How To Reboot Your Senses & Feel More Creative & Focused
Here are a few simple life coaching processes to help you reboot your senses, change your perception of stimuli, and feel more creative and focused.
When you’re studying NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP), one of the key frameworks of understanding you study is representational systems, which in a nutshell boils down to how you acquire, store, and process information using your senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and more (including temperature and even perception of size).
The most important thing this teaches you though, is that your senses are malleable and by manipulating them and working with them, you can change how you perceive and interact with the world around you – to your benefit.
The following exercise is drawn from improvisation comedy, and is hands down one of the most powerful I’ve ever encountered for changing the way you perceive stimuli through your senses, and for getting your creative juices flowing again. To begin with, stop and take stock of your senses for a moment, noticing how you are experiencing everything around you. Now that you have a clear feel for where you are and what you’re currently experiencing, we begin the exercise itself. All you’re going to do is walk around the room and let your eyes fall on whatever object they fall on, pointing to it if you want to. As the object comes into your view, simply say the very first word that comes to your mind – no editing, and not the name of the object. So you can point to a desk and call it silver, monkey, banana, twinkle, harness, or fish – anything but desk or table.
The point is to confuse your senses and your language processing for a few seconds.
The nice thing is that because all this stuff happens through our senses, it’s easy to manipulate it using that self-same sensory input. Now you’re simply going to keep going for as long as you can – which will only be twenty or thirty seconds in the beginning. It does get a bit easier as you go along, but in all honestly most people battle to keep the language confusion up for longer than a minute, and that’s okay. Once you’ve gone as far as you can, stop and cycle through the sensory questions again, noticing what’s changed: some elements will be the same, some will have changed quite dramatically. Most often, people experience an immediate difference in temperature, colour, clarity, sound perception, and sense of space. What you’ll find though is that the intensity of the sensory input that was overwhelming or irritating you is gone, which is really useful if, for example, you’re one of the many people that experiences heightened sound awareness when stressed or overwhelmed. In addition, if you’ve been experiencing a block in creative or work flow, you’ll find that this exercise often unsticks that and helps get you back into the groove. This next trick is gleaned from BodyTalk, which is an energy healing process that uses a combination of kinesiology to identify statements and tapping on the brain to release thought patterns, feelings, and more. BodyTalk has a public domain process called the BodyTalk Cortices Tapping Technique that is very effective if you use it on yourself or on others, for a variety of applications. One of my favourite applications of this DIY technique actually comes from BodyTalk sessions. In a BodyTalk session, in order to create practical functionality, a person’s subtle senses (basically the filters that receive the sensory input) are cleaned and then anchored to the brain. If a feeling of connectedness is called for then those same subtle senses would be anchored to the heart. For you own benefit, you can simply activate each sense by using it, or touching it: After you’ve activated each sense, if you want to feel more connected, take both hands and press them over your heart to connect those senses to your heart, while taking a deep breath. If you want to function better on a practical level and get stuff done, and establish a good workflow, then put one hand on either side of your head and connect those senses to your brain. Whether you choose practical functionality or connectedness, finish it off with the 1-minute BodyTalk Cortices Self Tapping Application. ———————————— Life Coaches Toolbox Life Coaches Toolbox offers a range of beautifully designed and ready-to-download Life Coaching processes, tools, techniques, scales and question sets, as well as a range of free tools and diagnostics for coaches to use with clients and for clients to use on their own. Chemory Gunko is a Life Coach, NLP Practitioner, Ericksonian Hypnotherapy Practitioner Energy Resourcing Practitioner and is available for one-on-one life coaching sessions, in person and via Skype. For more information visit www.lifecoachestoolbox.com .
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