Practical Wellbeing

It’s been snowing here.

The already rutted and grit stained street is covered with a fresh clean blanket of white powder.

It’s been cold here for a few weeks now which is unusual in a time of globally warmed, wet and windy winters.

If you would believe the news and bus stop conversation you would think that the snow was a terrible thing, the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Personally I love it!

I had a snow starved childhood. The closest we usually got to a white Christmas on the North Wales coast was if it was misty! Now when I see snow I’m pleased, I love the crunch of it underfoot, the quiet of its falling and its dazzling whiteness.

I realise from many practical points of view it’s a real pain in the neck. Paths are slippery, driving is difficult and it’s cold. I still love it.

I love it because it throws everything into sharp relief, it covers up the annoying little details of the world and shows the overall shape of the world.

I love it because of the clarity of a deep blue sunny winter’s day.  It’s a different view of the familiar.

I love it because it’s a challenge, you have to get kitted up to go out, you can’t just go out as you please. You need to be prepared. When you are out in it, it can be so much fun. Walks with friends are wonderful, sledging is exciting and convivial (how many people do you see sledging alone?)

I love it because it brings out the big kid in me

I love the contrast between the seasons. A vivid demonstration of the majestic, passage of time. A chance to reflect on what has been and what is to come.

All these feelings are important to me

• seeing the big picture
• clarity of vision
• challenge
• shared enjoyment.
• fun
• a chance to reflect.

To me this is the value of snow.

I think we often fall into the trap about thinking about things rather than considering what feelings are produced by the things. These feelings or values are quite personal, I’m quite prepared to believe that no-one else will have the same set of associations with snow that I do.

Maybe your feelings are mixed about snow, parts of the experience you enjoy and others you don’t.

I can even imagine that many people will have a lot of negative associations with snow (after all I am living in Britain).

What are the feelings that go with things? Everything elicits its own emotional reactions. What emotional reactions are important to you? What do you want to feel more of what do you want to feel less of or even avoid?

Feelings that are important to us, our values, guide our behaviour, provide our motivations or deterrents. Sometimes they can be straight forward and positive, as is my reaction to snow. At other times they can be conflicted or even hostile. However we feel about what’s important to us will play itself out over time in our behaviour and our experience. The funny thing is that these emotional responses are not fixed in stone, you can change them if you want to, clarify them, resolve conflicts within and between them and be more conscious.

If you want to become clearer and more conscious of what is important to you, you can attend the Aligning Your Values workshop that I am running at the beginning of February in Gateshead.

Now, it’s started snowing again, the sun has gone behind a cloud, flakes are spiralling down and I feel unreasonably happy.

How to use EFT to make those resolutions last longer than the 31st of January.

Have you ever had the same resolution year after year that only ever makes it to February?

Have you ever had a project that you really would like to complete to find that you couldn’t even start?

Have you ever had a project that you did start only to find that somehow it all grinds to a halt?

We often have things we want to do, goals we would like to achieve but somehow we get stuck. We may try our hardest but we find ourselves sabotaging our efforts or ‘driving with one foot on the brake’.

If this has ever happened to you then you will appreciate how frustrating or disheartening it can be.

In this month’s EFT Café Andy Hunt will guide thorough ‘The Ultimate Truth Statement’ process designed by EFT Master and Coach Lindsay Kenny. This process uses EFT to uncover and resolve the blocks that are getting in the way of achieving those goals.

The EFT Café is on Wednesday 13th January between 7pm and 9pm in the Coleman Teaching Centre at St Oswald’s Hospice. The cost is just £10.

Note: You will need some experience of EFT to attend.

Photo courtesy of katerha

How do you want to feel in 2010?

Image via Wikipedia

It’s that time of year when we start to think about those New Year’s Resolutions. All the things we want to do, have and be in this New Year – new car, exotic holiday, lose weight, a new career, etc.

Often we don’t realise consciously that what we want to have or achieve are just a means to an end. What we really want from our possessions and experiences is the feeling or emotion that it gives us.

Perhaps you want to have an exotic holiday. As you imagine the holiday of your dreams what feelings and emotions arise for you? Maybe you imagine feeling relaxed, excited, enthusiastic and happy. Have you ever spent time day dreaming about what your holiday is going to be like – enjoying the feelings you’ll have before you even get there. Or perhaps you want to lose weight. That might make you feel fit, healthy and attractive.

Advertisers figured this out a long time ago. It’s obvious from all the sofa adverts at this time of year that having a deluxe leather sofa with recliner options will give you a happy contented family or an appreciative and attractive partner. Or you could join an exclusive health club and become fit and attractive like the lithe young people in the advert (who obviously don’t need it).

The seductive voices of advertising tell us “just get this thing or take part in this activity and you will be rewarded with these feelings”. I think a sofa is not the only way to have a happy family. Joining a health club is not the only way to feel fit.

I think there is a more useful way to think about New Year resolutions that gives us a better chance of getting what we want and many more choices in how we get there.

How do you want to feel in 2010? What feelings or emotions would you like to feel more of?

How would your New Year resolutions be different if started by choosing the emotional states you wanted to experience?

Read the rest of this entry »

mastery: (noun) comprehensive knowledge or command of a subject or skill

There’s a big difference between a good driver and someone who has just passed his test. There’s a big difference between a cook and a chef. There’s a big difference between a hill walker and a mountaineer.

One of the differences is practice and experience. There’s no substitute for practice, getting good at something means putting in the time and effort. Another difference is training in new skills, learning deepens the perspective and expands the range of choices available to you.

