There’s a concept I came across in NLP at Work by Sue Knight. It’s the idea of “Time travel” as a way to achieve a desired state of mind and body.
The idea is that once you’ve experienced an emotion or accomplished a goal, you have all the resources you need to do it again on command.
Emotions are simply a chain of reactions and chemical releases that your brain associates as a feeling. Anger, confidence, nervousness, happiness, etc. When it comes to memories and constructed events, your brain cannot tell the difference between real or fake.
Say you’re about to go on stage for a presentation and you’re feeling nervous. You tell yourself “I can’t do this! I’ll mess everything up.” How would you like to feel in this situation? Confident, calm, knowledgeable. So the key to this “Time travel” method is to recall a time when you felt like that.
Visualize your life before you as a timeline, then slowly walk down through your past memories and let the useful ones come to you. Ask your brain to show you memories of you being confident, it’ll show you.
When you come to a memory that’s useful, fully associate with the moment. What does it look like, feel like, and sound like? Take in every detail you can and know exactly what it was like when you felt this desired state.
Continue to walk through your memories and come across beneficial ones until the desired state is in you and you’re ready to take on the present moment.
You’re able to do this exercise for anything and everything. You’re able to associate with any emotion you’ve ever felt and recall every event that can be useful. If you visualize it well enough, your brain thinks it’s real and releases all the chemicals it believes it’s supposed to.
This is a super basic description of the exercise, so if it sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend you look into it. Being able to do this at a moment’s notice can do an immense amount of good. It allows you to feel how you want, when you want and helps you take on any obstacle you’re facing.
Try it out. Practice it. Let me know how it worked for you!
February 18, 2022
