NLP motivation and daily tasks

Hi from Los Angeles, Venice Beach. You know what I find very interesting? Coaches, whether it’s an NLP coach or another type of coach, often give other people 10-minute assignments. Even physiotherapists do. All these people, like “can you do this at home for 10-minutes a day.” And it’s absolutely fascinating to me how so many people don’t end up doing those 10-minute things that coaches or other practitioners ask you to do.

And that’s usually the excuse that people come up with which I can completely understand… I don’t have any time. What I find when I do 10-minutes… I ask my clients to do 10-minute exercises, they actually do it, and that’s because the way that I frame it when I explain the exercise to them. First of all, the exercises that I give people are never random. It’s always about improving their presenting problem, to find solutions for their presenting problem. It’s always about a task that relates to something that they really want like a goal. And so, I do an enormous amount of work in terms of making everything custom, including the 10-minute exercise. I may even design it especially based on how their brain works if that makes sense at all.

I also make the 10-minute exercise valuable, fun, relaxing, or insightful, something that just lights the brain up and go hey, not only do I want to do this 10-minute exercise, I feel great as a result and I also learned something, and then actually people want to reflect on it. In many cases my clients even decide to do more than 10 minutes a day, or when technically it’s time for them to stop doing the 10-minute exercise they keep doing it, and that’s because it’s an enjoyable learning experience where there is a positive emotional payoff or a task completed of some kind.

So, the way that I do that is really… when I give someone this 10-minute exercise, is to really help them understand how this is a time saver. So I attach them that if you do this exercise for 10 minutes a day for let’s say 7 days, the payoff will be that your brain is trained in this way so that if you keep doing it, it will become automatic to you for you to feel this way, to coat this way, to change your brain, to complete your goal. So, I attach someone to the outcome of what that 10-minute exercise is meant to achieve. And in that achievement, I also point out how that achievement actually saves people time. So it’s not just about completing a goal, or happiness, or a positive emotion. No, if you do this you will actually train your brain to save time.

So, for instance, if it’s a 10-minute exercise for someone to be, let’s say, less judgmental, that will lead to lesser conflicts. It will lead to lesser problems in communication. Or if it’s a 10-minute relaxation exercise it’s meant to train your brain to sort for relaxation, to calm down, to focus your brain, to do actually more rather than less. And so I frame the 10-minute exercises as one, completely custom, attaching to the outcome, and help them understand that when they do this they actually save time by training the brain. Good luck.