Modern Jedi NLP Mind Mastery

Archive for February, 2009

Twitter Tips for the Modern Jedi NLP Mind Master

I’ve just finally “got” what twitter is all about. And I think it justifies a post so that I can share some of what I’ve learned and some of the resources I’ve discovered which may help you to get right to it. If you are wondering what twitter has to do with NLP or the Way of the Modern Jedi, it’s this: Tiwtter is a powerful tool to build your practice, and to rapidly build a community of people who are interested in what you have to offer. For folks like Noah St. John and Tony Robbins it’s a way to stay in touch with “the faithful” without clogging up their e-mail in-boxes. For me it’s a way I can reach out to people with specific interests in Music or NLP or who may be local. It’s flexible and a lot of fun.

The other day I saw a short post from some one I’m following on twitter it said: “I just ran with scissors!”

I wrote back “I just stood on a chair!” It was something that took only a moment and it made me smile. I also recently had lunch with some folks here in New Haven who I met on twitter. You never know till you get into it.

So here are some basics:

First things first:

Go to http://twitter.com and sign up for an account.

It is best to use your real name if you can get it. (Use upper and lower case so your first and last name stand out.) The new social media is about being real and accessible. If you advertised your practice in a holistic publication like “Natural Awakenings” you wouldn’t use some silly user name would you?

Make sure you fill out your location and short, one sentence bio. Make sure that you leave the box for “protect my updates” empty. You want to be in the public stream.

Next. Follow me. You can do that by using the twitter search function or just use this link: http://twitter.com/MarkShepard

The next thing you need to know about Twitter is that it is considered polite to follow those people who follow you. And unless some one is completely objectionable it’s a good idea. You can tell almost instantly from a persons follow/following ratio whether they “get” twitter or not. If someone’s following about the same number as are following them they are most likely going to follow you back when you follow them.

There are a couple of programs that can even automatically follow people who follow you and send them a welcoming message. You should get one of those when you follow me. It has a link to my http://MarkShepardSongs.com site where they can get free downloads of my songs.

I use http://www.SocialToo.com but I like http://www.TweetLater.com also. Check them both out.

Some people make a business pitch in their auto follow e-mail. This is not about making a sale. It’s about building a community and contributing something to that community. The best one’s offer some kind of legitimate help. Like the guy I followed who in his follow back pointed out I could change my twitter username from markshepard to MarkShepard. Just  a helpful little tip. I appreciated it. Most of what I’m sharing with you here today I learned from short little tweets on twitter.

And that’s what twitter is all about. It’s people helping other people and making themselves useful.

It’s not what it first appears to be, which is a platform for the self absorbed to trumpet their every moment of their dull mundane day. It’s about having conversations and making connections that gracefully lead people to what you have to offer.

Once you have a twitter account and have followed me, click on the link on your twitter home page titled “Everyone”. Just take a few minutes and read through the most recent posts.Any time you see someones user name preceded by an @ symbol you can right click and open their twitter page in a new tab. If they seem interesting to you go ahead and follow them by clicking the “follow” button. You can unfollow them at any time by clicking the same button on their page.

Please note: if you follow a bunch of people who have fewer than 100 followers and who are following a small number they most likely are newbies and will not have set up the auto follow process. You mostly want to follow people at this point who have a strong likely hood of following you back. One of our goals is to rapidly build social proof as well as a community of people who we can tweet to.

The best resource I found for getting a massive number of followers in a short time is Scot Mckay’s short video. Scot is also one of my favorite dating and relationship coaches and he is a master of the new Web 2.0 social media world. So if you’re not into dating or healthy relationships just focus on what he has to say about twitter. I have watched him go from 1,000 followers to over 25,000 followers in the last three weeks or so. Following his advice I’ve gone from 100 to well over 1,000 followers in about 2 weeks with very little time or effort spent on it. Plus I’ve connected with some great info about music marketing on the web etc.

How To Get 1,000 Twitter followers in 12 Days by Scot Mckay

Also his video “Why Follow Everyone Back On Twitter” is excellent as well.

Scot McKay also offers a free e-book called “Twiduction” that has a lot more nuts and bolts of how to pimp your twitter profile. You should do that even if you are not trying to attract dates. Just take his “how to” advice and use it in your own context. Everything in it works perfectly well for attracting business clients. After all business networking is a lot like dating…(I know, material for yet another post at another time)

Any questions? I’d be happy to answer them. Just leave a comment below. I look forward to Tweeting with you soon!

Mark

Just so you have them in one place here are some additional twitter resources to check out once you get going.

http://www.friendorfollow.com this enables you to see at a glance who is not following you back, who you are not following and who are your mutual followers/following folks.

http://www.twitter.grader.com this enables you to search specifi key words like NLP or localities like New Haven or Connecticut so you can find people who you might want to follow.

http://www.TweetDeck.com this handy application is actually much easier to use than the regular twitter home page. you can see all your follows tweeting by you in real time. it also does some handy things like automatically shorten any long URL that you might be passing on to your Tweets.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of "Eat, Pray, Love," muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares a radical idea. It's a funny, personal and moving talk.

