Articles by Andy

In the first NLP Cafe of 2010 join Andy Hunt in an exploration of what is most important in our lives: our values.

Often times these values may not be in concious awareness and we wander like an explorer without a compass.

When we know what our values are then we can use them to improve our decisions, motivate ourselves and construct a future that really works for us.

Because they are associated with worth, meaning and desire, values are a primary source of motivation in people’s lives. When peoples values are met or matched, they feel a sense of satisfaction, harmony or rapport. When  their values are not met, people often feel dissatisfied, incongruent or violated
Robert Dilts

In this NLP Cafe practice group on Wednesday January 20th we will use a simple process to elicit and sort our highest values. Then use that information to improve our decisions and make our goals and outcomes even more juicy and enticing.

Just £9.00 booking in advance online or £10 on the night.

7pm - 9pm ( Tea and Biscuits included )
St Oswalds Hospice
Regent Avenue
Gosforth
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE3 1EE

There’s an old joke.

A man in Time Square in New York wants to get to the concert and sees a man carrying a violin case.

He asks: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”.

“Practice, practice, practice” is the reply.

Like many good jokes it makes a serious point. Some skills need practice. One form of practice is mental rehearsal, which has been used by sports people in particular to improve their performance by playing out a game or a race in advance to prepare themselves for event when it actually happens.

NLP has an optimised strategy for mental rehearsal for developing and practising new skills; called ‘The New Behaviour Generator’.

In it’s original form it can be a little dry and mechanistic. What if we could juice it up with some of the feelings that would make it more likely that we would get the result we want with style and resourcefulness?

The Good Feeling of Practice Well Done is a process developed by Andy Hunt based on the New Behaviour Generator and incorporating states and values into the process to give it that extra juice.

You can learn and apply this new process at the October NLP Café on Wednesday October 21st at 7 pm in St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Some experience of NLP is not essential but would be very helpful.

All this and tea and biscuits for just £9.00 booking in advance online or £10 on the night.

It would be nice if life would present us with experiences we are well able to cope with and learn from. Unfortunately life follows it’s own agenda and presents us with experiences that we are not ready for and are difficult to cope with.

This often happens when we are young. These events are often profound learning experiences for us and the conclusions or decisions we make about them can affect us for the rest of our lives.

If only we had felt more resourceful we could have handled that situation so much better than we did and things would be different now.

Fortunately there is a way that we can go back and resource ourselves for those difficult experiences and re-live them in a much more productive way. And by changing our experience of the past we can change our present and future experiences.

The Decision Destroyer is an NLP process invented by Richard Bandler one of the co-founders of NLP designed to help you repair old difficulties and move on without being hampered by the past.

At the NLP Cafe on September 16th in St Oswald’s Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Andy Hunt will be demonstrating the Decision Destroyer and showing you how to use this process to undo old mistakes. Some experience of NLP is not essential but would be very helpful.

Just £9.00 booking in advance online or £10 on the night.

How often have you heard other people lamenting their inability to put things into perspective? If only we could step back and appreciate the bigger picture and put things into context. Fortunately NLP gives us some specific techniques to allow us to do just that.

In this week’s NLP Cafe Andy Hunt will take you through two processes for putting things into perspective. The Perspectives Pattern invented by NLP trainer John McWhirter and further developed by Steve Andreas. In this workshop we will learn to use this simple process to resolve troublesome images and unhelpful self talk. You will need to have had some experience of NLP to use these processes.

Join Nigel Hetherington and Andy Hunt at the NLP Cafe workshop on Wednesday 20th May at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne at 7pm. The cost is just £10.

Pay via email

Picture of Tiree Perspective courtesy of MacJewell

All sorts of self help books stress the value of having long term and short term goals. Usually these goals are expressed as things - a new car, a bigger house, the life partner of your dreams, a dream holiday etc. Which is odd, because the purpose of these things and activities is to give us certain feelings - security, freedom, love, relaxation, etc.

The theme of this NLP Cafe is exploring the states and feelings that we want to achieve from realising our goals and outcomes and using those emotions to make our goals that much more appealing and motivating.

To try out the Feelings of Outcomes and how you can put them to good use join Nigel Hetherington and Andy Hunt at the NLP Cafe workshop on Wednesday 15th April at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre at 7pm.

Pay £9.00 in advance online or £10 at the event.

