The 6-Step NLP Formula for Success

Jason Schneider
4 min readJan 3, 2020

Did you know that there is a 6-step NLP formula for success that you can apply to your personal life, professional life, finances, health and beyond?

Would you like to know what the steps are?

While I am not sure where this ‘NLP success formula’ comes from originally, I adapted it from the work of Dr. Michael Hall, co-founder of Neuro-Semantics.

While they may seem simple they make a profound difference in your life when you start to practice them.

In this article I will share the first 3-steps, and then I will follow up with the next 3-steps in my following article.

Step 1: Know what you want you want.

The first step toward success is to know what you want. If you are not clear where you want to go, you are very likely going where your past self wanted you to go or where someone else wants you to go. A lot of times what we want is elusive because we think we know what we want, but what we want is framed in terms of what we don’t want.

For example, “I don’t want to be out of shape anymore”, “I don’t want to be poor”, “I don’t want to be in relationships like that one again”, “I don’t want to be lonely anymore”.

I like to think about this as if we were playing darts. Aiming to hit a bullseye will lead to a much more successful outcome than “I don’t want to hit the wall”.

The NLP Well-Formed Outcome process and the Neuro-Semantic Well-Formed Outcome Funnel will help with this greatly!

Step 2: Take informed action towards the outcome.

This is where the ideas of “the secret” or the “law of attraction” seem to split from how reality works. In order to manifest something in your life you need to take action toward that goal.

And not just any action but informed action! Now “informed action” does not mean that you need to know everything before taking action. That is a trap that most ‘reflective thinkers’ fall into that could even lead them to inaction!

What this means is, to the best of your knowledge, do what you believe will bring you closer toward that outcome. If you know what you want but just sit on the couch dreaming about it all day the odds of that thing manifesting in your life becomes very slim! Action/behavior is one of the things that takes you from the psychological world of ideas/information into the physical world of physics.

Back to the darts example this refers to actually throwing the dart! You can read all of the books about dart throwing, and watch others do it all day but it will not bring you any closer to success.

There are all sorts of things that block people from this step. Fear of success, fear of failure, procrastination, overthinking/over planning, etc. but until you jump into the world and take action you will never get the feedback you need to take your skills to the next level.

Taking “informed” action may require finding a model of excellence or a mentor to give you the ‘informed’ strategies that work to cut down on trial and error mistakes. In Neuro-Semantics we say that we “stand on the shoulders of giants” and there is no point in reinventing the wheel if someone else already has a strategy.

Step 3: Use your senses to get feedback (on the response to those actions from others and from the world).

If you’ve come this far you’ve already come farther than many people do in terms of achieving their outcomes. Now that you’ve taken informed action towards making your goal(s) into a reality, the next step is to use your sensory acuity to pay attention to feedback given to you by others and by the world.

What is working? What is not working? What do you need to do more of? What do you need to do less or stop altogether?

It is only from throwing the dart that you could even receive the feedback about how it went. This step is to pay attention to what happened so you can adjust accordingly.

Some blocks that can come up at this part are lacking the ego-strength to look at the truth, over-personalizing, lack of awareness or purposefully looking in the other direction, inability to look at one’s own shortcomings, lack of boundaries between human being and human doing, etc.

So there you have it, the first 3-steps to the NLP success formula. Do you have any questions, comments, or feedback? Feel free to share them here: https://www.facebook.com/perceptionacademy/posts/1478057175679771

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Jason Schneider

Master Trainer of NLP, Neuro-Semantics, president of the US Institute of Neuro-Semantics & my passion is to unleash self-actualization in people & organizations