Michael Breen - NLP Times -- Emotional Mastery (State Control)

Michael Breen - NLP Times -- Emotional Mastery (State Control)

2 hours, 20 minutes of audio and a pdf transcript as well as an assignment pdf.

Here is the start of transcript so you know what this teleseminar is about.

Tom: Hello, everyone. It's Tom here, from NLP Times, and welcome to tonight's teleseminar "Emotional Mastery‐‐ How to Manage Your State", presented by master trainer Michael Breen.

Of all the ways the person can use the technology of NLP to better their life,
learning to better manage your emotions is surely one of the highest leverage
practices you can do. Everything starts and ends with state; with the right
emotions all kinds of things become possible, and in the wrong state certain
resources are blocked. Therefore tonight, Michael is going to review some of the fundamentals of state mastery, and share with you the strategies and insights on how you can become highly effective with managing your state, no matter what seems to be going on in your external environment. So, welcome Michael.

Michael: Hello there, Tom. How are you?

Tom: I'm great. How are you doing tonight?

Michael: Very well, thank you. Looking forward to this evening.

Tom: Good. Okay, so let's start off with the big path, Michael, which is, what are some of the essential things the listeners on the call should know in order to be able to manage their state effectively.

Michael: Essential things. Okay. Well, let's start with some definitions and some principles, just to make sure that everybody is in the same area before we start talking about techniques and how to be all things. And I'm sure people have got questions. It is this question around emotions and learning to work with them.

One of the most common things that people bring up, first and foremost, when
we're talking about emotions and states from an NLP point of view, a state‐‐
remember‐‐is the combination of the stuff that's going on on the inside‐‐the kindof pictures that you're making, the kind of way that you're talking to yourself, and all the other internal representational things‐‐plus what you're doing with your body. That includes everything from how you're using your body, the posture, the kinds of gestures, the quality of that irrelative tension in the muscles, how you use your voice, your breathing, all those other aspects. Those two things together are what we're talking about when we're talking about state.

Now, when we talk about emotions, emotions are not a mystical something that just happens. They're not like a cloud that floats over your head and just
descends on you. Emotions are a reaction to perceived events, or perceived
situations. They come out from how we interpret what's going on around us. So in that sense, they are reactive. They're not primary experiences as such.

We may have feelings and considerations about the emotions that we feel, but they're not in themselves primary. And of course, the proviso that goes along with this, is, we're talking about somebody who's in good health, but they don't have any, you know, brain disorders or any physiological disorder that actually causes misplaced emotions as it were.

So, if emotions being reactive in that way, they also are very, very personal. Both the triggers for the emotions, and the reactions are personal. They're not in the environment. They're not even in other people. Think about it. This is that quintessential experience of two people getting into an elevator, and one of them is just standing there checking their watch while things are going on. And another person gets in, and they're nervous. And as the doors close, they (gasps) take a short, deep breath in, and the twitch. And the two people are in the same circumstance and in the same situation.

Let's say the elevator stops between floors. Well, the one person‐‐the first
person‐‐just looks at their watch and says, "Damn, I'm gonna be late". And the other person starts saying, "The walls! The walls! They're closing in!" The two people are going into exactly the same situation, but they have a very different emotional response.

So, the triggers and the reactions are not in the environment; they're in each of us. And this will become important later on when we start talking about ways and means of modifying your state, changing your state, and then dealing with habituated emotions. And emotions are just like any other behaviors, they can become habituated. You can develop a nasty habit of being easy to arouse, you know, easy to wind up. And "bad emotions", or good emotions are habitual just like any other thing. You can work with them, you can cultivate them, you can end certain kinds of emotional responses, and you can deal with the kinds of things that come up unexpectedly, but those are matters of preparation or practice. And we'll talk about those in a little while.

I suppose the final thing that I should say about that is that quite often when you read about, or when you hear emotions talked about, there's a lot of metaphor, analogy, imagery diffused, in talking about the emotions. So, for example, in the NLP world there are some people who talk about what they call meta‐states. These are states about states; being afraid of your fear. Unfortunately, the way that our nervous system and the meat‐body is hooked up, we don't have facility to actually have a separate area for a state that's about another state. There's nothing in the neurology or in the physiology that would hold a meta‐state. Meta‐states are a way of talking about, rather than actually how a human being works.

In the same way, like in the name, Neuro‐linguistic programming, this notion of programming, of systemic and systematic process, which can be mapped out, it's an image, it's a metaphor. The notion of computer programming, which sometimes people try and bring to NLP, you know, push a button emotions, and push button other people, it's an idea and a concept, and not how things are.