Category Archives: mind strategies

Finding Lost or Missing Objects

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Here’s a nice little hack we call “Strike Up Accord”. It’s a version of the Higher Power trick for finding lost car keys.

But we don’t rely on some other agency. From our own viewpoint, we strike up accord with the missing object. Reach out and feel love and warmth towards it. It will swim into view in the mind’s eye. It’s as if it was seeking you out, to re-connect!

Definition: accord (noun); in harmony, in tune, a pleasing relationship, a balanced interrelationship.

Interestingly, there’s an older definition: to settle or to reconcile. That makes sense; when something has vanished it has gone out of harmony. There is a dissonance, or a break in togetherness.

Fun With Problems

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I have written many times over the years that the mark of a successful individual is not whether he or she has problems. It is whether he or she can solve the problems they have.

If the person has the same problem now as they had last year, he or she is poor at solving problems and not very successful.

A lot of people do not understand problems and cannot solve them (how can you, if you don’t know what a problem is?)

So the unsuccessful person just worries and frets and does nothing.

It’s not at all about having “no problems.” In fact the only sure way to have no problems is to be dead. Everybody has problems. Whenever we have a goal, there are barriers to achieving that goal. The goal blocked by a barrier is a problem. Continue reading →

Creatively Dealing With Problems

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There is an extremely powerful approach to life’s problems, which is to sit with the individual and have them think-up (invent, imagine, create) “a similar kind of problem” to the one which is bothering them. Have him or her come up with other trouble variants that are at least as complex and major as the one that’s bugging them.

It is capable of reducing the person’s pain and distress enormously. Yet it does not require an enormous insight into the workings of the mind to use effectively.

We are harnessing the person’s creative energy and not delving into negative areas of experience in the way that, say, regression therapy does. As a positive gain rather than a negative gain procedure which cannot easily be overrun, it can be used on a very wide variety of people and problems.

This makes it an ideal tool for what we jokingly call the car qualified practitioner (a “have a go” helper, not a professional; you know, the kind of conversation you could have with someone while driving along in a car).

When directed towards an individual’s fixed condition, (divorce, cancer, broken leg, etc), or even other long-term problems that the individual wants to get rid of, the person goes very thoroughly and immediately into session. He or she has an intense interest in getting rid of the problem and is almost invariably willing to talk to the practitioner/counselor.

One reason for this willingness, is that the individual does not have to dig out or reveal any damaging truths about themselves. Another reason this procedure is peculiarly suitable to car qualified work.

Here we are exercising a person’s creative ability to mock up or create mental structures, which can be done for ever, rather than trying to eliminate negative emotional energy from unpleasant memory. So it cannot easily be overdone, as some techniques can.

It enables the spiritual being or mental composite to rise above the mass of negative energy without viewing it in detail.  It simply moves the crushing weight of disempowering burden off the case.

How Is It Done? Continue reading →

Let me share my failure strategy!

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Keith Scott-Mumby

The NLP people have developed the concept of an internal strategy. It’s a kind of meta-program, a thought sequence, which runs on automatic, once triggered.

It’s often easy to see other peoples’ internal strategies but it’s not nearly as simple to see your own. We all have failure strategies, by the way. You need to figure out what your own is. Maybe this will help give you insight.

My Own Failure Strategy

I’ve figured out my personal “failure strategy”. It runs often.  As I said, you might learn something if I share it with you; it goes something like this:

  1. I think what I want, decide I am going to get it and tell myself that I am.
  2. I immediately think of all the problems that stand in the way of getting what I want, knowing that if I cannot solve them, I will fail.
  3. As I start to feel unsure about overcoming all obstacles in a timely manner, I start to feel unsure of myself. I begin to question my own judgment.
  4. The uncertainty and complexity of solutions and the probability of failure starts to grow.
  5. I make fitful efforts at thinking about the goal, pretending I’m still striving for it, talking to others as if I am, and I carry out desultory actions to achieve it.
  6. I soon start to modify the goal either changing it into something more “realistic”, or start adding time modifiers that would soon kick it out of the game.
  7. I know in my heart of hearts that I’m not hitting the bar for the effort required to succeed. Instead I get “tired”, disinterested, de-motivated and drink to forget the issues.
  8. I remember my spectacular successes of the past and use that to congratulate myself for being brilliant.
  9. I do not associate (NLP term) with the effort, integrity, focus, pleasure, ingenuity and continuous activity required that was the real reason for my successes, not my “brilliance”.
  10. I constantly allow myself to get distracted with off-target diversions, all seeming necessary.
  11. I sooner or later find a new goal that is exciting and inspiring and get involved with that.
  12. I allow this to displace the original goal, which I discard or re-classify as “sometime-maybe”.
  13. Eventually I lose sight of the goal and am not acting on it, without even admitting that I have quit! Continue reading →