This chick is funny and totally right on target. Your assignment? Watch this video. Then Watch your thoughts and start thinkin’ different thoughts that feel good…Now of course I’m not suggesting that you do this every single day. Oh no! I would never suggest that you even begin to notice how good it feels to speak much more kindly to yourself…but definitely watch this video. Now!

There will be a test….:o)

• The student would have a chance to learn a vital, low cost marketing skill that would help his/her practice.
• The fact that the student was answering in a public forum would challenge them to truly think about what they were learning.
• Since blogs are so much more search engine friendly than regular websites, it would enable the prospective NLP practitioner to begin to show up in Google searches.
• It also occurred to me that it would help spread the word about the Modern Jedi NLP training as well.

One of my students, Josh Kronlund chose to answer his quizzes on a free blog he set up in minutes.

Check out what happens when you google “Josh Kronlund NLP”

Here are the screen shots captured on 09/24/09:

Screen Shot 1: this first group shows mentions of Josh in my blog (which you are reading)

Screen shot 2: is still the first page of google and Josh gets a couple of direct listings for his blog.

Now, admittedly there is a lot to the art of blogging and getting search engine ranking.

I learned most of what I know about blogging and using it as a marketing tool from Rob Bronson & Michael Guerin.

If you want to boost your business you definitely need to learn this stuff. Here’s how:

Mike & Rob are offering a new course which they are beta testing (which means it will be at a fraction of it’s value)

Check it out here and tell them I sent you. (actually they’ll know where you visited their site from and they’ll teach you how to know that stuff too.

here’s the link: http://howtostartablognow.com/

Comments? Leave em below!

all the best,

Mark Shepard, Modern Jedi Guy

I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts below!

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I don’t know if this happens to you at all or if I’m the only one.

I take risks. I believe that in order to truly live my dream I have to put new ideas and tools into action. Sometimes it works out right away. Other times things take a lot longer than it looked like it was going to take. This is NOT failure. It is feedback.

For example: When I finished my NLP trainers training in the Summer of 2003 I thought that I would be teaching my first NLP practitioner course the following month.

It took me something like 5 years to achieve that goal.

Not because I was sitting around watching TV and wasting my time, but because there seemed to be some higher, wiser plan in effect. In order for me to be a congruent trainer, I had to first get some real life experience working with clients of all kinds. Perfect (in retrospect).

But to the people in my life at the time, my lack of earning power IMMEDIATELY after the big training was proof that I was a fool. NLP was supposed to suddenly enable me to start making big bucks right away. And I have seen people’s incomes skyrocket right after an NLP session or a training.

But for me, for my particular life’s purpose of integrating my music and my personal development work, it wasn’t an instant catapault to fame and riches.

Somehow I managed to make it through those first lean months and began to build a practice.

There was so much I didn’t know about marketing, and business. So much I had to learn “on the job”. Because I was so focused on building my practice, I didn’t do as much to get Music/Storytelling gigs that year… so my income actually went down even though I was feeling like I was on track with implementing my goals.

Working towards living my dreams.

Well, as the old saying goes, “Success is Messy”

In the last year or so as I’ve been putting new ways of doing business into practice, getting the word out on the Web. It’s been a huge learning curve, one that has often required 100% of my attention and energy.

If anyone looked in at certain points along this path it might seem to an outside that I was chasing after some “pie in the sky” dream. I am chasing a dream. But it’s not “pie in the sky”.

My dream is to create steady and increasing income from the many areas I’m interested in and passionate about in a way that contributes positively to the lives of others.

NLP, Sales training, storytelling, music, hypnosis, art, personal development, healing, creativity, education, leadership, motivation, Time Line therapy techniques ™ relationships, transformation and on and on. It’s a multi-dimensional approach that sometimes defies “branding”.

I once had a conversation with a business man who had been very successful as a mortgage broker. At some point he had decided to build a company with other mortgage reps working for him. At first, his income went down because he was no longer writing deals. Eventually as he brought more and more mortgage reps on board and he earned a percentage of each rep’s volume, his income soared.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that in any endeavor that is true and congruent for you, there will be times when your family members or friends will try to give you advice. Unfortunately their advice will come from their model of the world which may be an old framwork for you that you are letting go of.

