Archives for 2019

The difference NLP training makes in your life

How much of a difference can an NLP training make in your life?

NLP training will give you the skills to completely change your life. It’s not a magic wand, so big changes may not be immediately noticeable, which is why a clearly defined S.M.A.R.T. goal for each desired outcome is so important, as well as clearly defined evidence procedure for how you will notice when you are achieving steps along the way. Truth is – there are no big steps, only the accumulation of smaller ones. This is why it is important to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the big goals, and to understand that everything you do today moves either towards or away from those goals. Then you can concentrate on what you can actually do today that brings the goals closer. It may be as simple as an email or phone call…

Sitting on the beach on my day off from assisting at the NLP Trainers’ training in Sydney, it’s almost hard to conceive of just how much I’ve developed since being on the same beach three years earlier. I literally spent every penny I had to take Practitioner, Master Practitioner and Trainer certifications with the Tad James Company, enabling me to offer my own certifications in NLP, Hypnosis, Time Line Therapy® and NLP Coaching. Although I had originally trained in NLP to Trainer level in 1997-99 with Richard Bandler, I felt it was time for a major upgrade, and to extend myself beyond just NLP and into the other modalities. It’s a decision I will always thank myself for.

My own development

I am now in the 4th year of the NLP Master Trainer program with the Tad James Company, and I have just arrived back to the UK from Sydney, and what was the largest and most successful NLP Trainers training for them. I’m taking a moment to reflect on this awesome development program and the effect it is continually having on me.

Day by day I take action on my goals and outcomes, my directions and developments, and I focus on what I want and enforce my own boundaries – in short all the things I expect my clients to do. But when I reach Sydney each year, and assist in the coaching of the new NLP Trainers training, the changes I have gone through become unavoidably clear to me.

I’m there to help the students achieve true excellence in all things NLP, and become amongst the very best Trainers on the Planet. But I’m also there to get a sense of how much change I have created in myself in the interim year. By being around my peers I can appreciate the enormous leap I have made.

I can appreciate the development of those who are graduating the five year program before me and share in their success. I also take feedback from the students, from my own peers on the Master Trainer program, and from Adriana James, who continues to push me higher and accept no excuses for limitations.

NLP Master Trainer program

The Tad James Co. NLP Master Trainer program is a thorough and beautiful ride. It is equally empowering and humbling at the same time. This year the Coaches were achieving an unprecedentedly high bar together, supporting each other and projecting cleanly our desired outcomes, which we went on to exceed again and again.

In turn this was reflected in the students themselves, including a great number of the 90+ students hitting the hotel bar after graduation, and going well into the night celebrating together. People make friendships for life at this training.

One day back and I am already taking bookings through to May next year, and starting to think about my next visit to the Tad James Company in 2020 I look forward to being there, meeting my friends and peers for more fun and development, and doing our bit to make the planet a better place for all.

In three years I have moved from a 1-to-1 coaching model to a 1-to-many training model, offering certification trainings and work in the corporate sector. I launched a Limited Company from scratch and built it up to a very healthy position, and found every step of the way to be exciting, thanks to my own training. At each step I have been fully supported, with solid advice and feedback that has helped me form a business mind and approach to success.

The skill set I have learned has helped me in every part of my personal and professional life, whichever way you measure it. Part of my Master Trainer journey is being shown how to make my company successful by modelling their success.

So when I teach an NLP Training, I offer the same to my graduates, and this is something that will happen for you too when you decide to take the training for yourself.

What’s on offer

Firstly, the training itself is an immersive experience, that teaches the required syllabus for internationally recognised certification standards, backed up by professional bodies. But my training goes way beyond that and takes each individual as far along their own path of development as possible.

For example – I offer a lifetime of ongoing support for free after initial training. I do this because my graduates have invested in me as well as them and I want to return this investment as best as I can. I also offer a monthly NLP Practice group, which focuses on one or two aspects of the skills each time and practice them at a deeper level. I also offer new insights and developments as I gain them, so I keep my graduates up to date with their own development. Finally there is an ongoing professional coaching package to hold people’s hand through every aspect of their own development towards achieving the life they were always meant to live.

This training has changed forever for the better the way I think, feel and behave. It helped me take a great idea and turn it methodically into a thriving business. It is easy for me to make professional relationships, to nurture clients and colleagues, to make more business, to be healthier, and be be in charge of my thoughts and feelings. I have created a very compelling vision of my future, turned that into a plan, and have succeeded in every part of the first three years of that plan – which means I will achieve the next two years of the plan too. At the same time I am creating a new plan..

