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Create Your NLP Story Collection
by Dr Silvia Hartmann
Everybody has their own stories. Everybody tells their own stories. Go to an old people's home and wait for a moment or two, and EVERYONE will start telling you certain stories, about certain times in their lives, certain events that have "stuck" with them and which in many ways define their lives, their incarnations, their personalities.
One of the wonderful things about being a story teller, or an NLP trainer, or an author, is that we get to have MORE than just our own few stock stories that we tell every grandchild at every birthday party, over and over again.
We have ALL STORIES of human kind to play with, to learn from, and to use to create change, learning, healing and MOVEMENT within ourselves, and in those we speak with.
So in a way, what we need to learn to do is to pick out from this VAST, VAST reservoir of story those that are right, those that are appropriate, and those that SUPPORT OUR OUTCOMES AND AIMS.
That's being in control of story - and what that means essentially is being in control of the story of your life, and potentially, that of others.
Story Is Just A Bit Of Fantasy ...
Right! Believe that, if you will.
There was this stable, and there were shepherds and angels, and three wise kings ...
There was this mountain, and there were these golden tablets ...
There was this prince from long ago, and he went on this road, and there, he ...
How many people have lived and died and killed each other in special ways because of the stories they were told?
Science can't match this in any way, NOTHING CAN.
Stories rule the world, and all who hold power at the highest levels know this, and make jolly sure that control of the stories that are being told, is never given to "the people".
To have the population believe that "stories are just a bit of fantasy, for kids, nothing serious ..." is a good way to keep people away from them.
There are many others.
But what I need you and me to really understand is that there is nothing at all more powerful than a story to shape not just the life of one person, or one family, or one society, but HUMANKIND across literally millennia upon millennia.
Story & Event
The birth of any story is a real event. Something that happened to a person which had a big impact on that person.
You need at least one person to have witnessed the events first hand in order to create a story after the fact; but you can also have more than one person and their combined experiences becomes the event for the story.
For an NLP story teller, we can distinguish between two types of stories - your stories, created from events that you have experienced yourself directly; and stories that you were told and that made a big impact on you, and that's why you remember them and re-tell them from your end.
* A Safety Note for ALL Story Tellers: NEVER retell a story because someone told you "it's a good story" or "this is a story that works" or words to that effect. YOU NEED TO FEEL THE STORY, THE STORY HAS TO HAVE COME FROM A FELT, EXPERIENCED EVENT IN YOUR MIND/BODY SYSTEMS, for it to be of any use to you.
So you might like to sit down and make a note of some stories you remember that had a big impact on you.
One that I remember is the sinking of the Titanic. I saw the movie as a small child and it really had an effect on me. I don't declare things made by arrogant and underinformed humans to be metaphorically "unsinkable" as a result since that day and if I come across this pattern, I will always challenge it.
I might tell this story to transmit the idea of the fallability of human beings, engineers and scientists; leaders, gurus and bosses, and to make the comparison between Creator-made systems (such as galaxies, ants, and the like) and human systems (such as the Titanic, the Inquisition, the one way system around Lewes town center etc.).
I know this story, I know what it means to me, and should I come across an audience that might benefit from the distinction, and the example, I can choose to tell this story.
Here is another story, from the first person perspective.
I was at an energy healing training and there was a man who had a backache, and it wasn't going away even though everyone tried to "heal it better", including the workshop leader.
I put my head to one side and looked at the man with the backache and all the healers gathered round him, and then I noticed that he was sitting on a HUGE wallet that was wrenched into the right back pocket of his jeans, and that he had been sitting like that since 9 o'clock this morning, throwing his spine out, causing all manner of misalignments and probably muscle overstretch and ligament bruising, as well.
We're at 4.30 in the afternoon now.
I voiced my observation; the guy blushed bright red and removed the wallet from his back pocket, sat down again and a huge sigh of relief went through the whole man - the backache had been alleviated.
There were a lot of red faces that day ...
This story I sometimes tell to young energy healers, to open their minds, to have them pay attention to what there really is in front of them, and not to get stuck in their own heads and their lovely fantasies of fluffy bunny rabbits and light streaming from their fingertips. Energy healing works great when the problem is in the energy system - when it is a guy sitting on a rock uncomfortably for many hours, we don't need energy healing, we need to get him off the rock, and change the physical conditions. Simple, really, but often overlooked.
The point of both stories is this:
Know Your Stories!
To turn any old story into an NLP story, a device that is used to help us lead better lives, we need to first of all take an inventory of what there is there already.
To know your stories is the first step to getting control of them, and towards using your stories for yourself and others, to illustrate that which you might like people to learn or change something that they believe.
