3 Techniques from Neurolinguistic Programming
Over the past few years, I’ve been keen on self-development, and I recently came across a new field called Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). It has a lot of interesting ideas, so I decided to try some of them.
In this article, we’ll explore the different techniques I used and the impact I found it had on me.
The Swish Pattern
A lot of us struggle with urges.
Whether it be:
Junk food
Reducing Unwanted Social Media time
Porn
Video games
And when the urge comes, we start to lose ourselves- and we know how the rest of that story goes…
Even though I turned my life around in 2020. A lot of my previous urges were still there- I just got better at ignoring them.
I wanted to see if any techniques could reduce the resistance/urge and make the process ‘smooth’.
And there was.
One of the most famous techniques in NLP is related to controlling urges.
It’s called the Swish Pattern.
Here’s how it goes.
The technique involves replacing a negative behavior with a positive mental image of the person you want to be -the person who has all of their problems figured out. In doing so you interrupt the compulsive pattern and direct the compulsion to a behavior that aligns with your values.
More specifically, here are the steps.
1. Define clearly the behavior or state you want to change. This could be a habit, a thought pattern, or any automatic response you want to modify.
2. Determine the Cue Image:
Identify the visual cue that triggers the unwanted behavior. This is often the first image that comes to your mind when you think about the situation in which the unwanted behavior occurs.
Make this a specific, detailed, and clear image. For instance, if the behavior is smoking. The queue image might be you picking up a cigarette.
3. Replacement Image
This replacement image should be a picture of the ideal you (no context) that has everything they want solved in life.
4. The final part of it involves performing the ‘swish’ where you essentially visually replace the image of the behavior, thought pattern, etc… with the positive self-image of yourself.
Hint: Sometimes I found it useful to make it dramatic, as if this new positive self-image was coming in and shattering into pieces the negative thought pattern.
5. After each repetition, ‘break state’ by distracting yourself or thinking of something else. This prevents your mind from analyzing the process and enhances its effectiveness.
Keep repeating this until it becomes automatic. This way whenever the behavior pops up, the ‘swish’ happens and it gets replaced by the replacement image.
I think the huge benefit behind this is that you get an eye-opening perspective in the moment of what matters and you can destroy the inner parts of you that you don’t like.
This technique reminds me of the Nietzsche quote.
“ You must be ready to burn yourself in your flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes? “
Values Elicitation
This was an interesting exercise for me because of the overlap it had with the change I underwent in 2020. During that time I changed my identity — which is the most profound kind of change you can have. The actions that I took day by day were not because of what they got me, but because they aligned with the person that I wanted to be. The point of this exercise is to uncover hidden qualities that you value and want to instill within yourself — which is the first step to making that change.
The first realization you need to have is that what you want isn’t as important as what you think it will do for you. In this sense, your desires go much deeper than you think they do.
As we do this exercise, instead of painting a picture of what we want to have, we paint of picture of who we want to be. These are the root desires. And we start this off by figuring out which qualities about ourselves we truly value.
Here are the steps:
1. First identify a context in your life: Relationships, Career, Personal Growth, etc…
And ask yourself:
What do I want [ ] in this context?
2. Then start by asking yourself more open questions.
For example:
What is important about [ ] in your career?
What do you value about [ ] in a relationship?
What does [ ] do for you?
As you keep asking these questions, you’ll eventually find that what you’re pursuing is a high-level value.
These are things like.
Persistence
Freedom
Honesty
Trustworthiness
Curiosity
Love
Note: Sometimes when you do this exercise you'll find yourself saying things like ‘confidence’ or ‘fulfillment’. But notice that these are consequences of aligning your values- not values themselves. Therefore, If you find yourself reaching them in the process (which I did), keep asking more open-ended questions until you start coming up with values.
Here were some of the effects that I got from doing this exercise:
Clarity
One of the most important pieces for when I turned my life around was figuring out who I wanted to be. I had a vague idea, which gave me some clarity but never had I gotten this clear on the question.
Motivating
Realizing that many of our desires can be boiled down to high-level values was motivating because it was something that I could control and directly affected me and the goal I was pursuing- which was being the best version of myself.
Transforming Negative Self-Talk
I know how important self-talk can be in how you view yourself — It can make the difference between moving forward or staying stuck in life. This is why I am very conscious of how I speak to myself, and whenever the inner critic pops up, I smack it in the face and suggest something positive instead.
