watch tHe skies

At the weekend I met up with a guy that I hadn’t seen for some months. He was actually the first person I coached when I finished my NLP practitioner course and I coached him to improve his motivation to write and complete an album so it could be submitted to the industry with the ultimate aim to be released.

An admirable goal, and for many, a scary one I’m sure. I mean, the thought of putting yourself out there is a tough one. His challenge was to find the motivation to do this on top of a day job, DIY, going to the gym and all of the other stuff that we use to distract ourselves from what is important to you.

So anyway it’s been a while and, I think, we had 3 coaching sessions, during which we did some pretty cool stuff; lots of awkward questions, visualisation, deleting limiting beliefs and some hypnosis here and there - I really threw my toolbox at him!

I’m a lot better now, more subtle, I still use the toolbox, people just don’t know I’m doing it now

So I was pleased when he told me that he’s now writing more than he ever did before, and he’s enjoying the process and is much happier and confident about life and where he’s going. Which is fantastic for him, and great for me too, because feedback is a wonderful thing and I always come away from coaching sessions frustrated that I couldn’t have done more.

It was also really useful to know that even in my newly-qualified hands, that which I had learnt was powerful enough to have positive, lasting change on someone. Now I’m getting the same, and better, results in one session, the challenge is waiting for the change to happen so I can get feedback. In reality though, when you listen and watch really careful, you can tell that the change has happened, because if you ask, the unconscious mind tells you so.

So I’m not sure if this post has that much of a point other than to tell you that i’m chuffed, and that perhaps, that which I talk about here, and the books that I suggest may help, really can make a difference to you.

Thanks for listening and have a great week!

I get a lot of people emailing me because the link from this post about handshake interrupts has been taken down.

So it’s great that there is a new one available from Jamie Smart, that not only demonstrates how easy it is to put someone in to a trance, it also shows how easy it is to make someone feel good and how hypnosis isn’t all Derren Brown and dancing around like a chicken on a stage.

There’s no need for me to describe the video or even go on about the idea of pattern interrupts because it is all explained nicely in the video by someone who knows far more about the subject than I. Enjoy!

Another gem from Brian Tracy’s Success Mastery Academy is the use of affirmations. That is, using your self-talk to make behaviour changes. It works like this, a little guide that is a combination of the wisdom from Brian Tracy and Jamie Smart:

1) Identify a limiting belief you’d like to change.

We all have them, a belief, or a rule about the universe we live in that stops us doing something we really want to do, such as:

- I can’t start my own business
- I’ll always be overweight
- I don’t ever have enough money
- I can’t be happy because I’m manic depressive

The problem with these beliefs is that everytime we say them to ourselves, our unconscious mind hears them and does everything to help it be true. Your unconscious is incredibly helpful and trusts that what you say is what you want.. it can’t filter good from bad affirmations. (more…)

“I you do the things that you are afraid of, the fear goes away” says Brian Tracy. I love this idea, and yet it is so hard to do because it’s outside of what we believe is possible, isn’t it?

I was coaching someone the other day and she was telling me about the things that hold her back. We explored this some more and got to the root cause… that she was afraid to do them. So I asked her a question:

“Have you ever been chased by Lions or some other creature intent on rending you limb from limb?”

“No” came the answer, with an odd expression that I expected meant that she wondered where I was going with this questioning.

“So I wonder, if you’ve not experienced very real danger, where fear is a given, how do you know what you feel in those other situations is actually fear?”

That’s a tough question to answer. The truth is, emotions aren’t digital… we have an analogue set of feelings that we code, or generalise in to words. The words aren’t the feelings.

And even if they were, what is fear? Fear is a very real and practical emotion if you are in physical danger. Fear fires off adrenaline, which primes our bodies for fight or flight, handy in the jungle, annoying and fairly pointless if you are only anticipating stating your name and occupation at the beginning of a Health and Safety workshop. Thus, for most of us in our everyday lives, fear is redundant, and actually annoying.

And yet I said it doesn’t exist, didn’t I? That’s right. It’s just a name that we give to something, so if we aren’t really feeling fear in those moments where we get butterflies and the blood is pumping in our ears, what is it?

I wonder, is it excitement, anticipation, and a load of other “emotions” that are positive?

It could be, after all you name your emotions, it’s up to you.

So the next time you feel the fear, check that you aren’t in a jungle or similar, and feel something more productive instead! (more…)

Whenever I decide to review a book I always have a quick google to see what others are saying about it. I don’t mean reading the reviews on Amazon - people who review on Amazon either love a book or hate a book, I rarely see objective reviews on there. That isn’t to say that my reviews are objective, in fact they are highly subjective. After all we all read for a reason, and my reason is very specific when I tackle a tome such as this. “What does this book tell me about being a better xxxxxx (customise to suit)”. In the case of this book I was interested in empathy. I was hoping to understand what makes some people “people persons” and other people not that people-friendly.  From that I wanted to know how I could improve my own people skills, and hence improve team performance, and make working with me in whatever role I adopt an enjoyable and rewarding experience. I digress. If you want to read an objective, in-depth review of this book, go here.

Back to my thoughts. Interestingly before I read the book, based on a primitive understanding and assumption of what emotional intelligence was, I believed myself to be fairly emotionally thick. Not a good characteristic for a coach.

