Who are the mentors who have helped you?  Did they challenge you, push you to move beyond your limitations – imagined or real? Or did they just console you?  Did they expand your universe or just reinforce your existing beliefs?

There is a lot of confusion about how a coach is supposed to help you. If you are looking for someone to talk to, to simply feel better about yourself, then you’re not looking for a coach.  A coach will challenge you to make changes towards permanent positive change, new ideas, and new behavior. They will also give you the specific tools so that you can do it. They will hold you accountable to put those tools to use, and to keep using them. Anything less, and you are cheating yourself.

There’s also big myth about self-sufficiency, and self-determination,  and a false idea that we should all be able to go it alone. There’s confusion about independence and interdependence. There’s a difference between being pushed out of your comfortable nest, and being able to fly with exquisite skill. A good coach will push you beyond your comfort zone and give you the skills to thrive there.

The most accomplished and successful leaders in every field have always  been mentored. Professional athletes have coaches, effective organizations have consultants, even great spiritual teachers have advisers and guides! Artists, writers, musicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors .. you name it .. the best of them acknowledge the life-changing impact of their mentors,

Why would you imagine that you deserve less, or could achieve your best with less?

Perhaps you run your life by other myths, that you’re not good enough, or that you don’t deserve it, or that you can’t afford it. But your logic is backwards. You become good enough by stepping up, you come to deserve it by claiming it, and ultimately, if you want to become and do what you’re truly capable of becoming and doing, you can’t afford not to get the help you need and deserve to make it happen!

The work of a coach is not to help you feel comfortable with your limitations, real or imagined. It is not even to help you understand those limitations, however valuable understanding can sometimes be. It is to help you  focus your energy so that you move beyond those limitations altogether, and to sustain that movement so that you, and everyone around you benefits.

.. And aren’t all limitations imagined ones anyway?

So, are you coachable? Ask yourself:

1. Can you learn? Can you let go of what you thought you knew? Can you listen and take action based on what you hear? Can you stand directly in front of the things you have avoided because they terrified you, and learn from your fears? Can you trust .. which means, can you trust yourself, your dreams, desires, ambitions? Can you trust that life works for you, not against you, as soon as you start living and thinking for yourself.
2. Can you change? Can you risk losing what you thought you depended on? Can you risk losing who you thought you were? Can you risk failing in order to achieve a greater and deeper success. Can you understand that true success is not a zero-sum game. When you win, everyone can win? Can you get out of your own way? Can you stand face to face with those old fears and trust that they may be your greatest teachers, not just something to ‘overcome’, but true guides and teachers.

A few years ago I began working  with mentors who really challenged me to question my own belief system and the self-imposed limitations that were playing out in my life, as well as in my work as a teacher and mentor to others.

I realized that I had a ‘sacred’ duty to provoke, challenge, and question even more than I had been .. and to provide concrete tools, practical perspectives , and real-life skills with which people might sustain permanent change in an ongoing way. Anything less than that was merely misplaced kindness!

Genuine kindness sacrifices temporary comfort for long term achievement and ongoing, ever-evolving, fulfillment and creativity; to become a true reflection of this wild and marvelous adventure of living!

My father-in-law had mislaid his walking stick. The dementia he suffers from shows up in different ways at different times. Sometimes he’s coherent, and at other times loses the thread of his reality. He’ll be is watching a movie on TV and dodging John Wayne’s bullets, or offering his encouragement and advice to a jilted lover. Distinctions and boundaries between things disappear completely.

It helps me appreciate the apparent continuity that most of us enjoy, and marvel at the everyday mental abilities most of us take for granted.

My father-in-law knew he had lost something. His walking-stick is something he likes to hold as he sits in front of the TV, a reassuring and comforting object. But he wasn’t clear what it was that he had lost. He knew he had to search. He looked for it on the table.He looked under the DVD boxes. He picked up his headphones, his coffee mug, his shoes.

I asked him what he is looking for. He said he didn’t know.

He said that maybe it was something that goes over his head and covers his ears. He made a gesture of putting on headphones.

I asked if it’s his walking stick that he’s lost . He says he wasn’t sure.

