Redesign Your Reality

I would like to introduce you to something called Redesigning Your Reality and it’s all about changing how you perceive the world.  This is something that I have learned with NLP and changed it slightly to come up with this concept.

Reality

Your reality is totally different from my reality, and my reality is totally different from 6 billion other peoples reality – Why is that?

Without going too much into the neuro-biology of how external information from our five senses are processed, sufficed to say that the electrical signals are passed to various areas of the brain to give us feedback on how we should interpret the world around us.

So, we can therefore break it down like this

• Reality is the world in which we live
• The world in which we live is interpreted by our five senses
• Our five senses are essentially the same as every other human being in the world
• If all humans have the same five senses (some have lost some of their senses, but we mostly have the same 5 senses) then it stands to reason that there is another factor, which differentiates us,  between the processing of our five senses and the feedback of that processing.

That factor is:

Past experience

Past experience

Our past experience, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts are what makes every one of our realities totally different from one another.  So our perception of the world, or our reality, is shaped by our past experiences.

Since the past is the past, and we can’t go back and change it ,is it possible to change our reality and our perception of the world?

I think there is a way with a 3 step process called Redesigning Your Reality.

Redesgning Your Reality

Step 1 – Grouping

Using the example that you often feel intimated by certain people whilst in their company.  I’d like you to, on a piece of paper write down all the names of the people you have felt or feel intimated by.  Try and get a list of ten people if you can.  Now write down roughly when and what your situation was when you felt intimidated and why you feel intimidated.

So for example:

Name: Ann Hartley (just a name that sprung to mind)

Situation: At work

Date: Every day

Why: She is much more intelligent than me and makes me feel stupid

Step 2 – Re-Label

Now what I’d like you to do is to put a label on how you would like to feel around these people – e.g. You might want to label yourself as ‘Intelligent’ when you are around these people.

Re-Interpreting

Now imagine you are in a movie theatre and it’s just you sitting in the middle. Now for each person you have on your list go back to the past in the movie theatre of your mind, and talk to the people involved and imagine yourself having intelligent conversation, it doesn’t matter what you say it’s all very intelligent and the people are really interested in what you have to say because you are really intelligent. Make the movie extremely vivid with colours, sound, smells, use all five senses here.

Do this with every person on your list and do it as often as you can, possibly daily for the next few weeks until you start seeing the difference it makes in your life.

Now whenever you have a thought or a picture in your mind of feeling intimidated, shrink that image, to its smallest size, make it black and white and make it disappear from the movie screen in your mind and replace it with the movie of you feeling confident, having intelligent conversation with the person and make it as vivid and use all the five senses.

I think this concept is a powerful one as it gives us the ability to change our interpretations of past events in our lives and assign new ways of thinking.  Since we are re-labelling the past, the brain will assume that our re-labelling of the past is our actual past, so our past experience has been given a new look, so to speak.

I think this exercise has the potential to change a lot of aspects of our lives which we feel we want to rid ourselves of such as old beliefs, negative thinking patterns, unwanted emotions etc.