Day 4: Managing Limited Resources

We live with lots of limits. Limited time, limited energy, limited skill, limited money, limited attention. And commonly we fight those limits. We feel like if we were unlimited, it would be so much better. On day four of the NLP Practitioner certification at NLP Canada Training, we challenge that idea. We interact with limits and we begin to understand the value and the benefits of limits as well as the things that are maybe too limited and we can change. In his newest book, David Epstein writes about the benefits of constraints.

The book is called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. And it's a relatively simple idea. People are more creative and more motivated when there are boundaries around the problems they are solving. And even though you might think unlimited resources would make you so much more capable of dealing with the situations you face, so much more capable of building something you want to build. The evidence is that constraints are always part of how human beings are motivated to do their best thinking and their best work. How you feel about constraints largely comes down to how you feel about the world. Do you believe the world is a friendly place, a place where people help each other, a place that rewards effort, a place that offers safety?

Or do you believe the world is an unfriendly place? A place where some people never have enough, where there is not enough to go around, where you cannot count on other people, and frequently you cannot count on yourself. Of course, most of us believe both in general, in theory, when we think about it. But what do we believe moment to moment, situation by situation about the world and about the limits we face in this day of the practitioner training. We don't ask you to talk about the situations you're exploring in your mind. The situations that are possibly troubling you, the real limits you face. We ask you to think about them and we do work with them, but you don't have to talk about them.

So, it's a great idea on this day of the course to really push yourself to pick a problem you want to solve, a problem you do not currently see a way of solving, and to use the exercises to explore that in a different way to see what choices open up. And this could be money issues, you know, not enough money to do the thing I want to do. Not enough money to feel safe. I have a relationship with money maybe that I don't like very much. I'd like to change that relationship. You can do that without talking about it.

So work on it. Or perhaps your relationship is with time. You might feel that you never have enough time or that you have too much time on your hands. Although most people when asked how they are say busy. And that busyness becomes an attitude towards whether or not you have enough time, whether or not you can handle all the demands placed on your time and energy. I think we've all been there. When Tuesday morning feels like it should be Friday afternoon, when we feel that we can see all the boxes on the calendar, but we can't really imagine being present in all of them because we're not managing our attention.

We are not managing the limits of our attention. So these are the kinds of issues you can work on today. Real practical situations that not just impact like one or two situations in your life but tend to generalize into this sense that either the world is out to get you or the world is out to help you. People have frequently come to me through my career in NLP and asked, "Can you help me change my limiting beliefs? And my answer is no. All beliefs are limiting. There's no such thing as believing in unlimited.

Because the human mind, body, brain system has constraints on how much processing we can do consciously at one moment. So all of us have to narrow in on the part of the world we can give attention to at one moment and then we can shift our attention at a different moment. When we are deluged with so much information, our brain can take it in and record it, but our mind can't make meaning of it. There's simply too much information available.

And so we start grouping that information into categories into frames so that we can look at a small amount at a time and by understanding that smaller frame make implications about the rest of the world. These kinds of limits, the limits we decide to set are the kind of limits that foster attention, focus, creativity, productivity. Because we're not trying to do everything all at once everywhere. We are trying to do one thing at one time in one place with our best focus, our most congruent self. Choice points in NLP are sometimes problems. They are often situations where we're not sure what to give our attention to in order to move forward.

So, we feel stuck. And we feel stuck because either our attention is gravitating towards something that doesn't suggest a way forward or because our attention's bouncing all over. We see lots of choices. We don't know how to pick one. We don't know which values or which analysis would help us see what to do next. Some of the things that you can work on when we talk about using a pattern of an exercise to make a change in a choice point. Habits.

All of your habits are choice points. You do them automatically without thinking about them. So you don't have time in the moment to make a change in them. You actually have to step back from a habit and figure out how to change something outside the frame of the habit to change the habit itself. This is as true for good habits as it is for bad habits. And you may have heard that the good is the enemy of the great. And what it means is once our brain has a way of doing something that is relatively effective, that is efficient, and that it can run without consuming all the energy it takes to process new ideas.

