I wonder how you found your shine this week. Maybe, you can remember it now…
My shine was spotted by a business networking colleague, who said:
“You’re wearing some really cool new clothes, Tanya. Looking good and great energy today!””
“I’ve got my shine on,” I joked and accepted the compliment albeit none of my clothes were new!
In NLP terms, your “shine” is a nominalisation. Nominalisations are one of the Meta Model language patterns you learn on our Licensed practitioner of NLP course. These magical patterns are great if you want to understand how you or your team [family or colleagues], clients or others are thinking in order to affect success. Change workers, like me, love nominalisations because they’re magical words that tell us where to begin our work and they can be great if you want to motivate your team.
So, what is nominalisation? In a nutshell, nominalisations are verbs or adjectives that have been turned into a noun. People use them all the time and so long as your playful you can have all sorts of fun with them and support your own or others’ success.
You may hear: My anxieties are playing me up!
And say: Give them to me, I love to play!
Or: I’ve lost my sparkle!
And reply: I wonder where you left it.
Or even: I’ve got no motivation!
And reply in jest: Well, go and get some. Here’s the money!
But, as you know, you can’t put motivation in your shopping trolley however hard you try!
Nominalisations hide the action or behaviour but when you ask the right question, people realise the negative behaviours they need to stop and the positive actions that need to start. The wonderful thing is that when you turn any of these words back into a verb, you can instantly go from feeling stuck to feeling momentum again.
You don’t have to have anxieties that are playing up or have lost your sparkle to play along. Just notice what happens when you answer the questions below:
- What do you do to feel anxious? [To be anxious]
- What are you doing when you sparkle? [To sparkle]
- How do you know when you’re being motivated? [To be motivated or to motivate]
By now, you’ll know I wasn’t actually wearing my shine, but I was using lots of skills from NLP toolkit when I received that compliment…quickly building rapport and spinning a great state.
My invitation to you this week is to listen up and when you hear a nominalisation, ask a question to support you or others to change their thinking.