Shlomo Vaknin's Blog

In contrast to permanent narratives, the stories of your life are always being rewritten. As you seek to explain to yourself and others how you got to be the person you are, the delicate threads of causation are rewoven and reinterpreted. While listening to my clients’ recollections of their past, I am struck by the manner in which people make the connection between what they experienced as children and who they are now.

Thus, what is your personal past due? Certainly, these memories have an impact on you, and you must learn from them if you are to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again, which can make you feel imprisoned in a long-running drama of your own creation. In order to achieve this, it is vital to listen to the patient’s tale without interrupting it throughout the earliest phases of psychotherapy. Not only are the events themselves contained inside those memories, but so too is the significance that those experiences have for the individual who has experienced them. The fact that the narrative is being told by someone who is worried, unhappy, or otherwise unsatisfied with his or her existence increases the likelihood that one may hear about grievances and traumas that are apparently tied to current misery.

Every American has been exposed by now to pop psychology that promotes the idea of linking past problems to current symptoms. Because accepting responsibility for what you do and how you feel requires a deliberate act of will, it is tempting to place blame on people from your past, particularly your parents, for failing to provide a better education or upbringing.

Recognizing and processing major physical, sexual, or psychological trauma is critical for the individual who has suffered from it. The effects of parental abuse and neglect are irreversible in the lives of children. This assessment must be approached sensitively, with an emphasis on learning rather than on the idea that even the most traumatic experiences will define your life for the rest of your days and years to come.

In essence, most of your early traumas are no longer valid. It’s time to heal. 

Recall the first memory you have of driving and operating a vehicle. Compare that experience with your most recent one behind the wheel. Those experiences must feel different in some way. However, how exactly are they different? The answer to this question gives us an intuition about the difference between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. If you do not drive, or you have not driven for a significant duration of time, you could consider any other skill as a surrogate, such as playing a sport, and you should arrive at the same intuition.

At any given second, you are bombarded with roughly two million bits of information. There is no way you would remain sane if you had to be aware of all that information all the time. For that reason, your mind sifts through it, and psychological experiments have demonstrated that we handle approximately five to nine bits of information at any given moment in time. That is the information of which our minds are conscious.

In other words, a conscious mind is that which is aware of its existence and its environment. When you first begin to drive, you must make a conscious effort to become competent at this skill. It takes roughly one thousand hours to become that competent. Make a list of your personal skills, those that can take someone else a lifetime to reach your level:

At length, after you become consciously competent at driving, it takes approximately five thousand more hours to reach a stage known as unconscious competency.

At that stage, you usually no longer have to think about driving. Unless something happens on the road to bring your attention back to it, your mind has deemed that you no longer need to be persistently aware that you are operating an automobile. This frees up a bit of information in your mind so you can focus on other things.

Some people use that extra bit of information innocuously and maybe listen more to the radio. Unfortunately, some people use it to focus on texting while driving, which is, of course, not ideal. In that sense, the conscious mind should play a role in regulating the unconscious mind, but the unconscious mind is not something to be feared.

What do you believe is stored in your unconscious mind?

By contrast, Sigmund Freud popularized the unconscious mind and loaded it with many negative connotations in the public consciousness. The Oedipus complex is probably one of the more memorable subjects you learned in high school. The unconscious mind, or the id, is presented as this primitive drive that is to be feared and is uncontrollable.

NLP takes a different approach. It implies that the unconscious mind must balance the conscious mind. For that reason, the unconscious mind must at least in some ways be malleable to the conscious mind for that balance to occur. Ask yourself: Is it better to live in fear of a part of yourself or to face fear with that part in hand?

The unconscious mind contains everything that you’re not aware of. Some of these things are easy to become aware of. Stop and listen to the surrounding sounds that you weren’t aware of until now! What are they?

Some of these things you can directly influence, like if you’re fidgeting without knowing it and someone asks you to stop. Give an example of a couple of things you can directly influence:

You can even influence some of them indirectly, like when you learn relaxation or stress management techniques and lower your heart rate or brain activity. Give an example of a couple of things you can indirectly influence:

Where, in your opinion, should you draw the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind and the mechanics of the body, such as the electric impulses and chemical reactions that regulate the heartbeat?

Since NLP has evolved into a holistic approach, it thinks of the body and mind as an interplay or an entity, not as two things with a definite line between them. In fact, one of the foundational presuppositions in NLP states that mind-and-body affect each other. How does your mind affect your body at this moment?

All aspects of you are connected. There’s no reason to feel guilty if you get sick, as if you have total control over every aspect of your body.

Among its many jobs, the unconscious mind decides what needs to become conscious, what you can do unconsciously, and what your mental filters can dispose of. Neuropsychologists have even found a physical area of the brain that serves to filter your sensory impressions. It allows you to focus on what you need to do, but if it detects possible danger, it directs your attention to it. The unconscious mind performs many such tasks, so a lot of our behavior is shaped by things we don’t think about. This can happen in unwanted ways as well. Just as animal trainers shape the behaviors of tigers, dogs, and dolphins in complicated ways, our own behavior has been shaped without our knowledge. Our patterns of experience, our temperament, and even the programming by commercial advertisers influence us.

One major characteristic of the unconscious mind is that it only recognizes the present. We call it the “Absence of Chronology”. Your memories are “remembered,” and in fact, acted out in your mind’s eye in the present time. Thinking is a verb—you cannot perform an action in the past. Thinking about a certain event that happened even 10 seconds ago is separated from the original experience that is the subject of that memory. That’s common sense, you may say, but how many people do you know who claim they are victims and are “stuck in the past” and can’t get over something that happened 30 years ago? The unconscious mind keeps ruminating and floating these memories because the neurological link between the experience and the emotions is not resolved. Either you deal with it like a grown up, in a sense, or it will hunt your consciousness forever and ever.

Another major characteristic of the unconscious mind is the absence of contradictions. Negatives do not exist. When you tell your child, “don’t drop the plate.. do NOT drop the plate!”, their unconscious mind digests it without the negative… “Drop the plate! Do drop the plate! “, floods the consciousness with bright images of dropping that plate, and as you’ve experienced earlier with the visual sub-modalities, your mind is motivated when presented with bright and big images. Which results in what?

The unconscious mind works whether you’re awake or asleep. Your consciousness needs rest, just like your physical body needs rest, but your unconscious mind does not stop at any point in time. In your sleep, the unconscious mind roams free and brings up associations and images from your dreams. That’s the symbolic language of the unconscious, explored thoroughly by Carl Jung. Everything in a dream can be a symbol of a hidden desire, unresolved process, or some other misalignment.

You can compare the unconscious mind to a child. A child would do anything to avoid displeasure, even carelessly and without any concern at all about the consequences. That’s the pleasure principle predominance, and it’s not a flaw in the system; it’s a survival mechanism.

While our physical senses are limited, and the external stimuli processing power of our brain is also limited, the unconscious mind’s capabilities are not. Another major characteristic of the unconscious mind is that its internal reality perception is much more intense and feels even more real than the external. The theater inside your mind is more critical in determining your experience of life than external conditions. You can see countless examples of this in history.

