Once upon a time there were two frogs who lived in a pond. It was a comfortable environment that they had gotten used to over time and they imagined that this would be their home for the rest of their lives. Everyday they would hop across the lily pads, catch flies, go for a dip, and bask in the sunlight. One day, however, it started to rain and this was followed by even harder rain in the days that followed. They sensed that this weather was leading to something dangerous and sure enough a massive storm came along which threatened this environment that they had gotten used to. And they realized that they had to leave the pond in search of some place new.
So they hopped through a forest which protected them from the storm while their hearts pitter-pattered with the uncertainty of where they would end up. Soon afterwards, and having traveled a long and difficult journey, the storm finally passed. They then found themselves in an unfamiliar environment and in front of them stood a bucket. Although they couldn’t see inside the bucket they were very curious and excited to know what was inside. Ignoring the possibility of any danger, they decided to jump inside to discover what this new environment contained.
Splash! They quickly found that they had landed inside a bucket filled with cream for it seems that a farmer who lived nearby had left the bucket outside. While the frogs had initially felt excited and curious to explore this new environment, they now found that they were trapped. Upon realizing their predicament they struggled to find a way to escape. They tried to rock the bucket from side to side to no avail. They tried to climb out, but slipped back into the cream. No matter what they tried, they remained trapped.
One of the frogs said to the other, “This is hopeless. We are trying everything possible, but nothing is working!” Soon after, he gave up, sank to the bottom, drowned, and alas rose to frog heaven. The second frog, however, was determined to find a way to escape and avoid the fate of his pessimistic friend. In his more optimistic way, he became determined to do whatever was possible to find a way out. He continued to kick and noticed that something magical was occurring. The cream was starting to harden. The harder he kicked the harder the cream became until it eventually transformed into butter. He then stood on top of the butter and hopped safely to the outside. He then hopped along to other environments much wiser and stronger having learned to look before leaping and lived a long and enjoyable life.
Category: Other
When you are thinking of taking on a Coach, whether it is for personal or business reasons, it’s good to know just how that Coach can specifically help you to achieve your goals more successfully. At Standing in Spirit, we take this idea seriously, so we have discussed the idea of Coaching in this short article.
Most professional Coaches today use NLP as an integral part of their work because time and time again, NLP has been proven to support the coaching relationship and to achieve results. NLP focuses on how you communicate with others and with yourself and how you can change and enrich this communication to achieve the results and goals you want in your life. And, of course, to go further and uncover the goals that you haven’t even recognized yet because when you work with a professional Coach, you can begin to open up new doors and new perspectives that will change your life in positive ways that you haven’t even yet considered.
The presuppositions of NLP are the foundation of the relationship between the Coach and the Client. The central presupposition of NLP is that the map is not the territory. In other words, the way that we represent the world in our minds is not the same as the world itself. Another way to think of this is to understand that events don’t have meanings – we attach meanings to events. For example, if two company executives look at the same recession, one might see disaster yet the other might see huge potential. The event (the territory) is the same, but the interpretation (the map) is different. By working with a NLP Coach, you can quickly begin to identify the parts of your own maps that are holding you back from the success that you can truly attain. The motto of Standing in Spirit is “Let it Flow”, and by that we mean that we can help you to remove the limitations in your own maps of the world and let success flow to you much more easily. We’re not saying that you don’t have to work hard – you do – we’re just saying that it’s really important to establish the best maps of the world for directing that hard work in exactly the appropriate ways to achieve your goals. Isn’t it time that you let your hard work move things in exactly the right way – the best path through the most appropriate map?
NLP offers many coaching tools to help you to create and use the most appropriate maps that will allow you to perform at your very best, to effectively access all the resources that are available, and to achieve your goals much more quickly than you could have imagined. NLP is fundamentally interested in the modeling of excellence and the tools of techniques of NLP Coaching are appropriate for everyone who is interested in improving performance, in areas as diverse as personal development, therapy, medical professions, teaching, sports, business, relationships and much more.
One of the best definitions of Coaching based on an NLP perspective is the one posited by Robert Dilts on the back cover of his book, From Coach to Awakener.
Coaching is the process of helping people and teams to perform at the peak of their abilities. It involves drawing out people’s strengths, helping them to bypass personal barriers and limits in order to achieve their personal bests, and facilitating them to function more effectively as members of a team.
Historically, coaching has been focused towards achieving improvement with respect to a specific behavioral performance. This involves promoting the development of that person’s behavioral competence through careful observation and feedback.
In recent years, the notion of coaching has taken on a more generalized and expanded meaning. Personal coaching, executive coaching, and life coaching provide support on a number of different levels: behaviors, capabilities, beliefs,values, identity and even spiritual. These new and more comprehensive forms of coaching–executive coaching and life coaching–can be referred to as capital “C” Coaching. Large “C” Coaching involves helping people effectively achieve outcomes on a range of level. We guide people to learn about new environments, for instance; coach them to improve specific behavioral competencies; teach them new cognitive capabilities; mentor empowering beliefs and values; sponsor growth at the identity level; and awaken people’s awareness of the larger system or field.
