202 Part III: Opening the Toolkit
Chinese Qigong practitioners know that the ‘internal smile’ technique used in
step 2 improves their immune system, gets the brain working more efficiently,
and can reduce blood pressure, anxiety, and simple depression.
Grasping the importance of the ‘how’
NLP is interested more in process – how you do something – than in the con-
tent of your experience. So the issue isn’t that you get angry when you lose
at badminton (content), but rather how you go about getting angry when you
lose a game (process).
Because NLP is concerned with the process of your strategy, discovering and
analysing that process helps you to change a strategy that doesn’t provide
the desired results. So instead of smashing your badminton racket, you con-
struct a visual image of writing a hefty cheque for another expensive racket.
And because strategies can be modified, you can use the model of the way
you do something successfully to improve another area in your life in which
you don’t feel you do as well.
Identify an area of your life in which you’re successful and ask yourself, ‘What
strategy am I running now that I’m succeeding?’ We call this exercise playing
the ‘as if’ game. Suppose you consider yourself a fairly successful badminton
player and have always wanted to take up running. Every time you start run-
ning, however, you give up because you just can’t keep up the momentum. So
you think about running ‘as if’ you’re playing badminton. While examining the
strategies you operate while playing badminton, you realise that your breath-
ing and mental focus are different when you’re running around the court to
when you’re running on the track. By adopting the strategies that you use
when you play badminton when you run, you may find that you achieve your
desire of becoming a more successful runner.
Tim was extremely tidy and organised at the office. Unfortunately his home
was a mess: he was just unable to keep a tidy house. Romilla worked with Tim
to help him identify the processes he used in the office to keep his work area
tidy. He examined his strategy as follows:
- Test 1 – Trigger: He saw papers and folders on his desk at work and
decided he wanted to see clear space.
- Operate: Tim would do the following:
- Imagine his boss walking in and commenting on his untidiness.
Interestingly, the boss’s tone of voice was very similar to the one
Tim’s mother used when he was a child.
- Get an uncomfortable feeling in his solar plexus.
- Picture where the files went.
- Get up and file away the papers and folders.