What happens to a child when you neglect him or her for a lengthy period of time?

The same happens with the unconscious mind. If you do not take care of its warning signs, such as vivid dreams, strong emotional memories, obsessive thoughts, etc., you end up with habitual defense mechanisms. It’s not a personality defect, it’s a survival instinct. Your unconscious mind has to manage everything about you, all at the same time. It cannot resolve contradictions, such as a traumatic memory or shame and guilt. It cannot logically “figure it out” without your conscious effort. As we said before, it acts as if you are a child who knows nothing about the world around you.

There are plenty of defense mechanisms that originate in the unconscious mind. Take repression, for example. It means avoiding reality. The unconscious mind seeks pleasure, not pain. If reality is painful, for whatever reason, your mind will look for a way out of reality—repress negative emotions and pretend to “forget”.

Nothing is really forgotten, because a strong emotion creates an anchor—a link between a stimulus and the response—in your nervous system.

Another defense mechanism is projection. That’s when your mind dumps the responsibility on something or someone else. It’s a way of alleviating guilt. How can it be your fault when they didn’t act the way they should have?

Dissociation is another popular defense mechanism. It disconnects the “self” from the action. It’s usually evident if you get caught in something and you feel deeply ashamed. You feel as if it’s “you but not you” who’s done that.

Isolation is yet another popular defense mechanism. Avoiding contact with irritants, such as people who ask you how your job search is going, Or friends who challenge you to do things you’re not capable of and you want to avoid risking failure and looking like a…?

Another big one is substitution. When you’re mistreated at work, but take it out on your spouse, for example. If you can’t keep on repressing and dissociating, and you can’t isolate yourself from the irritant, then it’s less harmful to lash out at someone other than your boss if you want to keep your job.

Sublimation is a relative to substitution. That’s when you substitute a more suitable and socially acceptable object for your aggression impulse. Sport is a healthy one. Drinking until you pass out every night might not be the healthiest strategy to deal with emotional pain.

Rationalization is another popular defense mechanism. You justify your errors in order to end the self-talk loop.

Another one is negation, or denial; the pain is pushed aside and you pretend it never happened. You “suck it in” and act your age, even though you’re truly hurt. Your unconscious mind does not forget it, though, and it will keep flooding your consciousness until it is resolved.

Fantasy is yet another popular defense mechanism. You create a world of your own and make it realistic by sharing elements with real life. Kids do that all the time, but adults are extremely obsessed with their fantasies. Adults, in a sense, had a lot more practice time fantasizing than their children.

Displacement is when you transfer a negative impulse to other people or even objects. When you become a codependent, for example, or if a child begins to suck his thumb only after his brother is born,

Regression is another defense mechanism when a person reverts back to childish reactions in order to end a conflict. Couples in therapy exhibit this quite often, with blaming games and who did what, who said what to whom, and what their true intentions were.

Another prominent defense mechanism is compensation, when limits are compensated with other actions. Criminal behavior is often the result of a lack of boundaries and over-compensation tendencies.

The last one we’ll mention here is identification. This is when you pretend to be someone else, real or imagined, and not because you want to model them (as done in NLP), but because you’re so fed up with your current self that you assume a different persona for awhile.

Another important NLP concept is parts. The word “parts” refers to clusters of values, motivations, and other personality traits that tend to work together, a little bit like a personality. In fact, some people call them sub-personalities.

People with a lot of dissociation may have their parts act as full-blown alternative personalities, as in multiple personalities, known as dissociative identity disorder. But for most people, having parts works pretty well. Different situations call for different parts to come to the foreground or be activated.

Parts relate to states. If you get into the right state for a challenge, this helps bring the most appropriate parts forward. Consider playfulness. Let’s say you are on vacation and having a lot of fun at the beach. There, your personality contrasts quite a bit with your personality at work; the beach does not activate your worries, your workplace knowledge, nor your serious side. You are giving that aspect of yourself a rest and just having fun. NLP works with parts to align you towards making a good decision, handling a challenge, or communicating well. NLP can even assist you in negotiating.

Alignment, as occurs when your parts are aligned, brings much value to NLP because it empowers our resources. The most basic alignment occurs when our sense modalities are in harmony. On a larger scale, we become congruent when our parts harmonize. If there is a mismatch, then we have an internal contradiction.

As you’ll recall, parts act like little personalities within us, or clusters of motivation that work together. And ecology refers to parts or other systems supporting each other. So you could say that, in congruence, your parts play well together.

On an even grander level, congruence happens when our alignment points are in a constructive direction that matches our self-interest.

The highest order of congruence takes place when we align all the way up to and include our higher values and aspirations. This extreme alignment brings perhaps the greatest satisfaction a human being can experience.

When you meet someone who is not congruent, that is, incongruent, they tend to say things that don’t quite match up, or their behavior doesn’t match what they say, or their outcomes don’t match what they are trying to do. If you explore this with someone who is incongruent, they will reveal deeper and more obvious incongruities and deeper mis-matches. They may show ambivalence about the results they say they want. They may get a lot of benefits from the status quo by just saying they want to change. They may reveal insecurities about what they are trying to do. They may somehow dislike the kind of person they say they are trying to meet, like maybe feeling angry with all members of the opposite sex. They may have mental health or neurological problems that they have not fully accepted or learned to cope with. They might deny their serious problems with alcohol or other drugs. The list goes on.

Many things can cause incongruence. If you are consulting or coaching someone who has some kind of incongruity, you will want to use NLP strategies that help this person resolve these mismatches. We call this ability to get parts to mesh well “reintegration”.

Congruence is a major concept and concern in NLP. It is a gateway into the spirit of NLP. People are congruent when their body language says the same thing as their words. They are congruent when they are doing what they preach.

This means that a person who benefits from NLP develops a personality and perspective that is congruent with doing NLP for others. People who have improved their performance and resolved personal issues with NLP are much more believable as practitioners. They also have a better gut-level understanding and intuition when practicing NLP. This is key to achieving states that create the higher-order creative solutions characteristic of NLP mastery. It is very evident in the levels of motivation, objectivity, and resourcefulness that such NLP practitioners generate. They are not nearly so much at the mercy of their moods as most, because of their expertise in managing their states to maintain a focus on desired outcomes.

Congruent NLP practitioners are able to generate a mature and realistic sense of commitment. When they commit to doing something, it isn’t because they think they have a guarantee of success. The risk of failure does not cause them to falter, and the fantasy of a guaranteed outcome is not necessary for them to experience high levels of motivation. They generate a commitment to apply themselves that is not contingent on “the universe” cooperating and giving them a boost. This means that they are not substituting metaphysical or superstitious principles for the principles of NLP, expecting some kind of shortcut to success. Bandler famously said it well during his training: “Now open your eyes and look out on the world and say inside your mind, ‘Piece of cake!’”

