Spiritual NLP Blog | Neuro-Linguistic Programming | Change Your Life | Gary de Rodriguez, Dallas, TX

Here is the outline for establishing authentic conversations in your organizations.  Without the ability to create the trust and emotional safety within your teams to hold such a conversation the culture of your organization will toxify through withheld truths.  Rumor will replace truth and the organization will rot from within.

1. Purpose = To have the long awaited conversation concerning historical problems that has never happened before.  To give every member of the team the opportunity to be heard and their positions honored.

2. To reveal and discover the mutual agreement between the differences of diverse viewpoints and reach mutual understanding.

3. Identify a universal outcome for the conversation, one that is mutually beneficial to the group. 

4. Identify possibilities.

5. To identify core values and beliefs and set goals that aligns to the overall purpose of the team.

6. To identify strategies for massive movement out of stagnation into action and establish who, what and where of their execution. 

7. To create cohesion in vision, strategy and mutual respect for each member of the team. Here are the major points and objectives of an authentic conversation:

a. Enter the conversation with the intention to reach mutual understanding, clarification and a validation of differing points of view.

b. Be authentic with yourself and others and own your part in the situation. Declare your commitment to resolve the issue.

c. Be fully present and notice what is not being said.  Ask for clarification when unclear, commit to understand their point of view, practice active listening and know that the other person or person’s map of reality is just as valid as yours. 

d. Valid the other person’s point of view and state ” I can understand how you would feel that way.”

e. Acknowledge what has been learnt.  Clarify the positions that have been reached.  Ask for additional conversations if necessary and establish what the agreed upon resolution is now.

f. Create a commitment to hold each other accountable to the new agreement.

The definition of insanity is to attempt to solve the same problems with the same mindset and tools, expecting a different result.

To increase the health of our corporate culture, our own self esteem as a leader and the success of our organization, we require moving our conversations from monologue to dialogue.  The old paradigm of pride, positioning for power, control, anger and bullying to persuade, must come to an end if functional capitalism can once again prosper.

We must do business differently.  A new era of co-operation centered on mutual understanding of each other, recognizing and exploring possibilities and the common ground while objectively identifying what is missing and what is present is what will bring each organization to its pinnacle in service and production creating flourishing profit and a culture where people desire to belong.  

Join me tomorrow for another great blog!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gary De Rodriguez

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                     Harnessing the Power of Your Mind

By Gary De Rodriguez

Transcribed and slightly edited by Ro Saundry

 

 

Do you desire to be more than what you’ve been?  Do you know you are capable of more?  Do you know what path you would need to take to be more of what you want of what you are desirous to be?

 

What is NLP?  NLP is the modeling of excellence.  It is the discovery and duplication of patterns of excellence of successful people for the purpose of enhancing lives by teaching these patterns and strategies of excellence.

 

NLP came into existence during the early 1970’s out of the curiosity of John Grinder and Richard Bandler.  These men began a modeling project of three very famous therapists.  They chose to model these therapists because all three were creating tremendous changes in the human condition outside the Freudian and Jungian Models and each therapist used totally different styles of therapy.

 

They are Virginia Satire, who developed the family form of therapy, Milton Erickson, who developed the greatest form of hypnosis and the know-how of working with the unconscious mind known today as Ericksonian Hypnosis, and Fritz Pearls, who discovered Gestalt Therapy.  All three had an extremely different approach to the style of the therapy they did and yet, they were all very successful.

 

John Grinder and Richard Bandler chose to observe these therapists because of their successes.  The interesting observation was that they had success in what they did and how they did therapy without an absolute understanding of the processes they were using.  In fact, Milton Erickson wrote a letter to John Grinder and Richard Bandler and thanked them for explaining to him the processes he used and how he has such success. 

 

These therapists were exquisitely good at intuiting and guiding client’s problems to resolution. They had what is called unconscious competency.  Have you ever had unconscious competency in something?  Unconscious competency means you are “just” good at what ever it is you know how to do without having to put much thought to it.  Perhaps it’s a sport, math, or driving a car that comes natural to you.  It is doing something with little or no effort.

