Field Report: Office Demo

Summary: I demonstrate to a co-worker some NLP stuff, lead him to different emotional states, and ultimately help him feel a little bit better about a past experience.



This one happened last month. One of my co-workers was in my office and we got to talking about hypnosis and NLP. He asked me what NLP was and so I explained it to him. Then, I decided to give him a little demonstration of some of the techniques.

I asked him to think of a mildy unpleasant experience - like taking out the trash, or cleaning up dog poop, etc. But for some reason, just like a few other people that I've asked that same question, he came up with one that elicited strong unpleasant emotions.

He decided to think of an experience he had the night before at a club. I guess he got in an argument or almost got into a fist fight or something. Whatever it was, it got him pretty angry. As he thought of the experience, his emotional state went from curious and interested (about NLP) to upset (about the last night's little situation).

Anways, I decided to work with that one and did some sub-modality stuff. As we played with the sub-modalities of how he represented his experienece, his states changed pretty dramatically. At one point, he was so infuriated that he was sweating and moving all around the room. After taking him to that extreme, I went the other way and got him to be completely relaxed.

Before going into it, I didn't expect him to experience such a wide range of dramatic emotions. I asked him to think of a mildly unpleasant experience, not an infuriating one. It might have worked out for the better, though, because within the span of about 5 minutes, he went from a little upset, to really mad, to completely relaxed and then even indifferent about the last night's upsetting experience. Nice.

All in all, I think that the demonstration went pretty well.