Category Archives: Neuro-Linguistics

Posture Makes a Difference

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Open or closed body posture makes a difference.

Open or closed body posture makes a difference.

NLP trainers have known for some time and common sense tells you that posture plays an important role in determining whether people act as though they are really in charge. Research from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University confirms that “posture expansiveness,” or positioning yourself in a way that opens up the body to take up more space, creates a sense of power that produces behavioral changes in a person independent of their actual rank or hierarchical role in an organization. Indeed, these study findings demonstrate that posture may be more significant to a person’s psychological manifestations of power than their title or rank.

“Going into the research we figured role would make a big difference, but shockingly the effect of posture dominated the effect of role in each and every study,” Kellogg PhD candidate Li Huang said.

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Power Goal Achievement

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Jump-start your goals with the 5-yrs-from-now Exercise.

Jump-start your goals with the 5-yrs-from-now Exercise.

My friend, Noel, from Ireland, asked how he could better achieve his goals. Years ago, I borrowed ideas from Richard Bandler and others to create an exercise that helped one company sales team achieve their goals in record time and helped a group of women lose unwanted pounds and keep them off. Perhaps it will work for you, too.

First, I recommend Win Wenger’s Imagestreaming, perhaps the best exercise I’ve ever seen for breaking up writer’s block, clearing the mind for creative thought, and generally improving creativity.

Then the NLP Outcome frame offers a great outline for focusing the mind, clarifying goals, and creating a track on which to run. It also provides invaluable instruction on HOW to set achievable goals.

To jump-start your journey to goal achievement, I recommend the “5-years-from-now Exercise.” It’s amazingly easy to do and will provide you with motivation AND information necessary to achieve your goal – and do it all in minutes. I think it’s best done with a trained NLP professional to assist you, but you can get great results yourself by following the directions in this post. Here’s how:

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What Were You Thinking?

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What Were You Thinking?

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Whew! 15 years of work! Although this is book #5 for me, it was the most difficult to write – because it’s about ME and MY thinking errors (don’t you just love self-disclosure?!). The publisher says that if you use the code MVY7M9SU they will knock off $3. That’s about 20%. Nice!

What Were You Thinking?

Some Common Thinking Errors and What to Do About Them

Authored by Joseph Bennette

A critical look into how our magnificent brains can help us make the most of our lives – and get us into deep trouble. Fortunately, thanks to our big brains we have the capability to solve our own thinking errors – once we know what those errors are. Explore some common thinking errors and what you can do to prevent or correct them. From the introduction: Continue reading →

Clench for Willpower Boost

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Tempted? Clench your lip muscles shut!

Tempted? Clench your lip muscles shut!

A study reported in the Journal of Consumer Research says firming muscles can shore up self-control. Of course, it only works if the choice you are faced with is in alignment with your goals and the muscle clenching is done at the moment of highest self-control dilemma. For example, when faced with the choice to snag a high fat snack when your goal is to lose weight is the perfect time to clench your muscles – adding will-power to your self-control dilemma.

Apparently it doesn’t matter which muscles you clench – what matters is the timing. You must clench DURING a crisis of will-power – like when you’re staring that cigarette in the face! It doesn’t help – in fact it works to your detriment – to clench muscles before the temptation.

So, next time you feel the urge to break your diet, clench your lip muscles shut instead!

Study source: Iris W. Hung and Aparna A. Labroo. “From Firm Muscles to Firm Willpower: Understanding the Role of Embodied Cognition in Self-Regulation.” Journal of Consumer Research.

Don’t Stop?

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It takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it.

It takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it.

Thinking, that is! A study out of Case Western Reserve University shows that it takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it. No wonder it’s so hard to stop smoking or stop berating yourself or stop that tune that got stuck in your head. It just takes too much energy!

Some years ago, I underwent a year of intensive thought transformation in which a group of us focused attention on catching each other or sometimes even catch ourselves saying the “wrong” things – things that detracted us from our goals. “Try” was on the taboo list of words for obvious reasons – it holds a built-in failure. So, each time we’d hear one of us say the word, “try”, we’d say, “Cancel that!” The process seemed horribly difficult as we were catching each other often over that year. In the end, however, the goal was attained and my speech cleared up so much.

I wonder if we were unintentionally making it harder on ourselves by canceling (stopping) our thoughts instead of reframing them – sort of like nudging an asteroid instead of hitting it head-on.

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