Once it can run on autopilot, it tends to run on autopilot. And it's hard to intervene in a good habit that is getting good results so that you can make a better habit getting different results. Problems, anything you think of as a problem is also a choice point. And in NLP, there's only really one problem. You don't see a better step forward. You don't know how to choose what to do next.

Once you know you can go and do that, you're not stuck anymore. So other kinds of choice points, all of your beliefs, all of your beliefs are artificial boundaries you have accepted because they make some things easier. They help you to pay attention to some things, but they do that by filtering other things out. And so sometimes you want to change a belief or a value to allow yourself to value something else, to notice something else, to do something that is not possible within the limits of your current beliefs. Fear, anxiety, trauma, all of those things sit around in your head and they create a very distinct way of experiencing the world that shuts out many, many possibilities.

And so any episodes of fear or anxiety that sort of linger or that resurface periodically are situations where you're not currently knowing that you have better choices. So we want to open up more choices in those. And your memories are choice points. Everything you remember teaches you something about what the world is like. And your brain uses that to predict what the world will be like next. If the memories you have are pointing you to a world you no longer want to live in, are pointing you into limits you no longer want to accept, then you need to go back and rethink the memory to find out how it supports different limits, a different focus, different choices. How do you do all that?

Here is the simple pattern we will use in a dozen different ways. It will feel very different as we do it on different days and different problems. It's always the same. In NLP, we say you don't work on a problem from within a problem. You can't work on a choice point from within the choice point.

So, the first thing we need to do is put a useful limit around the choice point. And that is what we do by saying go back into a particular time and place when you experienced this choice point this situation where you don't know how to make a better choice past, present or future. It's in your memory. You can work with it but happens at a particular time and place. You get into your body there. You notice what you are seeing, hearing and feeling. And that tells you that this choice point is limited to this moment.

And then we say, shake it off. Step back from it. You're not in that situation right now. You don't need to have the feelings and the filters that come with that situation. And then we build up different perspectives, different strengths, different states, different connections to other people. And we use those, we heighten them and then we go back in and we say, "Okay, take all of that good stuff from outside the limits of that choice point and bring them inside the choice point and notice what changes.

So, first we stabilize, then we dissociate, then we find resources, then we integrate the resources back into the choice point and we ask the question, what's different now? And what's different now means do you now identify choices you didn't see before? Can you feel differently? Can you act differently? Can you express it differently? And then of course the followup is, is that enough? If it's not different enough, that's okay.

It only takes a few minutes to do these patterns. You can run another one. But that's the general pattern we use to approach any choice point in this course and throughout NLP. How do you respond to limits? Limits of money, limits of time, limits of attention. It's a little like being stuck in a prison in a small space where you don't have enough room to do the things you want to do.

So, we're going to start the day with a little playful anchoring exercise where we ask you to think about a time you were playing, a time you were playful. For many adults, this is a stretch. It helps that we've done the life map already so that you've already thought about play. But this really means getting into your body and your senses in a moment when you were doing something that had no practical value but felt good. And it might be from when you were a child playing. It might be from when you were playing with a child. And it might just be you playing.

And we take that into our bodies and into our minds and then shake it off. And then we also anchor a state of being brave. Now when I'm teaching a class, we are careful with brave. To be brave is a good thing, but nobody wants to need it. Nobody wants to need to be brave because it means you're in a scary place. And with NLP, we know you're you have a really strong memory for things that are scary. And you want to use that memory because it stabilizes it.

It stops it from generalizing. So everything is scary. You say, "No, that situation was scary and I was brave." And as soon as you see that that person is there and that you can see them being brave as a coach, you pull them out of it. You say, "That's it. We can stabilize quickly. We do not have to linger in a situation where we needed to be brave." And that's going to apply to anything we need to stabilize that is difficult or hurtful. We have to go there to learn.

