Amplifying Emotions with Association
Today’s topic is amplifying emotional states. In an earlier video tape we talked about how important it is to add emotion to your hypnotic suggestions and how important the emotion is to NLP processes. In this video we’ll talk about how to amplify that emotion, and one way to amplify emotion is to associate a person as opposed to disassociate a person.
Let’s talk a little bit about how this works. One of the easiest ways to get an emotional state up and running in a person is to ask them to step into a time when they had previously experienced the emotion you need. Let’s suppose you’re looking for an emotion of confidence and you’re working with a client. You might say, “OK. Remember a time when you were absolutely confident and it felt just wonderful. Now step into that time.” Now, that’s the association part.
People experience memories and imaginations “associated” or “dissociated.”
People can think of emotions, they can think of experiences in two ways. They can either see themselves going through the experience, or they can be themselves. They can be first person inside the experience. And to experience the maximum amount of emotion, we want them associated first person into the experience. And the way to do this is to use language like “step into that experience” rather than “think of that experience.”
And it’s important that you watch your language throughout this process. In other words, use “be” language, not “think about” language. Keep your tenses straight so that you use present tense. Use present tense as you step them into the experience. So, rather than, how did that feel, how does that feel. You can also use language like, looking out through your own eyes, hearing through your own ears, you’re inside your body, in that experience, what is it like rather than what was it like.
So, you can pick an experience that someone had that has the emotion that you would like to elicit in them and you step them into that experience, make sure it’s first person so that it’s associated. And that’s a great tip about how to amplify emotion.
Keith
