Posts Tagged ‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming’

Determination, Or Is It Something Else!

Jun 28th, 10 / 2 Comments

It’s funny how often we use the word Determined to describe a person, probably just as easily as we would say the word stubborn for others, but what is really going on here. Now as well as the England Team having their own, lets call them difficulties for the sake of taking a neutral stand point this morning, I had a bit of a challenge myself over the last few days.

I have been setting up my new website acehypnosis.co.uk and it is the first time I have ventured into the realms of WordPress. For those of you unfamiliar with that name, it is a web package that allows you to construct and manage website pages online, from any location, by multiple users if required, simply with the use of a web browser. As far as layout and control are concerned, it is not my favourite method, but very little comes close when it comes to running a blog and keeping people up to date with your latest ramblings – Oh sorry, Informative articles that should read.

Everything had been going well. I was happier with the look and feel of the site as it’s evolving, and my posts/articles were being sent out to those that had subscribed via the RSS feed. Yipee! Doesn’t it make you feel good when everything is working as you intended? Then, I noticed that the last article I had written and posted on my site, had only been sent out as what is referred to as a teaser or extract, which is just the first couple of lines. All my previous posts had been sent out in full, which is a great way to allow your subscribers to read them without needing to re-visit the website. so what had changed!

Well, I don’t mind telling you that I have spent hour upon hour trawling through all the settings over and over again looking for inspiration. I have posted questions on the main WordPress help section and still nothing. For Fathers Day, I had received a bundle of gifts from my son (and wife) one of which was the beginners guide to WordPress, and I had scanned all 210 pages looking for inspiration, and still no joy. I am not going to go into the depths of what I did try and the mini disasters that struck en route, just to say that eventually I found a solution. I had upgraded to the latest version of the software and it seems to have made the original RSS feed behave differently.

I was so happy, I can’t tell you – Ok I am telling you! So happy in fact that even though we had ventured into the wee hours of the morning, as I was burning the midnight oil to get to the bottom of this, I made my wife get up to come and see the full length post coming in. You guessed it, she wasn’t that impressed I had disturbed her, but she could see how happy I was and praised me for my ‘determination’. “I knew you would sort it out” she said. I beamed a smile at my screen for a while, feeling particularly pleased and relieved at the same time, and that got me thinking about ‘Determination’

So where does determination come from and what distinguishes it from stubbornness?

To understand this, I have to cast my mind back to that moment when I realised that the problem was solved. What was I thinking, what did resolving this give me that had driven me so. The fact is, each and every one of us could do this. We could ask ourselves when we accomplish something, even something seemingly insignificant, What did achieving this give us? How much did we want it? What skills and resources did we have that enabled us to achieve it? How did we know or what were we looking for, that showed us we had achieved? If we just think about these few questions here, and ask them of ourselves in relation to something we recently did well, the answers will probably come to mind quite easily. If we run through the same questions again with something that we did not do so well, then the chances are that we may have to look a little deeper for the answers, as we had not been aware of them.

So when I asked myself these questions, what did I hear?

As a couple of my readers had requested this change to my RSS feed, I wanted to show that I care. I want my subscribers to have the best experience when reading my blog, as I feel that this will retain them and keep them interested in what I have to say. There would be little point in me writing my blog to share the benefit of my experiences with others, if no one was going to read it in full,and so this was very compelling to me. I have a level of knowledge about the internet and web design, and so I knew that there would be a solution in sight. Keeping all that in mind, seeing the delivery of a full post would tell me that I had solved the problem and that all the above goals would have been achieved.

At times, we are driven to avoid problems and situations, and it is all to easy to maintain this habit of being motivated away from things. On other occasions we are motivated towards something, a goal or a dream we have, and we can make far better use of our resources if we set a plan in motion to achieve. In NLP terms, this is known as the well formed outcome. It is ‘always‘ essential to know exactly what you want and be a descriptive in your mind as you possibly can. Imagine for a while that you have already achieved your goal. Think about how good that feels. Think about how others may see your achievement. Notice in your mind how differently things are with this achievement. Think about all those things, all those skills and resources that you have right now that will help you to do that. Perhaps you notice things that you may need that you don’t have just now, and how you can go about including those. And then think about what will be your sign, what will indicate to you that you have achieved. It’s bad enough when others move the ‘goal posts’, so let’s make sure we don’t do it to ourselves. It is also good to recognise that you can be flexible, you can change what you are doing if it is not getting the results you need, and this is what distinguishes determination from  stubbornness.

I could just have sent out an Email to my subscribers to say – To get the full RSS Feed, you may need to subscribe to the new link – But I think this was better.

Well another busy day awaits and so I leave you with those thoughts.

Alan Herbert – Hypnotherapist and NLP Practitioner | acehypnosis.co.uk | follow me on twitter
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Hypnotherapy, Living & Learning

How Dreams Can Demonstrate What Goes On Inside

Jun 22nd, 10 / 0 Comments

When I woke up this morning, it was one of those rare occasions when I actually remembered the body of what I had been dreaming about.

I know that some people like to analyse dreams and delve into the content, whereas I imagine my mind being a huge store room of filling cabinets. When I rest, little mini me’s run around like headless chickens filing away all the things I had pulled out earlier and finding homes for all the new learnings and experiences generated during that day. The only way the mini me’s can know where to file things, is to read them to get an idea of the best place to put them. I believe that It is these ‘snippets’ of information, that form our dreams.

