I was doing so well the last couple of weeks: I knew my outcome, I knew what I had to do to get there and I was doing exactly that! I was in a real flow going towards my final goal.

And then suddenly… this week, for some reason, it felt like I lost it all: I didn’t manage to focus on rapport-building techniques, couldn’t focus, didn’t hear any predicates in conversations, didn’t accomplish any matching and mirroring… nothing! What happened?

We have probably all experienced it: losing the flow. And with it, your mood gets worse, nothing seems to work and so on. If you don’t stop yourself, you will come into a negative spiral and in the end will stop working towards your goal.

Then I heard myself thinking: resourceful state!

My so-called flow is my resourceful state and it was clear I wasn’t in it anymore. First things first: get back on track, which means getting back into this state… but how?

I started searching in the NLP Encyclopedia and found a technique I wanted to try under ‘State Management’, simply called ‘Accessing and Anchoring a State. Thinking about my resourceful state and identifying the submodalities that make that state, I was able to recover it and anchor it to a symbol, which I have drawn on a post-it. The post-it is now on my desk as a constant reminder.

Now that I know that I can get back to this state, the next thing was to get back on track working toward my final outcome. Tony Robbins uses the analogy of the fly on the window: the fly wants to go outside but keeps flying into the window, trying to get where he wants to go, but not getting any further. The only way to get there is to turn around, fly back and exit through the door.

This is what I need to do now: I am working toward my outcome of becoming a great communicator, but this week I have been bumping my head into the window. Taking a step back and overlooking the situation, I can conclude that maybe I have been focusing more and more on the techniques, forgetting my final outcome.

So next week, I will re-plan my road towards my desired outcome, because:

“If what you do is not getting the outcome that you want, than do something different!”