Fortunately this book caused me to reassess my own view. The EQ concept argues that IQ, or conventional intelligence, is too narrow; that there are wider areas of emotional intelligence that dictate and enable how successful we are. Success requires more than IQ, which has tended to be the traditional measure of intelligence, ignoring eseential behavioural and character elements. We’ve all met people who are academically brilliant and yet are socially and inter-personally inept. And we know that despite possessing a high IQ rating, success does not automatically follow. The essential premise of EQ is: to be successful requires the effective awareness, control and management of one’s own emotions, and those of other people. (more…)

A little shameless publicity is good for the soul, and so my soul is warm and cuddly as I ask you to take a moment to vote for my blog if you find it useful or entertaining or insightful or (add own description).

Anyhow, please take a moment to vote for me over at blogger’s choice awards, I thank thee.

Normal service will resume shortly…

Every now and then bloggers participate in certain “internet games” to improve their Google PageRank and attract new readers to their blog. These games are often easy to participate because they usually involve a simple copy/paste routine. Last time I participated in the Technorati Favorites Exchange and honestly it was fun to discover new blogs to read through this scheme. Now check out these new link building programs of Viralinks and Viraltags going round the net.

If you add these to your site you should see an increase traffic and Technorati authority. Drop me a comment if you include them. Cheers! (more…)

Man alive I do get frustrated over on the photoreading forum with the number of people who just don’t get that photoreading requires a different level of investment from the reader. It’s frustratingly full of people desperate to get through textbooks in minutes without investing effort in the learning process. Consequently they complain about how it doesn’t work, that it’s a shortcut rather than a skill that needs an entirely different way of reading to the traditional paradigm.

Perhaps the book needs to place more emphasis on this. After all if there are that many people that aren’t “getting it”, then the message is getting lost in translation.

Anyhow for those of you visitors who photoread or want to, here’s my standard answer to the “what is a purpose” question.

Traditional reading is a fairly passive activity.

That is, most people read from cover to cover and expect the information to wash over them. They then remember the stuff that was most relevant and the rest is ignored. You still read it all though.

ABANDON ALL PRECONCEPTIONS OF READING NOW!!!

Done that? Good. Right let’s get to work.

From now on you are ACTIVELY ENGAGED in the learning process.

That’s right, success is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. Forget that this is a book of paper. The author worked his ass off to impart in these pages all of the knowledge he took years to acquire.

Now if you were sitting with the author would you ask him to just tell you everything in a convenient order, and let the information wash over you?

If your answer isn’t NO!!! then go back to the start of the post and try again.

Hopefully you would engage with him (or her), ask him questions, get to the bottom of the bits that you don’t understand. You wouldn’t keep asking him the same generic question and hope to come away thoroughly understanding the book, would you? I hope not.

So here’s the thing.

EACH OF YOUR QUESTIONS COULD BE A PURPOSE!

That’s right, activate in short bursts, get your answer and then consider how that answer changes your next question. GET INVOLVED in the learning process and rather than have information wash over you, you will be diving for pearls with a 90% or better success rate.

From now on, don’t think of reading as a lecture, think of it as a 2 way conversation with the author GET INVOLVED and you will see results.

I’m currently listening to Brian Tracy’s Success Mastery Academy. Brian Tracy’s work is superb - littered with good humour and plenty of stories and examples, he is kind of the Success Yoda… if you want to be good at something, really good, such as being a master in your field, ot just plain earning money, I recommend you listen to Brian Tracy. He’s a straight down the line “been there, done it” guy with a lot of knowledge on what success is in its purest terms and how to achieve it.

And so far through this 10 hour programme, i’ve found it very useful. The first revelation for me was a new law. Sure I’ve heard of the Law of Attraction recently - who hasn’t? And that one for me doesn’t really ring true, I think it’s The Thinker and The Prover all wrapped up in a bunch of mystical poppycock.

And yet Brian Tracy quotes the Law of Correspondence. Hmm…

In the time of Abraham, the teacher Hermes Trismegistos asserted that all information about a man could be found within a single drop of his blood and that within a man was represented the entire universe. He formulated from this a principle which he called The Law of Correspondence which stated: “Whatever is above is like that which is below, and whatever is below is like that which is above“.

In the case of being successful, Tracy suggests that the Law of Correspondence means that your external world is representative of your internal world. And it’s one way - changing your external world, such as buying that hifi you can’t really afford, or giving your lounge a new coat of paint, doesn’t change who you are inside. He suggests that to make real change to your outside world, you must change your inner world, your mind.

And at this point i’m going to leave it there. I could (and usually do) continue to talk about the how. I’ll leave that for another post and let you wonder and wander about what this means to you.

Now I’m not one for commenting on current affairs really. Okay maybe flatulent cows and other environmental disasters, yet politics, terrorism and the like are events that generally I try to ignore in an effort to keep my own personal view that the world is cuddly and fluffy and people are essentially nice, even the ones who think that NLP is a load of old codswallop.

And yet, in recent weeks, it seems to me that what it means to be British has taken some serious beatings. Our society is based on the ideal that certain pillars of society are unfallible. The two that come to mind are Doctors and the BBC. When we need something signed or authorised, in the eyes of our law, you can’t really get better than a Doctor (perhaps a Vicar) as an endorsement of the truthfulness of the information you have placed on whatever the written document is. And yet suddenly the role of Doctor in our society has taken a serious battering with the revelation that even this proud and trustworthy profession has been infiltrated by those seeking to cause harm rather than save lives.

This in isolation is a shock to the foundations of our society, yet we are strong enough to survive such a paradigm shift. Yet when another pillar, that of the BBC, which in my eyes has always stood for fairness, trust and a step above the gutter that is the media in all of its forms, to be revealed as a common fraudster, is perhaps too much for our society to take. I wonder what the long-term repurcussions of these events are, how we can maintain our proud identity in the shadow of such events, and how we can know who to trust in the future?