This is the second article in the Sometimes We Runs… series. This one presents a very research supported approach to achieving goals.

See the full article on ChangePathsBlog: Sometimes We Run…Part 2: A smart strategy to achieve your goals!

The theme of the CANLP three day conference is “Brilliant Success through NLP.” The conference is being held in Montreal, October 1-3. The Canadian Association of NLP is a national association that is dedicated to stimulate and encourage the promotion and development of the worldwide practice of NLP. CANLP has a tradition of offering quality annual conferences, bringing in leaders in the field of NLP. To read more about the conference and CANLP go click here.

I will be presenting on a topic I have written about on change-paths-blog. The article that presents some of my ideas, in their early form is here.

My topic is:

Enhancing 4 Practices Vital to Achieving Abundance in Your Life

A sense of abundance is remarkably useful in helping you get what you want in your life. It is our premise that four general practices are vital to achieving abundance: reflection, appreciation, creation, and action. This presentation will show participants how a few basic NLP and Neuro-Semantic processes can help you achieve abundance in your life by enhancing the practices of reflecting, appreciating, creating, and taking action. Exercises designed to enhance these practices will be facilitated. For example exercises will provide strategies to help personal reflection to be more productive; intensify appreciation and gratitude, activate creation, and bolster their desire to take action.

The presentation will begin with an introduction to the model; how the practices of reflection, appreciation, creation, and action interact generatively to enhance abundance. Then attention will be given to each component. Some issues that will be addressed along the way include: how reflection is important to counter automatic patterns of thought and behaviour; that how we reflect on things matters; how appreciation, in all its facets, can energize us and set the stage for creation and action; how creation or the act of creating, within ourselves and in the world, increases momentum; and how action is ultimately the bridge between our inner state and achieving abundant outcomes in our lives.

So check out the CANLP site and perhaps I will see you at the conference!

The onion metaphor has often been used to describe the process of delving into a person’s psyche. Layers are removed to reveal what is beneath, toward the core. The metaphor reflects the many layers that we have inside us. Most who use this metaphor suggest that peeling away the layers of the onion is the complete story. The assumption seems to be that the awareness that happens as the layers of the onion are peeled away changes people. Is it the tears? Is it some magical healing factor that happens by exposing what was hidden to the light of day? Is it revealing the possibilities waiting for expression in the undamaged inner core? Certainly knowing what is within is useful, but usually insight alone is not enough to make real change and to sustain it.

Something critical is missing from the mind-as-onion metaphor. What supposedly happens when these layers are removed? Some unknown aspect of ourselves is revealed; okay then what?

It seems to me that the onion needs to be reconstructed and put back together, layer by layer, to be whole again. Putting the pieces together again, that is what’s missing! If we want to make it into something else entirely, such as salad, slices and layers scattered randomly around may be fine. But to be whole, the layers need to be re-placed or re-formed to complete what has essentially become a three dimensional puzzle. Have you ever tried to put a real onion back together? Not likely, but if so, how did that go for you? There is something about taking it apart that changes it. Perhaps that is the sometimes curative element of peeling away the layers of the onion; yet pieces themselves are not a whole.

Let us consider what these layers are for the human mind-body system. These layers are meanings. They are meanings we make from our experiences, our thoughts, and our feelings. These layers are the emotions, possibilities, limitations, beliefs, and intentions that we developed and solidified inside ourselves through our experience. These layers are fundamentally meanings, often multifaceted meanings, which direct how we live our life and how we feel about our life. Just examining these does not necessarily enrich them, or us, in ways that are helpful or in ways that serve us. It is what we do with that information next that matters.

In order to reconstruct the onion, to make it whole, changing the meanings of each layer and how they are stacked together is needed. Sometimes through our life experience the onion grew with the layers it needed to survive to deal with a lack of sunshine or too much rain. The way the layers formed may have served us then, but not now. Now the layers seem misplaced, out of place, malformed or just unhelpful! To make matters worse, sometimes the wrong layer is on top of another layer. The order of these layers matters, as it affects how we feel, how we function, what we think, and what we believe.

