watch tHe skies

The other day, I read a great quote by Zig Ziglar, motivational guru, that really got me thinking.

“You can get whatever you want simply by helping enough people to get what they want.”

This is an excellent reframe from typical thinking. It’s easy to think about helping other people as a bind, a chore. After all, if someone asks you for help, advice or assistance, it’s time that you aren’t spending on your own goals, right? Well I’ll go ahead and say wrong!!!!

Firstly I think it’s productive not to think of yourself as a person, instead as the Managing Director of YOU Ltd., after all YOU sets your wage, your type of work and everything else, so why not make yourself MD of your own life.

And of course companies live and die by customer service, right, and good companies treat everyone coming for a meeting or calling the exchange with the same level of respect and high customer service… after all this week’s small order might be next week’s strategic partnership. And I think this is very relevant for helping other people.

See, the more people you help, and the more often you help them, the more likely you are going to become recognised as the “go to” person… that invaluable contact, that essential company that helps everyone get what they want.

And when you are in that rare, enviable position, you will reap benefits, whether it be financially, spiritually, in favours or any other way, because people going places need go-to people to get them there, and the more people that see you in that light, the more likely it will be YOU that gets the call for that opportunity to get you closer to your own personal goals.

So why not try out the customer-service mindset today. Who knows, you might even enjoy it and get a little closer to where you want to be tomorrow.

It’s a great time to have a curious 15 month old boy. It’s sunny and the garden is trimmed and safe for him to run around and discover fauna and flora. Ben’s intrigue knows no bounds as he digs and climbs and pulls and pushes his way around the garden, rapidly expanding his perception of the world.

Recently I taught him to “hi five”, it’s a great little social skill and it lets people interact with him in a safe way (he likes to pull glasses off noses and poke eyes because he doesn’t know that he shouldn’t). It didn’t take long, half an hour here and there over a couple of days and now he comes up to me and wants me to hi five him which is very cool.

He’s learning stuff all of the time and yet at the same time he doesn’t know that he can’t do a whole bunch of stuff; jumping being an interesting one. After all I cannot remember a time when I couldn’t jump, and yet Ben looks at me puzzled when I leap in to the air to demonstrate. He doesn’t yet have the information to even let him comprehend what I’m doing sufficiently for him to understand that it’s a skill he doesn’t have and can learn.

So the communication line is dead. We don’t have enough in common for him to understand what I’m trying to teach him. Despite of his voracious appetite for learning.

And it makes me wonder, when someone I talk to just doesn’t “get” what I’m trying to tell them, is it simply because we don’t have enough in common for them to understand? I wonder if finding out more about what they do know well, and using that knowledge to get my point across will save lots of time and frustration in getting to where I want them to go?

Gillian McKeith, the diminuitive and forthright Scottish nutritionist tells us “you are what you eat”, that your diet directly affects your physical and emotional wellbeing. This is increasingly difficult in the age of processed, quick foods and fast paced lives.

Lifestyles are evolving at a much greater pace than our digestive systems, and so as the obesity epidemic spreads across the developed world, people are taking more and more notice of the nutritional value of the foods they eat. Heck, even McDonalds openly tell you that a box of fries has as much fat in them as an equal weighting of lard. How do they do that? The miracle of food science.

Now as we know as readers of this blog, our mind and body are one system. What affects one affects the other, so Gillian is of course right to say that what we eat affects both physical and mental health. Give the brain the right nutrients, manage your insulin levels properly and there is a very high chance that you will feel better, happier and more alert.

So I wonder how much your mind affects your body? Lots of course, just imagine yourself eating a lovely, fresh, crunchy bit of fruit, with the juice spilling across your tongue and splashing against your gums and you will notice that you’re salivating more, purely as your mind influences your body.

So if you are what you take in nutritionally, surely you are also what you take in mentally? (more…)

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 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…)

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.

I was coaching a guy the other day who came to me with a belief that he had a terrible lack of confidence. This was really affecting his ability to live the life he wanted to live, so of course I wanted to help him.

Now confidence, or lack of, is a gross generalisation… There have to be things that we are confident about or we would soon cease to exist, we wouldn’t have the confidence to eat something, or breathe.

