You Down with NLP? Yeah, You Know Me

This one turned out to be a pure rambler…making it up as I go…and I think my IQ dipped another five points (how low can you go!) for having written this…but hey, it’s entertaining and you just might learn something:

The last week or so, being hectic as sometimes life gets, I haven’t had much time to read (or write, for that matter).

To combat, I’ve committed the cardinal minimalist sin of multitasking on purpose lately by popping a few seminars on MP3 while shoveling scads of Buffalo snow and while driving too and fro (yeah, I said “fro”) work.

Forgive me minimalist bloggers

for I have sinned.

My last minimalist moment was

six days, nine hours, twenty seven minutes and eight seconds ago.

I’m working my way through Anthony Robbins’ Get the Edge right now, which I acquired several years ago in the usual way and have revisited repeatedly.

Yes, he may be the McDonald’s of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming…nothing funny there…I know I usually write something funny in parenthesis…followed by some ellipses…but not this time…) but you can’t argue with One Billion Served and it’s hard not to feel like you just got a kick in the ass after listening to him (which is better than getting your ass kicked…trust me).

So (I say “so” a lot too…which is different than “sew a lot”…which I don’t do), I’ve been meditating (read = zoning out while bottle feeding babies) on two related concepts in the program lately (I’m only on Day 1, but there’s like eight, forty minute plus programs to listen to before you can go to Day 2).

The first is the concept that the two primary human motivations are to move toward stimuli that are pleasurable, and move away from stimuli that are painful.  This is NLP 101 and despite it smacking a bit of Pavlov’s pooch (ding!), it’s a perfectly adequate working model for figuring out what the hell is wrong with us (or maybe just me).

So, we likey warm fuzzy thingies, we no-likey cold icky thingies.

Concept 2 – The powerful tool for change comes in the guise of Neuro-associations (which is different than Nero-associations which involve parading around in a Toga all day and committing tyrannical acts like hogging the TV Remote, or drinking the last of the milk and putting the bottle back in the fridge) that essentially drive our behavior.  And you’re a Neuro-associative machine all day long, linking pain and pleasure to every decision you make.  What you link pain to may be something that someone else links great pleasure to (leaving out any discussions on Sado-masochism)

Pause – I realize I’m just some thirty-something jackass blogger with no degree in psychology (though I do have degrees in Anthropology and English Lit… so if you ever want me to run down the Genus/Species classifications of all Primates or discuss why Shakespeare was a Misogynist pig I’m yer man) so if you want a better explanation, go listen to Robbins (who, incidentally, as far as I can tell, has no degree at all…the silly, miopithecus ogouensis fool ).

Play – So, what happens when you associate pleasure with the bad habit and pain with the good habit?  You get shyt out of life.

I struggle with my weight because when I was in high school running made my shins bleed internally and this one time, at band camp, during a five mile run my pants fell down around my ankles and I tripped and fell thus exposing all the inglorious minuteness of my manhood (I just got out of the pool, I swear) to a roving pack of feral cheerleaders who subsequently cackled at the absurdity that was me.  Not only do I hate running but I love junk food and M&M’s rock the house.

I struggle with my writing productivity because thinking makes my brain bleed and this one time, at band camp, I wrote a beautiful poem for one of the female counselors and she ripped up my poem, rubbed it in bear pooh and forced me to consume it while standing in my underwear in front of everyone who was (were?) laughing at me because all the inglorious minuteness of my manhood (the pool again, I swear) could easily be seen thru my tighty whiteys…and it’s more fun surfing the internet to read other peep’s stuff (while eating M&M’s because they rock the house).

I struggle with my finances (actually I don’t, but let’s pretend) because mom and dad used to always make me save 99% of my allowance for band camp and…well…you’ve seen what happened there…and besides, M&M’s ain’t free and me gots to have some…because they rock the house (4 “and’s” in one sentence!  or is that five because of the parentheses?).

There are two sides each here, and they’re both working against you (ok, me).  So how do you (I) change it?

Once you’ve identified the motivations, why you’re running away from something and why you’re running toward something else, I think you’ve really done the hard part.  You intellectually know what needs to be done next.  You need to change your associations on one or both ends of the pain/pleasure spectrum.

If you can associate more pain with M&M’s (sacrilegious, I know) than the pain you feel about your shins splintering in a bloody mess from running, then you may have enough power to move in the right direction.

If you can also associate massive pleasure to running (or some substitute form of exercise) then you’ve got your stoppages licked.

That’s the theory and it sounds great, but for me, a laboratory of one, the proof will be in the pudding (seriously…why the f*ck would there be proof in pudding and would I want it if it were?).

So I’m busy trying to figure out clearly what I want and what I’m doing to sabotage myself from accomplishing it.  I’m good at the what I want thingy.  I know that I want to become my own boss, making sufficient income from my writings, music and other creative endeavors to replace my jobby income.  This is a longer term goal.  My second major goal, more near term, is I need to drop this thirty pound spare tire post haste and get trained up to running 26.2 miles before the end of May.

I’ve figured M&M’s are evil (I think) and I’m learning to like brain and shin bleeds, feral cheerleaders aside, but other than that, I’m just figuring it out as I go.

Tagged as: Anthony Robbins, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, NLP