You must acknowledge their loving intention and appreciate it. However, you must also ignore their advice and continue to move beyond it. Even if it causes a temporary rift in the relationship.

Dreams are fragile at certain stages of their fulfillment. Stay with it. Keep doing what you know is right and true. Turn down the noise and the distractions around you and burn the boats. There is no returning to the way you used to be. Sometimes it takes longer to get to where you want to be. So what?

Every outcome that does not look like success is an opportunity to put another piece of the puzzle into place. Eventually it will come together.

Am I saying ignore solid, advice from people who truly know what they’re talking about in fields that are similar or related to what you are trying to accomplish? No. Other entrepreneurs or other people in your field who have done what you are attempting to do, have earned the right to give you guidance. I am only talking about people who have been employees all their life giving an entrepreneur advice about how to run his business.

Just like I know very little about ice skating and would never dream to give an ice skater advice about how to do a leap or a spin, people who trade hours for dollars or who are not able to tolerate the uncertainty of being in business (or sales) haven’t earned the right to give advice in this area. Are they bad people. No! Their intention is one of love and care and concern. It can still wreak havoc with your self confidence if you are going through some tough challenges.

What you do freaks them out and scares the hell out of them. That’s why they are chained to a steady paycheck. Sometimes in the entrepreneurial or artistic journey there are times when the cash flow just isn’t there. Those are moments of your greatest opportunity.

Worrying about someone based upon the false belief that imagining the worst and trying to protect your loved ones from their mistakes is the worst kind of projection.

For 40 years I’ve been pursuing a dream of using my music to positively impact the world. That journey has led me in a lot of different directions, first working on my self and my internal blocks and next learning how to reach out to other people in ways that may be non-traditional. The learning curve has been steep and at times breathtakingly difficult. Every step of the way, no matter how challenging, has been perfect and exactly what I was ready to tackle next.

• 75,000 people have watched my “How To Stop Anxiety” video series on YouTube.

• More than 25,000 people all over the globe have watched the video of my song “Together We Can Change The World” sung by Rilee O’Neill..

• The songs I wrote for Letters To Daddy have been enjoyed by several hundred audience members as the play was performed this past Spring by two different theater companies.

• 5,000 people follow me on twitter. http://www.twitter.com/markshepard

• Several dozen people have enrolled in the Modern Jedi NLP Practitioner Trainings I’ve taught

• Over 6,000 people have seen my Motivation Song on YouTube (see it at the end of this post).

Step by step. Goal by goal. Putting my plan into action.

Have those accomplishments resulted in a steady stream of income? Not yet. Have they touched lives in a postive way? Yes.

Am I on track? Yes. Am I as much a household name as Tony Robbins? Net yet. Do I always know how I’m going to pay this month’s bills? Nope.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Our backs are to the sea, the boats have been burned. There is nowhere to go but forward into the unknown.

So dare to dream folks. Dare to take action to fulfill your dream. Dare to find mentors to model yourself after. Dare to lovingly ignore the advice of parents, relatives, friends or anyone else who doesn’t “get” what you are all about.

Dare to believe in yourself even when outside events seem to conspire to get you to doubt.

Feed the Faith. Starve the Doubt. You gotta have some trust that it all works out…(better than you can possibly imagine)

Just in case you need a little motivation…

Please leave a comment below or share this with someone who many need your support today!

- Mark

Hi mark I am wondering before you do swish patterns and other NLP techniques, don’t we really have to clear our fears with the Timeline Therapy Techniques™?

When we worked together 1:1 and I was able to allow joy to come in my life for the first time, it was a good start but my other issues about living life and business issues are still coming up.

When a fear comes up should I do Timeline on myself with the issue to get it clear first?  In other words what is the checklist to follow for tools to use when a fear arises that is holding me back?  I feel at this point I  should be able to use the tools I am learning in your course and what I picked up at our breakthrough session .

