watch tHe skies

Thanks for all of your emails regarding my spring cleaning article. I’m surprised by the response, particularly as I thought it was only you and I that read the site! Lots of you have emailed me with your lists of stuff that you want to clear out…

Bear with me, I am responding to your emails as quick as I can!

And for those of you just asking for a chat via messenger, I will reply personally and my comment will be “what do you want?” and “how will you know when you’ve got that?”… being able to answer these questions is the first step in making a change. Nobody can be changed until they are ready to change, then it’s easy, and being able to answer those questions means that you are ready to change…

Finally, please bear with me on finding a time to talk to you, this is a first for me and I want to make it work, so patience on your part will pay off when we talk.

Plus, I’ve got to work out how to use Skype…!

After a week of consistently bad weather, it was a relief to get some sunshine this weekend. And I certainly made the most of it, up at the crack of dawn to mow our lawns that were long overdue a haircut.

However when I tried to get the lawnmower out of the garage, I was reminded pf how messy it is. Before Ben, we spent a lot of time putting up shelves and hooks and filling it full of systems to help us keep it tidy. However, when Ben arrived everything got put on hold, and instead of carefully putting stuff back in it’s place, stuff got put on other stuff until the straw broke on saturday when I had to fight with junk just to retrieve the lawn mower and strimmer. (more…)

The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Interesting statement. I wonder if it’s true… at what point in your life do you think you will have tread the same paths enough time for the ruts to form that dictate the rest of your existence?

“Life begins at 40″ some say, I wonder if they mean that by that time you’ve learnt all you need to learn and hence have more time to mess about?

If you could start your life over tomorrow, what would you do differently?

Why not start doing that differently today? The past is just a memory, and memories are just imaginations that you think are true, so you can imagine it happened however suits you best. So you can do things differently today. Start over right now and imagine now how you’ll be different tomorrow.

So at the weekend I spoke to my first smoke-free “victim”, who I helped about a month or so ago to stop smoking.  She’s still going strong and is finding it easier every day. It seems that at the session we pretty much killed her smoking habit and her challenge has been to find new things left by the void previously occupied by the habit.

Her big challenge is in dealing with new situations “smoke free”. That is, when she thinks about something that she is going to do, she wonders whether it will be as much fun without a cigarette. Sounds daft to many and to her it is reality. I did point out that she could indeed wonder how much more fun she will have in those new situations with more money and not having to stand outside every fifteen minutes… after all it is only her internal map of the world that suggests that she needs to think about it at all.

She also noted that it’s had a knock-on effect on some of her friends. One of her friends seems to have cut back or quit completely, whilst another smoked considerably less when he was with her. This makes her feel even better about herself, which is great by me. (more…)

A bloke around the corner from where we live has just bought a Porsche Boxter. Black and shiny, it’s lovely. Some people say hairdresser’s car but hey I like it, especially the little poppy-up spoiler on the back. Very cool.

As I drove past on my way home from work the other day, I was admiring it when really I should have been looking at the road, but still rather than crash it made me think about how my point of view has changed with regard to items of desire.

But a few years ago I would have passed this car with a completely different mindset. More than likely I would have secretly despised him for having more money \ success than I and then I would have made myself feel better by convincing myself that I was better than him in some other respect - be it bigger house, better prospects, tasier wife or larger manhood. Yes the green-eyed monster really can be that pathetic.

Some time last year I attended a course and during one day we were asked to write down our feelings with respect to money, success etc etc. and when the trainer went through what the different scores meant, it was very clear that I had quite a different view of money than everyone else in the room. Talk about transformational learning - right there and then, realising how I was behaving, compared to lots of people in the room who inspired me in many different ways, I realised that the way I was behaving was not only unhealthy, but counter-productive to what I really wanted. (more…)

A guy I work with once said to me about a particularly awkward associate who is no longer with us “Why does everyone take an instant dislike to him… is it just to save time?” Aside from the gross generalisation and being very funny, that phrase has stuck with me for many years because it’s an extreme example of the old saying about first impressions usually being right.

