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.