NLP: the ultimate key to high performance.

With all the chat around NLP and hypnotherapy as buzzwords for quitting smoking and quick weight loss, it is hard to know what to believe if you have never worked with this stuff before. I have to admit, as a physiotherapist I did not think much of NLP at first.

However, even with a science head, I could not help noticing that patients with an almost identical diagnosis differed dramatically in their perception of pain and symptoms and ability to manage through their daily life. A patient with a serious injury could continue to play sport, travel and work to a high level while another patient with a less serious injury would not be able to get out of bed. The subjective nature of pain was amazing to me. I wondered, “if we can differ in how we cope with pain and injury, could we ‘learn’ to cope better with our symptoms”?

After studying neurolinguistic programming techniques - NLP - I began to understand how our minds take in information. We start by seeing an event take place in front of us and we take in 2,000,000 bits of information. The brain immediately begins to delete, distort, and generalize the information based on our memories, values and beliefs. Therefore, no two people ever see the same event in the same way. Every person creates their own perception of what happened based on their thought patterns and beliefs. With the help of NLP and other techniques we can change those patterns. Think of how many marriages could have been saved if people could just understand that we often react based on what has happened to us in the past.

As a physiotherapist, I wondered how NLP can change our perception of pain. That would mean that we can actually control how much we feel our pain and how it affects us.

It turns out that you can change this and many sport athletes have used mind training to work through fatigue and burn-out during a competition. If you are suffering from chronic pain or illness mind train will help in the same way. And corporate CEOs could start to look at getting through a day of work tasks like competing in a marathon - using breathing, meditation, visualization to keep going at their best. Personally, I have first started to use breathing and meditation for running and now I use it to stay focused as an entrepreneur and to de-stress as a mom.

By focusing on breathing, meditation and visualization, one can overcome pain and fatigue in order to get the best quality of life. Whether you are using these methods to control your pain or fatigue in order to get through a full day of activities or to run an impactful business or raise a family, you can see how being in full control of your thought patterns and your internal state is the key to getting the most out of each day.