This week I have invited the Engineer María Velasco to write about her experiences with NLP. She has been an important member of the Coaching Vital team for two years now. She has been to numerous conferences of mine, and workshops in Bogotá, we have had uncountable conversations and Maria has read all the books I have thrown at her. She is also responsible for the designs that accompany my quotes, she updates my website and publishes my blog every week. So who better to give her testimony on what NLP has done for her? And share a bit of what she has learnt these last two years we have worked together.
Have a fantastic week and remember being kind is for free.
Best wishes
Ivalo
I pride myself on being a rational person. At least that’s what I tell myself, that I act under reason and not with emotion. I instinctively distrust my feelings, and my usual reaction is to ignore them, pretend they are not there. But the strategy is not very effective, because those feelings reveal themselves and force me to see them, even though I do not want to. Sometimes I cannot contain a reaction, because there are already so many unattended feelings accumulated, that it is as if they had a life of their own and began to speak for me, without my consent.
Therefore, the NLP techniques that I have learned in the lectures and sessions with Ivalo are fascinating to me. I am learning to integrate the emotionality within my rationality, understanding how important the feeling is before deciding or acting. I am solving the conflict between emotion and reason.
In particular, the technique of visualizing the feeling I have, imagining that it is something physical in my body, that has shape, color, texture, makes it easier for me to recognize the feeling, to know that it is there and has a powerful effect on my body and my mind. By seeing it, feeling it physically, being able to touch it and then moving it, moving it away or bringing it closer, changing its color, its texture slowly changes my mental state in the direction I am looking for at a certain moment.
Being an introverted person, I spend a lot of time remembering and reliving past events. And this technique allows me to take the negative feelings that some of these experiences have, process them, and be able to free myself of the burden that they produce when I pretend that they are not there. Instead of hiding from my feelings, I have learned to change them to colors that I like, textures that I appreciate, sensations that give me peace of mind, and so, I can finally let go of anger or sadness that from the past still makes me bitter from time to time.
I am happy to have found Ivalo and her sessions, and the world of knowledge that she has opened to me when she introduced me to NLP. I’m just beginning to see the potential this has in my life, but as I explore and move forward, I find fascinating lessons about myself, which I would very much like others to share.
María Velasco
This post was published initialy in May 2019