This article is written by David Haworth, our tutor in Malta & Gozo and author of many of our online personal development courses. You can find out more about the courses he teaches here, and about his online personal development courses here.
Life depends on how you look at it, doesn’t it? After what must seem like years of lockdowns, fear and uncertainty, it can be hard to find the bright side and, for many, this has led to mental health issues; not least, increased levels of stress and anxiety. But where do you turn when you can’t find the bright side, when you can’t find the right path or you feel too encumbered by the past that the bright future you once imagined for yourself is beginning to seem unreachable?
NLP coaching, in my view, is the perfect solution. A very powerful and versatile process, with tools and techniques that are effective in a whole range of situations and provide meaningful and lasting results. What’s more, the process is quick; you don’t need to spend months in traditional therapy to see a difference.
Because NLP coaching deals directly with the processes and thought patterns in the unconscious mind, we bypass the filters and safeguards of the sneaky and deceptive conscious mind which enables us to get to the root of a problem quickly and easily. Listening to what my clients say to me as they gradually open up in their very first session usually tells me everything I need to know in order to help them. Often, a client’s first session will end with an expression of surprise. “I had no idea I was going to tell you all of that – I didn’t even realise that I was feeling those things!” Often – very often – what started off as the answer to my question “How am I going to help you today?” turns out not to be the problem at all, and that’s never a surprise! What we learn together in that first session is how you feel and think about yourself, and what you believe about your own worth, your place, your expectations, and your desires.
Our memories, our habits and our unconscious thought patterns are what create our everyday model of the world. Almost always, these are distorted by our past experiences, trauma, self-expectation and self-limiting beliefs which we have about ourselves. Through NLP we become more self-aware and self-empowered; empowered to make changes that inevitably mean we can become the person we want to be. We become resilient, adaptable, and in control of our emotional state, realising that we are allowed to be totally in control of our own lives, how we feel, act, react and grow.
For all of us – and it’s obvious if you think about it – ‘spring cleaning’ the unconscious mind is a really great starting point to dealing with our issues. Not only does our unconscious mind store memories of everything we have ever seen, heard, felt, tasted and touched, it also holds onto all those pesky negative emotions that we have experienced; the anger, the sadness, the grief, the guilt and so on. Those emotions are terrifically damaging and also terrifically successful at ‘holding us back’, anchoring us in the past. Sometimes, our memory of a past situation is confused by our own perceptions of how things are/were or should be. And, most importantly, our unconscious mind will regularly throw up those emotions that we are gripping firmly onto, arising from past events; past events which we cannot ‘let go of’ because we haven’t processed them. By which, I mean that in every one of those past events there is a lesson to learn. Until we learn that lesson our unconscious mind won’t let it go.
So, how do we untangle all of that? Well, as is almost always the case with NLP, there is a wonderfully simple and very effective tool. Timeline therapy, used effectively, can allow us to release all of those stored up emotions quickly and, importantly, painlessly. And once they are gone…..? Well, then the real fun starts, and we can begin to build a future that is not encumbered by the thoughts, feelings and emotional baggage that have always held you back. We create a picture of the life you want, the life you can now have, and we start to build it.
David Haworth is a member of the APTL and a Master Practitioner of NLP. He works with clients internationally, both in person and online and is also the author of several popular courses in NLP and Life Coaching.