This is an approach that works. But after studying some more, I realized that there are better ways to deal with the inner critic. Instead of arguing with it, you can reframe its perspective- You’ll see what I mean in just a moment.
Note: Most of the ideas in this part of the article came from the book “Transforming Negative Self-Talk” by Steve Andreas, and it was truly transformational.
Here are three ways I tried this out.
1. Using the phrase “Even though” to link apparent opposites
An important part of improving your self-talk is about accepting past mistakes -recognizing that mistakes are normal, and then projecting a positive future goal despite the mistake.
However, this can be difficult and simply saying affirmations like:
“I completely accept myself”
Feel untrue because it sets up a direct conflict between self-rejection and self-acceptance.
However, by using something like “Even though” we can state opposites (positive and negative) in such a way that they don’t conflict with each other, while still projecting a future goal.
Here are some examples:
“Even though I have failed repeatedly, I can learn to succeed.”
“Even though I don’t like healthy food, I can lose weight.”
The general pattern is as follows:
“Even though I [statement of problem or difficulty], I [statement of a positive outcome]”
After having done this I felt much better about myself- no longer did mistakes hold me back — they propelled me further.
2. The “As if” frame
As you may have noticed, one of the most powerful techniques in NLP involves reframing scenarios. One of the common ways to do this is using the “As if” frame.
Here’s an example:
“I can’t succeed” → “What would it look like if I could succeed?”
The purpose of the exercise isn’t to trick yourself. You’re just asking what if?
When you do this you can use your imagination to go beyond your limitations and access more information and resources that you can then tap into to change your behavior- as opposed to limiting yourself by saying “I can’t” and remaining stuck in some particular endeavor.
After you ask yourself these questions, disassociate from the stuck state — by viewing it from a third-person perspective, add in these new resources- traits like patience, commitment, etc… and visualize a movie of how the pursuit of a given endeavor now looks like with these newfound resources.
I used this reframe to become more productive throughout the day. And here are some of the resources that I found.
Time aware
Focused
Knows how to manage distractions
Sticks to his plan
Finds joy in the work he does
Lives in the present
After thinking about the kind of attitudes and behaviors this person would have, I disassociated and looked at things from a third-person perspective, added the resources that I discovered would be useful, and then played it out — adding one resource at a time.
I found this to be a powerful reframe technique, because — unlike affirmations, you’re not tricking yourself, you’re just using your imagination to explore further possibilities of what behaviors and attitudes the person you want to be, has, and then bit by bit adding in these resources and seeing how it plays out.
This gives you clarity on what to change and what that would look like.
3. Core Questions
“When we ask ourselves questions it directs our attention to certain aspects of our experience and ignores others. If I’m at a restaurant, and it is time to order a meal, I could ask myself a wide variety of questions, and each one would point my mind in a different direction.
What’s the most delicious item?
What’s the cheapest item?
What’s the fastest-to-eat item?
etc… ”
This is a really powerful effect that questions have. And we can apply it to self-development.
Consider a life context (work, relationships, personal growth, etc…) ask the following questions, and observe how it is that they make you feel.
“Am I good enough?”
“Is this all there is?”
“What should I do?”
“What can I get here?”
“Who’s in charge?”
“Do they love me?”
“Will I survive this?”
“Will this give me pleasure?”
“How can I make the most of this situation?”
Notice how you feel differently depending on which question you ask yourself (because your attention is directed in a different direction).
The goal is that while thinking about your experience in this specific life context, ask yourself, “If there were a question, always in the back of my mind, that quietly guided all my experience and behavior in this context, what might it be?”
You can use the previous ones for inspiration.
Once you have come up with a question, generalize it.
“What food should I choose?” → “What should I do next?” is more general.
An important piece of choosing the question is that you want it to satisfy the right criteria:
There is a more general criteria in Steve Andreas book, but here a few things that you want to check for:
We want our question to presuppose:
Choice (Do I have control over this?)
Resource (Do we have the resources to do it?)
Good Feelings (It should lean towards positive feelings)
Here are some of the contexts and questions I got:
Work:
How can I make the most of this situation?
What are my options?
What problem are we solving?
Personal Growth:
What resources do I need to overcome this barrier?
What traits do I want that are missing?
Have I done everything I could have?
Notice how depending on the question you ask your attention shifts in a different direction.
That’s it for this article.
Use some of the techniques in the article — The order in which I listed them was the order in which I learned them, see how it goes. I’m thinking of making more articles on this topic in the future — comment below if you are interested!