I attended an amazing adult summer camp on my birthday weekend called Connection Camp organized by The Connection Movement. There were many fascinating experiences at and after the camp. This post is about my first practical experience with NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming).

NLP is the science of self-improvement.

It’s a theory developed by a couple of psychologists as they observed the leading psychotherapists of the 60s and tried to break down how these therapists were almost magically able to heal their traumatized clients.

I had written a post a short while ago on conflicts. A lot of the ideas in this post were my interpretations of what I’ve gathered by exploring the theory of NLP via a wonderfully written book called The Structure of Magic.

There’s lots of power in language and how we structure our thoughts. The words that we use reveal glimpses of the model of the world in our head. Given that the world is what we perceive of it, gently making changes in this model of the world has the power to unblock and spur growth. This requires carefully constructed open ended questions. That’s a hard and enviable skill to possess. But like any other skill, I think it can be picked up with practice.

Back to this practical experience. I attended a workshop by Brenda Mehl (http://brendamehl.com/). It was a 10 min session. Brenda led me through a serious of questions starting with “What’s blocking you?”. I chose “feeling shame and fear about expressing and being assertive about my sexual desires” (more on my rocky sexual history later) as my answer. She followed up with a serious of questions guiding me through my own assumptions. With every answer, she would follow up with another beautifully structured question. At the end of the session, I noticed a few paths of progress I was unaware of before.

The beauty of this 10 min session was that all of the answers were in my head. She had instructed me to not say them out loud. It was purely the power of the questions coupled with my intent to introspect.

I was quite impressed. Since then I’ve found myself recommending her free initial session to Mohit and Pramod while discussing growth blockers. If you think there’s a belief you hold that prevents you from making progress, I’d highly recommend reaching out to Brenda ([email protected]) and reading the book — The Structure of Magic.