Then I brought it to him from the other side of the room.

“Is this it?”I ask.

“Yes, yes, thank, thank you very much,”  he says.

He knew he had lost something. He knew that he felt less than complete. Something was missing. When he found it he felt better. He was himself again.

I wonder what it is you may have lost, or forgotten about, or can’t recognize, which, when someone helps you find it, will allow you to feel whole again. What’s missing from your life that you may have grown accustomed to? What will change when you find it? Like coming home after a long absence, remembering who you truly are.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Do you believe that? If it were true, what does it say about choices you may have made? We always get what we want and expect, whether we think so or not!

Of course, that doesn’t mean that outside influences don’t play out in our lives. They do, all the time. But how we negotiate and transform those influences is determined by us. It’s not a question of whether or not obstacles, challenges, and disappointment exit. They exist in abundance. The question is how you address them, and how your attitude and predisposition may be influencing their perceived impact.

This is something that every mature teaching system agrees on, from Buddhism to New Thought. More importantly, simple honest observation bears it out every day.

Without an intention, nothing is actually ‘accomplished’

This does not mean that your life must be dominated by your goals. Learning to be present, to be mindful, to have awareness in everyday life is essential. It is not a question of one being more important than the other. It’s not either or. In fact, it has been demonstrated that people who are on track with their goals and vision, and who are taking action to achieve them in a deliberate and conscious way, are more able to release anxiety and fully live in the present moment, which translates to fully enjoying life – this is something else that simple observation bears witness to every day. Just think of the people you know who are getting things accomplished in a steady measured way with deliberation and joy, clear intention and a clear plan.

There are two keys to sustaining intention and vision. The first is CONGRUITY —  being in agreement with yourself, embodying your ‘bliss’, and living with the integrity that allows you to live from the inside out. That means NOT fighting against yourself, living your truth, knowing your values and priorities, and trusting them.

The second key is MOTIVATION. Motivation is based on emotion, and emotions do not last. So the question is how you live into the marvelous unknown, with trust, enjoying the journey of your life so that it’s unfolding becomes a source of pleasure and joy. How do you become naturally self-motivated. How do you generate motivation within yourself every day. There are ways to learn to do exactly this. This is the not-so-secret secret known to almost everyone you have ever admired, emulated, or been inspired by — from the Buddha to Oprah Winfrey, from Nelson Mandela to the the Rolling Stones

To learn more please visit http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/N88FS76 to complete a short survey and request a complimentary Strategy-Focus phone call.

Podcast at: http://www.hownotwhy.com/?p=432

Who’s in charge of your life? Who’s driving the bus? These are the basic questions that NLP asks you, to challenge the idea that you are powerless to change.

Depression and anxiety disorders are related to your idea that someone or something else is in charge, and your  symptoms  are perpetuated and aggravated by the belief that you are helpless to change.

But you know that if you could, and when you do change, you will cease being a victim of the condition you experience, and become instead the one who’s driving that bus, and choosing your journey.

Although much is said about the chemical causes  for depression, that diagnosis doesn’t really address the issue. Everything is chemical to some extent. Love is chemical too. Anger is chemical, curiosity, fear, and any emotional state you care to mention has some chemical component. You can also ask, “What else is it aside from mere chemistry?”

Anger, addictions of various kinds, emotions of all sorts can be managed, and transformed. You can learn to change their negative effects easily when you know how. The same is true of depression and anxiety. It’s just a question of learning the skills.

Depression and Anxiety lead to many things:

• family conflict
• alienation
• learning disabilities necessary
• low self-esteem
• low energy
• absenteeism
• ill health
• chronic debilitating mental illness
  … the list goes on

Twenty-seven  million people in the US take medication for depression. Perhaps you’re one of them. Perhaps you would like to avoid becoming one of them.

Here’s a resource I discovered. It doesn’t mention NLP – but it’s got some good info.

http://www.teachhealth.com/

Sometimes it flows, sometimes not. Sometimes it rings true, sometimes not. Sometimes it is enthralling, scary,  predictable, or dull. Sometimes it is a dream come true? Sometimes you have to pinch yourself. It is so amazing that you have to accept that you live a charmed and blessed life; and sometimes you forget.

