We've all heard the phrase, "You get more of what you focus on." In the Hawaiian shamanism system, known as Huna, they teach the principle of blessing. For instance if you want to become a more creative individual every time you come across something that represents 'creativity' you would bless it. Let's say you were walking down the street and you saw an artist painting. You could verbally compliment him or you could simply mentally bless his creativity with your intention which could be something like, "This is creativity, I bless him for it." By doing this regularly you condition your mind to go in a certain direction: "Look for examples of creativity in the world that I can bless." An interesting effect of this practice is that the more you focus on finding positive qualities to bless, the more you discover! In therapeutic settings clients often come along complaining of behaviours they don't like and want to get rid of. Now if the therapist were to have the focus of believing that the clients behaviour was indeed unnecessary he may focus on this aspect and have the client discover where this behaviour started. Discovering why he has chosen to adopt this behaviour and so on. But what if the therapist had the focus of, "Every behaviour has a positive intention behind it." Just with this shift in direction could result in a much more pleasant and useful change in the client. By discovering the positive intention behind behaviours, adding in new behaviours, choices and flexibility would more likely create a generative, positively focused direction for the clients mind to go in. This kind of generative change-work tends to create a more pervasive shift in the clients model of the world because they have made a change that has added more choice and flexibility and so they think, "ahhh if I can add choices to this area of my life, why not get more flexible in other areas?!" Another interesting point about directions is that it's more powerful to setup a direction that is flowing, a process, rather than a static change. Think about the following and notice which statement is more powerful, "I am confident", or "I am becoming more confident." Because one of the minds natural functions is to go in a direction, change-work becomes more powerful if you set up a process as the direction. "I am confident" is static, whereas, "I am becoming more confident" is a process that re-enforces itself. Knowing this 'master key' can make your use of change technologies, such as the tools of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) work all the more effectively. So as you begin to think about the directions you want your mind to go in, doesn't it just make sense to use tools that re-program your mind to *automatically* go in the direction you want to go in? |
