174 Part III: Opening the Toolkit
If the pain has a colour, what happens when you give it a different
colour, such as healing blue? What happens if you see that band of
steel break up into strips of ribbon, fluttering in the wind? If the pain
is a dull ache, can you change the feeling to a tingle? If it feels hot, can
you change that feeling into one of a cool breeze blowing over the area?
These changes can reduce your backache, if it hasn’t already gone.
- Now imagine that you’re sitting in front of a cinema screen: remove
the backache from your body and project a picture of the backache on
to the screen.
- Make the picture on the screen smaller and smaller until it becomes
the size of a balloon.
- Now watch the balloon float up into the sky, and as you see it floating
away your backache is getting less and less.
- As the balloon reaches the clouds, calibrate your backache to just a 1.
- As the balloon disappears from sight, the backache fades to just the
faintest memory.
Using the swish
The swish is a powerful technique – based like a lot of NLP on behavioural
psychology – for making lasting changes in habits and behaviours. The swish
pattern is designed to change a problematic behaviour that’s driven by a trig-
ger. The idea behind the swish is to attach a self image to the trigger so that
every time the trigger is activated, you see a new way of behaving and you
change your behaviour effortlessly.
Say that you bite your nails. The swish enables you to use a picture of the
trigger – such as seeing you run a finger along a nail and finding a jagged edge
or a response to getting nervous that creates the unwanted behaviour (biting
your nails) – to create a new, desired pattern of behaviour or new image
(your hands looking immaculate).
You can use the swish pattern to change that feeling of exhaustion after a
day’s work into one of being relaxed and ready to enjoy your evening.
- Identify the unwanted behaviour.
You may want to stop biting your nails, stop smoking, or stop yourself
getting angry at small transgressions.
