle exertion, lethargy and fatigue. Deep breathing can help us activate our relaxationstress relievers. It also helps people suffering from insomnia. Deep breathing exercise benefits in losing weight.
Clearly, a simple shift in physiology such as taking a deep breath can affect a person’s state enormously. Other useful physiological shifts include moving from a slumped posture to an upright one or taking a few minutes to do stretches.

Mental Representations

Mental or internal representations are the patterns we use to represent the world to ourselves in our own minds and consist of our internal pictures, sounds, dialogues, and feelings. By beginning to take control of your internal representations, you can start to manage your state in exactly the way that you want to achieve your desired outcome. A simple example is when you remember a happy time. As you remember that time now, pictures, sounds, and feelings from that time will return to you as you relive that time. Your mind makes no distinction between the original happy time and your memory of it, so if you re-enter that memory fully and completely, you will naturally re-enter the happy state that you experienced at that time.

Conclusion

This article has been a short introduction to state management and the powerful COACH state. By learning to manage your state deliberately and effectively, eventually you will find that you are achieving your desired outcomes much more easily.
Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
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NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com