Without our stories, the world is about as interesting as a technical manual on a subject you know nothing about.

We learn through stories. Even hard facts must be transformed into metaphors, images, and stories for us to remember them. Children love stories because that’s how they learn to be in the world. We all love stories because of the new possibilities they present to us.

There are two kinds of stories: stories that limit us, and stories that expand the boundaries of what we imagine is possible. Possibilities must be imagined before they can be realized. Possibilities come to us first as stories. Limitations are negative possibilities, and are imagined in the same way.

A story that bursts through the limits of what was once imagined can liberate us from whatever story we may have been telling ourselves. “I can’t.” “I am too this or that.” “I always seem to mess it up.” “The world is too this or that.” “Too many people are suffering. I will only make it worse.” “People are unkind.” “Someone will rescue me.” “I am too young.” “Too old.” “Too smart.” “Too dumb.” You are whatever you say you are. You can be the exception to whatever it is you imagined others may have said about you.

A young woman in Kenya who saved scores of girls from genital mutilation because she herself had been mutilated. A dock-worker in Poland who catalyzed the downfall of the communist regime. A Burmese woman, Aung San Suu Kyi, who continues to tell a story about democracy and self-determination for the people of Burma. Under house arrest for decades,  she continues to inspire the world. How many examples are there of people who changed the lives of others. They did so by creating a story that was bigger than any of the limitations that might have consumed them.

The best healers and teachers teach us stories about what is possible. In the history of all people are stories about taming demons and monsters and making them into allies; and stories about transforming impossible tasks and accomplishing them. We make meaning through stories.

What story are you telling yourself, which when you change it now, changes everything about what is possible for yourself and for the world.

Do stories change hard facts? You bet they do! Is there still work to do? In Haiti, Pakistan, Iraq, and in your own life? Of course.

The question is simple. What stories lead you to say, “Yes, I can” so that you are empowered to do that necessary work of transforming your life and the life of the world?

But if you ONLY learn from your mistakes,

then you will learn very slowly. Learn from your mistakes certainly, and in addition seek a mentor, guide, teacher, coach. Regardless of what you do or aspire to do, there is someone who can help you move forward more effectively than you can even imagine (because you’re not there yet).

learn from those who have traveled the road ahead of you.

It’s rash to imagine that you can attain your best without wise counsel, support, and mentorship. If you feel that you have gifts to offer the world why would you deliberately hold yourself back from doing all you can from maximizing your ability to share them? Professional athletes have coaches, great spiritual teachers have mentors, and organizations have consultants.

Even the Dalai Lama has spiritual advisers to instruct him. The best athletes may have an entire squad of coaches and trainers. Leaders with the greatest responsibility and reach seek guidance from those whose perspectives they trust.

Why would you imagine that you deserve less, or could achieve your best with less?

The more creative and competent you are, the more this is true.

I have always looked for teachers that could guide me and help me move forward. I now invest a great deal to find teachers who will do more than that; who will move me forward, hold me accountable, and kick my butt (and my ‘buts’). Sometimes it feels scary. I have learned that when it does I am likely on the verge of a new and exciting opening, personally or professionally.

Two key principles make up the Psychology of Success. There are a multitude of details for how you achieve success, but here are two important principles, which when you apply them, puts success, however you choose to measure it, within your grasp.

My father had lived through the Great Depression, and when he spoke of success he meant that someone had made a lot of money. Much to his consternation, he was never very successful at making money himself, and in his later years came to depend on my mother. Like many people who never fully realized their dreams, he found ways to mask his disappointment. As a child I rebelled against his singular notion of success; in part because his disappointment was so painful to witness.

The dictionary tells us that the word success started its life meaning that something was concluded, something was done. Good or bad, intended or not, when a thing is finished it has arrived at its own successful conclusion. You could say the we all live the life of our dreams. Consciously or unconsciously we all strive towards our own desired outcomes, and we achieve them according to our own internal capacity (or otherwise) for inner congruence and focus. So, in the broadest sense, we are all successful.