Image by Jens Dahlin via Flickr

The SCORE model was invented by Robert Dilts and Todd Epstein in the mid 80s when they looked at the way that they were helping their clients and student solve problems. By dividing the problem down into the following components:

• Symptoms: The signs that something is wrong or not as it should be. In personal life this could be an anxiety or traumatic response, in a work setting it could be a poorly motivated team or a misbehaving class.
• Causes: What happened in the life of the individual or group that lead to these symptoms
• Outcomes: What do you want instead? Where do you want to be when the problem is solved. An outcome orientation is a fundamental part of the NLP world view.
• Resources: What skills, feelings, beliefs, values and other resources do you have that can be used to get you where you want to go.
• Effects: What are the effects of the outcome you are seeking. How will your goal play out over time? A consideration of the long term results of a plan often makes a huge difference to what happens (the Invasion of Iraq being a good example of what happens when you don’t think beyond the obvious objective).

To have an experience of the SCORE model and how you can put it into practice join Nigel and Andy at the NLP Cafe workshop on Wednesday 11th February at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre at 7pm. You don’t need any knowledge of NLP to attend this event but you do need to be willing to roll up your sleeves and join in.

Pay £9.00 in advance online or £10 at the event.

It’s the NLP Cafe’s First Birthday this month and we’d like to invite you to our FREE anniversary session.

Most other people would be content to sit around, eat birthday cake and reminisce. Not us! We are going to have our usual structured foray into the world of NLP and then eat birthday cake and reminisce.

The subject of this month’s meeting will be an NLP version of ‘The Work’ a self development process created by Byron Katie. Although she doesn’t mention NLP in her work there are many NLP aspects in her approach to eliciting and neutralising limiting beliefs. In this workshop Andy Hunt will explore the work from an NLP perspective and demonstrate ways of applying it in daily life.

We do hope you can come along and join our Birthday Bash!
Since it’s our Birthday it’s FREE … and there will be cake!

The NLP Cafe meets at 7pm on Tuesday, October 21st 2008 at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre, Regent Ave, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 1EE

Click here for map

UPDATE: The NLP Cafe is on Tuesday 15th, not 16th as previously advertised

Sometimes we find ourselves in situations that trigger unresourceful states in us. A letter from the bank, being called into the bosses office, having to do the paper work, etc, etc.

Wouldn’t it be nice if that not so useful state automatically triggered a more resourceful state in that situation? Not surprisingly NLP has a number of state based processes to help that happen.

In the next NLP Cafe on Tuesday July 15th we will use a simple technique called the Anchor Dance for automatically taking you from an unresourceful to a resourceful state quickly and easily.

Join Andy Hunt and Nigel Hetherington at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre between 7pm and 9pm on July 15th to find out how to do the Anchor Dance (courtesy of Vikas Dikshit an inventive NLPer from Pune, India).

The evening costs just £10 for which you will receive a Cafe Credit which will give you a £10 discount on any course run by Andy Hunt or Nigel Hetherington.

PS: This is a great way of finding out what we are like as trainers and the kind of thing you might expect to get from one of our IntegrityNLP Practitioner trainings.

In NLP a state is word describing the sum total of how we feel, our mood and our physiology.

Some states are very simple and have common every day names such as: angry, loving, dissappointed. Other states can be complex combinations of feelings and moods that may have no name but are very familiar to us.

Many people think that their state is something they are stuck with, in reality they are easy to change and choose. States and state management is a fundamental part of NLP.

In the next NLP Café meeting on May 20th we will explore getting in and out of states. In the first part of this practice group we will use a process to tease apart unresourceful states so that they are easier to change. In second part we will work on creating tailor made states for use on any occasion.

Join Andy Hunt and Nigel Hetherington to get in, and out of, a bit of a state at St Oswald’s Hospice Training Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle on Tuesday May 20th between 7pm & 9pm.

There are several emotions that we feel in response to ourselves, self-respect, self-appreciation, self-esteem etc. These feelings and beliefs about ourselves are taken on board during childhood and early life experiences.

In this month’s NLP Cafe we will use two processes to explore and develop positive ’self states’. First using the positive resources of mentors to access these states and develop them in ourselves. Then Guardian Angel process to introduce these states into our past, present and future timelines.

This is a complementary experience to last month’s NLP Cafe workshop using the submodality work of Steve Andreas.

7pm - 9pm Tuesday 18th March at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre