NLP: Uncovered with Tony Wrighton #61

After all, all art is experience. Hello and welcome to The Company Doctor, and an extra warm Company Doctor welcome to our special guest Tony Ryton, who's joined us today to dive into the topic of neurolinguistic programming. Tony is a podcast veteran, having hosted his own podcast, Zestology, for the past 10 years. He's also the author of 3 books, one of which, Learn NLP the Non-Boring Way, is regularly among Amazon's top 3 books in the world on the subject. We're very excited to have him on the show today stay for what is a fascinating discussion around the intriguing topic of neuro-linguistic programming. Tony and Gary, over to you.

Please don't send me to prison.

Hey, Tony Wrighton, thank you so much for joining the Company Doctor.

Welcome, Gary. How you doing?

So good.

Just before we start recording, you said I wasn't looking smiley enough, so I'm going to turn it on now.

I know, you're such a smiley face. I'm delighted to have you on. I was so excited that you were coming on because This— today's topic is NLP Uncovered, and I thought, who's one of the country's foremost experts in NLP? It's got to be Tony. So I'm so pleased you're on. Thanks for coming.

Oh, thank you, Gary. And now, over the years, I've always enjoyed our sort of chats and collaborations, and I always get inspired by spending time with you. So thanks for bigging me up, but I feel the same about you as well.

Very nice man that you are. So, so, Tony, listen, there's, there's lots to know about Tony. And you only have to Google Tony Wrighton to see how much there is about Tony. So what, for the people listening, what are the highlights and what makes Tony Tony?

Well, there's a backstory, um, but, uh, yeah, essentially I've, I've sort of been working in broadcasting for around 30 years in radio and TV, and I always had this thing on the side. I was always the self-help guy on the side because I started training in Neuro Linguistic Programming, or NLP. And I don't know how much your listeners know about NLP, but they may know a lot, in which case I don't know who to explain it, or they may not know much, in which case I can explain it more. You can let me know. But started training in that, and now that's become my full-time gig, really.

Amazing. Well, actually, we do want to know a lot about it, and it is mainly for people that don't know that much about it. So that's what we've called it, um, NLP Uncovered, because I think it's a great opportunity for people to lift the covers on NLP. And so my first question is, what is NLP and why does it matter?

Definitely a question that gets asked a lot. What is NLP? What is it? It's a study of how we communicate with ourselves and other people. And you can make radical changes when you start to communicate with yourself better and obviously with other people better as well. It's a study of how we do things well. And it's used by millions all over the world in all sorts of different disciplines. It's used a lot in business, a lot in therapy, a lot in everything from sales to speech writing to sports psychology. And the set of skills that it provides is really exciting, actually. And I mean, I sort of, when I first started training in it, it was, I was just doing NLP. And now I combine it with a whole hodgepodge of other things that I've trained in over the years, just like you, Gary. I mean, you've got so much experience. It's not just one thing that you do, is it?

No, and that's what I was going to ask you, actually, because I think when I first met you, you explained it is you kind of do a lot of this stuff anyway, you just don't think about it. And I think it'd be useful to share with people kind of how it shows up in our kind of average lives of a person that they might not realize, without getting too deep on it.

Well, I mean, that is an interesting one. And what I probably said to you at the time is that good people who are good at NLP actually are sometimes— haven't trained in NLP. And sometimes people who've trained for a long time in NLP are very bad at it. Some of us are just good at communicating. With ourselves and other people. You know, if I take one NLP skill which isn't exclusive to NLP but is fairly central to what we do, and that is the reframe, for example. That is taking something that's not particularly serving you, an attitude or an emotion or a belief or a feeling, and reframing it to mean something else in your life. So for example, I always struggle at this time of year, Gary Gamp. It's getting— it's damp and it's a bit cold and it's raining outside, and right now I can't see any sun as I look outside my window. But I could reframe that in all sorts of different ways to say, I love autumn because there's roaring fires and Strictly's on the telly and it's the football season and Christmas is almost here and the smell of bonfires and lovely, you know, the brown leaves and the lovely coloured leaves on the trees, all that sort of thing. Some people just do that naturally. And some people like me need a bit of a nudge, which is why I got so involved in all this.