 

NLP is applicable in sports, business, therapy, learning, educational fields, etc.  It’s broad applications cross the context of all of the human experience.  Why is this?  It is literally the owner’s manual for the human mind.  If you are going to tune up a car, program a VCR, put one of those difficult pieces of furniture together, you would be required to have some directional manual, would you not?  Have you ever attempted to do one of these activities and experience frustration?

 

Here we are in the most complex organism on this planet called the human body.  The human body contains more neurological possibilities then every grain of sand on every beach on this planet.  No one has ever come along and said, “Would you like to know how to use it?”  How did you create your unique beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives?  How did you encode your memory to instantly retrieve them?  How did you design the strategies you use to either motivate or sabotage?  How did you do it? If you had an owner’s manual that could show you how, could you fix it, could you adjust it?  You could!

 

Now every great thinker has consistently said that there’s only one thing to do here and that is to know ‘you.  In all of our relationships, what we are really involved with is a deep intrinsic relationship with ourselves, in the context of another person.

 

Have you ever been in a relationship with anyone?  Have you ever thought about what makes a relationship work?  It IS your relationship with you.  It IS your sense of identity, your boundaries, your negotiation skills, your ability to love rather than be afraid, and your ability to express rather than harbor and resent. Your ability to be in relationship with others is your key to financial, spiritual, emotional, and mental well-being.  Your ability to know yourself will assist you in every context of life.

 

In the past, I lived in a lot of procrastination.  When I say “the past”, I mean anything even a nano-second in the past.  What I’ve learned from a whole securitous pipe of experiences is that the place of most change is when you’re really terrified, but you take the leap anyway, you just step out into the unknown.  Have you ever done an action over and over and expect a different outcome then the time before?  Did you know that the definition of insanity is: doing the same thing consistently and expecting a different outcome, a different result?  

 

One of my most favorite movies is “The Last Crusade”, where the main character is searching for the Holy Grail out of the love for his father.  He comes to this place after passing through this tunnel of slicing swords and spiders and he arrived to a precipice where he couldn’t even see the bottom.  He closed his eyes and remembered a legend that taught him that when he chooses to step out in pure faith, he’d be supported.  So he stepped out into thin air.  As he did, a path appeared before him.  He made the choice to move through his fear by taking that step, that leap of faith, right through the fear.

 

Another story I’d like the share is a story about David and Elisa.  They were a young couple and they were given a beast.  The beast was an inheritance.  They knew the beast was a great gift, because once harnessed, it would be their greatest ally.  They also know that if this beast was left unbridled, it was dangerous and deep.

 

Because they had inherited this beast from the generations of their tribes, they really had no way of knowing how to harness its power.  This power was neither good nor bad, it was just power without direction. 

 

David and Elisa knew of a legend of a great wizard, a great beast master.  So the chose to take a leap of faith to search out the wizard.  They had to hike through the deserts and the mountains.  They must have traveled for half of their lives until they came to the sacred mountain where the wizard lived.  They climbed up the path to the entrance of the cave and simply sat and prayed.  The wizard, feeling their presence, came forward to the entrance of the cave and asked, “What can I do for you, how may I serve you?” So David and Elisa proceeded to tell the wizard that they had a beast and it is undisciplined. 

 

The wizard chose to teach David and Elisa by instructing them on how to harness this beast.  He began by telling them to sit a while, to listen, and to learn.  In doing so, the tools they required to harness the beast, would be known.  So they sat, they listened, and they learned how to harness the beast’s power, how to give it direction.

What I know about NLP is that my personal life has been and continues to be extraordinarily enhanced by these processes and this information.  My past comes from a home that was not a jolly one.  I was an IV drug user between the age of 14 and 18 taking LSD once a week for 3 years, doing heroin, and meth.  By all means, my body should not be here today.