This means that, by getting out of your own way and generating the proper state, you will not be intimidated by your objectives. More than that, you will experience the power of resourceful motivation. Instead, it becomes a reflex to shift into empowered states as needed. This means being able to generate and amplify resourceful states such as perseverance, curiosity, anticipation, exploration, desire, creativity, and productivity.

When your TV stops working, you do not assume that the TV, cable, and electricity have all stopped working at once, but rather that only one part of the whole is not working. You therefore try the different possibilities to try to determine what exactly the problem is. We can do the same for ourselves.

A dysfunctional system is when part of you makes it difficult to be stable, achieve your goals, or even creates situations that make it more difficult to achieve these goals.

The reason a system becomes dysfunctional is essentially either because its parts are not properly connected or are not connected at all. A person who sees criticism as an attack will have problems making improvements. A group that does not connect praise with reward will not be properly motivated. Similarly, if the employees can only communicate through their boss, it is very difficult to report improper behavior by that boss. In essence, we can say a dysfunctional system suffers from some kind of communication breakdown.

NLP thrives on results. NLP pays attention to how people interpret their experiences so that it can tailor its approach to the individual. NLP can help you have a more meaningful and useful subjective world. That means the world as you interpret or experience it.

Subjectivity means your personal take on what happened; how you react to things internally.

By objectivity, we mean the verifiable information that we can actually account for, like historical or scientific facts.

Ecology is an important aspect of congruence, so let’s review it again briefly. Think of a forest. You probably imagine the trees and some of the larger animals, such as deer, lions, elephants, or wolves (depending on where the forest is).

While they may seem like individual pieces, they are actually small parts of one single system. The trees provide food and shelter for small insects, birds, and mammals, which in turn are consumed by larger animals. Tiny animals and fungi live in the soil that helps the trees grow. If you take away one aspect of this system, the entire structure falls apart.

Furthermore, if you introduce a foreign species to this system, it can either die off very quickly, or be a huge success, which can actually bring down the entire system.

Our minds work very much in the same way as these natural systems. For example, have you ever wondered why some people can drink alcohol often and in quantity and have little effect on their lives, while others drink little and rarely, but that ruins their lives? Just like an invasive species, alcohol can have a little or big impact on a person depending on the environment it is introduced into.

Or maybe you wonder why people change dramatically after losing their job, retiring, or divorcing. Just as introducing a new aspect into a system can disrupt it, so can the removal of an existing aspect. If you took away insects, life on Earth would dramatically decrease, such that humans and thousands of other species would also disappear. So we can see how the health of the environment depends quite a bit on all of the little pieces that make it up.

It is precisely for this reason that NLP uses the term “ecology” to describe the system within the individual. If we do not focus on the system as a whole, even the positive changes we make can create major problems. For example, cats were introduced to Australia as a means to control rodents, but the cats have caused major problems for the native animals. In the same way, being more productive at work can mean less time for friends and family.

When we take a systemic approach, that is, when we look at the ecology of the situation, we can anticipate, mitigate, and properly deal with problems before they happen. Furthermore, when we look at ecology, we can see if one problem is actually a symptom of a larger problem. For example, alcohol might be a symptom of a larger issue, so if you only deal with the alcohol aspect, while you do improve the situation, you do not necessarily take the person from a negative to a positive one, you merely make it less bad. NLP is not interested in making people less “bad.” NLP is interested in bringing out the excellence in all of us, and ecology is fundamental to doing this.

Do you remember the Cartesian coordinates? You can apply Cartesian coordinates to decisions in order to check your ecology and refine your outcomes. You can try this on a decision you’re considering. Here they are: If I do X, what will happen? If I do X, what won’t happen? If I don’t do X, what will happen? If I don’t do X, what will happen?

Let’s discuss skills for a moment. Few words are as widely misunderstood as “skill.” Defining this word carefully can have an immediate and positive impact on your career planning.

One dictionary defines “skill” as “the ability to do something well, usually gained by training or experience.” Some skills—such as the ability to repair fiber-optic cables or perform brain surgery—are acquired through formal schooling, on-the-job training, or both. These abilities are called “work-content skills.” People with such skills have mastered a specialized body of knowledge needed to do a specific kind of work.

However, there is another category of skills that we develop through experience both inside and outside the classroom.

These are transferable skills. Transferable skills are abilities that help people thrive in any job—no matter what work-content skills they have. You start developing these skills even before you take your first job.

Perhaps you’ve heard someone described this way: “She’s really smart and knows what she’s doing, but she’s got lousy people skills.” People skills—such as listening and negotiating—are prime examples of transferable skills.

Transferable skills are often invisible to us. The problem begins when we assume that a given skill can be used in only one context, such as being in school or working at a particular job. Thinking in this way places an artificial limit on our possibilities.

Why do I identify my transferable skills? Getting past the “I don’t have any skills” syndrome means that you can approach new corporate clients with more confidence.

As you uncover these hidden assets, your list of qualifications will grow as if by magic. You won’t be padding your résumé. You’ll simply be using action words to convey the full truth about what you can do.

Identifying your transferable skills takes a little time. But the payoffs are numerous. A complete and accurate list of transferable skills can help you land projects that involve more responsibility, more variety, more freedom to structure your time, and more money. Careers can be made—or broken—by the skills that allow you to define your value to your customer’s business, manage your workload, and get along with people.

Transferable skills help you thrive in the midst of constant change. Technology will continue to develop.

Ongoing discoveries in many fields could render current knowledge obsolete. Jobs that exist today may disappear in a few years, only to be replaced by entirely new ones. In the economy of the twenty-first century, you might not be able to count on job security. What you can count on is skill security—abilities that you can carry from one career to another or acquire as needed. Therapy and live corporate training, however, are here to stay for many more years.

What are my transferable skills? Discover your transferable skills by reflecting on key experiences. Recall a time when you performed at the peak of your ability, overcame obstacles, won an award, gained a high grade, or achieved a significant goal. List the skills you used to achieve those successes.

For a more complete picture of your transferable skills, describe the object of your action. Say that one of the skills on your list is organizing. This could refer to organizing ideas, organizing people, or organizing objects in a room. Specify the kind of organizing that you like to do.

How do I perform these skills? You can bring your transferable skills into even sharper focus by adding adverbs—words that describe how you take action. You might say that you edit accurately or learn quickly.

You can use a three-column chart to summarize your transferable skills. Create a three-column chart. The first column should be labeled “verb.”Label the second column “Object.” Label the third column. Adverb: For instance, verb: organize; object: NLP Books; and adverb: effectively.

What if I could expand my transferable skills? In addition to thinking about the skills you already have, consider the skills you’d like to acquire. Describe them in detail. List experiences that can help you develop them. Let your list of transferable skills grow and develop as you do.

Pay close attention to the format of that last question: “What if I COULD…”. Procrastination tends to snap our conscious line of thought, often by using the word “couldn’t”… But what if I couldn’t make it and ended up wasting lots of precious time and money? This format closes the loop by asking, BUT what if I COULD? And how can you truly find out if you could or couldn’t?!

Discovering your skills includes five steps.

Step 1: Make a list of recent activities.Recall your activities during the past week or month. Jot down as many of these activities as you can. Include work-related, study-related, and recreational activities.Spend 10 minutes on this step.

