Day 2: Managing Emotions

How do you manage your emotions? How do you manage other people's emotions so that they serve you? So that you are able to move ahead with your life in a way that feels good and does good. This is the question we explore in the second day of our NLP Practitioner certification. Let's start with that word emotion. We think of it as kind of an abstract label, a feeling we call it. And that's closer to the truth because in order to know that we're having an emotion, something changes in our body.

And our brain makes all the arrangements for this change to happen in different parts of our body. And when we notice it, we say, "I am feeling something. And that feeling might be anger, sadness, happiness, those kinds of feelings that we're used to talking about as emotions. But in NLP, we also recognize that all of our thinking shows up in our body.

And so we have a lot of feelings that aren't just emotions. Feelings like focus, like clarity, like determination. Any state you are in changes how you interact with the world. It changes what you notice. And because it changes what you notice, your state changes what behaviors you do. And because it changes your behaviors, it also changes the results you get and the things you're able to achieve.

So in an NLP model, your state is the foundation for your ability to work on your own or with other people to achieve the things you want to achieve. It's not just NLP, but it's always been foundational in NLP. Now, what about this word manage? We manage resources. And we use the word manage for emotions not meaning tamp them down or avoid them, but meaning your emotions change your perceptions. They change your energy. And those changes are useful in some contexts.

And so the problem with an emotion is not, oh, you're emotional. The problem is when you have a mismatch between the energy and focus that an emotion is giving you and what you need to do what you want to do in a particular situation. So managing your emotions means like being a good manager to somebody at work. You acknowledge their strengths and you shift their context enough so that they can use their strengths to do good work. And that's what you want from your emotions and from other people's emotions, for them to do good work. The day starts, the day always starts, with state.

So today what we start with is really fundamentals of state and there are two kinds of fundamentals. The first is a model of what makes a good life and it's based on an interpretation of research from several different longevity studies that track people over decades trying to answer the question, what makes a good life? What allows people to live longer, healthier, happier lives. The root is a sense of well-being.

And so the first essential state that we want to identify in ourselves so that we can also identify it in other people is a state of well-being. Could be physical well-being, could be mental or emotional well-being. Well-being is a sense of pulling in and building energy and the power to take action. And without it, it's really hard to have any other good things.

Now, it's not just for healthy people. Of course, health is important, but some people have health challenges and they know they're going to have health challenges, and they still want to be able to focus on where in their day, where in their life, do they have the energy and focus required to support them in making a difference in the world outside them. So energy builds up through well-being and then we use it to do work in the world. Work is also a fundamental, a core of well-being. It's associated to purpose. It's associated to autonomy and the sense that you can be the master of your own fate. And it's also part of our connection to something bigger.

So if our north star is wellness, the south pole is work. It's what we do with our wellness. It's not necessarily paid labor. It is our ability to make an impact and to think about the impact we want to have on other people, on the world around us.

So the calibration game early on is to think about well-being, to think about work, and to notice the shift in energy and levels of tension and perception as you move between those two states. The state of really experiencing and gathering health and wellness, the experience of pouring yourself into making an impact in the world. There are two other states that we consider essential. One is the state of being in a good positive relationship, a connection with one or more other people. Human beings are all social creatures. It is in the DNA. It is in the brain structure.

It is in the brain function. It is not just a matter of personality. Some people are people people. Some people aren't. Everyone's a people person. We express it differently.

So figuring out how can we be related to other people in a way that is good for us, that works for us, and how do we recognize signs in our body and in the way we pay attention that we are in a relationship that is working. Now almost everybody who has positive relationships spends some of the time just enjoying them. And if you have a positive relationship with the world, you will spend some time playing. Not so you can do something important, but because you recognize that being in the world and fully enjoying what's on offer without needing a direct line to something practical is important. And in a way, it is practical because play opens us up to a different way of being in the world. It makes us more creative, but it also makes us more compassionate, more active, more willing to look at the big picture and to see things that we miss when we are very much directed to specific things.

And so play is the fourth essential state. And we begin the day by doing this little calibration game. But it really connects people into different ways of being in their bodies in the world that allow them to live a good life. Now the strongest state we have is called congruence in NLP. And it is a state where it feels like all of your attention is in just one place. This is never strictly speaking true. Your brain always maintains safety checks.

There's always other things going on. It also maintains all your autonomic function so that you breathe and blink and hold your body upright without thinking about it. But some of the things we do are so engaging that it feels that we only have one mind, one emotion. And some of the work done on these kinds of states is done on something called flow states. You've probably heard of flow states. You've probably heard of peak performance states. All of these are states where you have just one focus.

Your whole body contributes to you being in that state and supporting that state. And so we spend time mapping that state, noticing what changes in us when we are not distracted. I know it's a distracting world. I know that we all have to function with some level of distraction some of the time, but this is why it's very important to recognize that if we have something important to do or a relationship that it's important to build, we need to know, are we 100% there? How are we going to check in? Have you ever asked yourself, do I really want this? Well, what that really means is not that your wanting is or isn't real, but that there is no part of you that is pulling you in a different direction.

So, that's the morning of day two. As we move into the second session, we're going to think about how our emotions connect to other people's emotions. Have you ever said somebody made you feel something and then thought, "Oh, maybe they didn't make me feel it. Maybe I made me feel it." Theater of the mind is a wonderful NLP game where you take somebody who annoys you or irritates you. We don't want to take like trauma and put it up there right away.

