Who Killed Pikey?

I live in Pune and quite often find myself driving around some particularly large stretches of road. My usual travel has me driving around at least for an hour or more on a daily basis.

As an NLP trainer, I find that this driving time can particularly be useful in my own personal development and I utilize this time by listening to audio programs from other trainers including but not limited to Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Earl Nightingale and other programs from Nightingale Conant corporation.

During one of these not so unusual days, I was listening to a program titled "World's Greatest Achievers". And I heard a story that particularly caught my attention.

It is about an experiment conducted with a Pike fish whom I shall call "Pikey". So Pikey is a predator fish that feeds off smaller prey fish like minnows. As interesting science is, even more interesting is scientific research. As I sat in my car driving around one of the minor arterial roads of Pune, I couldn't help but wonder at the marvel of what passes in the name of scientific research. So here I was listening to a the story of a group of scientists and their study of Pikey.

It so happened, that they kept Pikey in a fish tank for observation and would regularly feed Pikey with its favorite food, the minnows. Then one day, this group of scientists decided to keep the minnows protected by a glass bowl inside Pikey's fish tank.

Can you imagine being hungry and watching your food right in front of your eyes and every time you make an attempt to grab the food, you bang your nose against a glass wall? Well that is exactly how Pikey must have felt. This went on for a few days and somehow Pikey survived the pangs of hunger.

Then these scientists who love to play with the mind under the noble but somewhat weird attempt at studying the neurological impact of food deprivation, decided to release the minnows freely into Pikey's tank.

Guess what? Even as I sat in my car driving around, my years of NLP Training made me realize even before the story proceeded further. Pikey starved himself to death.

This is referred as "Anchoring" in NLP or Neuro Associative Conditioning as referred to by Tony Robbins. Regardless of the linguistic play, what it effectively means is that Pikey programmed himself into a belief that he can't get to his food and hence did not even attempt to go for it after this belief was conditioned into his thought patterns.

Very interesting story about mental conditioning & programming. This would happen to be one of the many metaphors providing an analogy between mental programming and our day to day lives.

However, that day, I was struck by another thought and how it might be prevalent in our lives - be it in our relations or be it in our place of employment/profession.

That - there are people carrying out their own scientific research knowingly or unknowingly building and creating this mental conditioning; a conditioning which is harmful or undesirable in one way or another.

Do you know any Pikey who might have metaphorically starved to death? Could it be possible that you or someone you know, love or care for might have been Pikey at some time? Are there scientists that you know or might know of who might be creating these programs?

And what about those that you don't know of?

What if the same science could be used to create more useful and desirable mental programs that have a far more useful and desired impact on your neurology?

Would you want to learn how to identify these programs? Would you want to learn what builds / creates these programs? Would you want to learn how to break those which have stopped serving their purpose and only serve to limit you? Would you want to learn to build more useful and desirable programs?

You can do so now. NLP (Neuro Lingustic Programming) is the science of studying what creates/builds these programs.


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