 

I began having experiences that initiated my awakening to what my purpose in life is.  What I know about our life purpose is that, at some level, we are here to serve.  We get the greatest amount of value in our humanity by assisting others.  And our relationship with ourselves determines how we will shift and assist others. 

 

In San Diego, California I initiated an organization called “The AIDs Holistic Response Program.”  I worked with many people who were on the road to dieing.  Back then, if you were diagnosed with AID’s, your life expectancy was usually no longer than 3 months.  It was a very powerful place to work because there was no more denial there.  It was a wonderful place to serve life and people. It’s a federally funded program all over the United States.

 

It consists of a group of holistic practitioners doing chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, and other holistic modalities.  I taught the “Course in miracles” and “Rebirthing.”  We crated an entire network of support.  I received the greatest value of life out of doing that work and it evolved into what I do now. 

 

This evolution derived from my realization of what I was doing for that demographic was very limited from the prospective of not knowing how to work with the other 90% of the mind, the unconscious mind.  Think about it, your conscious mind is only 10% of who you are and how you are operating.   You don’t stand there and continuously say, “alright, I have to inhale, I have to exhale to continue breathing.  Your unconscious mind takes care of that for you.  If you are going to create effective change, does it not stand to reason that you require working with the other 90%? 

 

As I said earlier, NLP really came to reality out of the reaction of the laborious task of talk therapy, which is valid in the evolution of how some of us come to grips with what’s occurred in our lives. There comes a point where talk therapy is just talk.  You don’t feel any different but you sure know a lot about your problems.  NLP is about changing the structure of how your nervous system holds these challenges, these problem states.

 

The NLP model of communication is the prime model used in utilizing these tools and skills.  It shows us that information comes in through our nervous system and through our five senses; visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory.  Information becomes diluted or filtered from two million down to seven plus-or-minus pieces of conscious information per second.  The rest drops into the unconscious.

 

These filters consist of our language, our beliefs, our values, our culture, our memories, our attitudes, and a thing called Meta Programs.  It is what we do automatically, nano-second to nano-second.  Have you ever had negative people in your life?  Have you noticed that what ever comes through the filters is defined in a certain color?  We are all doing something similar based upon how we see life through the collective experience of the meaning we’ve given our lives and the people in it.

(to be continued tomorrow)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gary De Rodriguez

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Did you know that just by simply imagining vividly, specifically, till you felt it to be real, your nervous system wouldn’t know the difference.  How many of you can terrify yourself?  How many of you can put yourself into bliss?  You do it the exact same way.  Vivid imagination, imagining it till you feel it to be real, and it becomes real for you.  How can you use this to take the chariot of your mind and direct it toward your home.  So my invitation to you is, pick up the reins and steer your horses via your language and your imagination.

 

Are you beginning to see that, when you begin to harness the power of the imagination and the power of your language, your life can metamorphose and truly, in my experience, whatever else I have done which has been valuable, has fallen in importance and power because I have yet in the past to clean up the thing that is consistently programming my emotional states which is my imagination and my language.  I’ve hung out naked for a week with a team of people screaming and tearing apart futons about the rage about their parents.  How much more can you do?  I’ve been celibate for 15 years eating nothing but tofu and green beans meditating 3 and a half hours a day from 3 till 6 in the morning every day for 15 years going for god.  And I’m here to say that, no matter what I have done to wake myself up, this has been the most important generative thing I have done.  Because, for me to be able to sit in meditation, in order for me to sustain an emotional state strong enough to have me get value by being able to still my mind in meditation… if my mind is running amok for 22 hours a day, what makes me think I’m going to be able to still it in 2.  This information sustains and supports everything.  This is the foundation which we are required to stand on because it is the foundation of mindfulness, of living our lives with purpose and with mindfulness.  Live your life as if every word is a prayer coming into reality because speaking is your self fulfilling prophecy. So is your imagination.  Whatever you are focused upon you are still sitting under your wishing tree and you will manifest it.  Either it is the monster will the long fangs that is a meat eater and will devour you or it is your beautiful princess or prince in a palace.  Either one – god just looks down and says Yes!  You are using your god-given ability to create.  You go for it.  That is tying the legs of your camels and then surrendering.  It’s time to do it.