Success now means something more specific; a desired outcome, rather than just any old conclusion. We always have a choice in how we do things. The criteria and the necessary actions for our success is something we must determine ourselves. Some people have the mindset that allows them to regularly fulfill specific goals and ambitions decisively — whether it’s to climb a mountain, or to be the first to climb a particular mountain, or to climb many mountains. Whatever our mountain might be, each of us, deep down, has our own measure for our own specific success, regardless of whether we attain it or not.

So, what does success mean for you? Is it an abstraction, or do you have specific goals, your own  specific mountain? Perhaps you have learned to live with disappointment. Perhaps you are afraid of failure, or perhaps you are afraid of success. What picture do you have of your life ten years from now, twenty years, fifty years? Maybe you have heard that you should simply let things ‘unfold by themselves’? You know, even a blank slate, or an open door, is effectively a picture too.

What about happiness? Is happiness the measure of your success? As a child, questioning my father’s correlation of success with money, I looked for an alternative to his version of success, and began to equated success with creativity, beyond mere happiness, towards ecstasy and creative abandon. I was a romantic even then! I was uncomfortable with, and confused by my father’s notions of success because he provided no role model, other than his own failure. I did not yet have any idea that I might be responsible for my own outcomes, let alone how I might go about achieving them.

Success implies measurement. It involves assessment and comparison. We measure ourselves against others, and against what was and could have been. You might say that looking for happiness by comparing yourself to others is madness. Yet, we do it anyway, out of habit, because it is how we first learned to live in the world. It is how we learned to make the choices that now define who we are.

On our journey from infancy to adulthood it was by comparing and judging ourselves against others  that we formed our core values and identity.

But success has very little to do with finding happiness outside of yourself by comparisons with others. Assessment is necessary, but judgment and comparison may be optional extras.

Assessment begins with having clearly defined outcomes. This is the first of the two principles of success. When you have clearly defined outcomes, you either fulfill your intention, or you learn that you missed something on the way. You ask yourself why, you can even go a step further by saying, “This is the best thing that could have happened.”  The mindset you create with that statement helps you put your next clearly defined outcome into action, whether it concerns the moment-to-moment details of your daily life, or addresses the big picture, call it your destiny.

By having clearly defined outcomes, by asking what lessons there are for you to learn, even when challenged by impossibly difficult situations, you are no longer a victim of circumstance. You are now living at cause, choosing your own life. And isn’t choice the key ingredient here, the key to your success? You move freely, assessing what you have gained or missed, and self-correcting as you go. You are learning  to say, “This is the best thing that could have happened!”

The second of these two principles for the psychology of success concerns how you focus your attention. Your focus can be like a zoom lens. You can magnify small details, or you can have a wide view. You can be specific, or you can be more abstract. When you move through varying degrees of abstraction and specificity, you evaluate your options in ways that are impossible when you hold to a single perspective.

By zooming out to greater degrees of abstraction you are often asking, “Why? For what purpose?” By zooming in to greater specificity you are asking, “How? What specifically .. ?”  You can even direct your awareness in another direction outside of your immediate range of view to find analogies, and a broader context. You ask, “What are other examples of this?”

Some people are caught in details, and never get to see the big picture. Others are lost in abstraction and never get to apply their larger vision. Many people rely on only one singular point of view. When you know the difference between the vision and the details, when you learn to move easily between the two, when you learn to take another tack to find new perspective, then you have an edge that allows you to give what meanings you choose to such notions as success or failure.

There’s another element, a theme more essential than any psychological principle of success. It has to do with the simple capacity to focus, to sustain awareness. Combine that with the principle of well formed outcomes, and the principle of choosing your level of abstraction, within a hierarchy of possible perspectives, it becomes the glue that allows you to navigate your life with a proficiency that will let you define your success entirely on your own terms.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hypnotic Induction

10:26 minutes

The unconscious mind is a boundless resource, and repository. Within it is everything you are not now considering …  yet …
including any new paradigm and possibilities for your own positive transformation.

Here’s a gift of a trance induction for
Mind-Body Well-being, Healing, and Transformation.

Note: do not listen to this while driving.

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