Please share this with a friend!

-Mark

For many of us out here on the front lines of entrepreneurship, there is one constant that either makes us or breaks us...

And that's US!

As cartoon strip character Pogo said many years ago "We have met the enemy and he is us!"

Ultimately, wherever we are is the result of our thoughts, beliefs, values, decisions, and actions (BTW "inaction" is actually the action of not doing anything).

Since NLP provides us with easy to use maps for recognizing and changing our own blocks, patterns, behaviors, fears etc. it makes a great tool for business people. What I love about folks in business is that they "get" that if something is costing them, they have to change it.

My business clients "get" that if they spend $100 dollars to clear something that's holding them back and hurting their company or their success and they make an additional $100 dollars, then it wasn't a "cost" it was an investment that just paid for itself. If that $100 investment brings a return of $200 or $1,000 then it is a "no-brainer".

Typically, I find that when people clear the block that has held them back they go on to exponentially increase their income and their effectiveness as leaders in their respective fields.

Two examples that come to mind of people who have made revolutionary change in their lives as the result of learning NLP are Michael Guerin and Rob Bronson.

Michael has been kind enough to share his story with my readers on a number of occasions as well as on the phone and in an extensive video interview.

The bottom line for Mike is that before he worked with me he could barely use the phone. He literally had a phone phobia. He also suffered from agoraphobia so basically, he couldn't get out and meet and greet new clients and he couldn't call prospects on the phone! Not a recipe for success in business! We did my basic NLP breakthrough process and within hours he was on fire! As he said in his interview with me, "It was really strange because it was like the old pattern was just gone! As if it had never existed in the first place..."

Mike has gone on to increase his Credit Card Merchant Processing business so much that he is now training other associates to work for him. He has also expanded into helping other business owners make sense of online interactive marketing. In this severe economic climate Michael Guerin's businesses are thriving and growing by leaps and bounds. That's the power of NLP to help us get out of our own way.

Which brings me to Rob Bronson. Rob is my good friend and technical adviser. This blog format and all the videos I've been doing is the direct result of Rob using my own NLP stuff on ME! I had a lot of technological RESISTANCE. which Rob helped me to release!

I first got to know Rob when he took my "Reluctant Sales Person" training a couple of years ago. And immediately started implementing the tools and techniques he'd learned there. As a genius level technical guy, Rob had a little trouble relating to the rest of us non-geek types. Through the NLP sales training he learned how to speak another person's language and how to communicate the way other people preferred to communicate so that he could maintain rapport and get his message through in a way that could be well received.

Rob learned how to get out of his own world and to enter into the world of his client.

A year ago Rob and Mike and I began to meet every Monday in a "Master Mind". We would frequently spend the entire day learning about internet marketing and search engine optimization, blogging, copy writing and basic business tools, techniques and philosophy. We also continually put NLP into practice and shared our successes and challenges. We supported each other and acted as sounding boards for each other. Personally it saved my business and my sanity on a number of occasions.

At one point Mike did not even have his own website up. At one point Rob was living in someone's basement. At several points, I was tangled up in my own "stuff" and they helped "coach" me through the tunnel and out to the sunlight.BTW we all need the help of other people. NLP does not make anyone invincible or perfect.

It was a year of stripping the paint down to the surface and sanding and honing ourselves. and then as the financial storm clouds gathered back in the fall of 2008 something magical happened, Rob and Mike began to form a partnership that was all about helping other people in business save time and money and benefit from what they had learned and put into practice...

Now with their new business Best Web Presence they are so busy I haven't seen them in weeks. They are signing up clients left and right at a time when there are thousands of "Chicken Littles" running around screeching "The sky is falling! The sky is falling."

The point of my story is that there is a set of tools and techniques that if used properly will enable you to clear through the clutter of your own thinking and patterns of behavior. Once you clear the personal blocks that are holding you back, fasten your seat belt because things can change rather quickly. At this time last year neither Rob, nor Mike nor I knew how far we would have journeyed from where we began. It truly has "turned out better than they could possibly imagine..."

Does rapid change seem to be pretty scary to a lot of folks? Sure. But that's a subject for another post...

If you are curious about how NLP can help your business please call me at 203-804-1208 or e-mail me mark [at] markshepard.com. You can also learn more about NLP Certification here

Please share this post with anyone you know who may be struggling with their business or who may be ready to break through the blocks and experience more success.

- Mark Shepard, NLP Trainer, Songwriter, Visual Artist, Author, Speaker...

One of the major techniques of NLP is something called reframing. Essentially it is a way to take any limiting belief or behavioral pattern and turn it around in such a way that the persone either has an "aha" moment or it causes the problem to disappear entirely.

The reason reframing can be so powerful is that few people are aware of how strongly language affects our experience of what we call "reality". By changing the "frame" around a problem it doesn't just give you a new perspective (although that's certainly part of it), it can actually make a profound and observable neurological shift.

I had done a series on NLP reframing in my newsletter sometime last year and it was picked up on by a couple of guys in Ohio, Aaron Torres and Paul Binkley who have been learning NLP on their own and practicing it's applications at the auto factory they work in.

