John Tepe, founder of John Tepe High Performance Mindset Coaching and Therapy, helps professionals master their beliefs and behaviours. With advanced degress in English Literature and Applied Neuroscience and expertise as a Master Practitioner of Neurolinguistic Programming, John helps clients to take control of their narrative.
Have you ever wondered how your thoughts, language, and memories shape your reality? In this article, we explore the transformative power of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), hypnosis, and applied neuroscience. By understanding the interplay between language, the subconscious mind, and neuroplasticity, you can take control of your mental “map,” reframe limiting beliefs, and align your mindset with your goals. Whether you’re seeking personal growth, professional success, or a deeper understanding of your inner world, these practical techniques offer tools to unlock your full potential. Let’s dive into the science and strategies behind self-transformation.
What is NLP?
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) explores the intricate connection between neurological processes, language patterns, and behavioral outcomes. Developed in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, NLP integrates insights from psychology, linguistics, and hypnotherapy to facilitate personal development and effective communication. NLP examines how the mind encodes a person’s sensory and emotional experience as language and how language then frames a person’s core beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors.
The language a person uses reveals underlying thought patterns and behaviors. Trained NLP Practitioners and Master Practitioners help clients identify their language patterns. This provides a “map” for the language structures that shape a person’s experience. To quote an NLP maxim: “Everyone’s map works perfectly for them. However, the map is not the territory.” In other words, everyone has a language structure that functions perfectly to create a person’s reality—their map. However, that structure does not account for all of reality. It’s only a filter. NLP therapists and coaches help clients identify their map and see how it creates their experience. The client can then choose which parts of the map to change to optimize their experience.
NLP and literary theory: The intersection of language and experience
NLP’s ideas about language resonate with what has long been known in literary criticism: language shapes experience. Structuralist theories study how signs in language attempt to signify reality—the “signified.” Signs never account for the totality of reality. Similarly, deconstructionism picks apart the language structure of any text and, like an NLP therapist, reveals assumptions, deletions, and distortions within the meaning of the text.
This intersectionality between NLP and literary criticism highlights how language shapes our perception of reality. Language structures our thoughts and behaviors at a near-automatic and subconscious level. We don’t notice because we are too busy living according to our mind’s “map.” Literature mirrors society, offering readers the opportunity to reexamine how language shapes experience—an art prized in cultures around the world and central to NLP’s approach to reframing limiting beliefs. The work of Milton Erickson, a pioneering hypnotherapist, significantly impacted NLP by emphasizing the role of the subconscious mind in behavior change.
NLP and neuroscience: Bridging the gap
Contemporary neuroscience provides empirical support for principles underlying hypnosis and NLP. Dr. David Spiegel, Willson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, has extensively researched the functional impact of hypnotic states on brain function. Spiegel’s laboratory at Stanford uses fMRI scanners to investigate these effects, identifying three consecutive steps of the hypnotic state, each associated with a respective part of neuroanatomy.
1. Downregulation of fear systems
Hypnosis decreases activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a brain region responsible for filtering external stimuli and managing fear-based responses. The ACC modulates a person’s “salience network,” which filters stimuli to identify potential dangers and align with core beliefs. NLP and hypnosis help clients manage these beliefs, reshaping limiting, fear-based thoughts into those that motivate them toward positive, desired goals.
2. Engagement of the prefrontal cortex
With the ACC downregulated, the brain’s central executive—the prefrontal cortex—is free to manage planning and goal-oriented thinking unhindered. This stage fosters problem-solving and judgment-free critical thinking.
3. Deactivation of the default mode network
Hypnosis quiets the posterior cingulate cortex, where the brain’s “default mode network” resides. This network manages the ego and sense of self. By deactivating it, the client gains cognitive flexibility. As Dr. Spiegel explains, this enables clients to move beyond limiting beliefs about their identity and imagine new possibilities.
Memory, emotion, and neuroplasticity
Complementing this, Dr. Charan Ranganath’s research at the University of California, Davis, focuses on the malleability of memory and its interaction with emotion. His work indicates that emotional states from the past can and do significantly influence memory encoding and retrieval. Previous experience sets the pathways through which we process subsequent events. In other words, past events lay down the experiences we use to measure what is possible for us – what we can and cannot do. Rangantha’s findings align with NLP techniques that aim to reframe emotional associations to past experiences. Through self-hypnosis, one is able to imagine oneself in time and travel backwards and forwards through past experience and into the imagined future. Memory exemplifies neuroplasticity – the brain's ability to learn and unlearn patterns of movement, consciousness, and experience. Indeed, intentional curiosity, wanting to understand and learn from our memories, according to Raganath powers the brain’s capacity to learn. Repeating a particular activity over time acclimates neural connections to one another, building the neural networks that enable us to do things automatically – like riding a bike, swinging a golf club, speaking a language, anything. And remembering counts as an activity; when we get curious about the past and remember certain events on purpose, we fire the same neurons that were activated during the original event and so doing allow the memory itself to be reshaped. Every time we remember, the memory can, and does, change.
Through self-hypnosis, one can induce oneself into a state of intense, narrow attention and then focus that attention intentionally on a desired experience from either the past or the future. The hypnotic state diminishes the conventional filters the brain has been using to give our consciousness a sense of ‘reality’ and simultaneously marginalises our in-built threat detection system. In sum, the hypnotic state allows us to look within and reflect without fear. Without fear we can explore what we really want and attune memories, current beliefs, and desired futures along a refined timeline. When I say, ‘take control of your narrative’ on my website, I mean it. NLP and hypnosis provide the precise tools for clients to perform ‘chronesthesia’ to reflect on the past and imagine desired futures. NLP is like applied neuroscience; its techniques harness what scientists have now proven through laboratory study. Our present is more of our past than we think, and our salience filters can be reprogrammed, all using neuroplasticity. Through these methods, NLP practitioners support clients to reframe their memories and strategically embed the habits needed for a desired goal.
