experience life with a state of resourcefulness.

Because the fear has been well learned, it may take several repetitions of applying your resources over a period of time for your fear of blocking to diminish and eventually go away. Practice is essential. Every time the fear of blocking comes up, apply your resource state to the fear. Eventually the fear will weaken and disappear.

When the triggers for the fear are present your mind-body used to immediately respond with fear. Every time you challenge this connection you are interrupting the old strategy and in effect saying “No” to the fear and “Yes” to your resource state (see Exercise 6.3).

This meta-stating exercise involves changing the way you perceive your fear. You put yourself in a position of relative power, and use the positive energy of your resources to overcome the limitations of the unwanted state.Changing your point of view – perceptual positions

You are constantly changing your point of view, altering the way you perceive and understand your experience. In fact, every process in this book gets you to do this, because change entails perceiving your reality in a significantly different way. Although there are infinite different points of view, they can be categorized into five distinct perceptual positions. Each has a particular function and thus provides an alternative way of understanding what is happening. This section is about how you can move at will through the five perceptual positions in order to create the changes you want.

The fear relating to blocking comes from the point of view that the world is fixed in some aspect, that there is nothing to be done to change things. PWS get stuck in this point of view, and cannot conceive of alternatives being possible. There is a way out: imagine stepping outside those fears around blocking and stuttering and adopting a point of view in which change is possible, a position which enables fluent speech. For example, you feel confident and know that you can achieve great things by pretending you are an expert. That’s a change of point of view that the PWS can make to deal with their fear.

Deliberately changing your point of view is both useful in that it allows you to engage with the world in a different way, and provides a general strategy for dealing with any kind of change. It increases your mental flexibility in the way you perceive the world and thus in how you make meaning of the people and events you encounter.

The realization that humans operate from five basic ways of looking at experience offers tremendous potential in managing your own states and enhancing your communication. NLP’s original three positions have now been expanded to five (see Young 2004, and Figure 3.4), and these are simply numbered first, second, third, fourth and fifth perceptual positions respectively. You already use these perceptual positions; this model provides a way of thinking about them and using them systematically. Here we will consider how they work for people who block. As a clinician it is important that you recognize how to move flexibly around these different positions yourself in order to benefit from the insights offered by each perceptual position.

Figure 3.4: Perceptual positions

Associated points of view

First and second positions are both associated – you are fully in the experience. When you are fully associated in a memory, it is as if you are looking out through your eyes, hearing the sounds and feeling the feelings, and therefore you do not see yourself in the picture.

First position

This is the familiar position of being in your own body, looking out at the world from the viewpoint of being yourself. It’s ego-centric – the normal and healthy position of seeing, hearing, and feeling from inside your self. It’s your truth, your immediate needs that matter, and you take less account of anyone else’s position. You simply think, “How does this conversation or communication affect me?” In first position you speak with authenticity, you present yourself, your thoughts, feelings, and responses congruently. You disclose, listen, inquire, and are present for others.

The down-side of first position is that you get stuck: the PWS is totally blocked. The solution is to move to another perceptual position and view their blocking from a different perspective. Although this kind of shift may require some effort, it liberates the PWS and enables them to gain fluency. Now it is not the case that they have never done this before. They have – but they need to learn how to do it in the blocking context.

Second position

Second position offers alternatives. One aspect of this is pretending to be another person, imagining how everything appears from their physical location. You put yourself in a different context: in the other person’s body, looking at the world – and at yourself – through their eyes. “As this other person, what do I see, hear, and feel in this relationship, this communication?”

Experiencing how someone else perceives a situation provides you with empathic understanding. Although this is your imagination, the remarkable thing is that the more exactly you copy how the other person is, in terms of body, mind and spirit, the closer you come to experiencing things as they do, to seeing things from their point of view.

In everyday life you may wonder, “Now, what would he or she do in this situation?” Only by temporarily becoming that other person can you begin to find out. Adopting second position is important when you need flexibility in dealing with someone else, especially if there is any conflict.

When you find yourself thinking about someone’s point of view objectively, then you have moved to third position. It is easy for the PWS to get into trouble here. They think “If I were in your shoes …” but instead of empathizing with them they mind-read them as judging the PWS’s stuttering. Sometimes the PWS in second position looks back at themselves in first, sees their facial contortions and so

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