NLP and Happiness

First application of NLP is on self, so before we start discussing various NLP applications that work to give your career a boost, we will spend some time to discuss how you as a person can benefit from NLP.

One of the concepts we discuss during our NLP programs is the communication model. Mihlay Csikszentmihaly, in his widely acclaimed book “Flow” spoke of how people are able to achieve happiness in various domains doing what they love doing, be it sports, business, climbing, cooking and many other chores that don’t even notice. One interesting aspect is while people are happy about something they don’t even know that they are happy and it only a later reflection they realize that doing something made them happy.

The flow is stated to be “the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.”

According to him, flow is completely focused motivation. It’s a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand.

As per Mihaly, there are nine factors that accompany the flow experience

• Clear goals – expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities. Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
• Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
• A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
• Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered. We also call it a trance state.
• Direct and immediate feedback supported by NLP sensory acuity.
• Balance between ability level and challenge.
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action. And,
• People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

The rules of happiness as simplified as they are support another NLP presupposition “Experience has structure” and with modeling, anchoring and changing some beliefs, one can easily and almost on command achieve happiness and be effective in whatever he does.

Cheers!!!