Neuro-linguistic programming for everyday life
Incorporating NLP into daily routines can enhance self-awareness and goal attainment:
Monitor emotional states: Regularly assess your feelings to identify patterns.
Observe language use: Be mindful of the words you use, opting for empowering expressions.
Visualize desired outcomes: Engage in mental imagery of achieving your goals to reinforce positive, desired behaviour. See yourself having the skills you would like to acquire and attitudes you would like to embody.
Self-hypnosis techniques: Induction
Self-hypnosis serves as a valuable tool for accessing the subconscious mind, enabling individuals to reframe thought patterns and pursue personal goals. Here is an induction technique from Dr. Spiegel you can use:
1. Eye roll
Sit comfortably.
Gently roll your eyes upward as far as you can.
Notice the sensation of relaxation as your focus narrows.
2. Eye fixation induction
Choose a point slightly above eye level to focus on.
Keep looking up with your eyes rolled upwards as far as you can.
Close your eyes while still looking up. This will take effort.
3. Relax and let your body float.
Feel like you are floating on water, floating in outer space, on a bed, on a warm grassy meadow, whatever is your ideal.
Notice that as you float one of your hands wants to float upwards. Let it. If you want, you can rest this hand beside you or on your lap or chest.
Using timelines for change: A self-guided process
See here.
1. Discover your timeline
Recall a memory from your past (e.g., when you were five years old).
Ask yourself: “Where does this memory seem to come from? Is it behind me, to the side, or in another direction?”
Identify where your memories of the past and the future are located.
Observe if they seem arranged in a line. If so, this is your “timeline.”
2. Float above your timeline
Close your eyes and imagine yourself rising above your timeline, looking down on it.
Visualize the entire timeline below you, stretching from the past to the present and into the future
Notice how it feels to be above your timeline, observing it as a whole.
3. Relive a happy memory
Choose a positive memory from your past—something that made you very happy.
Float down into that memory and “step into” your body as it was then.
Relive the experience; make it as vivid with your senses and emotions as you can. Sense and feel everything.
After savouring the memory, step out of it and return to observing your timeline from above.
4. Check your future’s brightness
Float forward along your timeline to a point in the future.
Turn around and look back at the present and the past.
Ask yourself:
“Do the past, present, and future have the same brightness?”
If the future seems darker, acknowledge it and proceed to the next step.
5. Replace an unimportant memory
Select a light, non-significant memory from your past—something minor that isn’t emotionally charged.
Imagine taking this memory completely out of your timeline and holding it in front of you.
Push the memory farther and farther away, making it smaller and darker until it disappears.
6. Create a positive replacement
Design a new memory to replace the one you removed—one that reflects how you want to feel and act.
Visualize this new memory clearly, adding positive details that make it feel authentic and empowering. Sense and feel everything. Feel with your emotions and manipulate the memory so that everything happens ideally for your highest good.
Place the new memory into your timeline where the old one was, observing how it integrates with the surrounding memories.
7. Visualize a desired future event
Float forward into your timeline and find a future event you deeply want to achieve.
Step into this future event and imagine:
How it feels to accomplish this goal. Make your emotions vivid.
What you see, hear, and feel in this moment of success. Make your senses vivid.
Feel with your emotions and manipulate the memory so that everything happens ideally for your highest good.
Enhance the experience:
Adjust the brightness, clarity, or size of the event until it feels compelling and real. Imagine you have a workstation and you can use it to make the future event the very best experience.
Bring the event closer or further away based on what feels most powerful to you.
8. Anchor the future event
Step out of the future event and observe it from a third-person perspective.
Place the event back into your timeline, noting how it fits into the sequence of events between now and then.
Observe how changing this future event influences the other events along the timeline leading up to it. Image all previous events flying along the timeline and through this future event. As they pass through the future event, notice how they all adapt to align perfectly with it.
9. Return to the present
Float back along your timeline to the present moment
10. Exit the hypnotic state
Count backwards from 3.
On three, roll your eyes up.
On two, inhale and open your eyes
And one, let your floating hand fall, make a fist, open it and become completely present.
Give your mind some time to recalibrate. Notice how refresh and empowered you feel. Notice what’s different now about your mindset compared to how it was before you started this exercise.
Closing reflection
Reflect on how changing the timeline has altered your perspective on past and future events.
Notice any shifts in how you feel about the present or your ability to achieve your goals.
Recognize that adjusting one element of your timeline can influence the sum of all associated events.
Take control of your narrative today
Are you ready to reframe limiting beliefs, align your mindset with your goals, and unlock your full potential? Discover how the transformative tools of NLP, hypnosis, and applied neuroscience can help you create lasting change. Connect with us to start your journey toward personal and professional growth. Take the first step—schedule a session today and see what’s possible when you take control of your narrative.
Read more from John Tepe
John Tepe, High Performance Coach and Psychotherapist
John Tepe is the founder of John Tepe High Performance Mindset Coaching and Therapy, where he helps ambitious professionals gain clarity, master their behaviors, and capitalize on career opportunities like promotions, business deals, and personal milestones. With advanced degrees in English Literature and Applied Neuroscience, as well as expertise as a Master Practitioner of Neurolinguistic Programming, John blends creativity and science to empower his clients. His mission is to help professionals take control of their life narrative and achieve meaningful, lasting success.
