There are many times when I’m sure we can all recall when fear got the better of us – when it stopped us. Whether it was because we feared what people might think, what the outcome might be, whether ‘that’ risk is a risk to far, we fear what might happen if we put ourselves out there, or perhaps fear who we are or that what we do isn’t good enough …. Perhaps you fear not being perfect … the list of things that we could focus on goes on …

Anxiety is a warning from the unconscious mind to focus on what you want – Tad James

I want to be  clear, we all have the inbuilt fight or flight response that is there to protect us – thankfully there are no saber tooth Tigers wondering around where I live anymore, but our bodies kick in this flight or fight response often when it’s not overly helpful.

What would happen if you focused on something else, like being courageous?

What you focus on you get. I wonder what your results would be like if just for a moment, a few hours, a day or however long you choose, you push fear to one side and decided you could and would be brave & courageous? Your results would be different. You could choose to do this right now with no NLP experience – perhaps you’d feel comfortable doing this in a small way to start with, but soon you can expand this to a host of areas.

Can you recall a time when you were really brave, courageous, felt the ‘fear and did it anyway’? – so you know what it feels like then, right? … so now we know you’ve previously experienced it, we know that we could use an NLP technique call Anchoring to anchor those helpful more resourceful state so that you can access them when you wanted to (cool eh?) … we teach anchoring on our NLP Practitioner course and this week I was at an NLP Practice Group in Cardiff and people were having a go at creating an Anchor that they could use in the future. Anchoring like this is great for a ‘burst’ of a feeling, and for many anchoring has worked for a long time and many sports personalities use anchoring frequently in order to help them get the right feelings before a match, game etc (I use my resource anchor when I need it – it has feelings of motivation, determination, laughter, fun and a few other emotions too, and when I use my anchor I get a rush of those positive, helpful feelings). You could use Anchoring to enable to to recall any positive resourceful state whenever you want to – other examples of resourceful Anchors include confidence (which is great for when you need a burst of this to help you through the day).

There are other great techniques at NLP Practitioner level that we could also use such as a Swish Pattern (so that in a given context, if someone felt a certain way, we could help them feel a different way instead – e.g. asked to give a presentation). We could also use our work with strategies in order to change the sequence of steps our mind goes through which drives our behaviour (e.g. like changing a habit, so you could feel differently).

When students have completed the NLP Practitioner course the next course they move onto with us is the NLP Coach course and in this course, we teach people how to get rid of negative emotions from the past that have held them back … so that people are not held back by their old baggage.  Anchoring is a fantastic technique, but it doesn’t deal with the underlying issue that caused your anxiety/worry/fear in the first place – but at this level we start to address this. At Masters level (the course after the NLP Coach course) we go one step further with linguistic techniques that enable us to linguistically challenge what’s behind the fear – and help the people we are working with move past it …this is long lasting!

So, perhaps today you could choose to focus on being courageous – give it a try and see what happens?

Have a great day!