Autopilots

I have spent a good portion of the last month in Portugal, what a beautiful country. The main purpose of my stay there was to run an NLP Practitioner training course (NLP truly crosses all international boundaries) but I also took the opportunity to have a break at the end and recharge my batteries. Amongst other things during my break I was able to sit back and examine my life and my behaviours to check my autopilots. This is something that I do on a fairly regular basis and something that I would encourage you to do also.

We all run autopilots in our life, don’t we? Autopilots in this sense are the behaviours and thoughts that we run automatically and without consciously thinking about them. Our autopilots can range from all of the movements that are required in order to reach up and scratch our head when we have an itch, tying our shoelaces, to driving to work in the morning, and even doing all of the responsive tasks that are required to do our jobs.

Some Autopilots are useful to have

Some autopilots are certainly useful to have, aren’t they? If you had to think about all of the actions that are required to raise your hand to your head and scratch it, including activating all of the muscles in your arm and hand, then that would take a lot of thinking about, wouldn’t it? The thing is that we are limited in the amount of things that we can be doing and thinking about consciously at any one time, and so we rely on creating autopilots in order to ensure that we can maximise what we get done. This way we are able to scratch our head with one hand, write a text with the other hand, keep an eye out for the kids, and shout out instructions, all at the same time.

We learn, as we go through life that creating autopilots is timesaving, and can be productive and so we naturally try to automate as many things as possible. The trouble is that once we have our autopilots in place we hardly ever go back and make sure that they are serving us as we would like them to. The other trouble is that we automate things that we really would be better not automating.  This is where we end up getting drift in our lives and unwanted and self-defeating behaviours.

Examples of your autopilots

Let me give you a few examples. If you are going through a particularly tough time in your life, then when you wake up in the morning you may have lots of negative thoughts running through your head, thoughts about how bad things are and how bad things are going to be. We all go through tough times in life, that is part of life, there are ups and downs, eventually though storm clouds will pass over and brighter skies will return. The thing is that by the time the brighter skies are above us we may well have put in place an autopilot that ensures that we always run a series of negative thoughts when we wake up. This is how depression can start for some of us. We created an unwanted autopilot.

Another example. Once upon a time you may have thought that a certain nail on your hand had become a little long, so you thought that you would just bite it off. Problem over? Not necessarily, because the next time you look at a nail and see that it is a little long, then you may decide to take the same action. Before long you are biting your nails without thinking about it. You have created an unwanted autopilot.

The same thing can happen with smoking, overeating, bickering with your partner etc. Once these autopilots are ingrained in us, then they can be very tough to stop.

Fortunately we have lots of techniques in the world of NLP to help us with these unwanted autopilots. The key is to remember that behaviour is created by thought, and by examining our thoughts we can pinpoint the triggers (Anchors in NLP) to our unwanted actions. Amongst other things, we adopt beliefs about the world and our capabilities that also become autopilots and can seriously limit our potential in life.

A solution

So, I spent time on my break examining my results, my outcomes and my behaviours, working out where I had developed autopilots and removing the unwanted ones. I assessed my beliefs and my values, ordering and reordering them to make sure that I have my priorities in life the way that I want them. Oh, and I managed to spend time enjoying the beautiful algarve sunshine as well!

Are your autopilots running your life? Are your autopilots the way that you want them? Do you have unwanted thought patterns, unwanted behaviours? Learn techniques to get your life the way that you want it and assist others in doing the same, I invite you to join us on one of our NLP training courses.