Pegasus NLP Blog

Looking back I don’t why I did it.  Over mothered? Dropped on my head at birth? It doesn’t really matter, the point is I was prone to the odd tantrum.

It is possible, painful though it is to admit, that I actually enjoyed it; wearing a little hurt on my sleeve as I bravely ‘soldiered’ on.

I guess it’s just about acceptable from a child, from a teenager it’s tolerated for a short time - but from an adult? In fact the definition of an adult should really include emotional maturity as well as physical but I can say that in the former department I was lacking.  And then NLP happened, well as least Pegasus NLP happened.

Today if the ‘wrong’ thing is said to me, as fast as a desire for a sulk emerges; a mirror reflection of my face appears, only with raised eyebrows and unwavering stare.  I find myself laughing at this adult self, even putting my tongue out but eventually stepping inside it and moving on.

Thanks to the team at Pegasus I realise that I don’t have to beat myself up about my personality traits, just recognise them. From this I can either be the guide or the guided but the choice is mine and mine alone. (Matt Swain).

Thanks, Matt for the feedback note and for permission to publish it. (Btw, Matt successfully completed our NLP Practitioner Certification Programme a few years ago.)

One of the things you learn in NLP presentation skills trainings is the value of ‘open loops’ in which a topic is briefly explored and then left hanging while the focus moves on to something else – only to be returned to later.

‘Open loops’ is, in essence, one application of the Zeigarnik Effect which states that unfinished tasks are remembered better that finished ones.

So in a training programme skilful and judicious use of open loops means we can cram a lot more learning into a given amount of time – and achieve better retention of the material. Retention can be increased by as much as 90% in adults according to the Zeigarnik Effect paper which Lithuanian-born Bluma Zeigarnik published in 1927.

The down-side of this phenomenon is that it can be the cause of much stress and emotional unease – something which is explored in the early April issue of the Pegasus NLP Newsletter – because the amount of multi-tasking demanded by our daily lives ensures there are always lots of unfinished issues to prevent us from switching off and enjoying recreation time.