Hi folks, it’s me again. I wanted to follow up on my prod video that I did and I realised that one of the questions that comes up is how do I change my perception?
One of them relates to what we call being a silent witness the other one is being a movie buff.
Going back to prod we talked about perception, responsibility, ownership and decisiveness.
The whole concept to change your perception. A lot of people say and this is a common question I get, “I understand what you’re saying Dr Ro but I feel so emotionally charged about this situation, I don’t know how to do it. I feel angry, frustrated, bitter.” Whatever the circumstances.
For many people they feel almost like anger about their situation. They can’t see a way to do it.
Two things I recommend.
I’m going to read this briefly, from my turning point book to give you some clues. The first one is silent witness. Here we are again with the old friend, the silent witness, we’re going to use this in a slightly different way.
I’d like you to close your eyes and take three slow deep breaths and imagine your current situation. Put yourself in a position of experiencing it right now. If there are any other people involved, put them in the scene too. If you’ve got other people in the situation that you’re looking to change your perception on you need to put them in that now.
Once you have a specific scene in mind mentally float out of that situation out of your body and sit or stand next to yourself and start to be objective and make observations.
All you’re looking to do is really find out what your reaction is. If you’re in a situation where you’re noticing that there is a situation with somebody else that you’re feeling frustrated, angry, your communications poor with them, you’re going to imagine yourself standing just there and you’re looking really closely at both and as a silent witness observe factually what you’re seeing. He said this, she said that, he reacted that way, she reacted that way.
You’re basically cataloguing the situation you’re factually recording it, you’re observing it. You’re being objective, you’re not being emotionally attached to it. You’re being an observer of the situation. If you don’t know the person, what would you say about their attitude, maybe make a note of their attitude and what would you do to improve their outlook? What do you do to improve your outlook?
Secondly, if others are involved notice how they’re reacting and behaving in the situation. What do you sense about their feelings? What are they thinking and feeling about how you are acting?
This is your chance to observe at this stage, that’s the first one being a silent witness. The silent witness process is an objective, non-emotionally attached experience. Once you’ve looked at the situation from at least one of these perspectives open your eyes and take a notepad out and make a specific list of how each person or that person reacted.
If you remember to catalogue it in your brain do that, otherwise observe one person first open your eyes come out and write it right down.
In the past I’ve done it on two pieces of paper, my observation of them and then my observation of me that will give you a totally different perspective. If you do it properly and do it objectively.
The second one is the movie buff. In this role you are an avid movie watcher sitting in a cinema of your own as a movie buff, you settle into a chair in the front of the cinema and the movie running today is called the cinema of my life. This is an NLP technique.
This approach distancing yourself from the situation so you’re floating right back now and you change your perception of the situation, the movie that you have set in an easy way. You have a set of controls so what you’re doing is you’re watching a movie as though it’s on the screen now as opposed to up close and personal as you were when you were doing it as a silent witness really close.
You’ve got a set of controls in your hands, you have the ability to fast forward, rewind, you can make the image bigger, smaller, louder, quieter, or even less colourful. Make it grainy and you can even make it sort of like black and white. You can do anything you wish to do with the movie. It’s your life that you’re watching and you can zoom in and out, pause, distort and change at any time. You can even change the main characters role and perception in the movie.
The point here we are trying to do is a little bit part of distorting how you’re seeing it. Even running it backwards sometimes is enough to completely change your perception. Swinging the camera around and looking above and looking at people’s perception from above. Going in and moving the camera around so you’re looking over the shoulder of the person that you’re talking to and now you’re seeing yourself up close and personal, but now from a camera angle. Maybe backwards, forwards, maybe upside down, maybe inverted and you’re looking at it thinking this is ridiculous.
You might even laugh at the situation because now it seems ridiculous how you’re reacting. For example, let’s imagine a person on the screen is a business owner and the business is struggling. You might choose to introduce some additional characters in the movie that can help the main character.
By doing this you’re introducing an idea into your mind of people who you can bring into help to overcome the current situation. You may decide to speed the character up and make them more energetic, more enthusiastic, see what the result does in the movie. You introduce a character and that changes your perception of the situation.
It gives you ideas, you’re creating a movie live in front of you of the current situation, you’re looking at is saying what can I do to change that through the ideas of being a movie buff? You may decide to give the main character slightly comic features, making them smile more, do silly things, trying to approach the movie in a different way, you will start to have a different sense of how the situation could change. Some essential things to play would include different endings to the movie.
Making the colour brighter, making the sound louder, changing your character and your personality and the look of the main character.
All these are vital to the process of shifting perception so see which one of those works for you. Without a doubt one of them will in my experience the movie buff is a fun one to do.
I’ve done it with people in really bad situations and we’ve even had them shrink down the nasty characters you become bigger, the nasty character becomes comical, then you become like a comical character as well.
Rewind it, take it forward, open your eyes and actually take a deep breath and try and think about it. You’ve emotionally rewired your attachment to that situation without realising it. That is a classic NLP technique.
I’m going to sign off. See you all soon have an amazing day, take care.
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