But it's great. I mean, as you're talking through it, I'm thinking about the fire. I bought some wood yesterday, so it's coming. And so I love that time of year. Yeah, I love the smell of it. So is it then, because a lot of people— I know you're gonna, you know, this question is coming, but is it a force for good or a force for evil, would you say?

Well, that, I mean, that is a really interesting one because I've, I've now got the second or third best-selling book in the world on NLP. And when you look at a lot of the titles that sell quite well Unfortunately, they are aligned with things like dark psychology, which I don't even really know what it is, but it doesn't sound great. Let's be honest. Um, and really, you know, when you look at any form of communication skill, it's all about the intention behind it, is whether you, quote, use your powers for good or use your powers for evil. These are very powerful techniques, and I would say overall definitely a force for good. But just like all sorts of different things, it's not going to be a force for good if it's in the wrong hands. And you could say that for almost any technique for communication, therapy, self-improvement. You could say the same thing for that as well.

I love the way you just kind of threw into the conversation about being the bestseller, which you are, by the way. I think your, your work's been published in 12, and I think you're kind of excited because I think you're about to go into a 13th language, aren't you, on your books?

Thank you for mentioning it, Gary. I was almost like, I planted that question. Yes, I've just, just uh, signed a Vietnam deal for my, for my book Beat Burnout.

So I, I think it's fantastic. The reason, the way I found we met in the first place is you wrote a book called Persuade in a Minute, which I loved because it synthesized some of these ideas in a minute. And through, you know, through that, I got, I got in touch with you because I liked it so much. So something I really recommend. But back to this false for evil stuff, can you give us an example where it's been a force for good, where you got maybe some surprising results or some kind of transformation as a result?

Well, Persuade in a Minute is a good example because that was back in the old days, really, Gary. You know, my first 3 books were published through traditional publishers, the biggest publisher in the UK. And to be honest, the reception was quite underwhelming, which often happens when you publish with a traditional publisher. You know, they got published in lots of languages, but in our country, you know, Gary, you enjoyed the book and that, and at least somebody enjoyed it. That's excellent news. Loved it. So since then, my, my company has published the books and it's sort of being more positive. But, um, yeah, I mean, so essentially the skills in Persuade in a Minute are all skills where you are trying to be more persuasive with other people and with yourself as well. And you have to make a call: is this something that's going to put out a positive message in the world or not? For example, my son is struggling to go to school at the moment, and it is a real challenge of my NLP skills to get him to feel happier when we drop him off at school. He's perfectly happy when we pick him up, but he's 4 years old, he's only just started school. I'm really working on the NLP skills to try and make sure that he feels happier when we drop him off. And I feel this is an excellent example of NLP out in the world doing a force for good, because if he is happier, that means the NLP has worked well.

And we're looking forward to finding out a few more tips in there. I mean, one thing, as you were speaking, because you said that Persuade in a Minute was an early book of yours, I think it was about 8 to 10 years ago, maybe longer. Has NLP evolved over the last X years? And if so, how might it have changed? Because lots of things do change.

Yeah, so NLP was invented in the '70s by John Grinder and Richard Bandler in California, and that's why it has these sort of— a lot of the metaphors and the naming of the language in NLP can be sort of associated to computers, about the same time as computers started getting big. So neurolinguistic programming, for example. And I would say that over the years, NLP, along with many other of the sort of geeky things that I'm involved in, has become a little bit more normal. So when I— I mean, if you think about Tony Robbins, for example, Tony Robbins learned NLP. That is what he does. It is NLP skills, but it's quite big and bombastic and on the stage and, you know, sort of dancing around. And I would say that in recent years, a slightly more understated style has crept in of teaching around NLP. As well as some of the other things I'm involved in, like sort of biohacking and stuff like that. And that's actually very refreshing for me because that's my style.

Yeah, but you know, it would be interesting to bring it out because, uh, people are probably listening thinking, well, it sounds really intriguing, I can't get my arms around it. Could you walk us through maybe a simple NLP technique that listeners might be able to understand to benefit them? Maybe. I know there's so many.

Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I'm sort of keen to relate to your audience as much as possible. And obviously one of the things that I mentioned in the book was We talked quite a bit about emails and being more persuasive in emails. And one of the things that I think is interesting is that you can look at the language that someone uses and you can communicate better when you work out what sort of language system they prefer. So, we tend to prefer one of the three senses, the main senses. So, we tend to be quite visual, quite auditory, which means we sort of tend to focus on the way things sound, or quite kinesthetic, so the way things feel, or the way we sort of touch things. And we tend to prefer one of these senses. So, you will often see that people prefer one of these types of communication when they send you an email. They'll say something like, "Yeah, that looks like a really good idea." Or they might say, "Sounds good," in which case they favour the auditory system. Or they might say, "Yeah, feels like we're making progress here." When you start to notice these patterns in their email, you can start to reflect that language back to them. In fact, just in general, reflecting the language style. And even I find the layout of an email that you receive, if they say many thanks, say many thanks back. You know, you are literally just getting rapport with the other person, and rapport is such a central part. And I've noticed this with my wife, you know, she's very kinesthetic. The way things feel are so important to her. And I am a cold-hearted individual. No, I'm not really, but, uh, but for me, the way things look and sound— I mean, I have worked in broadcasting for 20 years— are more important. So I try and adapt my language when I'm talking with my wife.

That's great. And that kind of— is it called mirroring when you're trying to use same similar language? There's a term for it?

It would be, yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And mirroring and looking at the senses is a central part of NLP. So, you know, we've got 5 senses and that is how we experience the world. And sometimes that can be a very positive thing. Sometimes it can be not so positive. For example, a lot of phobias develop because we go through a negative experience. For instance, you might be scared of flying. You're on a plane and it's a very bumpy journey, and then in your mind you replay that plane journey and the senses just are just coming at you. It's an assault of the senses. The pictures are big and bright and colourful, and you can hear exactly how it sounded at the time, and you can feel just how terrified you felt. And what we do, what one of the things we do is the fast phobia cure in NLP, is we just sort of turn the senses down and we maybe make it black and white, or we push it off into the distance, or we, we sort of imagine that there's a volume knob, or we change the sound of the voice. And, um, all of that stuff works really very well.

I love that. As you were talking, I'm thinking my wife Jane, as you know, she's scared of flying and when they say this might be a bumpy journey, the pilot says it, then she's heightened the other way. So this is a good tip, I'm going to pass it on.

Yeah, it's funny because my mum just came to visit. You know, we're living in Portugal now, did you know that?

Yeah, I did.

Yeah, awesome. Um, my mum just came out to visit us a couple of weeks ago and the same thing happened. So the pilot said, oh, it's going to be a bit of a bumpy journey, and she was just, oh, now I'm, now I'm, now I'm on red alert.

Yeah, that's great. Oh, that's a great example. And, you know, and if someone's listening, they're thinking Right, I need to get started. Obviously I need to go and buy Tony's books, right? But what is the best way for someone who's just trying to initiate themselves in NLP and just get started? What would you recommend?

Um, well, I mean, I would say sort of looking into this stuff around the senses, and then you can look at some of the sort of NLP 101 techniques. There's, there's really fun stuff around anchoring and associating and disassociating with stuff as well. So what we were just talking about was when you're scared of flying, you're really associating with how it feels when you're scared of flying. And at that sense, you want to dissociate. Other times we want to associate with how we feel when we do something well. So if someone's just getting into NLP and they want to be better at something, for example, you know, I mean, it's sort of a— it's a, it's a bit of a cliché in a company setting, but you've got a presentation coming up and you're nervous of presentations, which most people are, and you want to do your best, and you also want to feel a little bit less nervous in the moment. One very positive thing to do would be to combine association with the senses. So think about when you did a presentation that was great, and then remember exactly how it looked and how it sounded and how you felt, and really associate with that feeling. And as you do that, you could layer in one more NLP technique, which is anchoring. And you could squeeze your thumb and forefinger together as you just think about exactly how it was when you were presenting really well. Then you can do that just before your presentation. You'll, you'll, you'll smash it.

