Continuing our focus on work life integration (see earlier blog). In today’s fast-paced world, balancing professional demands with personal well-being is no longer about strict boundaries, it’s more about blending the two together, a fusion. Work-life integration shifts our focus from separation to wholeness.
This is where Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) gives us a practical approach to make the shift possible. By understanding how our self-talk, behaviours, and mental maps shape our daily experience, we can align our thoughts, emotions, and actions to create results at work and at home. In this blog, we’ll explore four NLP-based strategies as tips to help bring greater clarity, and purpose.
Set An Outcome for The Day (Goal Setting)
Be In The Appropriate State When Needed (Anchoring)
Be Kind To Self Using Reframing (Reframing)
Enforce Your Boundaries (Sensory Acuity and Rapport)
4 tips to help alignment:
Tip 1: Set an outcome for the day
By setting an outcome for the day you are directing your unconscious mind to focus and support you in achieving it. Start by deciding on a suitable outcome for your day and focus on it. Think about what specifically you want eg an achievement or a result and run through the detail of what you may see, hear, feel and say to yourself when you have it. Make sure you are clear about the evidence for knowing when you have achieved your outcome.
Commit yourself fully in your mind and body to the outcome, visualise yourself as if you already have it and the actions you take to realise the outcome successfully. Throughout the day check in with yourself on progress. Notice if you start to go off track. Bring yourself back on track by refocusing on your outcome and the accompanying visualisation you did earlier.
Tip 2: Be in the best state at work and home
Anchoring is a powerful technique that involves using the process of stimulus response, creating a link between it and a desired emotional state that you have experienced in the past. For example, if you want to be confident, you can use anchoring to trigger that feeling of confidence whenever you need it.
By anchoring positive states, you can reconnect with emotions and experiences that make you feel alive and authentic. This technique helps you access the emotional resources you need to stay connected to yourself, even in challenging situations.
Process:
Decide on what positive state you want to be in. Some examples of states can be open, confident, motivated, dynamic or strong.
You may choose to use your chosen state to link to a specific event or activity due to occur during the day such as having difficult conversations, presenting or sales. Once you have decided on your state you can set up an anchor to access the state when required.
Do this by remembering a specific time when you experienced that particular state (eg confidence) intensely, (the more intense the better). As you remember that time, go back and relive it; see what you saw, hear the sounds and really feel the feelings at that time. As you relive that experience, say to yourself over and over again the name of the state (eg “confidence”) until the feelings wane. Your anchor word is now set. To trigger it say the word (eg “confidence”) to yourself when required.
Anchoring can be used across all contexts such as work, home, sport, relationships, personal growth and education.
Tip 3: Be kind to self using reframing
Reframing is about changing the way you perceive a situation in any context, work, home, relationships, sport, personal growth. If you’re feeling stuck or disconnected, it’s often because you’re viewing your circumstances through a limiting lens.
NLP can help you reframe these perspectives, allowing you to find new possibilities and solutions. Through reframing, you can shift from a place of negativity to one of empowerment. This change in perspective can help reignite your mojo and sense of purpose. For example, you take a much needed break at work, you may hear a negative voice calling yourself ‘lazy’, reframe it as ‘plugging into recharge’ or ‘refueling’ or having a ‘pitstop’. You can use this handy approach in life for example reframing a loss in sport or when events do not turn out as expected.
Tip 4: Enforce your boundaries
You have made change and liking your results, the work now begins to maintain progress. This starts with boundaries. Having made change or when embedding new behaviours, it’s important to understand there may be new personal boundaries in place which need to be enforced at work or at home. For example, it may be the use of saying ‘no’ with confidence when previously it had been ‘yes’. Those around you may be expecting the ‘old’ version of you to be saying ‘yes’ so this can take some careful preparation and thought on how to use your language and physiology.
At the start of our NLP training, students focus on communication including learning sensory acuity and building rapport. This is so that they know how to build relationships effectively. This involves learning to use appropriate language when communicating messages and know that it has been received and understood, with success.
We can also enforce our boundaries in a more physical way. For example the use of mobile phones. If you want to ensure you are more present at mealtimes or during meetings you can turn off notifications (or power down the phone) every time. This is an example in NLP of a pattern interrupt, a powerful way to break unresourceful behaviours in order to install more resourceful ones.
Next steps
Whenever we are making personal change, in NLP it is important to consider the ecology before taking action. Ecology is the study of consequences checking that the outcome is a win-win. A win-win for self, for those around us, for our community and even wider afield so that all the bases are considered. Some examples of useful ecology questions to ask self can be:
What will I gain or lose from implementing this new action or behaviour?
“How does this (action or behaviour) contribute positively?
“How will this (action or behaviour) help me be the person I want to be?”
Making change in behaviour and thinking involves changing patterns and / or processes to create alignment, which is where we realise true value. By learning NLP, we are able to encode or decode our programming, rewire unresourceful behaviours or habits positively with purpose and intention to produce wholeness, which ultimately, is what integration is all about. Start your free growth journey now by subscribing to our page, see our latest training or contact for a human conversation on how NLP can help you make change.
Learn all the processes referenced in this blog and many more to use in all situations on our NLP Training courses.
New Perspective NLP is based in Bolton working with clients and organisations in Greater Manchester, Merseyside Cheshire and beyond.