We can also exit. It's only by going there we learn we have the opportunity to shake it off and to replace it with something different. So it is important to go there, but it's important to go there with permission and with a light touch, playful and brave. What do they feel like together? We've anchored them on your shoulders and you're going to feel a rush of energy that challenges the idea that the energy you have at a given moment in time is just the energy you have. And then we're going to use that energy to go into a really wonderfully silly game we call the donkey fell in the hole. And this is a pattern that works to open up choice just by breaking down those relentlessly thick walls we put around some situations.

We have to see it this way. We have to feel this way. We say, "Okay, think of a time you would like more choice because you're feeling that constraint." Play this game that involves your body moving, your mind moving, and a lot of laughter and support from your team. And as you play it, as you stir things up, as you become sort of playfully confused, you are also confusing your internal representation of that situation so that you can't quite get back to it. And you open up, you kind of wiggle the edges of it so that you start seeing that there are more choices than you thought there were.

Then we take a break. That's a lot for one morning. It's useful that usually day four appears after a break. We do 3 days and then a couple of weeks so people are fresh and ready because when they come back we're going to consider this issue of how other people get into our heads and give us ideas about constraints about limits about what we should or shouldn't do. And we just want to start sorting out with respect, with love, not not necessarily with animosity or these are bad people, but just we want to start sorting out is this my thinking? Is this my experience of the world or does it belong to somebody else? Start off by thinking about two people that you respect.

One of these people is somebody who truly believes the world is a friendly place. And one of these people, another person you respect, another person you like, but they really believe the world is an unfriendly or dangerous place. And you're going to just notice what changes in you as you think of each of these people and their perspective on the world. Then you're going to play a game where you're actually going to imagine stepping into the chair, sitting in the chair of different people so that you can perceive your own limits through somebody else's eyes. And it's really interesting for most people that when you are asked to sit in your own chair, experience one of these limits, one of these situations where you feel too limited or too constrained where you don't know how to move forward and just experience it. And then imagine a chair on your left and in that chair is sitting somebody you respect. Imaginatively go sit in that chair.

But as you do, sit right into that person's perspective, their thoughts, their experience, and through that person's eyes look at you and your limits. What you find is you can do this and you can do it because your brain all your life has been observing other people kind of on the premise that if they can do it maybe you could do it. If it's useful for them it might be useful for you. And so when you say imagine you're somebody else it's never completely impossible to imagine it.

Now, what you imagine may not be completely accurate to the other person's experience from your brain's point of view. That's not the point. The point is to capture strengths and abilities it observes in other people so you can try them on for size. So, you sit in the chair of somebody you respect. You sit in the chair of somebody who challenges you because a challenge is a pushing against edges and limits. And that's what we want to do in this exercise. We want to exert some pressure to push back limits.

And then finally, because that takes a little bit of energy, you sit in the chair of somebody you absolutely know loves you. And you come back to your own chair with the learnings you have from three very different points of view. Not just about you, but probably about what the world is like. Probably about whether the world imposes limits or offers freedoms and then you're ready for another break.

After our second break, we come back to think about mindset as a frame. And we're going to explore more this idea of the world as either something that supports us, encourages us to explore, to go into new situations, to overcome limits. Or whether the world is a place that encourages us to live within limits and to find safety within limits. We begin with an exercise where a person is asked to write down a problem as if they're setting it as a question for somebody else on a test.

So, they don't say, "I don't have enough money to do this thing I want." They say Linda has x number of dollars and she wants to build her business. How's she going to do that? Or Tom has a very short fuse. He gets angry and his anger when it goes sets off really affects his ability to form useful relationships with people. What are some things that Tom could do when he starts to feel angry to preserve his relationships?

So, you're just putting it down as if it's a question for somebody else. Then your coach says, "Okay, put that aside. Tell me about a time you were competing and you lost or tell me about a time you tried to do something and it didn't work out." And just pick something that you're comfortable talking about. Doesn't have to go deep.

But a time you lost or a time you failed. And so you have a little conversation with your coach. And then your coach says, "All right, I want you to go back to that problem that you set and write some solutions. Just see what comes to mind. Write down how you might approach that problem. Shake it off. Come back.

