Day 115: Leslie Nipps

January 23, 2010 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

“We don’t get this all figured out by the time we’re 30 or whatever our original goal was for figuring it all out.  But then we can take that lifelong development and learning process and scale it down … noticing when we’re out of rapport with ourselves, in conflict with ourselves, and how to reach for a new experience of safety and inspiration that will be safe for us, that will feel like the most natural, the most wonderful, the most spontaneous experience of life that’s possible.”

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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Leslie, for being part of this project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Leslie Nipps: Hi, I’m Leslie Nipps, founder of Leslie Nipps Counseling in Oakland, California.  I’m a neuro-linguistic programming and family constellations practitioner, and at our business, our saying is “Trust is a Way of Life.”

Toni: I like that saying … Trust is a Way of Life.

Leslie: Yeah.

Toni: Well, to build on that, let’s talk about that word inspiration, and who do you inspire and how do you do that?

Leslie: Well, I’m really struck by the origin of the word to be inspired, which means to be filled with the spirit and the breath of life, energy.  So many people feel stuck, uninspired, lacking in life or energy.  And we could probably get into a big conversation why culturally that’s so, but this lack of energy comes from self-defeating life patterns which come from limiting beliefs that originated in some kind of trauma.

So oddly enough, these patterns are experienced as a way to keep us safe.  This lack of inspiration makes us feel safe, even though it causes us so much distress and pain.  And we’ll only allow ourselves to shift these patterns of being so uninspired when we feel safe, when we are seen, and we’re invited to step into what inspires us, our power, our proper place in life.  That’s what I do with my clients who are struggling with being inspired in their lives.

Toni: That’s interesting because you don’t hear … from a coaching perspective, you don’t hear a lot about “I work with people to find their inspiration,” you know, and to help them feel safe, that it’s okay to be inspired.  That’s really an interesting way to do that.  How do you go about that?

Leslie: Well, the main thing when we’re trying to shift things in our lives — whether that’s in a work environment or in our personal environments — we’re reaching out into unknown territory; “here they be dragons.”  The reason why we haven’t made the change already is because it’s scary.  Some unconscious part of us has encoded this as being frightening.  We may not consciously understand that.

Consciously, we want the change with all our heart, but unconsciously something’s really busy keeping us safe.  So, what we do through mostly some patterns and insights of neuro-linguistic programming is create an environment where it really is safe no matter what the client chooses to step out into.  They can go “Oh, I’m walking off of a ledge, and this is safe; this is good.”  We have to create that environment.  Otherwise, people are usually unwilling to take that step.

Toni: Then that is, I would imagine, the first step that you might do in order to help them explore their potential?

Leslie: Absolutely.  You have to create a safe environment.  It’s through what the founders of NLP a long time ago called “creating rapport.”  It’s getting on the map of the client rather than insisting the client get on your map, and creating the sense of, you know, gazelles out in the savannah.  As long as all they see around them are gazelles, everything’s good.  Anything else could be a lion, even if it’s just a moving bush.

When we perceive ourselves as being with like kind, someone who’s like us, then we relax.  We let go.  We start trying new things.

Toni: So when you need inspiration, Leslie, what do you do?  What do you look for?  What do you need to be inspired?

Leslie: Well, you know it’s really interesting.  I was thinking about that, because I don’t know about other folks, but I wake up in the morning … so I’ve had a nice night’s sleep, and I wake up and I know instantly whether I am waking up inspired or uninspired, whether I have energy or not.

Now, how does that happen without any effort at all, just waking up?  Which means it’s all running at an unconscious level.  Being inspired on a regular basis means your unconscious feels safe and excited and creative, and that gets experienced by our conscious selves.  So that means I need to be keeping my unconscious really inspired.

That may sound really tricky, but actually we’re doing it all the time.  For me, I need regular meditation and prayer.  I need a regular experience of beauty.  I need to see something and enjoy something beautiful every day.  I need to feel my body and have physical exertion and exercise.  I need to have fun every day.  I need to have positive intimate time spent with other people.  And I need regular effort at healing growth and learning about myself.

Those are all things I need to keep my unconscious kind of feeling good about things, and then my conscious gets to feel good about things and inspired and engaged.

Toni: Have you always come to the table this way?

Leslie: Which specific way are we asking?

Toni: It’s sounds so easy and gentle from you in this interview that the way you describe the way you wake up and that it must be an unconscious level and how you … and what you need and what you do; have you always been that kind of a person?

Leslie: Oh lordy, no!  And in fact I’m not always this way now.  At an intellectual level, I understand all this, but like I said, my unconscious is a part of the conversation as well all the time.  There are days that I wake up and I know that my unconscious is feeling unsafe, not ready to engage with the world and not sure if I have a place in it.  That’s a cue to me to start reaching for some of those things that’ll help my unconscious levels of myself to feel okay again.

