Release yourself from cause and effect.
On the Facebook page of Biology of Belief they posted this quote:
“When a photographer can’t change a scene, he changes his angles and lens to capture the best of that scene. Similarly, when you can’t change a situation in your life, change your perspective to get the best out of that situation. Be a filter not a sponge”
Biology of Belief
John Grinder, co-creator of Neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and one of my amazing teachers, puts it like this: “it is not the problem that is the problem”. If you think about this it makes a lot of sense, even though it is not always easy in practice on your own and this is where a Coach can come in handy.
As I have mentioned before, to me, NLP is about creating choice and when you change your angle on a situation you create more choice. It isn’t always the easiest way to go about things because our brain is programmed to seek patterns and therefore the way we react becomes patterns that we repeat even though they are no longer useful to us.
In my mini series on the Meta model (It sure looks like Holmes) you read how we generalize, distort and delete information when we communicate and an important part of that is the cause / effect distortion. When we think that A = B even though there is no logical support or evidence of a direct connection that one causes the other. What happens is that we have reactions to an outside stimulus and it is our reaction that affects our internal state and not the outside stimulus itself.
Once you have accepted this you can practice to either install different filters or change the angle from which you look at a scene to create choices on how to react to the outside stimuli, you can choose the internal state that is the best for you at a given point. It is as co-creator of NLP Richard Bandler, and also one of my teachers, says, “If you can change the way you think, you can change the way you feel”.
It does take some practice and it is essential to stop and think and not be on automatic pilot. At times the use of a Coach comes in handy, when I get stuck I use my amazing colleague Kathy Pedro. I choose to do this because I know how unpleasant it can be to get stuck in cause/effect and how liberating it feels when I step out of it and take back my power.
I hope you are as happy as you want to be and remember it is free to be nice.
Best wishes
Ivalo