One of the most useful and practical techniques advocated by NLP involves taking responsibility for your life and behaviour at cause rather than at effect.
Jimmy Petruzzi’s new book about NLP is a very clear and inspiring discussion of NLP techniques to maximise your performance in all areas of your life. Even though there are many books about NLP, I do like the clarity and focus of this book. It has an energy and feels as if you are being coached DIRECTLY as you read it.
If you take responsibility for your studies at CAUSE, then this means you accept full responsibility for your performance and are willing to change and adapt your behaviour in order to change that which no longer seems helpful.
If you live your life at EFFECT, then you tend to blame circumstances and others for your failure to enjoy the life you are searching for.
You can choose your reactions and you can change that which is unhelpful.
Or you can stay the same and repeat your habits and patterns of behaviour.
Your choice.
How does this choosing relate to English for example?
Well, you can choose to do something very effective and transforming in both life and studies.
For in moving on from this acceptance of living your life at CAUSE, then we can apply it to English Studies and bring in another NLP core precept.
This centres upon the achievement of excellence through MODELLING.
For if you see someone doing something well, why not model it?
Modelling gives you the opportunity to pay attention to the mechanics of excellence.
Modelling means you pay complete attention so you can reproduce the excellence.
Model this opening by T S Eliot for example:
‘The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.’ ( T S Eliot, Preludes)
- Here we meet a time of day and a season as a character. With an attitude, in this case a relaxed mood.
- We find a strong olfactory presence. Steaks. Is this repulsive? Meaty and earthy? Slightly predatory somehow? Masculine and elemental?
- What sort of place are we in? Claustrophobic? Secretive? Labyrinthine? Creepy and even insidious? Or liberating because of the secrecy. Night being a time for certain freedoms?
- And we have a literal clock time. A context. Surprisingly early?
- As an opening this is very effective and indeed EXCELLENT.
- We can thus MODEL it in our own writing or MODEL it ANALYTICALLY for English studies.
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Dr Janet Lewison
