The Power of Your Emotional State

“To be blind is to miss out on so much beauty but most of us waste this valuable gift by only choosing to see negativity.”

We all perceive the world through our senses, primarily the Visual – Auditory – Kinesthetic senses. In NLP we add in Olfactory (smell) and Gustatory (taste) and call these VAKOG. These are our internal representations of which we have one which is more active than the others in terms of how we feel about the world and the language we use. Some people’s primary representation changes according to the situation or their mood. We also refer to a sixth sense we call auditory digital which is self-talk.

Our experience of an event depends on our internal representations, or I/Rs for short. Through our filtering system, we delete, distort and generalize information received based on our attitudes, beliefs, values and experiences. No two people will give exactly the same account of an experience eg a traffic accident.

Alfred Korzybski noted, “The map is not the territory” meaning the map only represents the territory. A map of your country is not your country, only a graphic representation. The mental perception of a memory of an event is only our personal perception, not the event itself.

What we say or hear in our mind, or feel, will affect the behaviour we produce and our physiology. This in turn affects our emotional state. If someone is thinking unhappy thoughts, seeing someone in their mind whom they miss, their shoulders will droop, their mouth muscles will turn down and their whole physiology will become that of a depressed person. The more they hold that stance, the worse they will feel. But put a wide grin on your face, stupid as it may feel, pull your shoulders up and back and it is virtually impossible to feel depressed, regardless of the circumstances. Just a change in physiology has affected the emotional state for the better.

So, to control and direct our behaviours, we must control and direct our emotional state. To control our state, we must consciously direct our internal representations and physiologies.

When I attended a seminar which included the firewalk ie walking on burning coals, my prior belief was that I would not do the firewalk, indeed I could not. No way. Yet at 2am on the first night, I was standing barefoot on a tarmac carpark mentally preparing myself to reach the other side of the challenge to my limiting belief. It was 15 years ago and I do not remember what I did or said to myself but I do remember that I did it and so did another 2,000 people. When we release a limiting belief which does not serve us, we release other chains which have been holding us back. The firewalk is not an end it itself as it provides a new model for belief, allowing new areas to open in our life.

"A domino effect of potentiality."

The internal representations which produce a state that tells us that we cannot achieve are totally different to the new ones we can take on to empower us to produce positive results.

Sometimes we do not know what state we need to produce, what beliefs and attitudes to adopt and here we can model successful people. What do they say? What messages are they taking on board? How they do feel? We identify what is making them successful and then make those traits a part of us.

The kind of behavior people produce is the result of the state they are in. How they specifically respond out of that state is based on their models of the world.
Most people turn on the TV to change their state. Watch a comedy, lose themselves in a drama or incomprehensible to me, choose to watch a dreary programme about people doing negative things, making them feel even worse than before. Or they turn to alcohol, drugs or more positively, exercise. All of these affect our state temporarily.

We can learn techniques which lock in positive states and recall them whenever we need a boost, without resorting to external stimuli or artificial substances. This is the power of NLP.

For more information, I recommend chapter 3 of Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins entitled "The Power of the State":


©Antonia Harrison 2009 from Personal Development in the 21st Century and The Secret and Law of Attraction . Antonia Harrison is the English Hypnotherapist & NLP Coach in Belgium and Personal Development speaker leading workshops for groups and companies.

Is Your Unconscious Preventing Change?

In trance work with hypnosis we talk about the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. Some people associate the word “unconscious” with being in a coma or anaesthetized in an operation. We simply mean that the conscious mind, the content we are aware of, accounts for 5-10% of all brain activity whereas the unconscious mind takes up 90-95%. So most of our brain activity is unconscious, some of it related to normal body functions which we do not consciously control eg pumping blood around the body.

The distinction here is that we might know what we are doing wrong consciously, what we want to change or why phobias are irrational fears but the unconscious mind is keeping us stuck in the habit, the behavior pattern or the trigger response. All long-term change and learning takes place in the unconscious. You only know something when you cannot forget it.

The conscious mind might want to make a change and so those words come out of our mouth but the unconscious could be holding on for a secondary benefit such as attention-seeking, keeping the person on long-term sickness benefit.

Hypnotherapy can be a very fast technique. Typically, smokers stop smoking with hypnosis in one session. Most issues are dealt with in 2-5 sessions, some health problems take longer. But some people are not really ready to change. Without realizing, they argue to stay stuck the way they are and that is simply because they have rehearsed that way of being or doing for a very long time.

I always ask the client whether they are committed to make change NOW and may test with ideomotor signaling or quantum linguistics, questions which make no sense to the conscious mind but fire up the neurology in the unconscious. In relevant cases, a detailed personal history can already lead the person to identify patterns and make changes.

Milton Erickson said, “Your clients will be your clients because they are out of rapport with their unconscious mind.”

If the client cancels their second appointment, I don’t take it personally. I just realize they are not ready to make change even though they say they are. This lack of personal congruence may be due to beliefs, value systems, identity issues which is where NLP comes in.

I believe,
1. “People have within them all the resources they need to achieve what they want.” Yes, but they don’t know it.
2. “People make the best choices they can at any given moment, given their present model of their world.” Exactly, it is their model or view of the world which needs to be altered before they can achieve the outcome they want and we must always respect another’s model of the world, even crazy sounding ones!

The client must agree to enter into a relationship with me. Just because they have come for help does not mean that they are ready to change. My job is to do the initial work with their unconscious so that they can move forward and make positive change.

© Antonia Harrison is the English Hypnotherapist & NLP Coach in Belgium and recommends Download Hypnosis Mp3s for immediate access to positive life-changing hypnosis sessions.