Step 2: List rewards and recognitions. Next, list any rewards you’ve received, or other recognition of your achievements, during the past year. Examples include promotions or awards, a thank you letter from a client, or recognitions for volunteer work. Allow 10 minutes for this step as well.

Step 3: Make a list of job-related skills.Now, review the two lists you just created. Take another 10 minutes to list any specialized areas of knowledge needed to do those activities, win those awards, and receive that recognition.

Step 4: Make a list of transferable skills.Go over your list of activities one more time. Spend 10 minutes looking for examples of transferable skills—those that can be applied to a variety of situations. For instance, giving a speech or working as a salesperson in a computer store requires the ability to persuade people. Tuning a car means that you can attend to details and troubleshoot. List all of your skills that fall into this category, labeling each one as transferable.

Step 5: Evaluate and planYou now have a detailed picture of your skills. Review all the lists you’ve created in the previous steps. See whether you can add any items that occur to you. Save your lists in a place where you can easily find them again. Plan to update all of them at least once each year. Your lists will come in handy for writing your bio, preparing for new client interviews, and doing other career-planning tasks.

It is impossible to live a life that’s free of problems. Besides, problems serve a purpose. They provide opportunities to participate in life. Problems stimulate us and pull us forward.

Seen from this perspective, our goal becomes not to eliminate problems but to find problems that are worthy of us. Worthy problems are those that challenge us to think, consider our values, and define our goals. Solving the biggest problems offers the greatest potential benefits for others and ourselves. Engaging with big problems changes us for the better. Bigger problems give more meaning to our lives.

Problems expand to fill whatever space is available. Suppose that your only problem for today is to write a thank-you letter to a potential business partner. You could spend the entire day thinking about what you’re going to say, writing the letter, finding a stamp, going to the post office—and then thinking about all of the things you forgot to say.

Now suppose that you get a phone call with an urgent message: A close friend has been admitted to the hospital and wants you to come right away. It’s amazing how quickly and easily that letter can get finished when there’s a bigger problem on your plate.

True, the smaller problems that enter our lives still need to be solved. The goal is simply to solve them in less time and with less energy.

Bigger problems are easy to find—world hunger, child abuse, environmental pollution, terrorism, human rights violations, drug abuse, street crime, energy shortages, poverty, and wars. These problems await your attention and involvement.

Tackling a bigger problem does not have to be depressing. In fact, it can be energizing—a reason for getting up in the morning. A huge project can channel your passion and purpose.

When we take on a bigger problem, we play full out. We do justice to our potentials. We start to love what we do and do what we love. We’re awake, alert, and engaged. Playing full out means living our lives as if our lives depended on it.

Perhaps a little voice in your mind is saying, “That’s crazy. I can’t do anything about global problems.” In the spirit of NLP, put that idea to the test. Get involved in solving a bigger problem. Then notice the difference that you can make. And just as important, notice how your other problems dwindle—or even vanish.

Society depends on persuasion. We are flooded with content from TV, radio, magazines, books, billboards, and the Internet. This leaves us with hundreds of choices about what to buy, where to go, and who to be. It’s easy to lose our heads in the cross-current of competing ideas—unless we develop skills in NLP. When we think critically, we can make choices with open eyes.

It has been said that human beings are rational creatures.

Yet no one is born as an effective thinker. NLP is a learned skill. This is one reason that you study so many subjects in higher education—math, science, history, psychology, literature, and more. A broad base of courses helps you develop as a thinker. You see how people with different viewpoints arrive at conclusions, make decisions, and solve problems. This gives you a foundation for dealing with complex challenges in your career, your relationships, and your community.

NLP often involves analyzing an idea into parts and then combining those parts in a new way. Another source of creativity is taking several ideas and finding an unexpected connection among them. In either case, you are thinking at a very high level. You are going beyond agreement and disagreement to offer something unique—an original contribution of your own.

NLP is exciting. The potential rewards are many, and the stakes are high. Your major decisions in life—from choosing a mate to starting a new career—depend on your skills at critical and creative thinking.

Successful NLP practitioners are critical thinkers. But why does that matter? Seeing yourself as a critical thinker offers many benefits.

NLP frees us from nonsense. Novelist Ernest Hemingway once said that anyone who wants to be a great writer must have a built-in, shockproof “crap” detector. That inelegant comment points to a basic truth: As NLP practitioners, we are constantly on the lookout for thinking that’s inaccurate, sloppy, or misleading.

NLP is a skill that will never go out of style. At various times in human history, nonsense has been taken for the truth. For example, people have believed the following: Illness results from an imbalance in the four vital fluids: blood, phlegm, water, and bile; Racial integration of the armed forces will lead to the destruction of soldiers’ morale; Women are incapable of voting intelligently; People will never invent anything smaller than a transistor. (This was before the computer chip.)

NLP practitioners in history arose to challenge short-sighted ideas such as these listed. These courageous men and women held their peers to higher standards of NLP.

NLP frees us from self-deception. NLP is a path to freedom from half- truths and deception. You have the right to question everything that you see, hear, and read. Acquiring this ability is a major goal of a college education.

One of the reasons that NLP is so challenging—and so rewarding—is that we have a remarkable capacity to fool ourselves. Some of our ill-formed thoughts and half-truths have a source that hits a little close to home. That source is ourselves.

Successful NLP practitioners are willing to admit the truth when they discover that their thinking process is fuzzy, lazy, based on a false assumption, or dishonest. These masters value facts. When a solid fact contradicts a cherished belief, they are willing to change the belief.

NLP is done via thorough thinking. For some people, the term NLP has negative connotations. If you prefer, use thorough thinking instead. Both terms point to the same activities: sorting out conflicting claims, weighing the evidence, letting go of personal biases, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. These activities add up to an ongoing conversation—a constant process, not a final product.

We live in a culture that values quick answers and certainty. These concepts are often at odds with effective thinking. Thorough thinking is the ability to examine and reexamine ideas that might seem obvious. This kind of thinking takes time and the willingness to say three subversive words: I don’t know.

Thorough thinking is the basis for much of what you do in your private life and business—reading, writing, speaking, listening, observing, calculating, problem solving, and other forms of decision making. Skilled masters have strategies for accomplishing all these tasks. They distinguish between opinion and fact. They ask probing questions and make detailed observations. They uncover assumptions and define their terms. They make assertions carefully, basing them on sound logic and solid evidence. Almost everything that we call knowledge is a result of these activities. This means that NLP and learning are intimately linked.

The highest levels of NLP call for the highest investments of time and energy. Also, moving from a lower level of thinking to a higher level often requires courage and an ability to tolerate discomfort. Give yourself permission to experiment, practice, and learn from mistakes.

Look for different perceptual perspectives. Imagine Donald Trump, Cesar Chavez, and Barack Obama assembled in one room to debate the most desirable way to reshape our government. Picture Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, and Mark Zuckerberg leading a workshop on how to plan your business. When seeking out alternative points of view, let scenes like these unfold in your mind.

