Imagine seeing yourself in a comparable future “needy” situation and apply your new resourceful state from step 2 to that you, allowing your acceptance, appreciation and awe to transform that situation. Your point of view shifts as you associate into that other as you fully accept all the resources you now have available. Notice how this transforms the old context. Experience yourself now with this new sense of self-acceptance, self-appreciation and self-esteem.
5. Imagine a new future.
Imagine moving fully resourced through life in the weeks and months to come. Your life will be different because you have those resourceful states available to you. Put yourself in some typical situations where in the past you would have started blocking. Notice how you are now more fluent. Be aware of any further improvements you could make in the way you speak.
Doing this limits the amount of power others can have over you. Esteeming yourself means you care less about what others think about how you talk, and that allows you to care more for those people. You are better able to accept, appreciate and esteem them because you accept, appreciate and esteem yourself.
6. Personal ecology check.
Are all parts of you aligned with this new concept of yourself? If so, welcome that and thank yourself. If there is a part of you which is not OK with the new arrangement, find that part’s purpose for you and obtain its permission to let you think enough about yourself so that you will not allow what you think others may think of you to control how you speak. (See Exercise 5.2, step 7 for dealing with objecting parts.)
Become aware over the next period of weeks or months how your personal power or self-respect increases. The Swish Pattern
The Swish Pattern is a way of replacing the strategy you don’t want with a more appropriate strategy that leads to fluency. Use this process for changing your response to an event that triggers the blocking behavior. Making a new connection takes only a little practice; your substituted response will be activated automatically by the inciting incident. You could see it as rewiring the old stimulus-response linkage. The Swish process works by sending the unwanted response movie off into the background and replacing it with a more useful and desirable one. If this sounds familiar, it is because this pattern is similar to the Foreground/Background Pattern covered in Chapter Three. The Swish Pattern is powerful because you are installing a new behavioral response, and thereby moving toward the kind of person you want to become.
You can design swishes for yourself that set your mind, emotions, speech and behavior in a direction which aligns with your life purpose. Be drawn toward an image of yourself that is more valued, esteemed, loved, competent, happy, energetic and kind. This is a change of direction for people who block because they have developed the habit of seeing themselves experiencing blocking in their very next conversation. The Swish pattern retrains their mind to go beyond blocking, to even go beyond a concern for fluency, so that they can become all that they are inspired to be, so that they may be in awe of their personal capabilities and achievements.
Exercise 6.2: The Swish Pattern
In using the Swish Pattern, start by being fully associated into the old pattern. Then you can be pulled toward the new outcome image of the resourceful you. Many people find it is preferable to close their eyes during the process and open them between steps. Discover what works best for you. Overview
Identify experience to be changed.
Clarify the internal movie of this experience.
Develop a desired outcome picture.
Link the two representations.
Swishing the pictures.
Swish five times.
Test.
1. Identify experience to be changed.
Re-access your usual movie of fearing you will block in your very next conversation. Make sure that you are associated in this movie. If you are seeing yourself in the picture that means you are dissociated, so actually be in yourself, looking out through you own eyes in the picture, seeing what is around you.
Notice: What are you aware of just before you block? What do you see, hear, and feel that initiates your fear or anxiety of blocking? Make sure you have a sufficiently detailed image of that situation.
2. Clarify the internal movie of this experience.
You may be unaware of what exactly the trigger is for blocking. It is as if you have been on automatic pilot to some extent and the pattern operates out of habit. You can bring into awareness some of the cues by testing for key elements in the movie which create the fear of blocking.
Start by noticing the visual aspects, the qualities of the picture: size, distance, brightness, distance, color, and so on, and then systematically vary each quality to see which produces a significant change in the way you feel about the experience. For example, if you send the picture further away does that alter how you feel about the memory? What if you change the size of the picture or put a border round it? What happens when you make black and white? Out of focus? (Use the list in Figure 4.2 to help you here.) Then find which sound cues make a difference. What happens when you change the voice qualities or tonalities? What if you change the speed, or vary the pitch?
Something in this cue image triggers your response of fearing blocking – it’s already swishing your mind to a very unresourceful state. What you are going to do is utilize this same ability to swish yourself into a resourceful state by changing the image. Instead of fear, you can have that cue image generate calm or