I love that because basically with that time when you were in the zone, I was so good in that presentation, you kind of referenced back to that. That's so good.

Yeah, and I mean anchoring, you know this Gary already, but I might as well just briefly go over it. Anchoring was originally discovered by Pavlov And Pavlov's dogs, people might have heard of. Pavlov had a set of dogs that he would feed every day and he would ring a bell. And after a while, he noticed that he could ring the bell and they would salivate even when they weren't fed. And that is a perfect example of anchoring. They associated an external stimulus, which was the bell, with eating, and therefore they'd salivate. And these external stimulus are all around us. So for example, when you hear a song that reminded you of being in love when you were 17 years old, that's an anchor. And we can use physical anchors. Like that when we're going into a presentation or when we want to feel a certain way.

That's really good. And there's loads of nuggets like that. Obviously, they're kind of like almost set pieces, aren't they? The way you, the way you talk about them. And you've written a new book, which I've read and devoured, which is called Learn NLP the Non-Boring Way, I think is— I don't know if there's a strapline, but that's how you explained it. Yeah. What made you write that? What was behind that?

Well, it's been quite an interesting journey for me. I left my job at Sky about 2 and a half years ago, and I was always broadcasting 3 or 4 days a week and doing this stuff on the side when I first met you, 1 to 1 and a half days a week. And I thought, you know, I'm going to devote a bit more attention. I still do some broadcasting bits and do my own podcast as well, but I thought, I'm just going to go for it. I'm going to bring out some books. I'm going to keep doing my podcast and see if I can just build up that side of the business. And one of the things that I thought I could write a book about was NLP, but I thought, oh, no one will really be that interested because, uh, I mean, I don't— over the years I have— I don't necessarily say to people, hey, let's sit down and do an hour of NLP. I sort of reach into my toolkit and see what it is that might work. And I've trained in other stuff as well, energy psychology and Mind Factor stuff and this sort of thing. But actually, it turns out that the NLP stuff really is interesting to people, and there is a demand for people And I had double doubts when I brought it out because NLP now stands for two things, Gary. It also stands for natural language processing, which is what is used on ChatGPT.

I know. It's funny.

I thought everyone's gonna get confused.

It's funny actually, because I looked on ChatGPT to try and get some insight on NLP, and that's what it came up with. It came up with computer stuff. AI.

So I was very worried that actually the old NLP would just get forgotten, but no, it is still popular and it is a very worthwhile set of skills. So that's why I brought it out really. I also, I think I have always felt that one of the things I'm— there's lots of things I'm not very good at, but one of the things I am good at is demystifying quite complex techniques and distilling them down to something very simple, which is what my brain needs. And that is what I wanted to do with the book as well.

Now you are— and that was my intro to you because it all of a sudden made it simple because I'd read a book before about NLP and I just didn't get it. I just kept going into a trance while I was reading it. And actually, reading your new book, Learn NLP, that's how I've read it. It's almost like set pieces. So I've read, read a chapter and then I've just gone off and worked on that. I think it's amazing. So I highly recommend that. And, you know, now that you're kind of armed and dangerous and you've got this knowledge and you've got a lot of knowledge, you really are renowned for it. If you could go back, would it have helped you in your career more or in a different way? You know, going right back. Because you were on the breakfast show, I think, on the radio. You've had various— ITV presenter. If you knew what you knew now, going back, would that have helped you in your career in any way?

Well, I mean, that's— that is interesting because I started training in NLP in 2004, and I'm sure I told you the story, Gary, but in— in soon after I started, I thought, I've got the perfect place to try out some of these techniques, and that is on my radio show, to get people to feel a little bit happier and better when they listen to my show, and maybe try and get them to listen for a little bit longer as well. And my listening figures went through the roof. So, uh, it really made quite a difference quite quickly to what I did in terms of my career. I don't think that I would have made many different choices, but to be honest, I have been doing all this stuff alongside my career for quite a long time. Would I like to have a little bit more money in the bank account? Probably, but you know, most people would, but I don't, I don't, I don't regret too much. It's all going pretty well, to be honest.