I hadn't heard from these guys for a while and was delighted to get an e-mail from Paul Binkley with another great story. So here it is in it's entirely with Paul's permission. Thank you Paul! I definitely look forward to doing an NLP Certification in Ohio soon!

Please note: I've added a few comments in red to give you a little insight into what Paul is doing outside of conscious awareness.

Mark,
Long time no see. Thanks for the ongoing email and updates about your work.

I had an opportunity this week to help a coworker reframe a major life circumstance. and I thought you would like to hear about it, partly because it is a success story of mind over matter and because I had the presence of mind to offer it, in part, because of your invaluable contribution to my own perspectives on life, the universe, and everything.

A female coworker, 33yrs old apx., confided in me how angry she was that her mother, whom she asked to watch her dogs while she was away for the day, upset her greatly for about the millionth time over the same issue of playing favorites among her three daughters.

It seems that my coworker had left $30 for her mother to order her favorite pizza with everything on it while she watched the dogs at her (my coworkers) house.

Her mother, not wanting to spend the day alone, invited her favorite daughter over to her not so favorite daughters (my coworker) house, to keep her company.

This is where the problem begins.

The mother, desiring to bless her favorite daughter, gave the $30 to her favorite daughter instead of buying her favorite pizza for herself.

My coworker on hearing this, was outraged.

She went on to present to me all manor of evidences supporting her claim that her sister is her mothers favorite child ( they were many and convincing proofs). We often have major amounts of "evidence" for why a certain belief or perception is true. And then started telling how her sister (the favored) was totally dependent on their mother for everything and made no effort to have a life outside of her dependency on their mother, and how her mother was also equally her mothers ( my coworkers grandmother) favorite and just as insanely dependent on her to do everything for her.

She went on to explain how her mother does nothing for her own benefit to a point of serious health risk from obesity, attributing this to her dependency on her mother.

She nearly cried while confiding that her mother, during a day long visit on Christmas day, had not used the restroom all day and stank of urine.

When her mother got up to get something to eat, my coworker noticed a folded towel on her mothers chair, which she first mistook as an added padding then, on inspection, realized her mother had urinated on the folded towel.

The thought that her mother would employ such a method to circumvent needing to visit the restroom, grieved my coworker profoundly. I would like to mention that her mother is not reported to have any health condition relating to bladder control.

Harder to believe than the above:

Here's the underlying Limiting Decision:
My coworker admits that her own sense of self worth, her practiced state of mind, is dominated by her interpretation that she is less of a person because she is not her mothers favorite.

Here's what she's not seeing about herself. This is currently outside of her conscious awareness:
My coworker is about the hardest working, self-sufficient, commonsense, take care of business person I work with (outside of Aaron Torres of course). She is nothing like her mother or her sister or her grandmother.

Here Paul is associating her into the problem in order to "light up the neurological net":
I asked her to imagine what her life would be like she were her mother's favorite. She couldn't do it.

I suggested she(if she were the favorite) would be as pitifully helpless as her sister. How would she like that?

She convulsed with disgust at the thought. The fact that she convulsed with disgust at the thought is proof that she is indeed associated into that experience. When we say "associated" we mean that the person is looking through their own eyes in their internal representation of the situation. they are "in" it.

I told her that the next time her mother favors her sister over her she should thank God that she is not under the generational curse of being mothers favorite.

"I never thought of it that way" she said. Exactly!

I went on to thank God out loud ) quite loudly) right there on the spot that she was not her mothers favorite(note the embedded message). Paul is also using this person's model of the world. If he was talking to an atheist or a new ager he might not thank God he might say it in a different way. For the Atheist he might say "Thank Goodness!" for the spiritual but not religious peron he might say "Thank the Universe." It's all about speaking the language of the person you're working with

The grimace she had been wearing all day turned to a beaming smile. The great thing about NLP is using our sensory acuity skills we can actually look at another person and see the shift. In other words we can get immediate feedback as to whether something worked or not. Sometimes it's a subtle color shift other times it's pretty noticeable. If we get the shift great! if we don't get the shift, "there's no failure, there's only feedback" and we simply try a different approach.

I reiterated the suggestion to say out loud to herself how thankful she is to not be the favorite, next time she recognizes the hideous manifestation of favoritism disease. Speaking the phrase out loud creates an auditory and physiological anchor so that the shift can be "locked in" to her neurology and made available for re-triggering the new insight whenever it's reinforcement is needed. Also, labeling the old problem as "Favoritism disease" links the old thought pattern in a powerful way to a disease which locks in an "away from" strategy unconsciously.

She said she would.

God bless,
Paul

special thanks to Paul Binkley for sharing this story! Any other examples out there of powerful reframes? ether leave a comment here or e-mail me directly with your own stories and experiences at mark [at] markshepard.com

Please "Digg" or "Stumble" or "Facebook" or "Twitter" this! Thanks!

Mark

p.s. to learn more about NLP and how you can use it to "reframe" your own "problems" into "opportunities" visit Modern Jedi NLP Training