I was packing the car this morning to visit a customer and just as I was about to leave I had a feeling that I had forgotten something.

I considered a few things to help me remember but the phrase my mother always used kept jumping into my head "go back and think".

She always used this when we forgot something, go back and do what you were doing when you knew what it was. So I sat at the desk that I sat at when I was planing the trip and instantly remembered some paperwork that I needed.

It is basic anchoring really, but it was a standard phrase in my childhood, before I knew anything about NLP.

The other related and pretty obvious one is "when did you last have it"?

So

What things did you learn as a kid that you would now think of as NLP.

When I was about 18, I played field hockey at a fairly decent level. Every Saturday, before a match, we would have to wait for the pitch to become available. As we were warming up on the sidelines, we would normally watch the last 5-10 minutes of the previous game, usually an under-11 boys' match. Obviously, as we were much older, we hit the ball harder, ran faster etc, yet every Saturday when I watched these little kids playing it seemed like the ball was moving at incredible speeds, yet as soon as we started playing the speed of the ball was manageable.

This was probably the first time I was consciously aware of distorting time in this way.

Recalling emotional states by playing special pieces of music, not only to get seminental by recalling some event or person, but also to get motivated or to change the state. The same with the smells.

So to cut the story short, NLP was to technically reveal to me the associative mechanisms built on the auditory, visual, or oflactory rep systems.

I was creative in using speciall smells to get into the proper mood, and only later NLP explained that the smells dig out emotions straight from amygdala, bypassing cortex.

I was also using visualisation, which I believe NLP considers as its own "modelled" or contributed techique, nearly ever mentioning its big heros like Shakti Gawain or Maxwell Maltz, creator of the Psycho-Cybernetrics and self-image psychology.