Dozens of viewpoints exist on every important issue—reducing crime, ending world hunger, preventing war, and educating children, to name a few. But few problems have any single, permanent solution. Each generation produces its own answers to critical questions on the basis of current conditions. Our search for answers is a conversation that spans centuries. On each question, many voices are waiting to be heard.

You can take advantage of this diversity by seeking out alternative views with an open mind. When talking to another person, be willing to walk away with a new point of view—even if it’s the one you brought to the table—when faced or presented with new evidence.

Look for assertions. Speakers and writers present their key terms in a larger context called an assertion. An assertion is a complete sentence that directly answers a key question. For example, consider this sentence: “Mastery means attaining a level of skill that goes beyond technique.” This sentence is an assertion that answers an important question, How do we recognize mastery?

Look for multiple solutions. When asking questions, let go of the temptation to settle for just a single answer. Once you have come up with an answer, say to yourself, “Yes, that is one answer. Now what’s another?” Using this approach can sustain honest inquiry, fuel creativity, and lead to conceptual breakthroughs. Be prepared. The world is complicated, and NLP is a complex business. Some of your answers might contradict others. Resist the temptation to have all of your ideas in a neat, orderly bundle.

Look for logic and evidence. Uncritical thinkers shield themselves from new information and ideas. As an alternative, you can follow the example of scientists, who constantly search for evidence that contradicts their theories. 

The aim of using logic is to make statements that are clear, consistent, and coherent. As you examine a speaker’s or writer’s assertions, you might find errors in logic—assertions that contradict each other or assumptions that are unfounded.

Also assess the evidence used to support points of view. Evidence comes in several forms, including facts, expert testimony, and examples. 

To think critically about evidence, ask questions such as the following: Are all or most of the relevant facts presented? Are the facts consistent with one another? Are facts presented accurately or in a misleading way? Are opinions mistakenly being presented as facts? Are enough examples included to make a solid case for the viewpoint? Do the examples truly support the viewpoint? Are the examples typical? Could the author or speaker support the assertion with other similar examples? Is the expert credible—truly knowledgeable about the topic? Does this evidence affirm or contradict something that I already know?

In addition to knowing what to look for, NLP practitioners understand that there are many different perspectives and they have to consider all points of view.

Consider controversial topics. Many people have mental hot spots—topics that provoke strong opinions and feelings. Examples are abortion, homosexuality, gun control, and the death penalty. To become more skilled at examining various points of view, notice your own particular hot spots. Make a clear intention to accept your feelings about these topics and to continue using NLP techniques in relation to them.

One way to cool down our hot spots is to remember that we can change or even give up our current opinions without giving up ourselves. That’s a key message behind the power processes: “Ideas are tools” and “Detach.” These articles remind us that human beings are much more than the sum of their current opinions.

Consider alternatives. One path to NLP is tolerance for a wide range of opinions. Taking a position on important issues is natural. When we stop having an opinion on things, we’ve probably stopped breathing.

Problems occur when we become so attached to our current viewpoints that we refuse to consider alternatives. Likewise, it can be disastrous when we blindly follow everything any person or group believes without questioning its validity. Many ideas that are widely accepted in Western cultures—for example, civil liberties for people of color and the right of women to vote—were once considered dangerous. Viewpoints that seem outlandish today might become widely accepted a century, a decade, or even a year from now. Remembering this idea can help us practice tolerance for differing beliefs and, in doing so, make room for new ideas that might alter our lives.

Consider the source. A critical thinker takes into consideration the source of the information being reviewed. For example, you may have an article on the problems of manufacturing cars powered by natural gas. It might have been written by an executive from an oil company. Check out the expert who disputes the connection between smoking and lung cancer. That “expert” might be the president of a tobacco company.

This is not to say that we should dismiss the ideas of people who have a vested interest in stating their opinions. Rather, we should take their self-interest into account as we consider their ideas.

Define terms. Imagine two people arguing about whether an employer should limit health care benefits to members of a family. To one person, the word family means a mother, father, and children; to the other person, the word family applies to any individuals who live together in a long-term, supportive relationship. Chances are the debate will go nowhere until these two people realize that they’re defining the same word in different ways.

Conflicts of opinion can often be resolved—or at least clarified—when we define our key terms up front. This is especially true with abstract, emotion-laden terms such as freedom, peace, progress, or justice. Blood has been shed over the meaning of those words. Define terms with care.

Understand before criticizing. Polished debaters are good at summing up their opponents’ viewpoints—often better than the people who support those viewpoints themselves. Likewise, NLP practitioners take the time to understand a statement of opinion before agreeing or disagreeing with it.

Effective understanding calls for listening without judgment. Enter another person’s world by expressing her viewpoint in your own words. If you’re conversing with that person, keep revising your summary until she agrees that you’ve stated her position accurately. If you’re reading an article, write a short summary of it. Then scan the article again, checking to see whether your synopsis is on target.

Be willing to be uncertain. Some of the most profound thinkers have practiced the art of thinking by using a magic sentence: “I’m not sure yet.”

Those are words that many people do not like to hear. Our society rewards quick answers and quotable sound bites. We’re under considerable pressure to utter the truth in 10 seconds or less.

In such a society, it is courageous and unusual to take the time to pause, look, examine, be thoughtful, consider many points of view, and be unsure. When a society adopts half-truths in a blind rush for certainty, a willingness to embrace uncertainty can move us forward.

Write about it. Thoughts can move at blinding speed. Writing slows down that process. Gaps in logic that slip by us in thought or speech are often exposed when we commit the same ideas to paper. Writing down our thoughts allows us to compare, contrast, and combine points of view more clearly—and therefore to think more thoroughly.

Notice your changing perspectives. Researcher William Perry found that students in higher education move through stages of intellectual development (Rees Cheney 1990). In earlier stages, students tend to think there is only one correct viewpoint on each issue, and they look to their instructors to reveal that truth. Later, students acknowledge a variety of opinions on issues and construct their own viewpoints. 

We make decisions all the time, whether we realize it or not. Even avoiding decisions is a form of decision making. The student who puts off studying for a test until the last minute, for example, might really be saying, “I’ve decided this course is not important” or “I’ve decided not to give this course much time.”

Decisions are specific and lead to focused action. When we decide, we narrow down. We give up actions that are inconsistent with our decision.

Ask questions that create possibilities. At any moment, you can ask a question that opens up a new possibility for someone. Suppose a friend walks up to you and says, “People just never listen to me.” You listen carefully. Then you say, “Let me make sure I understand. Who, specifically, doesn’t listen to you? And how do you know they’re not listening?”

Another friend tells you, “I just lost my job to someone who has less experience. That should never happen.” You respond, “Wow, that’s hard. I’m sorry you lost your job. Who can help you find another job?”

A relative seeks your advice. “My mother-in-law makes me mad,” she says. “You’re having a hard time with this person,” you say. “What does she say and do when you feel mad at her? And are there times when you don’t get mad at her?”

These kinds of questions—asked with compassion and a sense of timing—can help people move from complaining about problems to solving them.

