P is for Programming
“The kind of life we lead today is essentially the product of our habits – our daily routines, our daily processes. ” – Jim Berry
The P in NLP stands for Programming.
I prefer the expression “patterns of behaviour”. Those unconscious patterns of behaviour including our habits and emotional reactions, good and bad.
Your unconscious mind works hard for you. Rather than using the conscious part of the mind, you will pass a learning to the unconscious part of the mind to manage it in the future. This frees up your the mental capacity to focus on your new decisions and challenges you face on a daily basis.
Your Patterns of Behaviour
Here are a couple of ides to test out your unconscious patterns:
1. Try this, cross your arms.
Now cross your arms the other way.
How does that feel? Strange? Uncomfortable? Exactly, because you have a pattern of behaviour to cross your arms a certain way.
2. Which sock do you put on first?
Think about when you get dressed in the morning, when you put your socks on do you put the right one on first or the left?
You may not be sure.
You may have to try it out to work out the answer.
This is how your unconscious takes charge of a simple task so you don’t have to think about it.
Again if you were to do it the other way around tomorrow it will be strange, uncomfortable, you may even fall over!
Your Emotional Reactions
Similar to the socks programme, you will find that your emotional reactions are also run at the unconscious level. For example:
- A person smiles at you and you smile back.
- A colleague says something you disagree with and you tell them they are wrong without considering their perspective.
- A driver pulls out in front of you and you go into an immediate rage.
Making Change to Your Patterns of Behaviour
The challenge is making the change in behaviour stick.
You may make the change tomorrow, but what happens the next day? If you do not think about what you are doing, you will revert back to the original way.
You need to keep the change at the forefront of your conscious awareness and will need to have persistence, patience and perseverance to make it stick..
Change takes place at the unconscious level and then we become aware of it. So one day, you will realise that you have changed the programme or pattern of behaviour and you didn’t even realise it!
If you want to know more about rewiring your programming, contact me to find out more about how NLP can help.