Toni: So you recognize the cues when they happen.

Leslie: I do.  I’m not always completely resourceful at doing something about them; none of us are.  Sometimes I go and sit on the couch and turn on the TV like the rest of us.  But yeah, I do know the cues.  I certainly am aware that there are times when the more gazelle part of me is just going “You know, I think the world’s filled with lions.  Let’s just sit on the couch.”

Toni: This is so helpful to people that are going to be reading and listening to this because you really … you’re very poised in how you describe what you do and what you need.  And it’s just so helpful to also say “You know what?  I’m not always this way, so here’s what I recognize in myself, and that’s when I know I need to reach for these things to get me to be re-inspired.”   That’s very helpful to be that honest.

Leslie: Yeah, I mean there are always times when people say “Why can’t I stop this overeating?  Why can’t I reach for a man or a woman who respects me rather than dismisses me?  Why can’t I have work that I enjoy?”  It’s so important to start out from that place of self-respect.

I am doing these things because they make some really deep part of me feel safe.  And when I sort of judge myself for having these patterns, when I put myself down for having these patterns, what I’m doing is disrespecting myself, disrespecting my own unconscious for doing the best job it knows how to keep us safe.  Change never starts from a place of disrespect.  It never starts from the place of putting ourselves in conflict with ourselves.

Toni: So what other ways then do you help yourself explore your own potential?

Leslie: Well, the main way that I do that is I keep on engaging in a process of learning.  Some people … this is a very, very tragic pattern that they learned quite young is they had the experience that if they didn’t know something — like they were trying to do fractions and they didn’t understand it for a while — that that was a really negative, painful experience.  So better not to reach for learning, because in learning there’s always that period of time when you don’t know.  I don’t understand the French grammar.  I don’t understand the fractions, whatever it may be.  For them, it gets really coated as a seriously negative experience, and so they don’t reach for learning.

I find that reaching for learning puts me in a place of kind of deliberate discomfort that lets my system know that not knowing is okay.  And over the course of days or weeks or months, the holes will get filled in.  I will get the joy and pleasure and delight of figuring out something.

The big thing I’m engaged in learning right now is everything to do with how we as individuals, you know, get ourselves trapped in patterns that are so self-defeating, and how do we reach for patterns that are liberating and are easy, not a struggle?

Toni: So this is the research now that you’re going through, that you’re learning about?

Leslie: Mm-hm.

Toni: How does all of that then, the things that you know you need, the cues you have, what you need to be inspired, to how you reach for your potential and engaging in learning all the time, how does that then for you translate into what you do for others?

Leslie: Well, it all becomes … it shrinks down to kind of a microcosm, right?  So what we’re hoping … there’s a sense in which we’re all in a lifelong learning process, right?  There’s no way in some sense to cut that short.

We’re in it for the long haul.  We don’t get this all figured out by the time we’re 30 or whatever our original goal was for figuring it all out.  But then we can take that lifelong development and learning process and scale it down to the 2 hours that I spend with a client or over a series of sessions, six months or whatever it might be.

We’re scaling down the experience of noticing when we’re out of rapport with ourselves, in conflict with ourselves, and how to reach for a new experience of safety and inspiration that will be safe for us, that will feel like the most natural, the most wonderful, the most spontaneous experience of life that’s possible.

Toni: Wow.

Leslie: We start out, or I start out – often the client doesn’t start out this way – this is a very big part of what I do.  I believe that for them until they can believe that for themselves.

Toni: That is really incredible, and the fact that you’ve taken it from yourself and put that out there to your clients, I can only imagine the work that you do. I appreciate as well as the people who follow this Project will appreciate.  You’ve given how you inspire, but what you need to be inspired, and you were very honest about it as I’ve stated earlier, and you can really see the connections between what you need to what you do.  And the way that you framed that has been beautiful, and I really appreciate that.

Leslie: I appreciate being asked.

Toni: Thank you.

Leslie: The last thought I have before you close off is there is a saying, “If you ever go to a church and listen to someone preach, the preacher is always preaching for themselves.”  Whatever a healer or a change agent or a coach is doing on behalf of their clients is probably what they themselves need, too, and what they’re reaching for.

Toni: You know, it’s so interesting, Leslie, because a  lot of people, different people throughout — we’ve been over 100 days now — and what a lot of people have said is that “Boy, we really do teach what we need to learn, don’t we?”

Leslie: There you go.

Toni: Thank you so much, and I appreciate everything that you’ve shared with us today.  Thank you so very much for your time today.

Leslie: Thank you.

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For more information about Leslie Nipps:  www.leslienipps.com, lnipps@gmail.com

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