 

We’re going to do a process called the theater of change.  It’s based on the NLP phobia technique and one of my thoughts is that we are this amazing being that has a whole series of pictures, sounds and feelings via our internal representational systems and that these internal representational systems act as drivers for much of our behavior and how we hold our reality.  What we’re going to do is we’re going to shift the pictures, sounds and feelings of your past.  It’s going to happen by partnering with me.  Any work that is ever done with a client that I do is you take 50% of the responsibility, as do I.  I will set up the environment for you to make the change and you’re the one who makes the change based upon the focus of your mind and your desire to have it be so.

 

So those of you who have had in the past the seemingly poor visualization skills, you actually have great visualization skills.  Just take the specific modality that you’re representing your experiences from, whether it’s kinesthetic or auditory, give a symbol to what those sounds or those feelings are and visualize that way.  Remember, the subconscious takes things very metaphorically and symbolically.  We’re going to enter a theater of your past.  You wrote the movie, you starred in it, you produced it.  You are the maker of the internal representations of your entire experience from conception to now.  You made it up.

 

So when you’re ready to just allow yourself to go into a more focused and concentrated state within yourself, allow your eyes to close.  Uncross your arms and your legs so the energy flows freely in your body and we’re going to go inside, deeper than you’ve gone before, allowing yourself the opportunity to begin to allow those parts of you that know how to change begin to change.  And what I’d like to suggest to your collective subconscious minds is that it now has an opportunity to begin to meet its highest prime directive by allowing the unresolved emotions from your past in a process that can be very quick and very powerful to begin to shift and change the unresolved emotions of the past in a way that is easy and comfortable, knowing that the highest prime directive of the subconscious mind is to preserve the body.  And as I speak to your collective subconscious I’d like to suggest to your subconscious to know that any stress caused by unresolved emotions is less than optimal for the human body.  So as your subconscious begins to understand the opportunity it has, your conscious mind can begin to drift, drifting to a place of focused concentration where your conscious mind can begin to let go.  That’s right.  Just letting go in a way that’s right for you.  Letting go in a way that is comfortable for you as your subconscious begins to understand the opportunity it has now.  So as your body begins to relax, allowing all the sounds you hear, the tone, the tempo of my voice, the sound of your breath entering and exiting your body, allowing yourself to feel the surface on which you’re sitting, awareness of how your hands, your arms, your legs, your feet are and allowing a sensation of just letting go and going deep, deep and even deeper into the state of awareness of the many different wonders within yourself.  And as you continue to focus your mind, imagine that you are now in a theater, a theater looking up at the screen and as you look at that screen, sitting in the theater, imagine a part of you, the observer part, the part of you that’s in control, lifts up out of that body sitting in the theater, and sits in the projection room of that theater.  And imagine now being in the projection room looking down at your body watching the screen and just breathe and be there with me in the theater of your own mind.  We’re going to review a film.  This is the film of your life.  You starred in it, you produced it, you directed it.  You’re going to edit it now.  I’d like to suggest to your subconscious mind that all of the positive learnings, all of the positive learnings from your life, is preserved in that place that you retain for such learnings.  Allowing all of those learnings beautifully and generatively contribute to your life from this point forward.  Allowing your subconscious mind through the internal representations that you have carried up to now to begin to shift and change in such a way that allows you now to have a different set of pictures, sounds and feelings which promote and produce the necessary internal representations to fulfil your life purpose in the optimum manner, according to your destiny. 

{More tomorrow Please Join Me}

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gary De Rodriguez

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I had a student once in one of my classes named Ruben.  He came into the class, he could barely speak because he was so shy and he listened to everything I said and every process I taught that class he went home and every night for the extension of a 5-week period of time he did every process every day constantly.  The school director came and in and spoke to me once and said, ‘Ruben is taking his classes completely different.  He shifted his entire life in that 5 week period.’  That was my challenge to the group.  I said, ‘You can metamorphose your life in 5 weeks if you choose to do that.  I’m laying the tools before you.  You do with it what you wish.’  And he took it and I have yet to see a student do it as devotedly as he did.  And he metamorphosed his life.  You have the same opportunity.

