I want to share with you how to recognise where you are at, acknowledge it and letting it go so that you can move on.
One of the things that I think sometimes people misinterpret with personal development tools such as NLP, is that when you recognise that there is a problem you should instantly, instantly overcome it and fix it.
There are techniques within NLP that work really fast and do bring about almost instant results for us but sometimes the real cure comes with time. When we can accept that repair and recovery takes a little bit of time we can allow ourselves to go through that process much more naturally so that we’re more robust against it if it shows up again in the future.
It also means that we’re also going through the experience at a more gentle pace, that we’re ok with the fact that sometimes we’re not ok.
I want to share with you today, an anecdote that I sent over to a friend of mine. My friend had contacted me on Facebook a few weeks back to say that she had had some traumatic times recently and that life had been a bit tough. She wanted to know what would I do in those situations to cheer myself up.
So, I sent her back a message, and said ‘If NLP techniques aren’t hitting the spot, music works well for me, exercise, or ideally both together. Sometimes I watch a superhero movie too because it makes me feel all empowered.’
My friend responded and gave me a bit more detail about what was going on for her and there was some really big stuff in there.
So, you know in those situations we can’t necessarily apply an NLP technique and say ‘oh I feel perfect now!’ because it’s not really appropriate. For example, if someone close to you has died, you go through a process to overcome that and you know that process will take time. It’s not necessarily going to be the case, unless you’re being flippant about it, that as a result of losing someone close to you, you do a technique and then feel great again and are back to normal. That’s unrealistic, so I slightly changed my response and suggestion and gave a more anecdotal, metaphorical response.
So I said, ‘Don’t beat yourself up about it, with all that’s happened you can expect to be a bit weathered as a result.
I got this spot on my chin a couple of weeks ago and it would not go. It turned out to be an ingrown hair like the bearded lady.’ Attractive! ‘Anyway, last week it got so big I named it Roy’
(Now, just for your information, Roy actually had his own twitter feed for a couple of days as well, that’s how significant Roy was in my life.)
‘Then it exploded. And now I’m left with a scab. As much as I’m glad it’s over with Roy, I’d like the scab to disappear because it’s not a great feature for my face. But the truth is, I’ll just have to wait for it to heal, which of course it will soon enough.’
Roy really did exist in my life and it’s still lingering to some extent even now, but knowing that through time that things will get better can be incredibly reassuring. If we just wait and focus our attention on other things in the meantime, eventually it will all settle down and the scabby things will start to disappear.