Fair enough. And if someone's listening and they're thinking, well, you know, I kind of like the sound of this stuff, I'm going to dig into it, maybe I can use some of these skills fundamentally in my career. I might be a salesperson, or I might be a manager, or I might be doing anything. What would be the best way for them to kind of get into it from a career point of view? So that it kind of, you know, because I guess you did the same when you launched your book, you know, use your techniques to help you with that. What could they do?

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I wrote about in the book is the Law of Requisite Variety. Which is best described as a state of curiosity. So it's not just into— this is healthy and helpful, not just for your career but for life. But really what the Law of Requisite Variety means is try as many different things as possible, and then you're more likely to find something that works. So that means try new things and eat new foods and ride a tandem or whatever, but it means the more variety you can introduce to your life, the more you can adjust and operate at your best. And so that, in terms of career means try and learn as many different sort of modalities as possible. Some things will work, some things don't. And one of the reasons that I introduced it in the book is because I wanted to say to people, there are 30 days worth of techniques in this book. Probably some of them you'll really enjoy, and possibly some of them you won't like as much. But the Law of Requisite Variety means if you keep an open mind in a state of curiosity, you are more likely to find something that serves you just by following the law of requisite variety.

That's interesting. So really what you're saying is that it's not, you know, you're not just trying to do it for your career, but it kind of becomes part of your, your life, your DNA. Is that what you say? That's the way you should behave?

I think so, yeah. And I think, you know, more recently, Gary, we've made decisions that, you know, moving to Portugal, for example, is a really interesting one because we've moved— obviously there's no, there's no career move in terms of moving to Portugal. It's purely a lifestyle thing. It does facilitate working in my career perfectly well, but quite often I'll now think it'll get to sort of 4:30 and I'll think, why am I, why am I still working? I've moved to Portugal to spend more time with the family, more time outside, have more fun. And that doesn't involve sitting in front of a screen till 9 o'clock. Now, sometimes there are times like at the moment when I'm launching a course when you have to be working a little bit longer, but as much as possible, I try and make my decisions, not just around work.

Yeah. So it's about your lifestyle and the balance in your life, which makes complete— and I think you've always been good at doing that, to be honest.

I think you're good at that as well, Gary.

What, life? Life? Yeah, I am. I party a bit too hard though.

It's a trouble. Yeah, yeah.

I think the wife keeps me young. But, um, you know, at the moment, Tony, I'm working with quite a lot of schools because I'm trying to give back a bit. I'm at that age I want to give back. And, and you've got me thinking through this conversation, do you think it's NLP is a skill that we should teach at school or something, you know, we should teach people to use in their everyday life at an early age, or is it a bit dangerous at that age?

I don't think it's dangerous at all because I think all of the skills of— and one of the things that I tried to do in the book is link everything back to science and scientific references because NLP itself is not a scientific endeavor, but everything that you find in NLP can be proved multiple times over, everything apart from one technique. Which I don't like as much, which I can talk to you about in a sec. But, um, for example, you know, there's a lot of stuff around metaphor and storytelling in NLP. And one of the things I talk about is, is don't trust the GPS. You know, I tell about— I talk about all these holidaymakers who hire a car and they type in their destination and they end up driving into the sea because they are blindly following the GPS. And the moral of the story is, are you on the right path? Don't necessarily trust the path just because you decided ages ago is the right path, or someone someone else told you, you know, continually figure out whether the sat nav is giving you good directions or not. And this sort of metaphor in storytelling, I think, is massively helpful to, to people at all ages, because I think really that's, you know, the way to communicate is through stories. And I've increasingly found, Gary, with all my favorite books now, my— all my favorite non-fiction books, it's got to be someone who's a really good storyteller, otherwise I just switch off.

Yeah. Otherwise it's just being talked at, isn't it? I guess that's part of the challenge.

Yeah. And you know, sometimes when you're reading a non-fiction book and it's quite dense and you're in bed and you're almost ready for bed and you drop off really quickly because it's just dense.

