When an event happens, you first sense it through one or more of the five senses, whether that’s things you see, hear, smell, taste or touch. That sense goes into your brain. Then comes the emotional feeling that causes you to decide what that event means to you and how you react to it. Notice I said what the event means to you and not what the event just means!

Very often at the end of a talk or presentation I will ask the audience if there are any questions on what I have spoken about. Usually this results in a deadly silence. I then explain to the audience that I could take the fact there are no questions to mean that the audience didn’t like the talk and, therefore, don’t want to engage with me and cannot wait to get away. Or I could take the silence to mean I have done such a good job of explaining things that no-one even has any unanswered questions about what I have been teaching them. Which “meaning” I select not only says a lot about my own beliefs but also has a great bearing on how I feel in that moment and whether I am likely to do another talk again or not!

Think about this situation – you are walking towards your place of work and you see a client coming towards you, you smile and say hello, but they ignore you. Do you think they don’t like you or were pretending to not see you? Or do you assume they didn’t recognize you or hear you? Perhaps they have just had some bad news and their mind is elsewhere.

Here is how we manage our daily experiences, an external event happens, we see a spider or think about making a cold call on the phone, then we process the information or event based on:

• our beliefs and values;
• our experiences to date;
• our assumptions about the future; and
• our “map of the world”.

All of this creates what we call our internal representation, i.e. how we represent (or “re-present”) to ourselves the actual event inside our minds.

You have to visualize everything before you do it, which of course happens really quickly, and you don’t always notice it on a conscious level. For instance, if you drive, the only way you are going to find your way back to your car is by picturing where it is, and you have to do that, you don’t just know where it is.

A lot of people don’t believe that initially, it takes practise sometimes to notice what images are coming into your mind, and the things you say in your head just before you get that emotional feeling determine what action, if any, you take.

Your internal representation then controls your thoughts, and as we know from earlier, your thoughts create your emotional state, your quality of action and your outcome and results. These thoughts are a cluster of things called “thought strategies”.

A strategy is a cluster of thoughts made up of pictures we imagine or remember, things people have said or we say to ourselves, feelings we get or remember, smells we remember or sense, and even taste memories. Some of this can be out of conscious awareness as it runs very quickly in your mind. However, you need to slow it down so you can start to notice these things going on in your mind. The one thing I really hope you get out of this is that once you’ve opened up awareness to how this works and I’ve pointed some of these tools and ideas out to you, you will start noticing more, especially when you get a bad emotion or feeling in a certain situation.

The next time you notice yourself overcome with a feeling of negativity ask yourself what were you thinking to cause yourself to feel like this? The more you do it, the more you practice and the more you can then start to trap what’s going on. You can then start to realize the pictures you’re making and the things you’re saying to yourself. You can start to slow it down and realize what’s going on inside your head. It might even be a memory of a teacher saying, “Oh you’ll never amount to much”, and things like that. And it’s rather common that parents or teachers quite unknowingly have embedded something in your head.

Actually, one of the more recent discoveries is that, apparently, when people come around after having have had an operation, and they’ve been unconscious, under hypnosis, they can then relay every single word that the surgeon said while they were in the operating theatre. So, when the surgeon said something like, “I can’t see him lasting six months after this, we’ve done the best we can”, that’s now planted in that person’s subconscious mind, and that sets them up for how they’re going to go forward. So you’ve got to be so careful with language and what you say to yourself and to others.

What happens, then, is we make pictures and movies in our heads when we imagine or think about something. If we think about something we’re going to do and say something to ourselves or remember something someone else said, or a smell or a taste, then one or more of these internal senses can loop around, and we call this collection of internal representations your “strategy”.

A real popular one for smells firing emotions off is when adults go into a school building, and they get that feeling of when they were at school. Often it’s the smell of the floor polish that sets that off with a lot of people, although they don’t realize it. Out of all the senses, smell goes straight to the emotional part of the brain and generates the emotion. It’s the fastest sense for generating emotion because it doesn’t go through any other filters. Everything else goes through belief filters and other mechanisms before the resulting emotion, but smell doesn’t.