 

Remember what I said to you – that the only way you know that you’re you is by the pictures, sounds and feelings you carry in your nervous system?  The flotation tank metaphor.  Well we’re going to be going into a process that begins to change the pictures, sounds and feelings in your head.  First of all I’m going to teach you a very simple technique that will decode your nervous system in about a minute to 2 minutes from negatively charged emotions from your past. Some of you already know it.  Who has a memory?  Come on up.

Now the way this works is a process called eye patterns.  In neurolinguistic programming we have eye patterns.  It’s very much like the computer keyboard to the nervous system.  The eyes grow out of the cerebral cortex.  The sclera of the eyes actually grows out of the dura of the brain.  So the eyes are deeply connected to the central nervous system.  They’re much like our list files on a computer.  You tap on your list files, you click on a particular file with your mouse and the file shows up on your screen.  The eyes have a particular pattern that has encoded your memories, visually, auditorily, kinesthetically.  So as you’re looking up you’re sorting for visual pictures.  As you’re looking laterally, you’re sorting for sounds, remembered or constructed.  As you’re looking down you’re sorting for feelings.  If it’s down to your left it’s your internal dialog to get to feelings but it’s still to get to feelings.  What we’re doing is we’re looking at our bodies as very much of a predictable biomechanical mechanism which the eyes are part of the computer keyboard.  When we are retrieving a memory, that memory has a specific eye pattern that will bring that memory back as if it was now. 

 

This is useful because if we were going to go to a door and we were going to look at the doorknob to open up the door and leave the room, if we did not have a method of encoding the learning, we would have to relearn the experience of opening up the door every time we went to a door.  So the human body has this amazing capacity to store the experiences because of the learning achieved through those experiences.  This is how we have learned all the things that we’ve learned and stored all the things that we’ve stored.  We have an eye pattern that retrieves our learnings from our memories.  Some of these memories are loaded with unresolved negative emotions and as we have stored them, we can retrieve them with the same emotional impact as before.  So what we’re going to be doing is working with the eyes so that we can decode the nervous system so the emotional impact goes neutral and we retain the learnings.

 

The way you do this is very simple.  NLP is very much like a set of keys.  Each key will open up a different lock.  This process is particularly good for memories that you’re done with.  When you think about them they still bring you pain.  However, it’s not something you’re masticating on like a baby pit bull on a bone – day to day, moment to moment.  This is not like the biggest experience you’ve ever done.  However, the last NLP class I taught in LA a woman got up.  She was the first one to raise her hand and said she had a memory that had clouded and overshadowed my entire existence and everything that’s in it.  And I thought, ‘Well, this may be interesting.’ So within two minutes she could no longer get back the memory. 

 

Demo: Do you have a memory that you’d like to feel differently about?  You’re going to go into the feeling of that memory and you’re job is to hold onto the feeling as you follow my finger with your eyes.  So when you’re in that memory, just nod your head.  So follow my finger with your eyes as you hold onto the emotions of that experience.  You have to follow my finger.  Keep holding onto that emotion and those feelings.  Keep moving your eyes.  Follow the finger.  I’ll slow down for you.  Okay, that’s about half a minute and we’re going to check and see where you are now.  Let your eyes rest and go to that memory.  You were up about a 10 on that memory so tell me what it feels like now.  Those of you who are over here are watching him sort for his eye patterns.  He’s looking for it.  Get that puppy back.  Make yourself feel bad.  Can you get it back?

So what happened was, I wiggled my finger in front of his face on a memory that was pretty high up there as far as the emotional impact of anger.  We spent about half of a minute and he can no longer get back the memory with the same negative emotions again.  Could that be useful in your life?

More tomorrow! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gary De Rodriguez

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