POSITIVE SPINS & NEGATIVE FRAMES


 Richard Bandler (2019). Thinking on Purpose: A 15 day Plan to a                                                 Smarter Life.


Bandler (along with John Grinder) is one of the founders of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), and has many books on the topic beginning with The Structure of Magic (Volumes 1 & 2) in the 1970's. This latest book harvests many key principles of NLP in creating a "smarter" life like: dealing with negative memories, spinning positive emotions in the body, creative visualization, and the view that happiness is an ACTIVITY, something we do.


2 practical things to test out in everyday life: framing negative memories and spinning positive emotions. 

1) For a negative memory, mentally put a FRAME (like a picture frame) around the image of the most troublesome part of the memory, drain the image of color so that it's black and white, shrink the image down to a very small size, and then send it off into the upper left corner of your mental visual field and have it disappear (you may have to do this several times for an emotionally charged memory). With practice, this becomes almost automatic--at first, like any new habit, it takes some intention and time.  

2) For a positive emotion, recall a time when you felt the emotion in memory (picturing a time when the emotion is at its peak), then use your index finger to SPIN (make circles) the emotion, first clockwise to see if the emotion intensifies, and if not, then try spinning your finger while thinking about the positive image counterclockwise (one of the directions should increase the intensity of the emotion, and the other direction should decrease the intensity). If one can locate the emotion in the body and imagine energy spinning in that location in combination with the finger spinning, the method is even more effective. The faster and the bigger the spinning circles, the greater the effect. One can also spin the finger forward or backward in addition to clockwise and counter clockwise to obtain the ideal effect. It sounds silly, but i have found that it generally "works" for me. One can also use this technique to decrease the impact of a negative emotion with the proper spin, but i like the framing technique better when dealing with negative emotions.




  

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