Case Studies

Michael had a problem in meeting new people. He usually stood back and found it very difficult to overcome his reserve and enter into conversations. He dealt with this by avoiding social situations that would bring him into contact with strangers and had managed to shape his job to allow him to follow a similar strategy in business.

He knew that this was going to become more serious as the demands of his job changed. He also now realised that he was missing an enormous amount of enjoyment in his life due to this inhibition.

His NLP coach guided him back along his "timeline" until he was looking at himself as a very young boy. In a shallow trance state, but still as a dissociated observer, Michael watched his younger self, with his mother, at a time shortly before he started school. The family lived just across the road from the village school and Michael could see the children there from his window.

As he described to his coach some of the things that were happening, the older Michael suddenly became aware of a voice. It was something that he had completely forgotten about years before. It was his mother warning him to keep away from the older children.

Everything fell into place. This well-meant caution had been distorted by the young boy to mean, "Older children are dangerous". When he subsequently started school, he soon made friends with his classmates but the older children remained strangers. So, his mother's warning now came to mean that "Strangers are dangerous" and the pattern was laid down that would shape Michael's feelings and behaviours for his whole life. Until now!

Reversing this was simple. The coach talked him through a process within which he took the resources of an adult (confidence, knowledge, social skills) back into that earlier time and then rapidly "walked" through his life up to the present. Then he pushed that new, resourceful attitude out unto the future and mentally rehearsed several meetings with strangers that were still to happen.

Coming out of the trance, Michael felt liberated and astonished by the effect that such a tiny incident had had on his life, and by how easy it had been to change the pattern.

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