Sometimes overcoming challenges is easy and sometimes less so. A great strategy for taking control of challenges is to do the absolute opposite of trying to get rid of it and instead study the skills you need and use in order to create it. Forget about getting rid of problems. There is in fact a school of thinking that believe that problems never really go away. You simply learn to behave as if they no longer exist as your thinking evolves.
Instead of getting rid of problems and overcoming challenges become an authority in them. Be the NLP master practitioner of your problems. When you start to get really good at getting at knowing how you do the problem for maximise affect the first thing that happens is you start to acknowledge how you drive the problem instead of having it driving you.
When you are at the mercy of your problems it can feel disempowering and cause feelings of weakness and being out of control. When you learn how you drive the problem you have the choice to drive it in a different direction or to stop it entirely. Another important element to observing how you do your problems is that in order to notice your own behaviour and reactions you momentarily have to step outside of yourself to witness what you do. This means that you stop doing your problem. Cease to experience your challenge and for a short span of time stop being you and instead become the all-seeing observer – an NLP Master practitioner.
When you witness yourself recreating your challenge in this specific ways in which you do it, you begin to dissect it. When something is dissected, it’s often difficult to reassemble to its former working condition. Oh dear, did you just pull your problem to pieces and break it?!
Let’s be clear, becoming an authority about your problem is about knowing the specifics of how you do what you do and not ‘why’. Don’t become an authority on ‘why’ because that will just be your lame justification for having it and hanging on to it. Know ‘how’ so that you can learn, unpick and break your strategy. Recently I attended a counselling talk and the counsellor mentioned that she used to run an OCD group. Everyone in the group was still successfully obsessive and compulsive and the counsellor had been surprised to discover that all the group did was fan each other’s flames about why they felt they had OCD and how bad their symptoms were and why they couldn’t get over it.
That’s very different to ‘how’ do you do it. What are the specific thoughts you have to think, the things you have to focus on, what do you need to say to yourself and how must you say it and not why. ‘Why’ only tells you the ideas that already exist which are not getting rid of the problem or else it would have gone on its own already. Whereas ‘how’ gets you to be external and more importantly outside of the system that is running the problem. When you become an authority on your problem you can develop the skills to support others who might otherwise feel totally alone and freakish. In looking at how others do problems you can’t not begin to consider how they might begin to overcome them. When you teach others how to overcome their challenges you get borrowing benefits as you are also teaching yourself and you really begin to develop master practitioner skills.
By Gemma Bailey
www.peoplebuilding.co.uk