Now, one or more of these internal representations will loop and follow a sequence, so with the spider phobia, it might be:

See a spider (the external event)

Their strategy then might be to:

Make a picture in their mind or recall a picture of a hairy spider running towards them

And then:

Hear their mum say, “Oh god! It’s a spider!”

And then:

Get a bad feeling

And then:

Panic and run out of the room screaming!

That’s their strategy.

Now, someone else’s strategy for dealing with that same external event might be totally different, they might:

See a spider (external event)

And then:

Say to themselves, “Oh look, it’s a spider. I’d better not tread on it.”

And then:

Pick the spider up in a glass and put it in a safe place outside!

That probably sounds bizarre to someone who’s got a spider phobia, but that’s a lot of peoples’ strategy to some degree or another. These are totally different outcomes to the same event based on how the people concerned are thinking about it or their strategy for dealing with a spider.

Your strategy in a given context is how you do what you do.

You can sit down and analyse your strategy as to why, for example, you don’t want to call someone. Perhaps it’s because you think you might interrupt them, or they might not want to hear from you. You might think you could be being a nuisance, perhaps you’re picturing them on the other end of the phone thinking, “S/he’s a nuisance”. But whatever your strategy is, that’s the reason why you’re not making the phone call, how you are thinking about it. You make a picture, you say something, you make another picture, then you get the feelings, and that’s what we call the structure of your strategy, that’s your sequencing. This order of feelings, pictures, sounds etc. is just an example, we are all different and structure the order of these elements and which elements are included based on the way we as individuals process information, and it can vary from situation to situation.

This example is in the context of making a phone call, but it isn’t the same sequence for another fear you may have such as a fear of giving a presentation or a fear of doing something else. The strategies can be different, the structures can be different, so, unfortunately, you don’t get the structure and answer to everything, but what you do get is your strategy in a given context or aspect of your life which tells you how you do what you do. Of course, you also have empowering strategies that really help you perform to the best of your current abilities in various situations. Notice I said your current abilities – this says you can or could improve your abilities in the future. If I had just said best of your abilities it would imply you could never improve or change, this is why language and the words we use are so important. They are making impressions on our mind that we are creating feelings about and storing away as experiences to affect us on another occasion.

How effective we are at anything we do is based on the strategy we run just beforehand, so if you interfere with someone’s strategy that’s how you can mess them up.

A tightrope walker who never used a net was in the news a few years back. Throughout his entire previous tightrope walks, he never fell. Then he went to a venue where the health and safety people said he had to have a net, and he fell because the net was there! Previously he probably just saw himself glide across to the other side but this issue about having a net and seeing it there likely caused him to start thinking about falling and imagine what it would be like to fall!

So, your strategy in a given context is how you do what you do.

Here are two everyday strategies I like to talk about to help people understand and notice exactly what their own strategies are.

I recall Richard Bandler explaining this first one in a training session I attended a number of years ago when I was looking to understand how I had achieved the success I had. In a restaurant, we’ve all got a strategy to decide what we want from a menu. This is even more complex when we go out with a group of friends because we all sit there around the table, we get our menu and, depending on our strategy, decide what we want to eat.

My wife’s strategy is to check out the desserts first; then she will go down the list of main courses. When she gets into the dessert category, she might just go in sequence, or she might scan for something and she might just read the first line of each menu item, such as chocolate gateaux, and then she might make a picture of it in her mind of what it might look like and think, “Oh go on then.”

We all have a strategy, a way of doing this. Other people might start by choosing a starter, and then choose a main course. It’s very complex to actually get to that decision, you have to go through all that processing because some people, like me for example with the mains courses, go through the list first and say no to all the fish items and then say no to all the meals that might actually look like an animal! Then when I start to go through the potentials, like fillet steak, I’ll imagine a picture of the steak and think what that’s going to look like, and what that’s going to taste like. I do that and carry on until I make a decision.

