watch tHe skies

Well this last week has been pretty exhausting hence the lack of posts. Saturday night saw Ben pick up a stomach bug, turning our house in to a 3 dimensional vomit target for 4 days. Poor Jen has been at home nursing him back to health, whilst I’ve helped in between the office, meetings in Edingburgh and Milton Keynes.

So it’s been non-stop all week as he’s not slept very well and at one point it looked like he might have to go in to hospital because he was so dehydrated. Fortunately the pair of us taking shifts feeding him water through a syringe for 3 days, night and day, kept him at home and now he’s looking much better, but quite thin because he’s not eaten solids for nearly a week.

This is the most poorly he’s been since we got him, and I was surprised by just how distressing it was to see him so ill. I think I might buy him an oxygen tent and keep him indoors until he’s 18 so he doesn’t get ill again…

Since that muppet went on Dragons Den and wanted to run a Live Coaching website I’ve been assaulted with a hail of questions on my opinion of what was said by the Dragons.

Firstly, although she mentioned NLP she didn’t seem to practice it… where was the rapport? Or any other technique that might help in a sales presentation, remembering that these guys have probably been badly NLP’ed a million times by clunky salesmen who did a bit of persuasion on some course. Of course the rapport could have been edited out to make the pitch more dramatic.

The last thing that coaching needs is the Dragons criticising it. I do understand their concern though - there are a lot of people out there being very evangelical about it’s benefits because of the potential money involved… in reality I think that there is a lot less money in the marketplace for this service because the public in general don’t see the point. People “get” and accept hypnotists nowadays but it will be a long time before personal coaching is a reality for all but the wealthy.

The woman on Dragon’s Den did have a good idea though - that people could be helped with only 6 questions. Now I don’t know what 6 questions she was going to ask, but if I was asking six questions to coach someone on a problem they would be:

(after they have the problem in mind)

1) What do you want?
2) How will you know you have got it?
3) What is different from when you have got it from what you have now?
4) What is stopping you doing it now?
5) What are your options?
6) What are your actions?

I might cheat and add a 4a) which tends to yield good results…

4a) If that didn’t stop you, what would?

Now you could go away and use those questions on your own and perhaps get some good results. However you might not and if you don’t it’s because you are too close to the problem… having a face to face discussion allows the coach to read a bunch of non-verbal information to support what you are saying… in most cases the actual words that come out of your mouth reveal a tonne of information, and coupled with your non-verbal, give a good coach a very powerful representation of what is going on, including what you don’t actually say.

For example, look out for people shaking their head when they are answering a question, now that could mean incongruence (they don’t agree with their spoken words), it could also mean that they are weighing up options represented auditorily (is that a word?) in each ear, or it could mean something else which has a context related to other things that they are saying. Clearly the first two could have considerable impact on the information offered verbally, and all this stuff and more you miss when you’re not face to face.

So my view is really that coaching isn’t a commodity ready for the internet… there’s no formula for people’s problems, so no expert system can be programmed (although I bet Richard Bandler has thought about it). Lots of people get coached by friends, families and coworkers every day. There’s no need for a website to replace this. Let’s spend MORE time face to face than less, please.

My brother is a Health and Safety Manager… yes that means I have to wear goggles if helping him put up shelves but the upside is some funny \ horrific slides of workplace safety. The following pictures are examples of what gets the belly laughs at a Health and Safety conference…

    

I was talking with a friend today who was getting married. She’s in a bit of a pickle because she is trying to decide who to invite to her wedding breakfast. The challenge being that it’s an expensive business AND the number of guests is limited by room size. She was stressed because it seemed to her that she HAS to invite a bunch of people that she doesn’t really want to come (we all have them), which means some people that she does want to come might not get invited.

So I suggested to her why not solve this with TWO wedding lists… for the people who she wants to come to the wedding, include with their invite a real wedding list. For the other people, include a wedding list from Harrods or somewhere, bristling with obscenely expensive gifts. This will mean that the unwanted people will be horrified by the thought of having to spend all of that money on a wedding gift and will make those excuses. Those not tricked by trap 1 will have concerns that they won’t “fit in” with the super rich people going to the wedding and will decide not to attend.

Personally I thought that this was not only funny but a stroke of genius. I welcome your comments if you can afford to leave one.

I read with abject horror that Hollywood is planning a remake of the legendary Escape From New York. The cult movie, starring Kurt Russell and Donald Pleasance, tells the futuristic story of one-eyed Rambo Snake Plissken going in to Manhattan (now used as a prison) to recover the US President whose plane has crashed on the island. Full of crims and nutcases, this John Carpenter movie is every bit daft as it is fantastic, and it also features a superb soundtrack by Carpenter himself.

Rumour has it that Gerard Butler will be filling Russell’s shoes. Quite frankly I don’t know why they are bothering. The original is a classic but the remake is hardly going to break the box office - even if it is superb it’s not going to make much money, unless they turn it from a downbeat futuristic thriller in to an all out action movie, so why not leave well alone?

I suppose the saving grace is that John Carpenter isn’t directing it. He seems to have had his good directing organs surgically removed many years ago, and is quite happy to hand over his scripts for remake and simply coin in the money.

I would like to point out at this time that if they decide to remake Blade Runner then I am leaving this planet for good.

Yesterday I read an excellent article by Adam Eason over at NLP Weekly. Talking about reframing - he gives some excellent examples of how everything has a frame or context, and by jumping outside of that frame and reframing the point of view you can make swift strides in overcoming objections and breaking people out of unproductive trances. Well worth a read.

Adam Eason’s Hypnotic blog is always worth a read, plenty of interesting and entertaining hypnosis material for your enjoyment!

With the fourth edition of the Photoreading Whole Mind System book coming out soon, Paul Scheele is offering free teleseminars on activation for those of you who photoread this blog. If you sign up at http://www.LearningStrategies.com/Free.asp you will also receive a PDF of the considerably expanded activation section absolutely free, and it’s not often that Learning Strategies give free stuff away now is it?

Fourth edition of the book is due out next month.

Well I spent my lunchtime playing around with a social networking plugin for this very blog. When I finally got it working I realised that it made the site look untidy and quite frankly I didn’t want snotty internet geeks dissing my site, I can do that perfectly well on my own.

And it is of course nothing to do with the fact that I don’t understand what social networking is. Nothing at all. Move along.

So with the completion of my media streaming project, the gadget monster has retired to its cave and is snoring loudly. It seems to have missed the furor around the PS3 and is quite happy that we can now watch our home movies, movie trailers, photos and all of the DVDs I’ve encoded, from the comfort of our sofas.

As regular reader(s) know, I abandoned the Apple TV idea because I couldn’t be bothered to code everything, wasn’t sure that iTunes was man enough for 100gb of video and didn’t see the point as iTunes UK only sells music videos which don’t make for an entertaining evening in front of the TV. (more…)

Hmm last evening’s post and page got a little trippy. In the cold hard light of thursday morning, close enough to the weekend to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but only in reflections on the walls, I was certainly away with the fairies.

I’ve been increasingly playing with trance and learning how to use it. It seems that it’s something that I do naturally, I certainly trance when I’m writing, whether it be for this blog or writing copy for work, and I feel that when I write in this manner my creativity certainly improves because i’m not consciously trying to control what comes out… I just let it escape on to the screen and only really engage consciously once I pause and re-read what I’ve read for readability and whether it makes any sense at all. (more…)