In an onion the layers have a static relationship to each other, a specific layer belongs on top of or beneath another and that’s just the way it is. Fortunately our layers have more options! Our structure is not static. It is a malleable, and perhaps even magical, multidimensional puzzle of onion pieces that can be put together in a variety of ways. People have a natural tendency to feel that things are the way they are, often not realizing the strength and power they have to reconstruct the onion and become someone better and different, an enriched version of their former self. We are capable of true transformation!

Changing the meaning is changing the layers; first by examining them, noticing them, acknowledging them, and then by questioning whether those meanings serve us. Changing the meaning is reconstructing each layer. Reconstructing is also deciding which layers go where. It is choosing which layers to honor and which ones are best discarded. Redesigning and improving ourselves is changing the nature of the layers and transforming them into something different, transforming the meanings. Then we can put the layers back together and reconstruct and revise and remap the layers.

Through reflection you can see the layers of your deeper self and appreciate the possibilities of your higher self. Know that you are capable of choosing how to layer and organize all the pieces to create a whole that manifests your highest goals and best dreams!

Who knows what will be the result. Perhaps what you will have at the end is not an onion at all, but something else, something more wonderful, a self transformed!

Some of the articles first posted on changepathsblog are also now ARTICLES on this site, particularly those relevant to ongoing projects. These include:

Passionate living is adeptly riding the wave of who you are! SEE ARTICLE HERE.

Latent Wisdom: Discovering What You Know. SEE ARTICLE HERE.

4 Practices Vital to Achieving Abundance in Your Life. A topic I will presenting on at two conferences this fall (2010). SEE ARTICLE HERE.

Delicate Moments, Notice Them! Also part of the abundance and appreciation theme. SEE ARTICLE HERE.

Abundance: Appreciating the Wealth of Our Senses. SEE ARTICLE HERE.

Much more coming soon.

Thrive,
Rich

Rich Liotta & Rosemary Lake-Liotta

Neurolinguistic Psychotherapy (2008) by Lisa Wake is a well researched, extensively referenced, and scholarly examination of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and the advancing model of neurolinguistic psychotherapy.  I enthusiastically recommend this book to clinicians, researchers, NLP practitioners, and anyone interested in advancing the science and theory of NLP. GO TO FULL BOOK REVIEW

I also recommend the 2002 book by Richard Bolstad, RESOLVE: A New Model of Therapy.  This book integrative and practical.  Bolstad makes connections between NLP and other models of psychotherapy.  He presents a perspective on the utility of NLP as an explanatory model, as NLP concepts are useful for explaining what therapist from many orientations do. GO TO FULL BOOK REVIEW

The Well Formed Outcome: The PROMISE Strategy is an article on this site.  PROMISE is an acronym for our formulation of the conditions of a well formed outcome.  We have found extremely useful in our work with clients to help them achieve their desired outcomes and live life more effectively….  Different authors and practitioners define the components of a well formed outcome somewhat differently, but the central premise is that you can’t get somewhere if you don’t know where you are going… The term, “well formed outcome,” was coined early in the development of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).  Having a well formed outcome is typically considered a prerequisite to other change interventions.  A well formed outcome is a central concept in goal setting, solution focused therapy, coaching, and just about any area where change and improvement are sought…

The acronym PROMISE is also meant to be a reminder that a well formed outcome is a commitment to change, a promise made to yourself to do what is effective to achieve your desired outcome.  Having “promise” also implies the potential for future accomplishment and excellence. Go to the full article.

The Rainbow Machine:  Tales from a Neurolinguist’s Journal by Andrew T. Austin  is a book definitely different from most books on NLP or hypnosis. This is a book of short stories and articles, many of them anecdotal, illustrating the use of various neurolinguistic techniques with humor, wit, and insight…… This book is unique and well worth reading.  Go to the full review.

Six Blind Elephants, volumes one and two, by Steve Andreas (2006)  is a very worthwhile read.  These books are about “scope” and “category” – and how we experience and understand ourselves, others, and our worlds. For therapists or other change agents, understanding “scope” and “category” opens up new possibilities for helping people change…..The Six Blind Elephants volumes demonstrate that Andreas continues to be one of the foremost thinkers advancing the development of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).  In my estimation these volumes will have a long term impact on future direction of NLP.  Indeed the concepts here can be explanatory in understanding how NLP and other therapeutic processes work.  As essentially any change in emotion, response, cognition, and behavior can be examined as scope and category shifts. . . Go to the full review.