Self Mastery Series - Learning to like things that you don't - NLP

This is the very first of the self mastery topics that I will be touching on. Why self mastery.... it is because the path of success in life and entrepreneurship will have lots of difficulties and the chief culprit is the lack of control over one behaviour, thoughts or action. So, by mastering oneself, a person can take control of his/her own life and gear towards success and happiness. It is interesting to know that sometimes people tends to do things that is counter productive or even engage in self destructive behaviour even though one maybe fully aware of it but cannot really help it. Enough said, lets start.

This is something which I learned years ago but did not give much thought to it till now. Learning to like things that you dislike. Well, not just anything, but things that are actually good for you or can help you in a big way but somehow you just don't really like it.

I asked my colleague that how he managed to get his 1st class honours degree in one of most competitive school system in the world, Singapore. Note : Getting the grades is not enough to get 1st class honours, only the top 2-5 % of the cohort get it.

He simply put it, "learn to like the subjects that you hate." Why learn to like the subjects that you hate... no matter how much you might like your degree program, there will be bound to have some subjects that you really don't like or even hate it. These disliked subjects will pull down your overall credit points because you will definitely not be doing too well on it.

How this will work?

Remember that the pet subjects that you have back in school that always have very good grades? When you like a subject...

1. You will tend to spend more time and heart working on it.

2. You will go the extra mile become really good in it.

3. When you become really good in it, there will be a sense of satisfaction and you will feel better about it and will go through no.1 and 2 again and again.

4. With each each progression, you will repeatedly repeat the process. While doing so you will find that you can derived more joy from it and will really look forward doing it to become better and better.

5. Even when there is any obstacles, your "true love" of the subject will ensure that you will not at pulling out all available reserves to overcome it and the process will then repeat from 1 to 4.

(This is sometimes how expert or gurus are created. A great example will be Michael Jordan. How he became one of the best basketball player of all time will be a good read. In fact, in the early beginning, he is not that good. But passion, goal and sheer hard work make him into the person that we all know now. You can read more about it at a Michael Jordan tribute site.)

So, how do you make yourself to like those "good things" that you hate?

This is where Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) comes in.

1. A simple method is by association. Reward yourself with something that you really like when you have completed doing the targeted amount of tasks as required of the dislike subject. So, you will not hate it so much anymore. Slowly, you will start to associate things that makes you feel good with it.

2. Break it up into chunks and pieces. Take a "bite" at those pieces that does not seems so bad or those that you might even like. With each extra "bite", you will tell yourself that it is actually not so bad or maybe even really good. (George H W Bush might want to take a couple of hints here. He might fall in love eating his broccoli.)

3. Psyched yourself up. Keep telling yourself that it is good and make a list saying why it is good. Some of you might think that this is easier said than done but if you combined this with methods 1 and 2, this will be easier to accomplish.

I will appreciate it if anyone of you guys and gals out there have tried this method and give an objective feedback of your experience. Together, we will learned more ways to apply.