This concept of first impressions took on more meaning for me when I began to learn the difference between the conscious and unconscious minds. The conscious mind is a relatively new development in our species, some say it’s only been around for the last 30,000 years or so. The unconscious mind has been around for millions, maybe tens of millions or so years and is so much more advanced. And it is the unconscious mind’s job to protect us - to keep us safe from predators by processing millions more bits of data at a time than our relatively feeble conscious minds could manage. The results of this unconscious processing is fed to our conscious minds in a form some describe as intuition - those feelings that we get. So when we meet someone and take an instant dislike (or like) to them, there is a lot more going on in that “instant” than you are consciously aware of, in fact a large proportion of that initial feeling about someone has been processed unconsciously by the part of you that is comparing the person to everybody you’ve ever met, reading micro-body language, tonality, facial expressions and much more in a fraction of a second, and converting that decision in to a set of analogue signals that you might consider intuition. (more…)

Last week I was jetting around the US drumming up some business. For part of my stay I was down near Norfolk in Virginia, not far from Virginia Tech which has been in the news following the terrible shootings. Clearly many people there are hurt and upset at the event, and some people I met had either attended the school or had children there, so it was a tough time for everyone, including the poor Englishman looking for business at that particular time. My heart goes out to a nation of kind people affected by the tragedy.

Staying in hotels as I was, I found the debates on television about the situation and what to do about it fascinating. Strangely, most of the ideas involved providing better defence against such events occurring in the future - better armed guards, arming teachers etc etc, were serious suggestions on major TV stations. It seemed to me that there was a much simpler one:

Ban guns

This is of course easy for me to say - I live in a society where it is supposedly very hard to obtain firearms. That’s not to say that we don’t have problems with guns - of course we do, but our incident rate is considerably lower even when pro-rated by population and I would like to believe that this is mostly attributable to our culture and the greater difficulty in obtaining firearms.

And I did speak to people about this whilst I was over there, and I got an almost unanimous reply.

“You can’t ban guns - it’s part of the Constitution - the right to bear arms”

And then it dawned on me - this right to bear arms is buried so deep down in the foundations of their society that they can’t consider it as a possibility. (more…)

Urgh the recent travelling and sleep depravation are obviously taking their toll on me because the 4am start this morning to get to the airport left me so absent minded that I left the £50 I withdrew from the atm IN the cash machine. Doh!

Now I don’t know about you but when I do something so ridiculously stupid (and costly), I agonise over it for hours, replaying the event and beating myself up, sometimes so much so that I struggle to concentrate on anything else.

Fortunately there is a cool little exercise that can be used for memories that have unwanted emotional content, and here it goes… (more…)

I was in London today, strolling nonchalantly up Regent Street on my way to worship at the Apple store, when my unconscious mind brought to my attention one t-shirt in the window of Virgin Records. There were many tees in the window, however the one I was attentive on was interesting:

“I could give up chocolate, but i’m not a quitter”

Now quite why my unconscious brought this to my attention remains to be seen. However it did get me thinking about the giving up metaphor. It seems to me that we spend our childhoods having many messages tatooed in our minds, such as “don’t lose things”, “failure is bad” and “don’t give up”. Fundamental rules of society I hope that you would agree wouldn’t you?

So it comes as no surprise to me that most people that attempt to free themselves from an unwanted habit fail, as their very physiology is coded not to give up, to keep things. In addition to this you have the natural law that nature abhors a vacuum - this seems to be true both literally and metaphorically as the universe fills in vacuums of all kind with whatever comes to hand.

However this doesn’t mean that you can’t eliminate habits, you just need to think about them from another angle. Richard Bandler suggests that eliminating a habit is a simple case of identifying some state or situation that is incredibly attractive and compelling, one that gives you an almost magnetic attraction to that excludes that unwanted habit. For example you could enjoy really fantasising what you will look, feel and act like when you have reached your target, and indulge in this fantasy regularly, noting how in control you are in situations where previously you would have had little, and enjoying the wonderful feeling that accompanies that fantasy. (more…)

Firstly apologies for the lack of updates recently. I’m currently in the United States making contact with a few potential customers and catching up with some contacts. Everyone in the office assumes that a week in the US is a holiday, and conveniently filter out that travelling around, staying in hotels and getting up and working to ungodly hours is very hard work. I suppose when I get back I should remind them of all of these factors instead of just telling them about the excellent margharitas we had in Virginia Beach..!

So the other day I attended a function and hoped to meet some people that I met back in the UK a month or so ago. That meeting was the first time we met, and I worked hard to ensure that we would have a positive meet, which it was, and I gained very strong rapport with all of them. Consequently the meeting was very positive. When I arrived at the function, I met up with these people and rapport was immediate… it would appear that the rapport was triggered by our meeting again, and as a result our second meeting was very productive, strengthening this new relationship.

So I wonder whether rapport elicits a state that can be anchored with a simple handshake… after all the action of shaking hands defines the business relationship? So my point is that taking that effort to be in a positive, warm and interested state when meeting new people can elicit close rapport that is easily anchored and re-triggered, making the process of developing new relationships as easy as it could be.

As you read this I wonder what situations you are already imagining yourself in gaining stronger and stronger levels of rapport with people, aren’t you?