Definitely. It's great for going to sleep to, right?

Yeah, exactly. But other times you're reading a fiction book. I mean, I remember there was one, the one book, I don't know if you've ever read The Help, fantastic book. But when I got near the end of The Help, I loved it so much I stayed up until 6 o'clock in the morning reading the book. Wow. Just, I just couldn't put it down. And that's the difference between being a good storyteller and then weaving in your point, or not telling stories.

Yeah, I can see it. Well, that's great. So I've got a couple of more questions for you, and then we're going to get to your musical taste. One of the things is just, just to kind of synthesize into like 3 things, because most people can only remember 3 things. If there were 3 things that someone should do to get started, what would you recommend? Because there's a lot out there, it's kind of hard to know where to start. If you could only do 3 things, what would they be for an LP?

I would say you could, well, first you could buy my book, which has got 30 days worth of techniques, but you could do something called Good, Better, How, which I've talked to you about in the past. At the end of every day, you could write down 3 things, good, What went well during the day? And you could write this on your computer, on your phone, or you could write it a piece of paper and a pen if you want to be old school. Then you don't write what wasn't good, you write what could be better. That is a very simple example of a reframe that we spoke about previously. And then the final column, you write how. So how could it be better? And that gives you the action point to go on to the next day. You know, I mean, there's a— there's a— you'll read so many things online around goal setting. And how important it is to have goals. And in NLP, we talk about outcomes rather than goals. And we also talk about processes because ultimately there's a lot of people who want to, I don't know, win Wimbledon, for example, but only one person can win Wimbledon every year.

Yeah, it's not going to be me.

Are we going to say that we fail every, every day, or are we going to say, well, that went— what was good? You're giving yourself some little victories every day by saying what was good, and then you're giving yourself something to work on, and you're potentially realigning your goal as you go along. Okay, maybe I'm not going to win Wimbledon, but I'm going to train a Wimbledon champion. Or maybe I'm not going to train a Wimbledon champion, but I'm just going to win against Bob on Friday.

Yeah, that's correct. That's, that's great advice. Yeah, because, uh, and actually, that technique that you taught me, I actually still do it. I find it massively helpful because I used to do a to-do list in the morning and then not do any of it, and it's demoralizing. So I find using that technique really works for me, so I love it.

Great, I'm so pleased you still use it.

I do, I love it, honestly. It's just really practical, it makes sense. There's so many apps where you can kind of have to-do lists, but they're pointless because you're, you're not motivated to do them. Um, yeah, Tony, so give us 3 quickfire takeaways Uh, NLP in a nutshell, what are the 3 things that you want us to think about when you think NLP?

I'd like you to think about changing your perspective. So I'll give you a couple of quotes. Matt Haig in the book The Humans, which is an excellent book by the way, said, uh, in your mind, change the name of every day to Saturday and change the name of work to play. And where that's the reframes that we were speaking about before. So you might want to, you might want to think about changing your perspective. Then you could think about one of the central tenets of NLP is how we do things well. So if you want to learn how to do things well, you want to model other people who've already done it well, and you want to model how you do it well as well. So, you know, for a start, reading books about other people. If you admired Steve Jobs, you'd be— great start to read Walter Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs. You'll find he did some things very well and some things very badly as well. And then I guess the other things you could think about is the power of the unconscious mind in terms of we have a lot of these limiting beliefs that hold us back. And I see this particularly in the health area, which is where I'm working a lot at the moment in terms of NLP and health. And limiting beliefs would be something like, "I'm just the sort who gets ill often," or, "Oh, I never get promotions." And when you can delve into your unconscious mind, because often this requires a bit more deep work, you can start to change those limiting beliefs, and then you really soar, because those are the things that were always subconsciously steering you in the slightly wrong direction.

