Every once in a while, especially when I play Coach in the Patterns of Excellence(POE) Workshop, I get requests to model my strategy to deal with difficult people and stressful situations.

Some people are surprised how easy it is.

To spare you the technicalities of an actual NLP modeling session, the core of my strategy is a personal mantra:

“You don’t have the PERMISSION to make me to CHOOSE to feel bad!!”

Permission denotes that we have to empower or submit to the authority or eventuality of someone or something.

In NLP, we say that ‘People make the best choices available to them’. In coaching, we often address the issue of how we can make the best light of any situation by the process of Reframing. We also say that ‘Every behaviour has a positive intention.’ When we are able to see the highest positive intention of people and the highest positive meaning of a situation, more options (choices) are opened to us.

We all know that we are more efficient and things are more enjoyable when we FEEL GOOD. Some people will argue that not feeling bad doesn’t mean that we’ll feel good, that doesn’t make much pragmatic sense in this context. OK, for argument’s sake, bad denotes all form of negativity. If you are the kind very much into semantics and say we can still feel worse or worst or like shit or a loser…. I’m sorry: you don’t have the permission to make me choose to feel bad.

One of the central themes of Patterns of Excellence is:

Event + Response = Outcome

When something happens (event), what we do/feel/say/think/imagine (response) will give meaning to it (outcome). Working on our response, we can choose our desired outcome to any event.

My personal mantra empowers me in 2 ways: I do not give away (permission) to others how I decide to respond to a set of event and just in case I do feel bad, I know I have a choice to reframe and see things in a better light, thereby feeling good!!

Stay tuned for how I use my personal mantra to drown out and eliminate negative self-talk in my coaching sessions. Watch out for next by Pete: Negativity Interruptus