This is an authentic photograph-actually a composite of photos taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and by the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
It depicts the Helix nebula, described by astronomers as “a trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases.” At its center is a dying star, which has ejected masses of dust and gas to form [...]

Often when I have something to do, but don’t feel much like doing it, I find it useful to fully acknowledge my not wanting to do it. “No, I don’t want to do that now,” in effect giving myself complete permission to not do it. Quite often I find that my response to this is a feeling of relaxation and increased willingness to do the task, and I can proceed with full attention, no longer hindered by the not wanting. There is something about fully validating the “not wanting” that frees me from it. And of course there are other times when I find myself congruent with not doing the task, and relax or do something else.

A more general form of this process is that whenever you have to make a decision between two alternatives, and have all the information that you need, but still can’t make a decision, try the following:

Arbitrarily decide to commit yourself to one of the alternatives, and notice your response. Sometimes it will be “Yes, that feels right,” while at other times it will be, “No, the other one is better,” and you can switch to that one. Either way, you will have moved out of indecision into action.

The general principle is to validate all the different aspects of your functioning, making it much easier to decide between the many opportunities available to you, and make choices that are satisfying.

In the previous newsletter I included the cartoon above, and asked readers to identify the basic structure of the communication, “Are you happier than you ever thought you’d be,” (or “Are you better at spotting trick questions than you ever thought you’d be.”) and play with how you could use this pattern in a positive way with someone (instead of as a trick question). If you didn’t do this before, try thinking about this now, before reading further.

The pattern asks someone to compare their present experience with an earlier expectation, and to decide whether one is more intense than the other. The word “ever” adds an additional piece, asking the listener to think of the most extreme expectation they have had about the present. A number of studies have shown definitively that our expectations are often inaccurate, and this is true of both positive and negative ones. All of us tend to anticipate that a new relationship, job, or possession will give us more pleasure than it actually does, and we also tend to anticipate that a serious loss or illness will be more catastrophic than it is. For instance, people who become paralyzed are initially focused on their expectations and feel terrible; after some experience with the actuality of their situation, they often find that they can still have a worthwhile and interesting life despite their handicap.

However, some of us do this much more than others, and it can often be very useful to ask someone to compare their expectations with reality, so that they can use this as useful feedback in adjusting their expectations when making future choices. “Was that discussion with your boss as bad as you had ever feared?” “Did that new TV actually give you as much pleasure as you ever thought it would?” The latter is particularly useful with addictive behaviors, in which someone is often more addicted to their expectation of a rewarding stimulus than they are to the stimulus itself. As Winnie the Pooh said, “ ‘Well,’ said Pooh, ‘what I like best,’ and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.” –A.A. Milne

In a previous article, I wrote about moving a representation to a location outside the head, so that it wouldn’t be distracting. In response to that, I received the following from Don Aspromonte, a colleague in Dallas, TX, who works with businesses internationally to improve sales and customer satisfaction, and author of Green Light Selling, a book that is based firmly in NLP communication processes.

“I read your piece about moving a representation in the head in your last newsletter, and it reminded me of a method I have used for many years. The first time I used this pattern for dealing with a migraine headache was in the early 1980’s with my sister. Based on what we were experimenting with in those days in NLP-land, I coached her over the phone to move her headache to another area of her head. This was not immediately successful for two reasons: random movement is less likely to work than moving it from/to a specific location, and ecology needs to be observed. We figured this out fairly quickly when I mentioned that we were not going to get rid of the symptom, we were just asking it to move to a different place. . . . Since migraine headaches almost always start in only one hemisphere, we began by moving it to the other side of the head. Once that is done, it can be moved up to a location a few inches above the head. When I asked her if she still had a headache she said, ‘Yes, but I can’t feel it.’ After a while she forgot that she had it. She is still successful in using this method and the frequency of headaches has dropped to nearly zero over the years. . . . I have used this exact pattern with many clients over the years and consistently received the same report, ‘Yes, I still have the headache, but I can’t feel it.’ I suspect there are many possible variations on this theme for others to explore.”

This is a nice example of the limitation of metaphor, and it occurs on two different logical levels. First Ratbert worries about his wisdom being derived from bad analogies (a form of metaphor). Then Dogbert responds to this worry with an analogy that implicitly compares his wisdom to wine, and then punctures it with his last observation.

Metaphor can be very useful, but it always has this inherent limitation–Is the analogy really appropriate, or is it misleading–or perhaps both? One of my favorite sayings points this out well: “The early bird gets the worm. . . . But the second mouse gets the cheese.”