Anthony Robbins, a prestigious North American coach, has developed a model for change that he calls NAC, an acronym for Neuro-Associative Conditioning or Neuro-Associative Conditioning. Let's see some of the principles of this model and its applications.
One of the most interesting concepts for a coach is the specific knowledge about what makes people change their mental state, the way they feel, their emotions and what prevents or facilitates them to do so at will.
Anthony Robbins, a prestigious North American coach, has developed a model for change that he calls NAC, an acronym for Neuro-Associative Conditioning or Neuro-Associative Conditioning. Let's see some of the principles of this model and its applications.
In essence, what the NAC offers us is a series of specific guidelines on the mechanisms that facilitate people's emotional management.
Anthony Robbins starts from the desire to experience pleasure and the fear of feeling pain as mechanisms that guide any aspect of people's lives, the great motivators of everything we do or do not do. Thus, according to him, we have a tendency to do what we suppose will bring us pleasant experiences and we will avoid doing what we suppose will mean pain.
One of the concepts that underpin his philosophy as a coach is to encourage his clients to take action, to use what he calls his personal power, the power to decide what he wants in life and to take action to to get it. What happens, says this author, is that what people achieve in life is often not going to depend on their abilities but on their motivation. It is not that people do not know how to get what they want, but rather that they associate pain with taking action in the direction that would lead them to achieve their goals.
The funny thing is that the associated pain is not usually real pain, rather it is fear of feeling pain. It is interesting for the coach to understand this key concept: many of our clients do not take action consistently enough to achieve the results they want because they imagine that doing so will mean pain. In their neurological system they have associated pain with taking action, so they do not take it. But they are not reacting to real pain but to imagined pain.
According to the terminology of the NAC, they have created a series of Neuro-Associations, between taking action and feeling intent, which make them respond in a conditioned way, inhibiting those actions.
What Anthony Robbins proposes is a methodology to change negative Neuro-Associations and create others of positive, others that facilitate action. What he suggests is use pain and pleasure instead of letting pain and pleasure use you.
The way to use it is to begin to understand that at any moment in life, our reality is based on what we focus our attention on. So, instead of focusing on the supposed painful consequences of taking action, what he proposes is to focus on the consequences of not taking action, at the price paid for not getting the results you want.
Using a methodology based on questions, we focus our client's attention on the true price that he will pay if he continues without taking action. We look for the price you are paying now and the price you are going to pay over the coming months and years. The price that he pays and the price that the people around him pay.
When we have made the pain of not taking action real for the client, when we have made him aware of this pain, what we achieve is a "lever" to move him to action and once he decides to take action, we condition it by reinforcing it positive way for you to experience pleasure.
Pain can be your best ally if you know how to use it to your advantage.
