Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
“I Just Want NLP Techniques to Help Me Achieve My Goals!”
I’ve had a bit of pushback about this article series, along the lines of “Where’s the NLP? I want techniques I can use, not stuff about knowing yourself!”
Well… NLP, especially first-generation ‘classic’ NLP, has not traditionally put much emphasis on self-awareness. On the ‘personal development’ side (as opposed to using techniques to fix other people like a mechanic would fix a car), it’s mostly been about achieving your goals and techniques to increase your effectiveness and feel great, without much attention being paid to why you want those goals or what you want to feel great about.
You can see this when motivational gurus like Tony Robbins urge you to ‘master your self’ (as if the self was a lazy servant, to be whipped into line), or more recently in NLP-derived ‘dark psychology’ books which purport to give you techniques to influence people, without much consideration of your motivations for wanting to influence them in the first place, let alone the ethics of doing so.
So, no apologies for focusing on self-knowledge for a couple of articles. If you set out on a path of goal achievement without some idea of your own motivations and what’s really important to you, you might end up achieving all the goals you set yourself and then discovering, after all that effort, that they weren’t really what you wanted at all.
And if you don’t have some sense of what’s worked for you in the past, and what your strengths are, you might choose a path to your goals that’s much harder work and more emotionally bruising than it needed to be.
There are plenty of goal-setting techniques in this blog already, and plenty more to come.
That being said, let’s take a look at the high and low points of your life and see what you can learn from them.
Look at Your Life’s Journey So Far
Following on from the previous article about discovering your strengths, another way of becoming more self-aware is to take a look at the high and low points of your life. You could draw them as a graph, or list them out as in this example:
High points:
- Scoring the winning goal in a crucial match
- Being awarded my degree
- Birth of my children
- Finally getting the right marketing job
- Gaining a promotion last year
Low points:
- Failing my driving test
- Spending two years in a job I disliked
- Being passed over for the post in Paris
- Divorce
- Finding out I wasn’t suited to sales
When you have completed your list or graph, look back over it. Notice how each significant experience in your life has helped to make you the person you are today. Your life story is an endless source of learning, and you can look at it in different ways to gain new insights. First, take credit for making the high points happen happen. Ask yourself these questions:
- How did I contribute to that being a high point?
- What was I doing right?
- What did that teach me about myself?
How to Learn From Low Points
Remember that there is something positive to learn from the worst experiences, even if it’s only how to prevent a similar experience happening again. Facing adversity develops your character, but only if you choose to learn from it.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What positive things have I learned from that experience?
- In what ways has this made me a stronger/wiser/more compassionate person?
- If your life were to be made into a film, which episodes would the director emphasise to make an inspiring story?
- Which episodes would be selected if it was a feelgood comedy?
This article is based on an extract from my new book, Achieve Your Goals, Second Edition: Strategies from NLP and Psychology to Transform Your Life, which as the title implies is packed full of tools and thought experiments to help you achieve your goals, maintain your motivation while you’re getting there, and make sure they’re the right goals for you in the first place. Available in paperback or Kindle editions from Amazon, or in ebook format only direct from me.
© 2026, Andy Smith. All rights reserved.
I really enjoyed this article. The self-awareness chart is a thoughtful way to reflect on life’s highs and lows, and it encourages meaningful personal growth through honest self-reflection.