Sometimes you can access a deeper level of knowledge by taking out your pen, putting it on a piece of paper, and writing down questions—even before you know what to write. Don’t think. Just watch the pen move across the paper. Notice what appears. The results might be surprising.

Ask about what’s missing. Another way to invent useful questions is to notice what’s missing from your life and then ask how to supply it. For example, if you want to take better notes, you can write, “What’s missing is skill in note taking. How can I gain more skill in taking notes?” If you always feel rushed, you can write, “What’s missing is time. How do I create enough time in my day to actually do the things that I say I want to do?”

Pretend to be someone else. Another way to invent questions is first to think of someone you greatly respect. Then pretend you’re that person. Ask the questions you think she would ask. In NLP we call this strategy, “As/If”. 

Begin with a general question, and then brainstorm the endings. By starting with a general question and then brainstorming a long list of endings, you can invent a question that you’ve never asked before. Examples: What can I do when… How can I… When do I… What else do I want to know about… Who can I ask about…

Many times you can quickly generate questions by simply asking yourself, “What else do I want to know?” Ask this question immediately after you read a paragraph in a book or listen to someone speak. Start from the assumption that you are brilliant. Then ask questions to unlock your brilliance.

At this point in time, let’s compare the NLP’s Well-Defined Outcome process (which you’ve mastered by now) to the average goal-setting process. Think of each of the following words in the sequence in which they are presented, and note how your internalization of each word changes as you progress:

As is apparent, the words describe the same subject sound with greater and greater specificity. You also probably noted that, as specificity increased, you began to understand what was being described better. In other words, you were better able to internally represent what was being described. How do you think this is related to setting outcomes?

Specificity focuses consciousness, and it is this maxim that underlies the difference between goals and outcomes. Were the outcomes you were working on recently specified enough (or “well formed” in NLP lingo)?

Many people have written about the importance of goal setting, and many more have probably heard of S.M.A.R.T goals. S stands for specific, M for measurable, A for attainable or assignable, R for realistic or rewardable, and T for time-able or tangible. Nonetheless, only about 5% of Americans actually set goals.Why is goal setting just not catching on, in your opinion?

Ironically, despite the S in S.M.A.R.T goals, many goals are simply not specific enough. For example, consider the goal, “I want to increase participation in my work team.” Which area of work should be measured in order to determine whether participation has increased? How would one know when the goal has been accomplished?

As specificity decreases, the consciousness focuses less, and a more unfocused consciousness does not seem to be conducive towards any goal. That is the gap that outcomes seek to bridge. How do you believe the outcomes you worked on will bridge this gap?

An outcome represents a goal developed with specificity that endows people with a clear understanding of what to do. Outcomes should answer all those questions that goals couldn’t.

Even better, a goal that passes through the well-formed outcome model yields a well-formed outcome by enabling people to direct their attention toward their desired outcomes.

The well-formed outcome process should yield an outcome that is stated in a form that contains all seven characteristics, which should certainly satisfy any focusing consciousness hungry for particularity.

Recall the process you went through with your outcomes. Before we provide you with the answer, think and answer this: what seven characteristics or attributes would you say were the most important?

The first attribute is that outcomes should be stated in the positive, not the negative. After all, the mind does not directly process the negative. If you tell people not to think of poverty, they will have to think of poverty first before trying to cross that internal representation out of their minds. Are your outcomes stated in the positive?

The second attribute is that outcomes should be described in sensory-based language. As is to be discussed in Representational Systems, the mind processes information in terms of the senses, in particular sight, sound, and feelings. For that reason, stating outcomes in terms of those senses would make them more effective. Are your outcomes described in sensory-based language?

The third attribute is that the outcome must ultimately be controllable by you. You should not set an outcome that is along the lines of changing someone else’s behavior.

If you change your behavior, someone else may change his or her responses to you, but putting your outcome in someone else’s hands deprives you of so much power.

Is it possible for you to control your outcomes, and is it possible for you to achieve them entirely on your own?

The fourth attribute is that the context in which the outcome should apply must be clear. Are your outcomes stated in a clear and realistic context?

The fifth attribute is that the outcome must maintain a secondary gain. In psychology, a secondary gain is the reward an undesirable behavior generates. For example, if you smoke, you are obviously rewarded somehow by it, or else you would not be doing it. The outcome must find an alternative method to supply that secondary gain, or else the sustainability of the outcome may be jeopardized. Are your outcomes satisfying the secondary gains that (if not considered) could hinder your efforts?

The sixth attribute is a practical consideration. Have all the resources necessary for the actualization of your outcomes been inventoried?

Finally, the seventh attribute is ecology. How will any change in the human system resulting from the outcome balance out? Are your outcomes ecological?

Although not many Americans practice goal setting, that does not necessarily mean that the American people are not goal-oriented.

With the well-formed outcome model, NLP essentially optimizes goal setting, and that allows the average person to more easily establish future plans, as outstanding goal setters already do without the assistance. You should know the answer to this question by now: Is not studying excellence the entire reason for NLP?

Before we get to build your map of reality, there are a few more points we should discuss. Think about this sentence: 

“The apple is red”. 

What is subjective and what is objective about this sentence? If the apple is indeed red, is the word “red” an objective word or not? 

It is NOT an objective word, because the only word in this sentence that fits reality is the word “apple”. Only the apple exists. “Red” is an interpretation of the apple’s characteristics. When you see red, a color blind person might see a whole different color. 

“The rose is beautiful” presents the same inherent problem. The rose exists, there is no question about it. If it is beautiful or not, that is up to the observer, not the observed. “You are lazy”, “I am horrible in math”, “This is stupid”, and so on – all are sentences that reflect the subjective evaluation, not a fact. 

Confusing evaluations of reality with the mental interpretations and descriptions and distortions of it, is common. It leads to conflicts, in the better case, and to mental health issues in the extremes. 

The way we use the structure of our language leads us to think that the map in our head accurately defines the territory out there. 

You may feel that the way you think is correct, but how often do you find out that you were wrong about your assumptions? 

If you want to know how powerful the language you use can be, next time you’re out at a restaurant with friends, describe to them in details how the hamburger they’re eating got to their plate from the cow’s behinds. See how fast they lose their appetite, not because they saw the butcher’s work up close, but because they heard your words and made up a whole interpretation in their minds which lead to certain feelings float. 

Another point to remember: the world changes much faster than words do. Our mental maps are expiring as soon as an event they describe is finished in real time. Even then, we use some of these maps for the rest of our lives. Your brother might have played a trick on you in early childhood, pretending to throw a snake on your neck. Since then, you’re afraid of snakes and also get extremely anxious when something is touching your neck… if you’re unaware of this limiting mental map, you could spend your whole life looking behind your shoulders for potential threat and reacting negatively when anyone even gently touches your neck. 

Your brain is not a supercomputer. In fact, it is not a computer at all. It evolves and changes with time. But it is also extremely limited in processing capability. Too much stimulation leads your brain to fatigue and the preference is for running old known patterns of thoughts and behaviors. 

