Putting Yourself in the Picture

In NLP we use ‘Reframing’ (so this might be walking through the door frame) to create a different meaning, for example to turn a bad experience into a good one, or to notice that there is actually something positive.

Here’s a literal reframe

A. Remember an occasion where you got angry.

B. Disassociate: See yourself in the picture.

C. Now put a frame around the picture.

How does your response to the situation change when you put a wooden frame around it? What about a metal frame? A multi-coloured frame. An oval frame?

How about a colourful frame with balloons hanging from it?

 

And what do we do to remember things when we’ve walked through the door (see more on walking through doorways below)?

We need to make a conscious effort to stop briefly and think about the thing we want to do, or are going to, or are have been doing.  And then we need to make a mental image of this thing and place it up to our left.  And looking up to our left see this thing, this object, this person, this task, this memory, see it in colour and see it standing still. Making sure it’s still there, move on out of the room and when you’re out of the room and doing the next thing look up to your left and see this item, still standing there.  And hey presto, you’ll remember.

If you find this tricky, practice.  Only perfect practise makes permanent.

And for some people you might need to place this image up on your right.

Try it out and let me know what happens for you, then walking through the door will be much easier and your memory will improve.

Forgotten to catch up after a meeting or networking?

Well most of us do at times. Some of us believe making notes will help, not so good if you then lave all your info somewhere.  I recently realised that I had left all my info from one networking meeting, neatly packaged on one place on the table in the room I had been in.  Fortunately the info was still there. 

According to an article in Scientific American online, which being scientific has lots and lots of references and could be (for me) a tad exhausting; when we walk through a door we forget.  Well actually they were interested in why walking through a door makes us forget.

The article: Gabriel A. Radvansky, Sabine A. Krawietz & Andrea K. Tamplin (2011): Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64:8,1632-1645 click here  states that walking through a doorway causes what they call ‘an event boundary’ and we update our model of events in respect of what happened previously.  They maintain that this ‘can reduce the availability of information in our memory for objects associated with the prior event. And then they do some scientific speak about how memory is essential (in my words) dependent on how or what we associate with the previous event.  ?  What does that mean, you might be asking? Well it means we need to remind ourselves in some way of what happened or was happening before we left the room. 

So in my case above remembering to take all my info from the event happened because I generally (I stress the word generally) have a checking thing (or system) before I leave one place to go to another.  We don’t always check because often deep in thought we move from one doorway to another and therefore onto something else.