What happens is that moment comes, especially if you’re the first, when you say, “I know what I’m having.” You then turn to the person next to you and say, “What are you going to have?”

They reply, “I’m having the fish.”

“Oh, I was going to have the fish,” you say. Then you’ve got to go all back through it again because you don’t want to not have it, and they have it, and it is nice, but if you change, you’re going to have to re-evaluate everything again, not just the main courses, but potentially the starters and desserts, because they may not go with the new main course!

That’s why I said it’s a really complex strategy. Next time you’re sitting down looking at a menu deciding what you’re going to have, just say to yourself, “How am I deciding?” Are you picturing things? Are you saying something in your head? Are you imagining what each item will taste like?

Now that I’ve mentioned this, you’ll become more and more aware of the things that normally happen on autopilot and are normally out of your conscious awareness, happening so fast you don’t realize you are doing it most of the time.

It’s like the person with a spider phobia, a lot of the time they see the spider and just panic. They don’t think about the little strategy running inside their heads where they’re creating their own panic on a subconscious level.

In life, we often rush around here there and everywhere, and people say you’ve got to slow down, but you haven’t got to slow down, you’ve got to calm down! That’s what you’ve got to do because when you’re not calm, that’s when your fight or flight mechanism from the subconscious mind kicks in. You get all emotional, start generating panic, stress or fear emotions and the brain wants to protect you and preserve its power for your survival in the pending flight or fight situation it believes you are about to face.

When you’re not calm, it cuts off a lot of your potential. As soon as you get yourself in a bit of a state, you can’t think straight, and you can’t see what to do next. All these signals tell you that you’ve got yourself into this confusion and you need to calm down. Only when you are calm and composed will you be able to maximize your potential, your skills and your knowledge of dealing with things. It’s like when you can’t remember someone’s name. No matter how frustrated you get the answer doesn’t come until you put it aside, calm down and get on with something else – when you are calm the answer comes.

So, back to strategies …

Walking. This is a classic; walking. You know when you’re in a crowded street; some people have got a really good walking strategy. You’ve seen them, they just walk straight through and it’s like the parting of the Red Sea. Everyone gets out of their way; they just cruise through, just walk! Whereas other people just bump into everyone, and they get into that “you go, no you go” dance, where they end up going in the same direction when trying to avoid each other. What happens then is that both people have got the same strategy where if they come in front of somebody like that, they move aside. This can happen several times and end up like a dance because the two keep running and re-running the same strategy to move aside.

There is always that one person who bumps into everyone and has basically got a bad strategy.

They are probably walking along saying something to themselves in their head like, “I mustn’t bump into people”, or perhaps they are saying to themselves something like, “There’s a lot of people, I’ve got to avoid other people.” But their focus is on the people, and like the tightrope walker falling off the rope, no matter how hard you try, you’re going to be drawn towards the people as you walk, if you’re thinking about “avoiding the people”.

The people who walk in busy places and just cruise along probably have a good strategy where they focus on the gaps and space around the people, rather than the people themselves. When they focus on a gap, no matter how small, and head towards that gap, then most of the time the people coming the other way will have moved slightly to enable them to pass through the gap.

In life, you must remember that you mustn’t think about what you don’t want; you’ve got to think about what you’d like things to be like or what you are looking for.

If you think about what you don’t want, you actually get attracted to what you don’t want. If you say to someone “don’t be scared”, they start thinking about being scared; it would be better to tell them to be calm, you’ve got to think about the outcome.

The outcome that you want is what you’ve got to focus on.

Developing a New Strategy

There is research that says to develop a habit you have to do something for over twenty-eight to thirty-two days consecutively and then you’ll implant a habit. If you’re learning a new skill or doing something different like playing tennis for example, then, on average, you have to do it about fifty times to gain a reasonable level of competence so you can play at a good level.

