The way you speak, listen and respond to irritation in a relationship depends substantially on the inner resources available to you in that moment. When humour, appreciation, calm, clarity and connection are easier to notice, you have more friendly and flexible responses available during demanding conversations. Training your attentional focus is therefore a practical relationship skill.
“Energy flows where attention goes” describes a practical choice in NLP: whatever receives your repeated focus becomes easier for you to notice and influences what you respond to next. The mind therefore has a certain momentum. When your thinking often follows worry and fear, the next thought is more likely to follow the same direction. When you practise a positive focus, positive thoughts also begin to arise more readily and automatically. In this article, I share an exercise that changed my outlook on life as profoundly as almost anything I have experienced.
Attention gives experience a direction
When you think about your partner, or another person whose relationship matters to you, you can focus on the qualities you appreciate, love and enjoy in them. You can equally focus on the things that irritate you. Both kinds of qualities are present. The quality of your time together and of the conversations you have depends substantially on where you direct your focus. The portion selected by your attention therefore shapes a portion of your experience.
Can attention be trained?
In short: yes. Appreciation and gratitude are widely recognised as helpful for relationships. The practical question is how to become more appreciative and grateful when your everyday attention repeatedly returns to angry or sad thoughts. This article gives you a specific exercise for doing exactly that.
To stabilise a more positive focus, you need resources. A great many resources.
A resource is anything that makes a useful difference in a situation: humour can make a difficult moment lighter, appreciation can improve a relationship and reflection can support a good decision. A clear thought, a familiar voice, sunlight, movement or somebody who listens can also be a resource. The more precisely you distinguish these resources, the more readily you can access them when they are useful.
Understanding chunking: one term becomes many
Chunking is an association technique that lets you generalise a term, make it more specific or connect it with similar terms, dramatically expanding the usefulness of your resources. The word “apple” offers a simple example:
Chunk up
What is this term an example of? Which category does it belong to?
Fruit · a word beginning with A · something healthy
Chunk down
Which parts, varieties or specific details belong to it?
Skin · juice · Boskoop · Pink Lady
Chunk sideways
What sits at the same level in a similar category?
Banana · anchor · bread
another fruit · another word beginning with A · another five-letter food
How humour becomes many resources
In the German-language podcast episode, I explain chunking with the resource “humour”. Chunking down leads to specific experiences and details: a particular joke, a memory of shared laughter, the brighter sound of my inner voice or the smile on my face. Chunking up asks what humour is an example of: a value, an emotion, a form of communication or part of my identity. Chunking sideways leads to related ideas such as jokes, satire, parody, wordplay or comedy.
One resource quickly produces many more in this way. Every new term can become another starting point for chunking up, down or sideways. From a single thing that makes your life richer, more enjoyable or better, you can therefore develop a virtually unlimited number of resources.
The 1,000-resources exercise
The strongest change I have experienced through deliberate attention came from the NLP exercise “1,000 resources”. I bought a blank squared A4 notebook, divided each page into three columns and created space for roughly 100 entries. For ten mornings, I filled one page with things that enriched my life, inspired gratitude or made a positive difference.
I began with a resource such as “love” and used chunking to find examples, details, categories and related resources. When one chain of associations slowed down, I chose one of the newly found terms as my next starting point. There was one basic rule: everything I wrote down had to enrich my life in some way.
How the training changed the way I see life
After ten days, I had completed my first 1,000 resources. The effect was life-changing for me: I experienced considerably more energy, gratitude and emotional balance. Sunlight between the trees, a punctual train or a friendly smile became resources that I genuinely noticed in daily life — and I began to look forward to writing them down the following morning.
My attentional focus had learnt a new search direction. Gratitude, joy and appreciation became the default setting of my mind. After two months and an incredible total of almost 10,000 resources, this positive attentional focus had become such an integral part of my nature that thinking differently felt almost impossible.
Only now does the time involved become relevant. At first, writing my morning list of 100 resources sometimes took almost an hour. I continued the training beyond the initial ten days. After around three months, I could fill a page in ten to fifteen minutes. The resources had been present all along; training enabled me to find them more quickly and easily.
Begin with ten resources
Start with ten entries today. Then choose one term and find two more resources in each chunking direction, taking your list to sixteen. Use a different starting resource tomorrow. If the exercise feels useful, gradually increase the number and create your own 1,000-resources book.
Write in sensory, specific language: “the warm cup in my hands”, “the smell of rain” or “my partner's laugh at breakfast”. Concrete details turn an abstract idea into a memorable experience.
Use resources in relationships
A resourceful inner state expands your options in relationships. You can listen with greater empathy, bring humour and appreciation into the conversation, express your own needs more clearly and look more readily for a solution that works for both of you. Before an important discussion, activate three resources:
- Which quality in me will help me speak clearly today?
- Which quality in the other person would I like to keep in view?
- Which shared experience reminds me of our connection?
These questions strengthen your ability to act and prepare the inner state from which you want to conduct the conversation. This connects closely with the NLP presupposition of positive intention: greater access to your own resources makes it easier to ask curiously about needs and intentions.
Practise attention regularly
For a brief daily version, try my Prompts of Joy morning ritual. The 1,000-resources exercise goes further: it becomes a personal archive of whatever gives you energy, orientation, joy and connection. You can read it or add new entries before a demanding day. If this kind of morning ritual is new to you, begin with Prompts of Joy. Once you notice a positive effect in your life, you can expand the practice through chunking and the 1,000-resources exercise.
Further ideas, personal experiences, the complete reasoning behind the exercise and more encouragement to try it are available in episode 3, Energy Flows Where Attention Goes (available in German only).