Getting More Out Of Life

It is important that you have a clear internal representation of where your life is going. This means you have a positive representation (image, soundtrack and feeling) of career, wealth, health, personal relationships and any other area that is important to you over the long term. When you are tuned into the bigger picture of your life, procrastination is a bad choice and motivation to act is natural.

Having a good sense of direction for where your life is heading is abstract and does not include tasks and evidence frames for getting things done. This is where the NLP well formed outcome process is useful.  You can read the procedure for setting well formed outcomes in the article I wrote in February, click this link. In a nutshell, a well formed outcome is a sensory specified goal, with evidence and ecology checks. It’s good to set well formed outcomes in all areas of your life to create balance. In doing so, you have a feel good, moving forward scenario in your career, personal relationships, health, wealth and so on.

If you have established a clear big picture representation of your life and have set some well formed outcomes it would be a mistake to scatter your attention and actions across the different outcomes. This could put you on overwhelm and reduce your effectiveness. Fully focussing your attention on what is important will enable your actions to be effective. If you establish the important things to be done and give each one your full attention for the time allocated to it, you will soon experience the benefits. For example, I have allocated a set time for this article, during this time the article has my full attention. My door is closed; I will not check my emails or do anything to distract me. Tonight when I am with my family, they will have my full attention as I absorb myself in family life. You will find you get so much more done when you use full attention and you will enjoy life more. Saying it another way, give everything you choose to do your full attention while doing it.

I love to feel good and conversely I do not like to feel bad. Feeling good or bad are labels assigned to bodily sensations. It’s useful to be more aware of the sensations than labels. The sensations are not digital they are analogue; you will notice that there are different degrees of feeling good. i.e. you can feel very good, or just OK. You can also feel a little good and little bad at the same time. Self awareness is literally sensing what you feel in your body and then responding to the different sensory feedback. As you achieve your outcomes the sensations attributed to feeling good will be stronger. The more congruent you are with the big picture of your life the more you feel those good sensations. Procrastination stimulates the other set of sensations, and who wants to feel bad? When you have self awareness you can use these sensations. The minute you feel any procrastination sensations do something and feel good so that you are no longer procrastinating. You will soon notice the scaleability, the more you work towards your goal, the stronger the positive sensations.

Your state is the sum total of what is occurring in the mind body system at any given time. It is the neurological, biological, endocrine, immune and lymphatic systems working together to create a state. I am sure you have experienced states where everything seemed to flow for you. In these states challenging tasks seemed easy. On the other hand, you have probably experienced states where even the most simple of tasks seemed difficult. In the old days of NLP we used to refer to state control as an important part of self development. In modern NLP we think state choice is a more useful term. You do have choice over your state, it depends to what extent you choose to exercise the choice.  In New Code NLP we say state is the leverage point in conducting change work.

There are several ways to exercise state choice, the simplest is to ensure that your breathing patterns are fluent and your posture is not tense. Irregular breathing and tension in the body produce stress. People who are depressing themselves are doing so with their breathing, physiology, inner dialogue and internal representations. People who are in a resource state are in that state because of the same factors, i.e. their breathing, physiology, inner dialogue and internal representations.

There is evidence to show the happier you are the happier you feel and your mental filters see and hear more positive aspects of life. The same is true in reverse, i.e the more negative you feel the more evidence you will find to support your negativity. So exercising choice over your state not only enables you feel to good it enables you to unconsciously experience the good things that surround you

So to summarise, to get more out of life:

• Know the big picture


• Set well formed outcomes for all areas of life


• Use all your attention not scattered attention


• Develop self awareness and respond to your inner sensations


• Exercise choice with your state