I really understand that we are the only ones that can cure ourselves.  Thanks so much.

-Name Witheld

Here’s my response:

An important Key to NLP Success: As long as we’re alive stuff will come up. It’s like your Unconscious Mind  “gets” that it can release stuff now and so it keeps offering up new “layers” to be addressed. I also want to remind us all that when we do make a major shift to not discount it or negate it just because there is still more work to do. There will always be more to shift. That why it’s so cool to have a wide choice of NLP tools to choose from.

I find that when I clear something with timeline it typically stays cleared if I have gotten the root cause event. Sometimes, I’ve had to go back and clear a slightly different limiting decision that seemed to have the same root cause.

I prefer to do time line therapy techniques ® to clear the limiting decision and chain of negative emotions first. Then I’ll use the swish pattern to “program” the new response I want into my neurology. If you do a Swish pattern enough times it’s cool because the old negative “knee-jerk” trigger will now bring up the desired state or picture.

It’s hard to give a “check-list” of first do a. then b. then c. I tend to follow my intuition with what to do when.

What I love about NLP, Hypnosis, Time Line and EFT is that I can do a lot of things on my own to clear stuff that comes up at the moment it gets in my face. That’s one reason I truly believe in teaching my clients how to take charge of their own change rather than see me as the “curer” or “healer”.  That said, sometimes though we just can’t get enough leverage on our selves to shift something.  At those moments it can save a lot of time and angst to get help from a trained practitioner of NLP.

In those cases, I find it a lot easier to have someone else do it with me. That’s yet another benefit of the NLP Training because you not only learn how to do the NLP techniques on your own for yourself and for other people, but you actually get to take turns with the other students in being the “client” in our 4 day bootcamp. So you can clear a lot of your own stuff in the process of learning NLP. You also make friends with other people who “get” you and who are interested in clearing their own issues and blocks. So it makes a lot of sense to come to the training and then do trades afterward with the students you meet.

If I’m in a moment of  “challenge” and I just need to shift something immediately, I  use EFT.  I tap and speak the “set up phrase” LOUDLY! It seems the more emotion I have towards clearing something the more powerful EFT tapping is. If you’d like to learn more about EFT click here:  Get a free EFT Starter package

Here’s an example:

“Even though I thought I’d cleared this @#^&*$%!@$*%$!@# problem, I deeply and completely accept myself!”
I do a couple rounds unashamedly focusing on the problem and wallowing loudly in the whiny victim mode as much as I want while tapping the EFT acupressure points. I have so much fun with this that often that’s enough to snap me out of my funk!

Then I start feeding in positive how and why questions like:
“Even though I haven’t yet found and released the root cause event of this challenge, why do I deeply and completely accept myself?”

Finally I just tap on

“Why do I deeply and completely accept myself and why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine?”
“Why do I love myself? Why do I attract all the resources and assistance I need to clear this once and for all?”
Why do I resolve this in a way that’s even better than I can possibly imagine?”
etc.
Usually EFT clears  pretty much everything from headaches to limiting beliefs.

If it doesn’t do the job for a particular issue I will next use swish patterns and other NLP submodalities techniques to get relief.

If I’m still not shifting the issue, then I will call one of my students/colleagues and get them to do Time Line Therapy with me. Sometimes I can do Time line by myself but I tend to space out and drift off unless someone is there keeping me on track.

Depending upon the issue, when I can’t get enough leverage on my “stuff” by myself, I call Joann Dunsing or Joe Schroder or Kathy McAfee or Kim Kasperian.

Remember that Tiger Woods has a coach and Michael Jordan had a coach. One of my greatest and most humbling lessons is that sometimes it saves a lot of time and money to get with someone who can get you the results you can’t always get on your own.

I have even just handed the Time Line Therapy™ script to someone who knew nothing about it and just had them read the damn thing. It worked like a charm because it kept me on task. The script doesn’t do the clearing, we do. So as you learn various techniques approach using them on your own issues or “stuff” with an attitude of wanton curiosity and playfulness.