You go through a rough day and you resort to eating a whole box of cookies in front of the TV instead of going to the gym like you originally thought you should. Some people have it wired the opposite way: they go to the gym instead of staying home, because that’s the default program in their unconscious mind. 

The language we use to orient ourselves in the territory is often the precursor to the self fulfilling prophecies we encounter in life. “I am a procrastinator” or “Lisa is a liar” are not the most efficient beliefs to hold. Yet, if you’re unaware of them and they determine the content of your mental map, how would you automatically behave when confronted with new tasks or meeting Lisa?

Most of the psychological challenges you’re facing are easily solved by exposing the real content of your mental maps of reality and altering the pieces of their puzzles. We will expose these dysfunctional elements and deal with them directly later on. In the meantime, let’s design your future. 

By design, you are a learning machine. As an infant, you learned to walk. As a toddler, you learned to talk. By the time you reached age 5, you had mastered many skills needed to thrive in the world. And you learned all these things without formal instruction, without lectures, without books, without conscious effort, and without fear. 

Shortly after we start school, however, something happens to us. Somehow, we start forgetting about the successful easy-going learner inside us. Even under the best teachers, we experience the discomfort that sometimes accompanies learning. We start avoiding situations that might lead to embarrassment. We turn away from experiences that could lead to mistakes. We accumulate a growing list of ideas to defend, a catalog of familiar experiences that discourage us from learning anything new. Slowly, we restrict our possibilities and potentials.

From the moment you started your journey, learning NLP, you are in fact an NLP practitioner (as in, a person who is practicing NLP). Don’t wait for your certificate before you see yourself as a competent NLP practitioner – a medical school graduate is called a ‘doctor’ even though no one in his right mind will allow him to operate on anyone’s brain just yet… You’re going to learn these skills by practicing – by BEING a practitioner. 

Successful NLP learners share certain qualities. These are attitudes and core values. Although they imply various strategies for learning, they ultimately go beyond what you do. These qualities are ways of being exceptional. As you read the following list of qualities common to successful NLP learners, look to yourself. Make a list of each quality that you already demonstrate. Make another list of each quality that you want to possess. This is not a test. It is simply a chance to celebrate what qualities you possess so far—and to start thinking about what’s possible for your future.

A successful NLP learner cares about knowledge and has a passion for ideas. She also cares about other people and appreciates learning from them. She collaborates on projects and thrives on teams. She flourishes in a community that values win-win outcomes, cooperation, and love.

A successful NLP learner is highly inquisitive and is curious about everything. By posing questions, you can generate interest in the most mundane, humdrum situations. 

Mastery of skills is important to a successful NLP learner. When he learns a new practical concept, he studies it until they become second nature. He practices until he knows the process cold and then puts in a few extra minutes of practice. He also is able to apply what he learns to new and different situations.

More often than not, a successful NLP learner is seen with a smile on her face—sometimes a smile at nothing in particular other than amazement at the world and her experience of it. This ties well with the curiosity and wonder that NLP is built upon. 

The successful NLP learner is energetic and determined and persistent. He uses the tools he learns to boost his energy and increase his determination to explore even more. 

A successful NLP learner is self aware and is willing to evaluate herself and her behavior. She regularly tells the truth about her strengths and those aspects that could be improved.

The successful NLP learner is a responsible grown-up. There is a difference between responsibility and blame, and successful students know it well. He is willing to take responsibility for everything in his life. He remembers that by choosing his thoughts and behaviors, he can create and jump into interesting challenges, enjoyable relationships, fulfilling work experiences, and just about anything else he wants.

A successful NLP learner admits her fear and fully experiences it. She does not deny fear but embraces it. If she doesn’t understand something or makes a mistake, she admits it. When she faces a challenge and bumps into her limits, she asks for help. And she’s just as willing to give help as to receive it.

Rewards or punishments provided by others do not motivate a successful NLP learner. He is self-directed. His desire to learn comes from within, and his goals come from himself. He competes like a star athlete—not to defeat other people but to push himself to the next level of excellence.

A successful NLP learner is truly in the here and now, fully present, open and spontaneous. She is able to respond to the moment in fresh, surprising, and unplanned ways.

Where others see dull details and trivia, a successful NLP learner sees opportunities to create. He can gather pieces of knowledge from a wide range of subjects and can put them together in new ways. He is creative in every aspect of his life.

A successful NLP learner sees setbacks as temporary and isolated, knowing that she can choose her response to any circumstance.

Human beings begin life with a natural appetite for knowledge. In some people, it soon gets dulled. A successful NLP learner has tapped that hunger, and it gives him a desire to learn for the sake of learning.

A successful NLP learner has an inner sense, an intuition that cannot be explained by logic alone. She trusts her gut instincts as well as her mind.

Becoming a successful NLP practitioner means mastering learning for you, for who you are, based on your skills and personal characteristics. 

Mastery means attaining a level of skill that goes beyond technique. For a master, work is effortless and struggle evaporates. The master carpenter, for example, is so familiar with her tools that they are part of her. To a master chef, utensils are old friends. Because these masters don’t have to think about the details of the process, they bring more of themselves to their work. Actually, mastery does not make sense, when you think about it – the master is always relaxed, and makes his actions seem effortless. The master is hyper alert and self disciplined. The master works hard without seeming to make any effort whatsoever. Mastery cannot be captured in words. It defies analysis. It cannot be taught. It can only be learned and experienced.

Imagine a person who walks up to a counter at the airport to buy a plane ticket for his next vacation. 

“Just give me a ticket,” he says to the reservation agent. “Anywhere will do.” 

The agent stares back at him in disbelief. 

“I’m sorry, sir,” she replies. “I’ll need some more details. Just minor things—such as the name of your destination city and your arrival and departure dates.” 

“Oh, I’m not fussy,” says the would-be traveler. “I just want to get away. You choose for me.” 

Now compare this person to another traveler who walks up to the counter and says, “I’d like a ticket to Ixtapa, Mexico, departing on Saturday, March 23, and returning Sunday, April 7. Please give me a window seat, first class, with vegetarian meals.” 

Ask yourself which traveler is more likely to end up with a vacation that he’ll enjoy. The same principle applies in any area of life, including NLP. Discovering what you want and having a plan to get there helps you succeed in life, and NLP is a tool to help you get there faster. 

Look at your list of true desires and pick 10 specific outcomes, that you feel are the most important to you.

Make a list of the 10 outcomes in order of importance.

For outcome #1, write the answer to “If I got that, what would it do for me?”. Think about the consequences of achieving each outcome: how would it influence your life? How would you change as a result? How would you feel and think and behave differently than today? How is it going to affect your relationship with other people? 

For outcome #1, ask yourself and answer: “do I feel more or less motivated to achieve it?”:

If the answer is “less”, change outcome #1 to something more important to you. If it’s “more”, then describe where in your body your feel this motivation? What sensations do you get, and where exactly, as you think about achieving each specific outcome? 

Now take outcome #1, and write it down in this format (replace X with your outcome and Y with what it will do for you): “When I get to X, I would/will Y.” 

