NLP Swish Pattern
Imagine you want to exercise, but whenever you think of going to the gym you think about huffing and puffing for what feels like hours on the treadmill while people laugh at you until you fall to the floor covered in your own smelly sweat.
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One thing is certain, you wouldn't be spending much time at the gym.
The NLP swish pattern is a very good way of replacing an unresourceful representation such as this one, that gets in they way of you achieving what you want, with a more resourceful one.
It's a great way of dealing with issues that make us feel uncomfortable such as public speaking, where we imagine ourselves failing and performing badly, and issues such as motivation, where we can think about what it will be like to live in a clean and tidy house rather than think about the hours of work we don't enjoy that are required to get there.
It's a way of telling the brain, not this - this.
Before using this NLP technique, it is important to understand the individual steps so that you can perform the exercise without any doubt as to what you are doing and why. It is also useful to read the NLP Submodalities and NLP Memory Manipulation lessons to get a general feel of how NLP is performed and to gain some experience uncovering your own mental processes.
The NLP swish pattern is usually one of the first patterns that people learn. It's an easy exercise, a good introduction to submodalities, and a very good way to understand the effectiveness of NLP. It's best to perform this exercise with your eyes closed, so read the description below a couple of times so you can remember the process.
NLP Swish Pattern - step by step
Now, think of the aspect of your life where you are not as resourceful as you would like to be. Notice the mental representation you make. Perhaps whenever you think about going out for a run you imagine feeling out of breath and not enjoying the experience, or when you think about giving a presentation at work you imagine stuttering and people laughing at you. Pick something that generates within your mind a mental picture of things going badly or things being difficult or hard work. The swish pattern is a good pattern for both confidence in our abilities and issues of motivation.
“Most people plan by disaster. They think of what can go wrong and then they master it.”
Once it is clear to you what image you make that prevents you doing what you want, make an image of how you would like to experience that event.
So in the example of running on a treadmill, perhaps you would make a picture of you striding out on the treadmill full of energy, with immaculate posture, while all around people were sweating and struggling. For going a speech, perhaps you would visualize people clapping or laughing at one of your jokes. For cleaning the house, perhaps an image of sitting in your clean house admiring your work.
This is your representation, so make it as motivating as possible. Remember back to the NLP Submodalities exercise and work on those submodalites - make the image large, make it close to you and add some brightness and color. When you are happy with this representation, take a break for a moment.
Now its time for the swish. Remember the original unresourceful image and place a small dot in either the center or one of it's corners.
This small dot is a very small, barely visible copy of the resourceful image.
Now, very quickly, and with a nice whooshing noise, expand the dot until it fills the whole original image replacing the image with the new resourceful one - it can be larger and closer if you wish. The positive image should now be the only image you can see. You should overwhelm the original image with it.
Pause for a moment, clear your mind, then return to the first image and perform the swish again. Keep clearing your mind and performing this shift until you can perform it effortlessly taking care to first imagine the dot then expand it quickly.
Once you have performed the shift five or six times, taking a moments break between each attempt, take another break, then think of performing the task that you struggled to be resourceful for.
What image pops into your mind?
Hopefully at this point something new happens.
Some people find that they need to practice the swish several times for it to stick, and as with many NLP techniques the key is in the speed that you make the change.
“The easier you can make it inside your head, the easier it will make things outside your head.”
Supercharge your Swish Pattern
There is another way to make the swish more effective and that is through the use of submodalities. Basically, through knowing which submodalities have a positive effect for you, the key is to use those as part of the swish. So if like most people, color, brightness, size and closeness make an image more motivating then try making the new image more colorful, brighter, larger and closer than the one it's replacing and shift each of these submodalities as you do the swish.
The more you practice this technique the easier it becomes - often to the point where you perform it almost automatically whenever you become aware of a mental representation that is holding you back.
Spend a few days watching out for issues that suit the swish pattern and either use the pattern straight away or make a list and work through them later. Over time you should find that the swish becomes something you need less and less because as soon as you become aware of a problem, you've swished it!
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