Now, sit back and have a think.
What stories do you tell often about your own life?
If you don't talk to others, which stories (of events that have happened to you) do you THINK about most often?
This can be as dramatic as "the story when I was nearly killed in the war and my best friend took the bullet for me ..." or as mundane as "every time I want to ask a girl out I think of that time when Susie in the 3rd grade threw her pencil at me because I tried to kiss her ..."
Some people habitually re-tell their good stories: "I never forget the day I won first prize with a horse I bred myself ..." and some people habitually re-tell their disasters: "God we were so drunk and I ended up lying face down in a puddle ... outside the local police station ..."
Some people are good at embellishing the stories further, essentially CHANGING THE STORY to suit their need for more attention, usually: "... outside the police station, with a kilo of heroin in my back pocket ..."
Do you do that?
How do you do that?
The stories you tell say everything about you - they tell of your most formative experiences, moments where you learned something important, and they tell those who know how to listen all they need to know about your internal maps, your beliefs, values and attitudes, and even who you can or can never become in this lifetime - until and unless you take charge of your stories.
Your NLP Story Collection
If you are new to the concept of changing people and yourself with stories, start today. Make a folder or get a notebook and jot down YOUR STORIES, as they are.
When you come across one, take a moment to reflect what you learned from that, what was so important about it, what the meta comments were you made in the formation of this story, what the outcomes were, and how this story still affects you today.
You might like to bring into consciousness what you want to happen for other people when you tell this story, what you want THEM to learn.
This brings you closer to your own stories and creates a conscious-energy mind (unconscious mind) connection so that your energy mind can FLASH UP a story for you in the moment, in the field, as the right story to tell, here and now.
Adding To Your Existing NLP Story Collection
After you become more familiar with your own stories and you begin to understand the pattern of a story, which sets it apart from just ordinary chit chat, you begin to notice story around you when it happens.
You notice events in your life and you know that will be a story one day; it becomes marked out to yourself as it happens.
You can also notice second hand events that would make a good NLP story.
For example, I was watching TV during the Katrina Hurricane crisis and there was a story being told of some old people who had been completely abandoned by their carers and the floodwaters were rising in their rooms.
These old people, literally poor old people on their last legs, many of them blind, bedridden, lame, suffering from dementia and so forth, banded together and saved each other, becoming the most unlikely of heroes in the process.
I saw that and LOVED the metaphor of it, the fact that even a broken down human being right at the very end of their lives, when everyone, including themselves, think they're utterly useless, utterly defenseless, utterly helpless and utterly hopeless have still that spark inside of them which will lead them into heroic action, if you just give them the chance.
I immediately made the mental note and added that news story to my NLP story collection - and I have drawn on it numerous times since then, talking to people who believed themselves utterly without resources left due to illness or mental disturbance, and it really works to give people hope and look inside for that strength that the old people in New Orleans showed us all we really have.
A last note.
Stories are Devices not Defendants
A story is a device, a tool for the mind to use to change reality. You wouldn't ask a hammer if "it was true", or a chainsaw, or a bedsheet.
In the same vein, it doesn't make any sense to ask of a story if it is true, or if it ever was true, or if there some truth in it or none; that is truly immaterial.
The question is, does the story WORK? Does it do the job? Does it have an effect on you intrapersonally, does it have an effect interpersonally?
What is that effect?
Is there something we can do to make the story more effective?
Try it.
Add something to a favourite story of yours - a metaphor, an artefact, another sequence of events that follows, and find out how the story changes, how the information contained within the story changes, how the energy changes, how it starts to feel differently.
Remove something from a favourite story - this is really interesting because you will find those things that are important in the structure of the story and without which, it really doesn't work (the story collapses); and other things that are interchangeable and can be used to "flavor" the story and shift it a little this way, or that.
As an example, imagine the Little Red Riding Hood & The Big Bad Wolf story minus Little Red Riding Hood. The story collapses, doesn't make any sense, structurally ceases to function when you do that.
But you can change the bread she's carrying into anything else you want, a new modem for bed-ridden Granny, a bunch of flowers to cheer her up, batteries for her hearing aid - adding a twist or a slightly different flavour to the events.
Working with story in this way will teach you a lot how to use story to create events in your listener's or reader's neurology. It will will give you a lot more flexibility, but most of all, a form of "story dictionary" of your very own, a reservoir with stories that are familiar to you, that are fully under your control in every way, that you can morph and flex to fit the audience better, and that you can USE to create masterful NLP communications on every level.
Create Your NLP Story Collection © Dr Silvia Hartmann 2009
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