How to Live a Happy Life Using New Code NLP – by Peter Salisbury

Have you noticed there are more and more books being released each year with promises of how to be happy and contented?

On face value it would appear there is a desperate search for happiness taking place and it is a very elusive commodity.That’s not that surprising when you see how people go about looking for happiness. Lets just define what does Happiness mean?

How do people tend to approach the happiness issue?

Most people coming to me searching for happiness tend to come from a perspective of lack – they don’t ‘have’ it – as if it were a commodity. Lets be clear, you can’t buy it in shops, send it by post or make it in a factory.

A common misconception is that you can become happy if you achieve something or depend on someone else making you happy. Also that happiness is like a can of coke, predictably always the same for everyone.

The important mistake here being the idea, ‘Happiness is something outside of ourselves and mainly causal’.

Does this sound familiar to you? If yes, then I would like to show you some New Code NLP techniques that have had profound results helping my clients first change the way they experience this ‘apparent’ lack and then create what it is they would like.

Lets get some clarity! For most people ‘Happiness’ is a linguistic label for a feeling.

Humans feel emotions in their bodies, which is their connection or feedback system to their unconscious. The majority of my clients are trying to block the feelings they don’t like and create feelings they enjoy.

In most cases they don’t understand the relationship to how this works and get caught in a loop of pain and pleasure or most commonly become a victim of circumstance at others peoples fancy. They also mistakenly feel a need to ‘label’ their feelings with meanings and conditions attached to them. I.e. intellectualising the experience. 

So where it started off just being a feeling, direct experience, it has now become disassociated and categorised. Then further de-compartmentalised into good or bad, promoting ‘away’ from or ‘towards’ motivation strategies. As humans we have a tendency to move away from pain and move towards pleasure.

Hence the majority of people coming to see me are demonstrating ‘away’ from thinking patterns. Life has become so difficult or painful from where they currently are, that it has motivated them to take action and make changes to their lives. A ‘towards’ person would be eager to enjoy life to the full and would take responsibility to see that it happens.

 

In New Code NLP we recognise that feelings and thinking are two quite different aspects of the human condition. The mind and body is one organism but the internal processes the mind uses to make sense of the world are so interlinked that as humans we are not aware of how seamless these functions operate.

Consequently we apportion evaluated thinking patterns to our feelings, which by their very nature creates the problems that they seek to avoid! The main perpetrator being ‘cause and effect’. As Einstein pointed out, you can’t use the same thinking process to solve the problems that were created by them in the first place. In New Code we bypass conscious thinking by using a different ‘logical level’ to change our experience of the perceived issue.

When you understand these baseline concepts it becomes much easier to quantify our emotions as felt experiences, plain and simple. The evaluation of those experiences can be viewed for what they are, an after the event attempt to understand something that actually cannot ever be understood via the use of language.

With the model of New Code NLP we can recognise how we define our experiences and consequently CHOOSE what we wish to experience through state choice. The key word for this is perception. Our unique perception and map of the world can either be the door to our own prison cell or our freedom, two sides of the same coin.

John Grinder recognised the importance of multiple perspectives early on when he created New Code NLP from his experiences as co-creator of the original NLP codings with Richard Bandler in the 1970’s. It became clear to him that perception and state were key components for many of our achievements and our failings. 

Grinder consequently designed several models to give people the opportunity to alter their outcomes using state and perspective as a route to extended choice. When he revised the original NLP into New Code NLP he placed a greater emphasis on these two aspects.

Everything we do in life is done whilst in a particular state. From the moment we wake- up until we go to sleep at night we pass through different states of consciousness. The ‘behaviours’ we exhibit tend to be attributed to a particular state.

I.e. Have you ever run a race whilst being totally relaxed? – unlikely as adrenalin and relaxation don’t tend to function too well together for that activity.

I.e. Have you ever been really polite and softly spoken to someone whilst in a fuming rage?

The most important thing is that we ‘can’ and ‘do’ choose our state of mind even if we are not consciously aware of it. If you are feeling happy you have ‘chosen’ to be in that state as opposed to the myriad of other choices available. If you are unhappy the same rule applies.

So how does it work? How do we do that? Why do so many people not get it?

In the next follow-on article I will explain why New Code NLP places such an emphasis on state and how you can start to create the life you want and attain autonomy in the process.

Essentially state control is the key to the door to achieving a life on your own terms with congruency.