In an NLP Practitioner course you learn the fundamentals. In an IntegrityNLP training we visit and revisit the skills needed for communicating effectively with ourselves and others. It’s a hundred and twenty hours of training and practice. That might sound like a lot of time but it’s only time to scratch the surface of what’s possibles with this material. We have to leave out a lot of stuff: working on beliefs and values, even more skillful use of language, modeling the success of others to name but a few.

In the IntegrityNLP Master Practitioner we take you way beyond the level of Practitioner – opening up your skills and understandings – If you thought you learned a lot on your NLP Practitioner training be prepared to go much further.

In January 2010 IntegrityNLP will be running it’s first six month NLP Master Practitioner Training.

This training, and only this training, will cost you just £500.

This will be the only one offered at this price. If you have an NLP Practitioner certificate and you want to take the next step. Click here.

Photo courtesy of Andreas Rueda

Last year I wrote a couple of articles – New Year’s Clarifications and Sorting the wheat from the chaff -  about clarifying values. What values are, why they are important and why it might be useful to work on them.

Here’s a reminder of why understanding and aligning our values is so important.

Because they are associated with worth, meaning and desire, values are a primary source of motivation in people’s lives. When peoples values are met or matched, they feel a sense of satisfaction, harmony or rapport. When  their values are not met, people often feel dissatisfied, incongruent or violated

Robert Dilts

Those articles described my first attempts to work with values in a systematic way. Since I wrote them  I have been lucky enough to attend a Values Intensive workshop with Steve Wells.  That workshop went way beyond the processes I suggested in those articles. Not only did we elicit our values, we resolved conflicts within and between them in a variety of ways using EFT.

I enjoyed and benefited so much from that workshop that I have have decided to run a course based on that event here on Tyneside.

Our values govern our behaviour and we are not usually aware of them. They play out in our behaviour or goals but are seldom examined. Lining up with our values is a great way to end the struggles with ourselves.

So ,if you wondered why you do the things you do, or find yourself pulled in different directions when you want to do some things. Now is a chance to find out why and, more importantly, how to do something about it.

The Aligning Your Values Workshop will help you find out what’s important to you, then show you how your values align and conflict and then how to change them. Clarifying your values is a hugely important step in clearing up your internal clutter, lining yourself up with what is important, and enjoying a purposeful life.

The two day workshop is split into 4 parts.

Part 1 – Identifying what is important to you

Part 2 – Resolving conflicts within values

Part 3 – Resolving conflicts between values

Part 4 – Lessening the power of those values or states we avoid

The workshop will be run at the Angel View Inn, Gateshead on Saturday February 6th & Sunday February 7th 2010.

Book now on the Aligning Your Values Workshop page or email andy@practicalwellbeing.co.uk for an application form or more information.

Note: You need to know some EFT to attend this workshop.

Why would anyone bother to take an NLP Practitioner Training? After all it’s a weird thing from California and it costs money. On one level it’s a completely understandable question, time and money can feel like scarce commodities. Why spend 10 weekends over 10 months learning personal and professional transformation skills?

Most people want to learn to drive and they spend a lot of time and money learning. They don’t even think about it. Driving is an obvious skill with obvious benefits and everyone else is doing it as well.

The benefits of an NLP training are not quite so obvious, but what you can learn on an NLP Practitioner training will certainly change your life in far more ways than learning to drive.

What if?

• You could change all those old unhelpful patterns of emotions, beliefs and behaviours you have picked up along your way through life. The ones that make life much harder than it needs to be. The ones that stop you doing what you would really like to do. Over 6 months you have a lot of opportunities to undo old patterns in ways that are surprisingly easy and gentle.
• You could put down all the old junk from the past and choose the kind of future you had always wanted. The memories of old disasters seem to carry around those old debilitating emotional reactions. It doesn’t have to be that way. There are ways of taking the charge out of old memories so that they become just memories. Free of old clutter it’s possible to move into a new future greater ease.
• There were ways you could get on with people. People are tricky aren’t they? If you could really connect with people in an honest and powerful way things would just get so much easier. You learn how to improve on this skill (you already have it to some degree or another) on the very first weekend.
• You could be far more influential than you had ever imagined possible. If you can connect with people in a direct and resourceful way then you can be so much more influential than you imagined. After all it’s just what the influential people you know are doing. They are human beings just like you. If they can do it, so can you.
• Other people’s behaviour and your reactions to it made sense, and better still could be changed? Once you understand that people’s behaviour is just an expression of a positive intention. Then it’s possible to find new ways to meet that intention and enjoy much greater success. This can include your apparently less than useful behaviour.
• You had far more resources than you had ever imagined. It’s funny how some people have boundless energy or confidence or happiness or courage or …. (what would be a very long list of resources). We all have these resources to one degree or another, some people seem to have them close at hand whenever they need them. What if you had ways to draw on (and amplify) your positive resources?

You don’t have to take our word for it.

Reading about NLP led me to believe that there were many ways to change myself and others so that life would be ‘better’. What surprised me was how easy it was to change everyday habits and responses and it was the little changes rather than the deeper applications that really impressed me and I’ve never worn my socks in bed since !! The changes didn’t involve willpower and work just an NLP process and all of a sudden the habit was over.

Heather

I have begun to incorporate nlp methods into my every day life – without realizing it. I feel much more able to change states – particularly if I am in a sad mood – I visualise a bright cloud and step into it – or I think of sometime in the past when I was much happier and soon my mood lifts.

I notice the words and the language people use in everyday speech more, and I have started to be careful about my own choice of language. … But I think the biggest thing for me is using rapport skills – I do find myself practising down the local pub on some unassuming stranger – and I am always so amazed how it often leads to much more of a connection with the person that I am in rapport with.

Lisa

The next IntegrityNLP Practitioner Training starts in January 2010. If you are already an NLP Practitioner then you can always take the next step with our NLP Master Practitioner Training.