Many believe that to become really successful at what you do you have to have the professional qualifications and skills in that field. Obviously there are cases where you do need qualifications, you wouldn’t want your doctor to have not qualified from medical school. However, just because they have those skills doesn’t mean they feel that they are successful.
So the question can be asked: “is your success down to your skills or to the vision you hold of yourself in the future?”
I would say that it is both. Your success is partly down to your skills otherwise you wouldn’t have got as far as you have done, but I do think that a large part of success is because you have the mental strength and determination to get you there. The vision that is driving you to want something more.
NLP can help you review your skills and your vision and see how you can utilise them to your advantage. We can look at your skills and work on turning them into good skills that can work for you and get you closer to your goal. We can look at your vision and work out the best way for you to achieve it through further training, positive thinking or just refreshed thinking. We can retrain your brain to work in a way that is conducive to your vision.
So in short yes, success is down to the skills you have, but no one is saying you are lacking those skills, you just might not have realised you have them yet.
Gambling is getting a lot of press lately. The rise in online gambling has increased what is often known as the hidden addiction.
The Independent reported that the number of gamblers that would class themselves as “hardcore” has risen in the past six years to 500,000. The number of people in danger of having a gambling problem has risen to nearly a million.
It is big business, the industry is expected to be worth £2bn this year alone. The big companies have celebrity endorsements and the temptation of gambling is all too prevalent in professional sport, with cricket and football being the most high profile.
How is this relevant to professional coaching I hear you cry. Well many of the people I coach are professional business men who gamble in business everyday and sometimes the thrill of the chase is too much to give up in ones leisure time.
If you realize that your little flutter has become a serious habit and you want to address it then I can help you. It is about taking the obsessive thoughts and learning to control them, making them weaker over time. We can use a variety of techniques to help you find the one that works for you, that will help you organize your thoughts, control them and learn to overcome then, in the end helping you prevent them in the first place.
NLP can help you change the way you think about gambling and understand why you get those urges. Using NLP techniques you can retrain your brain to use those thoughts in a constructive way.
If you want to talk to me about gambling or any other obsessive behaviour then please contact me. We can arrange a meeting to develop a bespoke treatment to help you understand the issues and put you on the road to recovery.
Every year I am invited to be a “Dragon” at The New College in Pontefract, as part of their Dragon’s Den event for their students.
The students work in teams of two, and have to come up with a business idea and then think about the branding, advertising, and a unique selling point for their product. The pitches varied from energy drinks to perfume, charities to cupcakes.
James Westmorland and Megan Beach presented their cupcake idea to us and this was my favourite pitch, it was certainly the tastiest! I really enjoy attending this events as I witness an abundant of Good Skills among all the students at the college.
The New College, Pontefract, is currently ranked 19th in the country for their 6th form college, according to The Times, which is great news for the students as it is obviously a fantastic place to study and set them on a path to success.
Today is blue Monday – supposedly the most depressing day of the year. This was of course a PR stunt dreamt up a few years ago but it did get me thinking.
January can be a very drab month. The parties are all over, pay day seems like it will never arrive again and the dark days drag.
However, today it snowed and it made everything luminous and everyone seemed happier, lighter, like they no longer had any responsibilities and were children again. We fill our lives with troubles and stresses, sometimes this cloud our judgement on what our real goals are and the path we need to be on to achieve these.
Snow days like today clear these black clouds and remind us of the path we should be on.
For the days when there are no snow and to help you get on the right path, why not have a session with me, and I can show you that everyday can be a snow day and not a Blue Monday.
At this time of year we put pressure on ourselves to be fitter, stop smoking, get a new job or make personal changes.
The problem with New Year’s resolutions is that they don’t work. They are spur of the moment, not thought through, and not always in line with your core values.
If you have a dream the chances are it won’t happen, because dreams are different to goals. If you want something to change you need to make sure you know why you want to change.
One of my friends decided she wanted to make several changes in her life so instead of making one New Year’s resolution she decided that every month she would do something new. Whether it was a new skill, experience or significant life changing decision, every month she completed it. At the end of 12 months she felt like she had achieved everything she set out to do and had gained some Good Skills along the way!
So when making your resolution, why not make it yours to gain some Good Skills.
Comfort Zones are really easy to find and even easier to stay in!
But let’s talk about the “Stretch Zone” and one way to approach it. Why not try my 11% method. Instead of going all out; just work the muscle a little (11%); once that ceases to take you in to stretch; voila! You have just expanded your comfort zone.
Enjoy it (but only for a bit!) and then; you’ve guessed it apply the 11% rule again and so on. A truly awesome way to expand and enrich all areas of your life; good skills!
Big News today! I have finally bitten the bullet and will be training to be a trainer.
Yes next summer I embark on the Trainer Training course with the (other!) co-creator of NLP Mr John Grinder. Three intensive weeks in Sunny Andalucia; this will undoubtedly make me the most qualified NLP expert in Sheffield by a country mile.
What is NLP?
In last weeks blog post we asked this question; and I gave the “official” version of Richard’s.
Ask a hundred NLP Practitioners though and you will probably get a slightly different answer every time. Because we acknowledge that we all have a different map of the world; express things differently and attach more (or less) importance to what we take from the different facets of the subject.
So less of the kaftan talk! Heres my “definitive” definition:
NLP is the study of how we get results in life.
NLP: Neuro – Linguistic Programming
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) began as a model of how we communicate to ourselves and others developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder during the seventies.
NLP is the practice of understanding how people organise their thinking, feeling, language and behaviour to produce the results they do. NLP provides people with a methodology to model outstanding performances achieved by geniuses and leaders in their field.
NLP is used to help us recognise, use and change mental programming in both personal and business development.
Neuro: Each individual has established their own unique mental filtering system for processing the millions of bits of data being absorbed through the senses. Our first mental map of the world is constituted of internal images, sounds, tactile awareness, internal sensations, tastes and smells that form as result of the neurological filtering process. The first mental map is called ‘First Access’ in NLP.
Linguistic: We then assign personal meaning to the information being received from the world outside. We form our second mental map by assigning language to the internal images, sounds and feelings, tastes and smells, thus forming everyday conscious awareness. The second mental map is called the Linguistic Map (sometimes known as Linguistic Representation)
Programming: The behavioural response that occurs as a result of neurological filtering processes and the subsequent linguistic map.
The NLP Academy is the UK’s leading centre for NLP Learning and offer a more comprehensive explanation of its uses here.
Richard Bandler – with whom I had the pleasure of working with on my NLP Practitioner course, explains ‘what is NLP’ very well in the below video.
Everyones got ‘some’ good skills…..
Napoleon Dynamite: Well, nobody’s going to go out with *me*!
Pedro: Have you asked anybody yet?
Napoleon Dynamite: No, but who would? I don’t even have any good skills.
Pedro: What do you mean?
Napoleon Dynamite: You know, like nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills… Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.
Pedro: Aren’t you pretty good at drawing, like animals and warriors and stuff?
Napoleon Dynamite: Yes… probably the best that I know of.
Pedro: Just draw a picture of the girl you want to take out… and give it to her for like a gift or something.
Napoleon Dynamite: That’s a pretty good idea.
What are your top 5 good skills?