But we have lots of interactions with people that pull us out of our best state. And if we imagine them out on a stage, we see someone who looks and sounds like us on that stage and somebody who looks like the other person on that stage. And from that distance we get in the theater, we see that one person's behavior is modifying another person's behavior. And this happens at the level of state. Whenever we go into rapport with somebody, we kind of match their state and that changes our state. And then we have to decide, can we get back to our state from here? Do we have to continue to live in their emotional or mental state?

So in theater of the mind, by putting it out from you somewhere you can observe yourself, you begin seeing feedback loops, seeing the way your behavior feeds somebody else's behavior. Your state is triggering their state. And that gives you the ability to make different choices about what you feel and what you do so that you can change what they feel and what they do. Move from there into how do we use language to support shared experience? Because the only way we can manage somebody else's emotions is if we are also managing our own. And what we see in theater of the mind is that two people may not have identical experiences, but as soon as they are in connection, they are influencing the other person's state.

And so if we really want to manage our own states so that we feel better and do better, we need to be able to draw other people into states that are useful for us. Somebody might be a high performer when they're really hyper. Somebody else might only be a high performer when they're really calm. They can't both be calm and hyper at the same time.

So if you have a mismatch like this, you need to be able to think, how do I draw somebody in to a state that I'm comfortable holding that's also good for them? Where do we compromise? How do we find emotions or feelings or perceptual positions that work for both of us? There are two things that language does that makes people pull into a shared state that is useful. And the first thing it does is it gives us the sense that we are in agreement. We are on the same team.

And so the exercise we do is one where you say yes. It comes from improv, from the idea of "yes and." When you start with yes, people relax their guard. They want to connect and they want to sort of notice where you're at. They won't always agree with your state, much less your content. It's not magic, but it creates an opening. The word no says there's a wall between us. If there's a wall between us, it is hard to perceive each other accurately.

So, the first thing we need to do is turn that wall into a window. And that's what the word yes does. And so, there's some exercises where you just practice having conversations where every sentence starts with some form of yes. From there we move into the more interesting problem of how does an experience I have had get into your mind and into your body so that you can experience the state I have experienced through language. We know that happens. We know people read books and they get excited or sad or whatever as they read.

So language can create experience in us. How does it do it? What's the right kind of language to use? And we do an exercise. It's an exercise in vivification. It comes from the work of Milton Erickson. And essentially you start learning through this exercise that changing someone's attention is different than giving somebody content.

And so if you want them to experience a walk in the woods and you talk about how you experience it, sometimes they won't understand what you're talking about. That won't be their experience. They won't have stored experience in their brains to match it and they won't be able to engage. Vivification means saying, "Think of a time you walked in the woods in the past and start noticing what you're noticing and start heightening awareness of different sights, different sounds. Notice what your body is feeling. Notice the way you are walking. Notice the ground under your feet.

Notice the way your breath is coming in and out and the way the air is moving through you. And as you draw attention to these specific sensory inputs without telling people exactly what they are, you're actually going to raise their engagement because they have to meet you halfway. They have to fill in the details and they're going to fill it in based on their experience. And so your words will always be a fit for their experience. And this is a way of helping people get excited about something in the future or helping them imagine a difference in a situation in the past so that they can learn something new from it. It is a key to many many change patterns in NLP. And it starts with the idea that your language is not meant to accurately describe experience.

It is meant to accurately evoke experience to get somebody else to use what is stored in their mind and body as memory and really put all the wonderful sensory detail into their thinking so that that thinking feels real, so that it transfers back into the real world. So, by now we've spent about, you know, five or six hours together with a couple of short breaks. We've experienced NLP's version of emotion, which means we have gone into ourselves and noticed physical change and associated it to the meaning that comes with different emotional labels. We've practiced labeling emotion that we're feeling and we're practicing using labels to evoke an emotion. We have noticed how we either change or support each other's emotions as two different people's states come together. And we've noticed too that backing up and imagining ourselves in relation gives us better choices both about what we feel and about what we draw out in the other person. And then we've learned that we can use language to support somebody else's experience, to change what they are thinking so that it feels more real, so that they are able to make changes first in their minds and then in their real behaviors.

And so that brings us to the end of the day. We're ready now to think about the good life, to loop back to those four essential states and to fill out what we're going to call a life compass and a life map. The life compass has wellness as its north star. It has work as its south pole. It has relationships to the west and play to the east. And because we're doing our goal setting, our big picture of a good life on a map, all parts of the map are equally important and we can see relationships between different behaviors and goals and qualities that we enjoy having in our life. The other thing that we do at NLP Canada that not everybody does is we think it's really important that your map includes the life you have now.

It includes the things you value and the things you want to grow. It's never just about adding new stuff because the danger of adding new stuff, if you don't have a sense of relative importance and how things connect and of how it's important to have all these different experiences to have a good life, is that you will work on one at the expense of the other without even knowing you're doing it. So the end of the day is for mapping out what you want your life to be and to include looking at where there are some gaps in your map, where there was a quadrant that maybe hard to fill in, hasn't been getting much of your attention and then also to identify where are the things that you want to be active in. Where are the things you know you want to do something about and identifying some concrete steps to move towards just some of the things on your map so that you have both the big picture, out from third position looking at a whole landscape of your life, but you also have that real granularity of that congruent presence in the moments where you want to make a difference. And that's day two of the NLP Practitioner certification.

Our day on managing emotion in yourself and in others. Stay tuned. Come back. There will be another video on day three. I'm Linda Ferguson, NLP Canada Training.