The difference that makes a difference

I am more creative in the way I think, I find possible solutions everywhere, I believe unshakeably in myself and my ability to achieve anything, and I have a methodology for initiating and maintaining my efforts in the right direction. And my personal life continues to get better and better through time, such that it is completely satisfying in every way.

In these and many more ways NLP training has enhanced the quality of my life through the last 22 years, and so it gives me great pleasure to pass on this understanding to as many others as possible through my NLP certification trainings and work in the corporate sector.

Are you ready to discover how you too can make the difference that really makes a difference in your life?

NLP and How It Works For Weight Management

Over the coming months I will be writing a series of articles about Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) – and how it can help with weight management, both physically and mentally. But what is NLP and why would you even be interested in what it can do for you?

Neuro refers to the neurological makeup, the nervous system, which is most of our body. Our experiences and memories are stored in the nervous system and the way they are stored will dictate how we think and feel about them, and what behaviours we generate.

Linguistic is all about communication, on all levels, including the words we say and think to ourselves. Only 7% of the communication is the words, but they are important to pay attention to, and sometimes to change. Our language should always positively reflect as closely as possible the goals and desires we wish to have.

Programming is about learned behaviour, and not turning ourselves into robots. We are born with certain things hardwired, like language acquisition and mobility. But things like writing, driving cars and playing music are essentially add-ons or programs which – unlike The Matrix – are acquired and developed over time. The way we create or program new behaviours is by combining our thoughts, actions, feelings and recall of past experiences.

NLP Communication Model

We are bombarded with information all day long. Our phones, TVs, adverts everywhere, social media ‘opinion’, shop fronts, radio, there is so much going on all around us. If we were aware of it all it would drive us mad, so we filter things down to a manageable level. The filters do three things; they delete things, distort things and generalise things, to suit our beliefs, values and attitudes – all of which can be changed through NLP techniques.

While reading this you were probably not that aware of the feeling of the clothes on your body, or other sounds around you, or what your left hand feels like. This is deleting information. Some people have an image of themselves that is distorted, such as body dysmorphia, thinking they’re ugly or fat or thin etc. I have met many people who are underweight, anorexic even, who see a fat person when they look in the mirror. As incredulous as it may seem for some, it is the picture they actually ‘see’, and they are distorting their reality.

Media and adverts are very guilty of projecting an idea of how we should be, and there can be pressure to conform to the generalized image projected. It is possible to start thinking thoughts like “everyone else is thin and healthy” or “I’ll never sort this out” – these are generalizations about the world. Notice they are not necessarily true but we hold them to be so.

There’s a part of you that I call the Unconscious Mind. When you go to sleep at night, you don’t worry that you will forget how to breathe, or keep your blood warm and at the correct pressure. Similarly you don’t know how you interpret random black marks on a white background, call it English language, and find meaning in it, or how you vibrate your neck and move air across it to make a vibration I call language. Your Unconscious Mind is responsible for these things and many, many more. It operates out of a set of defined directives – such as preserving the body and storing the memories – and does its best to carry out the instructions it receives from us.

The trouble here can be that we may inadvertently give it instructions that, if we thought about it, we probably wouldn’t have given. Then, having not realized we have issued one of these ‘inadvertent’ orders, we promptly forget we did it, and this makes the problem harder for us to spot at first without help. Let me give you an example so you can see how this process can work.

Example of a program

I had a client that came to me because she was going to have a job interview in two weeks and she knew she was going to panic and fail. I asked was she sure this was going to happen and she said yes. Now personally if I could tell the future, I’d be making a lot more money! I asked could she have the panic a couple of hours after the interview, and she thought I was weird. So when I asked could she have it the night before the interview while she was asleep, she thought I was even crazier. But here’s the thing – I thought she was crazy for being determined to have that negative experience, set into the future in such a precise way that it would only happen in a very specific time frame or else it wouldn’t have the effect.

So I asked her how she was going to do it, and calm as anything she said she would wake up feeling awful, and then she would say to herself that she knew she would wake up feeling like this. Then she would think of all the questions they could ask her that would lead her to feeling like this. Then she would cycle this around while she got up and made a coffee, and by the time she left to go for the interview she’d have amplified it so much she knew she was going to panic and fail.