Wow, that's good stuff. And actually, you've helped me with my last question. My last— before we get to your musical taste, my last question is that you have kind of fused together your thinking around, or your work around, NLP and health. Tell us about that, because I, I think it's a— it's an eye-opener. Just give us a kind of quick intro to that. How the two go together.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just really interesting because over the years I've specialized in two areas, which is NLP but also health. I've got a podcast on health. I love a bit of biohacking, and I know a lot of people in what you might call the slightly extreme health space. And I find almost every time there's one thing that they're missing, and it's not yet another supplement or yet another gadget, it's what's going on between the ears and their mindset. Ultimately, it's not necessarily the sexy stuff, but the things that we know are good for us, everything from meditation to working on these limiting beliefs. Often, people have real anxiety, especially related to their health. When you can start to interrupt that using an NLP pattern interrupt, looking at NLP presuppositions to change the way that you feel and the way that you think about your health, So on the course that I've got, which is called the Healthy AF Method— thank you for mentioning it, Gary— there's 3 sort of pillars to it. The first one is just healing. So it's like immediately stuff which starts to make you feel better, reduce that fight or flight response, boost your parasympathetic nervous system, and start to allow your body to heal. And then we look at the fun stuff around optimizing, and then the really deep stuff, which is transformation. And that we use an NLP technique called logical levels, which is Ah, we could have done a whole podcast on logical levels.

It's brilliant. Maybe we will, who knows, right?

Let's do it.

Yeah, let's do it. But this is great because we, on the last few episodes, we've been talking about growth mindset, Carol Dweck. I don't know if you're into that.

I've heard of it, yeah.

And when I've been digging into some of the things you've said about linking NLP to health and talking about mindset being a big part of the way you, the way you feel, you know, we're going to do a podcast on growth mindset. Maybe we will, if you, if you're up for it. Maybe we'll revisit it because I think it's really It's a really interesting area that will really help people. Awesome. Tony, we're going to go to your musical taste. Just before we do, thank you so much for coming on. I'll tell you, you know, I've known you for, I think it's 10 years now. We did an audiobook together early in my, in my career of doing this kind of stuff, and you really helped me and my family. So it's great having you on. You're an inspiration, and, and you simplify the complex, and I really recommend people dig into NLP, but particularly look at Tony's stuff because it just makes it clear and obvious and practical.

Oh, Gary, thank you very much for that. Really appreciate it. No, I mean it.

So here goes. Here's the thing we want to know. We've got a playlist for our guests on the music that either inspires them or just some, it means something to them, and we'll add it to our Spotify company doctor playlist. So what is the Tony Wrighton choice of music?

Okay, well, I'm looking forward to contributing to your playlist. But just before I do, I just want to explain an example of how I use playlists with an NLP technique called chaining anchors. So music can make us feel a certain way, can't it? But often when you're feeling particularly, let's say, anxious or nervous or unhappy, just putting on one song is not going to make a huge difference. So what I use with chaining anchors is 4 songs, and it will be one song that makes you feel neutral, one song you quite like, one song you really like, and then the fourth song is the song that you love beyond any other. And what happens is you're sort of guiding yourself through this journey. I used to use it with someone who was scared of driving over bridges, believe it or not, and she would put on this playlist 15 minutes before she got to the bridge. And at 15 minutes away, she was feeling awful, and it sort of guided her into a more positive state by the time she got to the bridge. So the final song on my Chaining Anchors playlist, which I'm going to contribute today, is the one that I absolutely love at the moment. Me and my 4-year-old son dance around to a lot, and I'm not sure how cool it is, but it's Dire Straits' Money for Nothing.

Love that song.

Good, good.

I can see it. I'm picturing it. We should get your Chaining Anchors list, actually. Maybe we should do another playlist on that.

That's really cool.

Great. That's really cool.

Yeah.

Tony, thank you so much. It's been really interesting and helpful and inspirational. Thanks for joining us, and we hope to maybe make another one another time.

Ah, brilliant. Love to. Thank you for having me on.

Thanks for listening and gratitude to Tony for that terrific insight into the world of NLP. If you're interested in learning more from Tony about the topics that he spoke about today and how they relate to health, visit TonyWyton.com/healthy. And if, like me, this episode has made you realize that some one-on-one coaching from Tony would be massively beneficial, head to TonyWyton.com/coaching. For now, thanks again for lending us your ears, and we'll see you next time.