Sensory Experience
NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) is known as the study of human excellence. It asserts that we can’t know the world directly but rather we can only experience it through the representations we build from our sensory experience. This includes what we see, hear, feel/touch, taste and smell. Consequently, NLP strategies work directly with the way in which our sensory experiences produce the building blocks of our experiences. This results in our patterns of belief, emotion and action. In other words NLP explains why we do what we do and offers methods to change it.
Transform Your Sensory Experience for Healthy Lifestyle Habits
When you voluntarily rearrange the combination of your sensory experience regarding any issue or aspect of your life, you then change the way in which your brain stores and recalls that issue. As a result, you naturally change your future beliefs, emotions and actions. Consider the implications of this approach in helping you transform your relationship with food, exercise or past hurts. NLP is a powerful change agent for developing healthy lifestyle habits, decreasing stress and reaching your authentic potential. Let’s demonstrate this.
Visual Sensory Experience Exercise: Your Minds Eye
Think of a pleasant experience. In your minds eye bring the image closer, make it richer, make it more colorful, clarify the details and turn up the brightness. Notice how you feel?
Now take that same experience and send it get farther away in your minds eye. Make the image smaller, less clear, dim and black and white. Notice how you feel again?
Now put the experience back where it was originally.
You probably had stronger feelings when it was closer to you and weaker feelings when it was farther away.
Achieve Your Goals
If you want to increase your happiness and achieve your goals then move these experiences close to you in your minds eye with clarity and bright colors.
If you want to transform challenging experiences, move them farther away and visualize them in black and white.
Coaching and Counseling
Hilary Stokes Ph.D. and Kim Ward Ph.D. have been a team for 20 years, specializing in mind, body, spirit psychology. They are the authors of the bestselling books The Happy Map: Your roadmap to the habit of happiness and Manifesting Mindset: The 6-step formula for attracting your goals and dreams and founders of Authenticity Associates Coaching and Counseling. They are passionate about combining the best of holistic and traditional approaches to health and happiness. If you are interested in learning the answers to the most frequently asked questions on how to decrease stress and increase happiness sign up for their free video series.