I hope that answered the question and was helpful for those of you who are working to “Defeat The Dark Side In Your Personal And Professional Life. Master Your Mind For A Change with NLP!” )

Why does it work out better than you can possibly imagine?

-Mark Shepard, NLPT
Certified Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP, Hypnosis & Time Line Therapy™

p.s. Any questions or comments? Leave them below. Please pass this post along on Twitter, or Facebook or StumbleUpon etc.

One of the contributions of NLP to the world of communication excellence is the process I call “Magical Rapport”.

You know that feeling you get when you “click” with another person or you just met them but you feel like you’ve known them forever? That’s rapport. We all do it all the time unconsciously when we are connecting with another person. The most typical way we approach it is to talk and find things in common. “so, where are you from?” “How many children do you have” etc.  But the founders of NLP discovered that we do tons of other things that we don’t have the foggiest notion we’re doing, like matching and mirroring physiology and tonality (among other secret stuff)…

So NLP didn’t invent rapport, it just brought the unconscious process up into conscious awareness so that we could do it more often and with greater effectiveness.  It would take me hours to share all the stories of how I’ve been able to build deep and lasting business and personal friendships rapidly. Suffice it to say that people like to do business with people they like.

We cover rapid rapport building  fully in the Modern Jedi NLP On-Line/Hands-On Training. If you’re business or relationships could use a boost you might want to join us (there’s still time)

One of my NLP students who is a law enforcement professional asked a really good question and I wanted to answer it here on my blog so that all my students as well as those of you who are passionate about NLP could have a chance to hear my answer as well as to make a comment or share an experience you might have had with Rapport building.

Question:

I had a question regarding rapport.  When someone is displaying negative emotions such as defensive, angry or some other type of negative behavior, would mirroring or matching be counterproductive because of how the other person may interpret their behavior being matched or mirrored?

My concern was that because so much of communication is non-verbal this may only inflame an already negative situation. Or would mirroring and matching help to “sync” in with that person and once rapport is established you are now able to more effectively move the person away from those negative behaviors.  I could see both being applicable but on a case by case situation.  I would like to get your take on this as well as if it is a case by case situation what would be examples of when each would be appropriate.

Also are there more subtle rapport techniques within mirroring/matching that could be used such as only eye blinks or other less noticeable techniques like cross matching, etc…

- Mike L.

Answer:

When someone is angry or depressed we want to connect with them in a way that will enable them to feel heard and understood without getting pulled into their state. If you use the typical rapport skills of matching and mirroring words, tonality, and physiology with an angry person you will almost be guaranteed to get angry.

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However there is nothing more infuriating to an angry person than dealing with someone who remains totally calm in the face of his/her anger. What we found in NLP was that if you mirror back the angry person’s tonality but say concilatory words, you will be able to connect enough so that the person can begin to hear you. Then once you’ve estabilished rapport, you can begin to gradually change your tonality and lead them into a calmer state.

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With someone who is depressed you could also match their typically softer quieter tonality while beginning to use words of more positive and hopeful outlook.

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Once we establish rapport we can test it to make sure we maintain it. Whenever we encounter resistance we need to go back and develop more rapport.

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We can also use a technique called Crossover matching and mirroring, using one body part like a finger, to match the upset person’s eye blinks or foot tapping.

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Josh is one of the students in the new Modern Jedi NLP On-Line/Hands-On Certification Course. I wanted to share his comments with you all as well as answer his questions and invite those of you who are still interested in learning NLP to “Defeat the Dark Side and Master Your Mind For A Change For Less Than A Latte.” )

The course is ridiculously cheap and set up to be a “do-it-at-your-own-pace” program.

Join us! Check it out Here: Modern Jedi NLP Trainings

The On-Line portion of the course is complimented by a Hands-On “Boot-Camp August 6-9, 2009 in the New Haven CT area. At the Boot-Camp we’ll take all the “foundation concepts” learned virtually and put them into practical use. Location is still TBD but we’ll be firming that up soon.