That was her ‘job interview program’, matter of fact. The short story is we made it so she woke up feeling fantastic, full or energy, excited and motivated. And then she would say to herself that she knew she was going to wake up feeling like that. Then she would think of all the questions they could ask her that would lead her to feeling like this etc… So the program itself wasn’t far out, just the feeling she was planning to take into it. In case you’re wondering, she sailed through the interview feeling great, got the promotion and the wage rise to go with it.

Implications for weight management

In terms of weight management, there are a couple of caveats. Firstly there are a number of medical conditions which CAN but DON’T HAVE TO lead to weight gain.  And there are certain drugs that also may or may not have weight gain as an effect, such as antipsychotic medication. Most people are not in this category though, and I am not writing about that category in this article.

So if you are planning on managing your weight there are a number of things to take into consideration:

Is the target weight specified, measurable, achievable and realistic within a specific timescale you are setting yourself?

  • Do you want to achieve this for yourself or because someone else is pressuring you into it?
  • Have you looked for other ways you can achieve the target weight that you haven’t thought of yet?
  • Are you prepared to do whatever it takes to hit the target weight?

NLP can help with all the above processes, so you are fully prepared beforehand and supported throughout the process, and have all the skills to maintain the results afterwards through embracing a lifestyle change and enjoying the benefits experienced.

Under natural circumstances, one of the things the Unconscious Mind does is to regulate and optimize the body system, including weight. But habits form and can over-ride that natural balancing act. Many people overeat and think they cannot control those urges, or are simply unaware of the amount of snacking they do, or choose unhealthy snacking. Others go through cycles of eating unhealthily and then feeling bad or thinking negatively about themselves in some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. There are many things you can do though to combat this and create new behaviours, which become healthy habits, which in turn replace the unhealthy ones.

Calories in

One thing that surprises many of my clients is just how much they distort what goes into them. The simple answer to that is a phone app called myfitnesspal. Enter everything that goes into the body and find out exactly what is happening. A lot of people don’t consider the alcohol intake as significant, and how many nuts is a couple of handfuls? Most people live sedentary lifestyles so as a rule of thumb, to maintain weight, most women need about 2000 calories and most men need 2400. To lose weight therefore you need less – maybe 500 under this figure. Good news is vegetables are mostly very low calorie, so you don’t have to be hungry or miserable about it.

Calories out

Coupled with this is to look at calorie expenditure. Sitting on the couch is unhealthy in a number of ways. It certainly doesn’t burn the calories off, but this can seem daunting at first. Images may spring to mind of thin people in gyms, and it’s easy to be put off the effort. But simply walking to the shops each day is a start, or a walk in the park, or even to the end of the road and back at first. But consistent effort is king (or queen). Remember – realistic and achievable. It has to be something you can maintain, rather than do a bit and give up.

There are plenty of online ways to guestimate the calories burned. You may burn 100 going to the shops and back, 350 gardening or gently cycling for an hour. Jogging or swimming may burn 550 an hour, and martial arts and other strenuous activities may burn up to 1000. Using a calculator online you can work out your calorie burn rate. The next step is to start making the calorie output greater than the calorie input. What I mean by this is if you’re needing 2000 to maintain average weight, but you eat 2700, you need to lose more than the 700, and this is done by cutting calories in and also increasing calories out. Going below the 2000 will make weight loss start to happen.

NLP can be used to effectively to change mindset about the process, to eliminate unwanted limiting beliefs and limiting decisions made about self and others. It can help set realistic targets and steps to achieving it, and hold you accountable to the plan. Also, it can eliminate negative emotional content from the past, or help with becoming motivated, to feeling good about the process, to focus on the benefits and the gains to health and longevity. It can even help turn up the metabolism to burn more calories.

Are you ready to take up the challenge to make a shift in lifestyle choices, rather than pay homage to a fad diet? Are you ready to monitor and be aware of everything that goes in? How about making a pact with yourself, to start moving more to spend some calories? Are you ready to move towards a longer and healthier future? If the answers are yes to most of those questions, then make some simple plans today for how you want to be in a year’s time from today. Make it realistic and achievable, and then be prepared to play at 100% for the goal you have.

Future articles on this subject will include how to avoid comfort eating or snacking, mindful eating, changing mindset, letting go of guilt and other related negative emotions, and preventing slipping into old habits at the first sign of failure.

For more information about my weight loss program see here or contact me now to discuss how I can assist you in achieving your goals.