When we ask cold groups who want to learn more about NLP, one thing we always get from the group is – “NLP helps you become Positive and overcome the Negative”

With so many theories around Positivity, positive emotions and negative emotions – I can’t but wonder about this useless farce of labeling certain emotions ‘Positve’ and certain emotions ‘Negative’!

Most of you would easily classify Hard work, Happiness, Calmness etc. to be Positive emotions while Anger, Laziness, Procrastination to be Negative emotions.

Consider this:

1. A man who generally has trouble watching his wallet is out on a social evening and has got a couple of drinks down. Isn’t it useful for him to Procrastinate another drink or be just plain lazy to have one more?
2. Some of the Best Programmers in the world who’ve contributed majorly to the Open source world developing some amazing stuff on the computer attribute their success mainly to Laziness! One – they write programs for stuff that they’re lazy to do. And Two – It allows them to stay away from writing monotonous, repetitive code. Infact, I know an erstwhile Chief Technology Officer (Read Antano) who’d look at code his team would write and plain delete tons and tons of lines. Long repetitive code is any programmer’s nightmare!
3. There was a client came in for therapy to our NLP Clinic and said “My life is boring. I’m depressed. Everything is terrible. I don’t want to live anymore. I am going to kill myself and Die”. And to my surprise, I watched Antano get red-Angry and say – “then Get out of here and die. Don’t waste my time”. And instantly the client got angry too and said – “How can you say that to me? Do you know of things I can accomplish if I live? I have a family, I have a little daughter… I want them to be happy”. And at that moment, I noticed him quickly anchor this state.
   Anger in this instance – negative or was it a useful state to provoke a client into a more useful state?!

   The skill here is Antano can really get angry by choice just for a few seconds and instantly lead to any other emotion of happiness, joy, calmness and take the client with him. The art is the dance of states. The choice to move across what is useful without getting drenched in it!

   The next few moments I noticed Antano and the client happily discussing how wonderful the gift of life is…

What would happen if Anger was taken away permanently from you? You’d be a boring machine that’d smile or be calm for everything!

I know some of us get overly angry!

Someone who gets overly angry and someone who never ever gets angry, in my opinion are not very different from each other. They both don’t have the choice of how angry or how calm they can be. It’s like someone else and not their brain controls these emotions for them.

What we’re after really is Choice!

Ask yourself - Do you have the flexibility to wear on any emotion and shift immediately into another one on-demand?
Do you have the Flexibility to be Angry and snap out of it and get into another state of your choice in split seconds?
Are you Driving your Brain or are you always saying stuff like “My boss makes me angry”, “She drives me mad”…?

Do you WANT to Master your own emotions?! Then What stops you from learning NLP – the art of flexibility and the dance of states!

Tweet