Tell me about a time you were competing and you won. Maybe you were part of a team or maybe you succeeded at doing something that was really important to you. Other people helped you do it. You had a time like that. Tell me about that. And of course, the person starts telling the coach, going into that mindset, stepping back into that memory. And then the coach says, "All right, take a clean sheet of paper, look at that problem again, write some answers, and then they have a conversation.

How did setting up the mindset change? What options appeared? What choices appeared to the person having the experience, the person being coached? We also want to tighten frames. Sometimes one of the things that helps us understand how to manage limits is we have to understand when even more limits are useful. That was the point of Epstein's book that constraints or limits often make people do better work. They allow you to imagine specific time, a specific place.

And this matters because that's how you live life. You do not live life in the abstract or in general. You live it in specifics. And so in a coaching session, we tighten the frame by asking questions like, "How is this problem different than other problems you faced?" And in order to do that, we have to stop grouping things and start narrowing down the specifics, the individual that automatically takes you more into your body where you take action into your lived experience. We might say, what's the smallest thing you could do? And just by directing people to small, it's like we are shining a flashlight if not a spotlight on it. And they're looking within the circle of light.

They're saying, "What is the detail that I can influence?" And then what if you were confident? What if you change that mindset? What else becomes available? If you are in a mindset where the whole world is either for you or against you, then it can be hard to identify practical steps. If you're in a mindset where you are confident, where you know you have what you need to deal with this specific situation, you naturally accept the constraint. We call it focus. And through that focus, you see other things you can do.

And the day ends with setting goals. Again, there's a lot of people who will talk about setting unlimited goals. Pick the moonshot. And that can feel great in the moment.

But if everything is possible and we're not achieving our goals, then the problem must be us. By setting really big goals without thinking about limits, we can keep ourselves stuck because often we're not the problem. There are real limits and constraints around us that we need to deal with. And if we just refuse to acknowledge them, we stay in the same stuck place wanting something that is perpetually out of reach and blaming ourselves. Not blaming the situations and not blaming the actions that we're not taking.

So, we're going to look at two different kinds of situations that begin filtered. They begin not exciting, not huge, focused, full of the details of lived experience. And we're going to ask you to think about a routine communication, the conversation you have every day to get your kid to school, to start the meeting at work, to call a friend and try and set up a time to see them. Small, something small. What makes it routine is you do it often. Because you do it often, because it is contained, you have detail about it. And we work through just questions like why do you do it?

What changes when you do it well? What changes for you? What changes for the other person? What changes in how you're seen in the world? Because you do this little thing well. And it is again like putting a spotlight on something. And that edges of the light which are limits are limits that open us up to look more closely to pay attention differently and to make something feel real that isn't actually happening right now.

And then the well-formed outcome. You've heard of smart goals. You might have heard of well-formed outcomes. They're a lot like smart goals. They're supposed to be within your control. They're supposed to happen at a particular time and place. These aren't very big goals because big goals, they unfold over time and they usually involve other people.

But you can look at your life map that you will have done already. You can look at your sense of things you want in your life and pick one and then pick not how are we going to think about the whole goal but how specifically can we think about the next step. Just one step that you know is within your control to take and find out what will you see and hear and feel when that step is done. What will you give up so that you can do that step? Like how does it fit into your calendar? How does it fit into your energy? You only have so much of willpower, of attention, of energy, of money, of time.

When you give it to one thing, you're taking it away from something else. How will taking this one little step make a difference to other people? And is there anything stopping you? And if nothing is stopping you and you are satisfied that this one small step is within your control and will have a positive effect, it's likely you'll just go out and do it.

And so the answer to limited resources and managing them better is mostly about accepting the limit and then wiggling, creating small changes that lead to bigger changes. As you come to understand that you are capable of working within the limits or of changing the limits when that's necessary. I'm Linda Ferguson, NLP Canada Training. That's day four. We're halfway through the NLP Practitioner certification. Come back in a few days for day five.