Towards what you want vs. Away from what you don’t

Would you like to know the part of NLP that has had the biggest impact on my life over the past 10 years of practicing?

Around the time I attended my first NLP training I was very focused on the past and my problems. I was also in a blaming mindset – blaming my past, my parents, my circumstances. I was not in a good place to say the least.

Surprisingly to me, when I took my first NLP certification program the facet of the training that had the biggest impact on my life was not the processes for shifting unconscious psychological programs, or the hypnotic language patterns. The part of NLP that had the biggest impact in my life was the NLP goal setting process.

* How often do you set goals for yourself?

* How much do you focused on the past vs. the present and the future?

* How many of the questions you ask yourself are about ‘why things are the way they are’ vs. how they can be improved?

* How much time do you spend focusing on problems vs. outcomes & solutions?

The NLP process for goal setting that I learned had 10 distinctions, however since discovering Neuro-Semantics that list has been increased to 18 distinctions that we use to coach ourselves and others to success.

In this article we will explore the first of those distinctions and give you a practice exercise to begin to make this real in your life. Are you ready?

The first distinction is to state your goal in terms of ‘what you want’ as opposed to ‘what you don’t want’. Seems simple upon first glance but I can’t tell you how often I ask a client “what do you want” and they answer with something along the lines of “I don’t want to be nervous while I am coaching”, “I don’t want to be uncomfortable in social situations”, I don’t want to have anxiety anymore” I don’t want to be overweight anymore”.

Do you see a pattern there? In answering the “what do you want” question they are answering with what they don’t want.

Do you ever do that?

If so these are ‘negatively’ stated outcomes.

This is the equivalent of ordering a taxi or an Uber and when the driver picks you up and asks “where do you want to go” you answer with “I don’t want to be at my home anymore”.
Would the driver know where to take you? Of course not! And yet these are the signals/communications you are sending to your body. No wonder your “goals” are ill-formed when stated in this way. They do not give any clear direction to your nervous system about where to go.

Another example of this is in Alice in Wonderland when Alice walks up to the crossroad and asks the Cheshire cat “which path should I take”. When the cheshire cat asks here where she wants to go she says she doesn’t know. “Then it doesn’t matter which path you take!”
Now a big mistake I see clients/coaches making at this point is just to flip it around and state the opposite.

For a simple example the client says “I don’t want to be fat anymore” and so they simply flip it to “I want to be thin”.

Sure, this may be true but what you want is not always simply the opposite of what you don’t want. A lot of the time it takes a little more thought than that.

Perhaps you want to be thin, but perhaps you want to be fit. Or you want to be able to walk 5 miles without being tired. Or you want to be able to have 12 inch thighs. Or you want to have 6-pack abs.

This is where you have to do a little mind work and stretch your brain. It’s at this point that you might realize that you really haven’t put much thought into what you actually want which makes this exercise even more important.

What do you want? What do you really want?

This idea of “stating your goals positively” does not just apply to your formal goals but to pretty much any mini-impulse in your mind away from something.
Once you have stated what you want positively i.e. towards what you want, you have take a huge leap towards making your goals well-formed.

Now you can finally signal to your nervous system about which way to go!

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