And that’s why I love generalisations, when I hear them in conversation I look forward to challenging, because they just don’t stand up to even light scrutiny.

“No confidence? Not even when you are deciding what to eat?” stuff like that usually gets a response, because people don’t think of stuff like that as things that they are confident about. And this is the way, because what ever you do that you think is easy and doesn’t require any confidence, I guarantee that there are people out there wishing that they had as much confidence as you in making that decision.

So back to this guy. We identified some particular areas that were really limiting him, and I asked him a really simple question.

“Imagine you could go back in time to a time when you felt like that, and give yourself resources, that would have really helped you.”

Hindsight is 20:20, the cool thing is, if you know how, you can actually use hindsight to go back to the experience and modify it. The brain gets this really quick, and it will integrate the change in to future situations. (more…)

So Giles, a friend of mine from my NLP Practitioner course, has set up his website offering his coaching and NLP skills to you, the general public.

So if you think any of these apply to you:

• I just can’t get motivated
• This experience \ memory \ phobia is holding me back
• I feel a little lost
• I don’t know what I want

Or anything similar, then perhaps you should head over to www.emotion-magic.com and get in touch with Giles, because the fact that you’re aware of those feelings means that Giles can help you feel better and move on.

The other day someone asked me what coaching is all about. I thought about it for a while and said that, for me, coaching is about giving people choice. That is, helping people to see choice where they didn’t believe that they had any.

And of course I’ve spoken at length before about how who we are and what we do is defined by self-imposed barriers, or beliefs, that inhibit choices.  Then, just to complicate matters, there are our actual, internal beliefs, and those that we say, or espouse, quite often they are different. I mean, how are we supposed to work efficiently when what we say isn’t even congruent with what we do or believe?? Complicated isn’t it?.

So coaching for me is about helping people to realise that they have way more choice than they thought that they had. And one way to further that is to understand how congruent your internal view of who you are is with the perception of those around you.

An interesting tool to use for this exercise is the Johari window. The idea is that the window is a metaphor for the four sides of who you are:

• Parts of your identity known to you and others - The Arena
• Parts of your identity known only to you - The Facade
• Parts of your identity known only to others - The Blind Spot
• Parts of your identity known to no-one - The Unknown

The idea of this tool is for you to map out words that describe you and see how aligned what you think about yourself is with what people think of you. It’s an interesting exercise to carry out and can yield some startling revelations to yourself. It also helps you to understand how other people perceive you and hence why they behave with you in certain ways, as well as help you to think about what signals you present to new people to cause them to react the way that they do. If people don’t react the way you would like, with some consistency, then it is likely that it is your first impression, rather than them.

So perhaps you could find it useful to learn how your perception of you differs from other people’s? Perhaps gaining an insight in to your own Blind Spots can help give you new choices on how to communicate with people. Remember - people do the best thing in any given instant based on their own personal values and the information that they have to hand. Do people around you know what you are really like?

Now it wouldn’t be fair for me to talk about the Johari window without showing you mine, would it? Fortunately the nice person over at http://kevan.org/johari provides a free Johari that you can invite people to contribute. If you read the rest of the article, you can take a butcher’s at mine, kindly filled in by some of my friends.

Now one thing about the Johari window is that it uses only positive words. There is one for you budding Darth Vaders out there, called the Nohari window, which again you can find interactively over at http://kevan.org/nohari. (more…)

When I’m coaching someone, we look at the things people spend most of their time on, and then compare these to the things they really want. Do you think the two are aligned? Not very often… if they are then they probably don’t need coaching. 

You’re either aligned or you’re not. There is a unique set of values for YOU, that if followed, will allow you to live a fulfilled life, doing things that meet your base needs as a human being. If your current priorities are fully aligned with these, then congratulations! I’d love to hear about it. You probably have a real sense of contentment and fulfilment all of the time. Whereas for many of us we feel that in fits and starts, when we happen to do something that resonates with who we are.

If your current priorities are significantly “out of whack” with what’s REALLY important to you, you are probably very busy, constantly rushing, a little stressed, and when you get what your chasing - it’s never enough! You turn around and go: “NEXT!”. This is because we can never get enough of what we don’t really want. Understanding the difference between what we chase and what we want is a good step to doing what you love. (more…)