The average adult gives up in less than ten attempts when doing something new; and that’s a large part of the problem. As adults, we won’t do the child strategy of looking at the results we’re getting, adjusting our approach, seeing if that improves our results or makes our results worse, and adjusting accordingly, as a continual check, adjust, check, adjust to get to where we want to be. That’s what Edison did with the light bulb; he had 10,000 attempts, or something like that, before he finally got the light bulb to work and people used to say to him, “Doesn’t it bother you that you failed 10,000 times to get a light bulb to work?”

He said, “I haven’t failed 10,000, times, I’ve discovered 10,000 ways to not make a light bulb work and I’m getting closer.” All the time it’s getting closer, this belief that he’s getting closer. Of course, this Edison story appears in many variations over the years of 1,000 times, 5,000 times and 10,000 times, but the fact of the matter is the principle is one of the fundamental aspects of success and learning.

Some people visualize really, really well. What they’ll do is use their hands to work out which way the door opens by imagining they were actually opening the door. I always remember this specific example of which way the door opens. I was in full flow speaking at a conference and had just asked the audience to think about their own door and if it opened to the left or the right, so they could notice a picture of the door in their minds. A hand went up in the audience and I asked the man what he wanted, he said, “Am I standing inside or outside the house?” Sometimes you can’t predict what someone will throw at you. Of course it didn’t matter, the answer wasn’t important; it was noticing the process or the pictures that came to mind that was important.

These pictures are in our minds, but to get perspective and organize the images our brains actually project them forwards so we can get a sense of where the picture seems to be. For example, it could be straight in front, off to the left, the right or anywhere.

It’s like when somebody says they went on holiday and they went out and had this fantastic meal. They make some gesture with their hands as to the size of the meal. What they’re doing at that point is telling you they are picturing that meal and they’ve got really good association at the moment with this space; we call it a spatial anchor. They have created a spatial anchor of something they really liked or felt good about.

We all place images out there in our perspective space.

If I were to ask you to think of someone you like and picture them, then think of someone you don’t like and picture them, there’ll be something different about the structure of the pictures.

Your brain doesn’t really know if you like them or not based on just the content; the way it knows is by the way it stores the pictures, which in turn is based on the feelings or emotions you felt when the image was stored.

It’s a bit outside the scope of this book, but some people might place people they like on the left and people they don’t like on the right. They could even be in the same position but one might be colour, one might be black and white, one might be fuzzy, one might be sharp. This might sound alien to people at the moment, but if you start tracking your pictures and noticing what things look like, you will notice their structure and how they are placed differently. It’s just the way it works with the brain.

Strategies to Empower You

What is your current strategy in an area of life you want to be better or more effective in?

How do you think about it? What sort of thoughts do you have? What pictures come to mind? What do you say to yourself? Do you imagine other people saying things? Do you remember something someone else once said?

Whatever and however you are thinking, it is your strategy; and that current strategy generates a feeling inside you, one that either empowers you towards your goal or sends you running away from it, or, as is usually the case, somewhere in between the two extremes.

If your current strategy in a situation is not empowering you, then you need to change it to a more effective strategy; one that would generate more empowering emotions and lead to better actions and results.

Just think, if there’s something where you aren’t getting the end results you want, how are you thinking about it? What is your strategy?

Does your current strategy empower you or hold you back?

There are clues in everything you say if you’re looking to work out what it is you are picturing in your mind, or what you might be saying to yourself.

Listen to the words you use because, quite often, the language you use tells of your inner experience. So if you say something like “I can’t see myself doing it”, that suggests you are either making pictures you don’t believe or a picture of yourself failing. It tells you what elements are probably having the biggest impact on you at the moment. People will say things like, “It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I could do.” That suggests the auditory part (they are either talking to themselves in their heads or remembering something someone else once said) of their strategy is having the most impact on them at the moment, when they’re talking or thinking about it.