Now look back at what you’ve written and consider each of your answers to the previous questions. Ask yourself: “And when I get Y, what will that do for me?”. Write down your answers. 

On the surface we all seem to have the same type of outcomes. We each want to earn enough money (or more than enough) to support ourselves and our families. We all want to be happy and have lots of friends. We want to be strong and healthy and attractive. We want to ‘figure life out’. That’s the surface structure of our language, what we absorb from our culture, our parents and our wild imagination. Then there’s a deep structure, hiding in the background. By exposing this deep structure, we get to experience our true desires and become congruent with our choices. 

A student want to succeed in his NLP course, because he wants to change his career and start a coaching business. What will that do for him? Perhaps he thinks it will give him financial security and more freedom to do as he wishes. And what will THAT do for him? Maybe financial security is an important value in his life and it will free his mind of worries? And what will THAT do for him? Being worry free, he believes, would enable him to become more present and aware. And what will THAT do for him? Being more present and aware, he would experience a stronger connection to other people, especially his children. And what will THAT do for him? 

You get the idea… deeper and deeper. 

The question “what it will do for me?”, gives you the key to unlock the deep hidden meanings of your seemingly earthly outcome. Ask sincerely and repeatedly, for outcome #1, what will the result do for you? And then ask again, what will THAT result do for you? 

Take your original outcome #1, and complete this sentence, fast and without thinking: “Yes, BUT…”

We’ll deal with these objections and obstacles later on, but in the meantime imagine each one of them as a huge rock blocking your path. Give each of them a specific color and a shape:

Take outcome #1 and rewrite it in a positive way. If you outcome is “to lose 10% body fat” or “eliminate my fear of flying”, change it to something like, “my body has only 11% fat” and “I enjoy flying”: 

For outcome #1, answer: how will you know when you’ve achieved it? What exactly will happen then? What would you see, hear and feel, as this outcome becomes a reality? How would people behave around you? How will you behave around other people?

Think carefully about the context of your outcome #1. If your outcome is to be more passionate with your spouse, it would be only appropriate in certain locations and at certain times, not anywhere and anytime, right? For outcome #1, answer: Exactly when, where and with whom do you wish this outcome to be effective? 

Consider the side effects of achieving outcome #1. Is there anything you or others will lose when you achieve this outcome? What are these things? Are you willing to accept the responsibility and consequences? How will you handle these loses? 

There’s a famous, and true, saying: “if you don’t have a plan for your life, you’ll end up a part of someone else’s plan and guess what – they don’t have your best interests in mind”. When your outcome depends on other people’s choices, your chances and slim and you have to exert a whole lot of effort to get it. “I want other people to respect or admire me” is unattainable. “I want to behave, think and handle my affairs in a respectful, authentic and serious manner” is attainable. Other people’s reactions or choices are made in their heads, not yours. Ask yourself: “Is achieving this outcome #1 within my control?”

For outcome #1 ask yourself, what skills and abilities and other resources (money, connections, knowledge, etc.) do you have currently, that make it more likely for you to achieve this outcome? Define the resources you will need for achieving this outcome. Who can help you and how exactly? What physical items you absolutely need to make progress? What new skills you might have to learn? What information is needed and where will you get it? How much money is required? Be specific and thorough. 

For outcome #1, specify: What do you still need to get or ask for, that you don’t currently have, in order to achieve this outcome elegantly and promptly? 

For outcome #1, specify: Who can help you get what you need to achieve your outcome? How else can you get anything else you need for the achievement of this outcome?

Take outcome #1 and build an internal image of it. Can you experience your outcome, in your mind, clearly? Can you see, hear and feel what it WILL be like in the near future, when you ‘have it’? Write a sentence or two for outcome #1, that describes this internal image. 

Divide outcome #1 to 10 milestones. What are the most important action steps you must take in order to achieve this outcome within a realistic time frame?

Do you truly believe that pursuing outcome #1 is important and meaningful? If yes, why exactly? If not, why did you choose this outcome at all? (here you have a chance to rewrite it).

How exactly would you feel ashamed, guilty or anxious if you did less than your best to achieve outcome #1? Describe the inner conversation you will have with yourself if, a year or two from today, you regret not taking the appropriate action steps. 

Do you want to achieve outcome #1 for personal reasons, or to please someone else?

Is the pursuit of outcome #1 exciting? enjoyable? satisfying? Describe the feelings and sensation you’re expecting from the journey towards fulfilling the outcome, from taking courageous actions and building your inner strength in the process. 

Does outcome #1 represent a deeply felt personal dream? Describe it:

How would a disciplined successful achievement of outcome #1 change the way that you see yourself?

How would achieving outcome #1 affect the lives of the people around you? Family, relatives, friends, colleagues? 

How would achieving outcome #1 affect the broader community you live in? 

Until when exactly would you like to achieve outcome #1? Be specific, you can change the deadline later. 

How will you monitor your own behavior to ensure you’re making progress towards your desired outcome #1? 

How can you ensure you’re not pushing yourself too hard and burn out, while working on outcome #1? How would you know if the opposite is true – being too easy on yourself and becoming bored and cynical? 

What is a first small step which you could take in the next 3 days, towards the realization of outcome #1? Write it down on a sticky note and attach it to your computer screen. 

Repeat this whole process with outcomes #2 to #10.

Awareness of your true desires is a key element in achieving it. How lucky do you need to be to end up in a desired place, if you just start walking without knowing where you want to go and how to get there? 

The more clearly and precisely you know what it is that you desire, the more clearly you can manifest these outcomes in your mind and build a strong internal foundation to support it – which naturally leads to the right actions at the right time, and all that increases greatly your chances of achieving it. 

Writing your outcomes down is critical. It sends a signal to your CNS (central nervous system), that this is an important direction to follow. The following mini assignments will help you clarify your true desires. 

Write down 100 realistic achievements / desires, you wish you could do or be in this lifetime (pay attention – REALISTIC desires, which means it depends on your efforts and physically possible).

What does happiness mean to you, specifically? 

What is your greatest fear? How did you allow this fear to sabotage your efforts in the past? How did this fear help you avoid uncomfortable or embarrassing situations? How did this fear shape your philosophy of life?

When you leave the house, what items must be on you, otherwise you’d feel uneasy? And why?Who do you truly and unconditionally love? Who loves you, truly and unconditionally? 

Which personality traits you like the most in people you know?

Which personality traits you dislike the most in people you know? 

Which personality traits you dislike the most in yourself? 

What is your most favorite taste? Smell?

If you could sum up your whole personality into one sentence, what would it say?

In contrast to the last statement, how would you want to be remembered and talked about? 

Is there anything that lately keeps you up at night, worrying and fretting about it?

Life offers us plenty of lessons. What is the most important lesson you learned out of your life so far?

You’ve reached the end of your journey, many years ahead, sitting with your favorite drink on a balcony viewing the sunset, only a few hours before you pass away. Smile. You feel you’ve accomplished your purpose in this lifetime, and you gently recall each and every one of your many achievements and contributions to the world. What are they?