Last night saw the release of Apples ios4 – the latest software for the iPhone and iPod touch – and this in turn required an update to the latest version of iTunes. Our internet was taking a severe bashing as we are a household of mac users, and we do love our technology. We had several computers all hitting Apple’s servers, greedily demanding the latest version of their software and as time went on, the download speed was getting slower and slower. Eventually, in the small hours of the morning, everything in the House of Herberts – an unfortunate phrase but it makes me laugh – was up and running again with the coolest gadgets to leave Cupertino [ The Home of the Mac ] . Relieved and ready for bed, I retired for the night.

This brings me nicely back to that dream I talked about earlier. Hopefully, at least some of you will have seen that great film Zulu, with Michael Caine. Now I hasten to add that this film was made back in 1964, I while before i sprang to life, but never the less I have enjoyed watching it on several occasions. The key point about this is the stand that Michael made with his few remaining soldiers at the end of the film, against the Zulu Warriors. They were clearly out numbered but reluctantly stood their ground until the bitter end.

In my dream, I could see Michael Caine in his bright red uniform, walking up and down a line of troops instructing them on how they were to stand guard over the information being given out from those massive servers at Apple. “Give them just enough to keep them happy lads” Is what I was hearing. It seemed really major and very vivid. When I woke up, I remember thinking that was probably a tough night for them.

The thing about all this, is how when we don’t have much else to occupy our minds, we allow other ‘stuff’ to amplify and fill all that unused space in our heads. You know how sometimes we wake in the early hours, thinking about something that appears to be a big issue to us at the time, and yet in the morning, it’s much less of a concern. We have filled our minds with many different things by this stage, so each of them can only occupy an appropriate amount of space, putting things back into perspective for us.

A similar thing happens when we dwell on problems. If we focus on the negative aspect of a problem, omitting anything useful from our thought process, there is room for anxiety about that problem to grow, until eventually the problem can seem overwhelming.

It is always sensible to keep sight of the good things that we have in life, and give those just as much, if not more attention than things that bother us.

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Living & Learning, Technology

The Hypnotic Effect of the Progress Bar – Really!

May 12th, 10 / 0 Comments

A few of days ago, my son had decided to upgrade one of his computers to enable him to make use of all the benefits of the latest version of the operating system. Now I not only love, but I embrace whole heartedly, the idea that children should take on adventures and challenges of their own, just as us ‘grown ups’ should continually encourage ourselves by try something different. I don’t mind telling you though that I had some reservations.

I should mention at this point that my son is now a teenager, a mighty 13 years old and probably one of the more cautious members of our household. With that in mind I trust his judgement and hoped that he has not left any little golden nugget of data behind, before he wipes his hard drive and begins the process. I kept my crossed fingers out of site the entire time.

He didn’t actually need me to be with him, but he was so excited about what he was going to be able to do, that I pulled up a chair and made myself comfortable for the next hour to share his experience. After a few clicks, a bit of frantic keyboard action and a quick disc swap, the screen went decidedly black and then grey…. followed by a deathly silence. I could feel my heart pounding, wondering if this was it! The final curtain for the old computer, until I managed to pull my gaze away from the screen and looked at my son, who had this amazing carefree look on his face as he tapped his fingers on the desk.

“Is that right” I said. He just looked at me, smiled and turned back to look at the screen with almost perfect timing – I was sure there was a director hiding somewhere who had just shouted action – as it sprang into life and we were presented with a bright new window. A few more clicks and high speed typing, swapped this options screen for the now visible progress bar. I have seen these many times before, as they appear whenever you instal a new application or perform some sort of update, but I have never paid much heed to them before, until now.

I was feeling better, my heart rate had returned to it’s normal rate and I was feeling very relaxed. The progress bar was doing it’s whirly thing and I settled back in my chair and just listened. I listened for the next 45 minutes to my son telling me about all the new features, all the things he was going to be able to do, how fantastic this upgrade would be. And as I listened, I was transfixed by the progress bar.

So many of the things we do in life, we have a good idea about the outcome. We know what is required from us, what we will need to do and what shows us we have done that. It could be something as simple as cutting the grass. We know how the lawn will look when it’s cut, which is how we know it needs cutting in the first place – right! Or it could be something like running a race. A  friend of mine recently entered into and completed I hasten to add, the London Marathon. Now he knew what was required of him, he knew how much he needed to put into this to finish the race – even if he did lower our expectations by telling us he was older and heavier than on previous occasions – and he would see the finish line which would give him something very special. With all those things, we have a level of control.

By contrast, we have no control with the progress of the software installation, and so we get the progress bar. This was the only sign we had of just how well things were going. and as I continued to listen, with the progress bar getting closer and closer to the end, I could feel the anticipation building inside of me. There was nothing I could do to push that bar those last couple of millimetres, which seemed to take an eternity. No last minute burst of energy or second wind was going to help here. I just had to wait and let the anticipation do it’s thing.

Finally, the computer sprang into life and we were greeted with a host of welcomes in almost all languages. I think by that time, I would have been happy with almost anything, which made this fantastic display of graphical genius even more tantalising. Having been staring at the building progress bar and listening to my sons positive statements about all the wonderful new benefits this would bring, I was already conditioned for great things. And I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed.

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Hypnotherapy