This may sound obvious, but many of us live our lives as if the most important things we ever want to do are “once and done” type of things. Never is this more prevalent in the area of NLP. Almost every NLP seminar is sold as some kind of passive “installation” process where students (after forking over several thousand dollars) need only to sit in the chair and do a few exercises in a remote vacation location for a couple weeks and they are now “trained” in NLP. The best athletes are the best because they practice the most.
The best martial artists spend hours a day honing their skills. Imagine if you paid several thousand dollars to attend a violinist training seminar. The violin was even included! After two weeks, would you be considered a violinist? Of course not! Yet that’s how most of us view the most important skill set: Communicating with others. There are tons of books on communication. Endless books on sales. Even more books on seduction and pickup. Sure, these books have helpful advice, but knowing how is much different than being able to do. You could spend four years getting a degree of music theory, and know everything there is to know about the different types of music, how certain chords go together, how to deconstruct popular melodies, all without ever learning how to play an instrument. We seem to have this deep belief that there exists a hidden switch in our brains, and all we need to really do in order to do the complicated stuff (fall in love, make money, stay healthy) we just need to find and flip the switch and we’ll be good. However, we end up spending much more time and money looking for that mysterious switch that we could have been better of learning the skills!
One of the reasons we are afraid of learning certain skills is that we are afraid of feeling foolish. After all, practicing those goofy NLP patterns in the seminar room where it’s safe is much easier on unsuspecting people out in public! However, remember the “see what happens” mindset. Everything in life is simple one more iteration of “seeing what happens.” If you see an interesting person across the room, unless you are committed to marrying them if they give you their phone number, and running away to join a monastery if they don’t, why not just see what happens? One of the reasons for the difficulties with this mindset in social settings is we are falling back on our ancient programming. Remember the instincts we talked about before? Unless we make efforts with our conscious mind, our brains are going to revert back to their instinctive programming. And our brains were programmed to live in a time when we lived with the same people our entire lives. Remember our instincts to maintain our social status? It feels, on a deep emotional level, that if that person across the room rejects us, it’s like we’re getting rejected by somebody within our own tribe. Pretty soon everybody will know about it, and we will be doomed! This is similar in structure to consciously choosing to eat healthy foods rather than eating only things that taste good. Our instincts are telling us that getting rejected by that interesting person across the room is super dangerous, just like it’s telling us if we don’t eat that slice of pizza we might die. But we can overcome both of those with conscious practice.
That’s right, overcoming our instincts with our conscious thinking is not something that some people can “do” while other people “can’t do.” This is something that everybody can do with practice. How do you learn to juggle three balls for ten minutes? Start juggling one ball for one minute. Then practice with one ball and one hand. Then two balls with two hands. Then two balls with one hand. Then three balls for one round through. Then two rounds through. Until you get up to ten minutes.
How do you practice overcoming your instincts with consciously decided behavior? The very same way. Start with something very easy. Eat one less piece of pizza, and drink one more glass of water. Talk to somebody that’s only somewhat interesting, not somebody you are head over heels in love with.
The truth about practicing skills is so long you start slow, give yourself plenty of time you really can learn to do anything. Just let your mind wander, for a moment, and imagine the things you could learn how to do if you only gave yourself the time to do it. Most languages use about 500 words about ninety percent of the time. In one year, learning only two words per day, you could be fluent enough in another language to converse with a native. Sure, you wouldn’t sound very elegant, but you would be able to get your point across, and the world would seem a lot smaller. If you spent ten minutes a day learning an instrument, within one year you could play well enough to impress your friends. If you made it a habit to start a conversation with one stranger a day, within a year, you could walk up to anybody, anywhere, anytime and get a good conversation flowing, something that would put you in high social demand. If you spent one hour a week learning the ins and outs of the stock market, you’d be able to able to read stock charts like a pro, and understand the basics of any company within seconds of taking a look at their stock price. (You may even learn to make a lot of money!)
Exercise
Think of five things you’d like to master. Imagine you had a magic pill, and by taking that magic pill, you would be able to do that skill well enough to impress all your friends. Now consider taking ten minutes a day to master that skill. Would you still be willing to do that if you knew you would still achieve the same level of mastery? Come up with a list of skills that you’d like to master, and you’d be willing to start learning over the course of the next year.