2009 NLP Bootcamp Up-Date: the Next Modern Jedi NLP Bootcamp will be Thursday, November 12 thru Sunday, November 15 in the New Haven, CT area.

2010 NLP Bootcamp Up-Date: SOMEWHERE WARM!

Here’s Josh’s e-mail:

Hi Mark,

First, I would like to thank you for you products, they have been pretty awesome and I can’t seem to get enough of NLP. In fact, it has helped so much, so fast, that at first, my wife was a little skeptical. But now, she wants to go with me to the August workshop, how cool is that?!

Also, I appreciate all the comments you made on my blog. I have never done anything like that, and I am actually having fun answering the questions in the quiz and learning how to blog.

Lastly, could you send me some information on the workshop in August. I would like to start making plans to do that as well.

Sincerely,

Joshua Kronlund

http://nlpstuff.blogspot.com

Thanks Josh! I’m glad you are experiencing the benefits of this awesome NLP material! I get personally excited about it because it just rocks!

One of the options I give the course students is to answer their quizzes on their blog, thereby creating content (which the search engines love) and learning some of the basics of Web 2.0 marketing.

To answer your question Josh, the Hands-On NLP Bootcamp will be August 6-9 in the New Haven CT area. The closest airport is Tweed Airport (just 5 minutes away). USAir links up to Tweed via Philadelphia.

The next closest is Bradley Airport near Hartford (about 45 minutes away) which is much larger. I’ve flown a number of times on Southwest out of Bradley.

Then of course there are the New York airports which have a lot more flights but are a definite challenge to get to during peak rush hour times.

Hope that helps.

I will hopefully firm up the location by next week.

- Mark

p.s. Want to know why I answered Joshua Kronlund’s e-mail here on my blog? Prior to this post when I googled Josh his blog did not come up on the first page of google. By the time Josh is done with the course a by product of his participation will be a much higher placement on google. While I can’t guarantee a first page placement. It’s kind of fun to see what we can do by doing just a few things differently. Essentially NLP is and attitude of wanton curiosity and willingness to experiment and pay attention to what works and what doesn’t. What works, we do more of!

So just for fun, in a week or so google Josh Kronlund or Josh Kronlund NLP and see what happens!

UPDATE 09/24/09

Check out what happens when you google “Josh Kronlund NLP”

Josh comes up on the 1st page not just once but several times. The point? When you take the Modern Jedi NLP course and choose to answer your quizzes on your blog, it will help you create a presence on line that could make a positive difference in your NLP career as well as your “day job”. Here are the screen shots:

Screen Shot 1

josh kronlund nlp

Screen shot 2

josh kronlund nlp student

Introduction to the Modern Jedi NLP Online Course

• Convenient
• Affordable
• Multi-media
• NLP Community Master-Mind
• A few examples of Real People Using NLP Michael Guerin and Rob Bronson
• Graduates of this course will be able to be certified NLP Practitioners or they can just use the tools and techniques to improve their lives.

Q: What is NLP?

A: Neuro Linguistic Programming is all about how you run your mind. How you interpret the external world and make sense of it internally. It’s also the study of excellence. It’s also all about how you communicate with other people.

NLP is partly modeled on the work of Dr. Milton Erickson, MD “the father of Modern Hypnosis” as well as some of best Therapists, athletes, business people, etc.

Your behavior, thoughts, reactions, interpretations of the world, etc are under our control…if we knew how to access the “programs”. People can make incredible improvements in their lives, relationships and work rapidly.

Q: Can NLP help with changes where a person knows they should eat more vegetables but just never does?

A: Yes. I give a short introduction to NLP submodalities on the recording.

Q: A question about Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic channels of communication.

A: I give an example of making a quick change with a client using kinesthetic submodalities (over the phone while in the grocery store)

Q: How young can a client be and what intelligence level is needed for success with NLP?

A: Works great with kids. Works with all intelligence levels as long as a client can access their imagination.

Q: Can you explain about how your unconscious mind doesn’t recognize the difference between what is real and what is a memory or an imagined event?

A: Explained with example

Register for the Modern Jedi NLP Online Mind Mastery Course