Or how to not be intimidated by your own thoughts!

NLP is well-known for its great range of techniques for changing you you think, feel and communicate.

But, deep down, NLP is really a ‘modelling’ process – a set of skills for identifying what makes us tick: how we have thoughts, how we create our emotions, and how we achieve great (and not-so-great) results in our lives.

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The NLP techniques can be useful, up to a point and when used with the rights skills. But it’s the modelling approach that really begins to utilise the true value of NLP: identifying what people do and how they do it. Doing this enables us to recognise skills which they use and which we might find useful for ourselves – as well as skills which they use that are decidedly un-useful and to be avoided.

Mr Eat-it-all

In this month’s Pegasus NLP Newsletter we look at the skills of Michel Lotito, also known as Monsoir Mangetout (Mr Eat-it-all) because of his ability to eat indigestible things like bicycles, razor blades and light bulbs. In the 41 years until his death at the age of 57 (from natural causes) he ate some 9 tons of metal including

  • 18 Bicycles
  • 15 shopping trollies,
  • 6 chandeliers,
  • 7 TVs,
  • 2 beds
  • a pair of skis
  • a small section of the Eiffel Tower and
  • a coffin
  • a Cessna 150 airplane.

If we do a rough model of what he did we can identify a few things. For example, he had two innate gifts. Firstly, the lining of his stomach and intestines was unusually thick so he could have sharp metal objects ‘pass through’. Secondly, he was nudged into being an omnivore entertainer because he reportedly had a condition called Pica which gave him a taste(!) for eating inedible objects as a child.

But he then had to develop the rest of his ability.

And the most useful strategy he developed was that of breaking things down into bite-sized chunks – about 1-2 cubic centimetres, to be precise. So rather than put, say, the bicycle on a plate and begin chewing he would chop it up into small pieces and eat about 2 pounds of it each day.

I don’t want to eat bicycles…

In NLP modelling we aim to think a bit laterally. A bit creatively.  For example, on encountering a not particularly undesirable skill such as eating a kilo of metal a day we might wonder what is the thinking behind this skill and where might this thinking be useful?

Michel developed the skill of  breaking down huge undertakings, like eating an airplane, into bite-sized chunks. This skill can  be very valuable in achieving those big life goals which might otherwise intimidate us by their very immensity.

Maybe I can go for it, after all!

We are often encouraged or inspired to dream a great big dream – or take on a huge project. Sadly, for many of us, ‘reality’ sets in very quickly. But this reality may simply be our way of convincing ourselves that the dream is un-achievable – without fully verifying this.

A key part of verifying how achievable something is involves breaking the project down into bite-sized chunks. And then verifying how achievable is each of the first two or three chunks.

The newsletter link is at the top of this page: http://www.nlp-now.co.uk/nlp_newsletter.htm

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