As Dilts’ definition shows, one of the strengths of NLP Coaching is that it takes place at many levels, and you will find yourself recognizing new resources and possibilities as you see your work and life at each level with these new perspectives. Combined with the power and potential of NLP, Coaching can traverse all of these levels easily and take you much further much more quickly than you had previously thought.
Peter Wrycza also describes the strengths of NLP for Coaching in the journal AnchorPoint:
When people ask, ‘What’s NLP?’ I now say, “It’s the most sophisticated approach to coaching there is.” And if they need more detail, I can explain how it is so: because it offers a powerful methodology for uncovering the structure of subjective experience, thereby helping us to model excellence in any field. And it uses the fruits of that modeling to draw on more of our inner resources, so that our Performance and our Alignment become and remain best friends, as we grow and develop.
And at Standing in Spirit, that is our goal – to provide Coaching and training that will let your performance be aligned in exactly the directions that will bring you the greatest success in your personal and working life, no matter how you define that success. But at Standing in Spirit we like to say it a little more simply: Let it Flow.
Once upon a time, there was a rose that longed to meet some bees. Because as you know, roses and bees have a special relationship. But although the rose dreamed day and night about the bees, no bee ever came to see her or to rest upon her petals. Yet, the rose continued to dream, always in hope, that one day a bee would come to her. Even during the long nights, she imagined a sky-full of bees, all gazing down upon her, and some of those bees coming to kiss her. And it was perhaps only this hope that kept her alive and helped her to last until the next day when the sun came again and she opened up her beautiful blossoms.
On one of these nights, the moon (who had seen her longings for many a long night) spoke to her and said, “You must be so tired of waiting – would it not be easier for you to just give up?”
“Oh yes, I am so tired and so lonely,” said the Rose, “but I will keep trying and trying.”
The moon laughed in an unpleasant way and said, “Why bother?”
And the rose answered, “Because if I don’t remain open, I will simply fade away.”
Recently, a designer did a couple of simple logo ideas for the new Standing in Spirit website. These are still rough, and all suggestions are welcome. Or if you have a good idea that captures the name of the company and the statement “Let it Flow”, please just let that creativity flow and share with us!
“Come to the edge!”
“Tis too high!”
“Come to the edge!”
“We might fall!”
“Come to the edge!”
So they came to the edge and
He pushed them and
THEY FLEW!
Worry is a useful signal. It’s like a telephone call from your unconscious mind. So it’s good, of course, to notice the call and answer it. That allows you to make the proper response. I mean, you don’t want the phone to keep ringing. Once is enough. So just make the appropriate response immediately and then the ringing will stop.
During 1999, a very bizarre fear and worry filled the newspapers every day. It was called the Y2K problem. The year 2,000 sounds a little ominous, of course, and people may have been looking for it to have a special meaning or even to mark the end of an era in a really obvious way. Or perhaps, Y2K was a serious fear for people.
It’s interesting to consider how this problem began before we look at its more interesting consequences today. Back when computers were first invented and developed, computer memory was really really expensive. And so programmers would try to save bits and bytes wherever possible. So when a programmer was entering the format for the date, he decided to use “55″ instead of the longer “1955.” By doing this, he could use half as much memory to encode the data. Saving two bytes may not sound like much, but when a program used a date in hundreds or thousands of places, this could add up to big memory savings.
Of course, the programmer didn’t imagine that the computer and his program would still be in use in the year 2000. Back then, people imagined the year 2000 as having flying cars and amazing anti-gravity devices. Although the world has progressed enormously, it is amazing how some things can still stay around much much longer than people imagine. And that’s what happened with the code that the programmer wrote. Just like a person can keep snippets of memory from long long ago, in the same way, snippets of code can stay around in newer systems long after could be imagined.
And of course, those snippets continue to play an important role in the system. So in the year 1999, people began to worry very much about the effect of all these old snippets that remained in the system. Because what would happen when the two digit representation of the year 1999 changed into the two digit representation of the year 2000? What the programmers had never imagined – 99 would change into 00 right at the first stroke of the clock in the year two thousand.
Let’s think about this to show what it could mean. Supposing a bank is calculating your interest according to how many years you have had it on deposit. For example, let’s say that you deposited $100,000 in the bank at a simple interest rate of 4% per year.
Interest = (99-60) * 100,000 * 4% = $156,000
So far, so good. But let’s look at the calculation when “99″ changes into “00.”
Interest = (00 – 60) * 100,000 * 4% = -$240,000
Yes, that’s right, instead of being ahead by about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, your account is suddenly going to be massively depleted and you’ll be in the red by two hundred and fourty thousand dollars. That’s an overall loss of almost four hundred thousand dollars. For any investor, that is going to rate as a pretty bad one-second loss.
So it’s clear how financial institutes were worried by Y2K. But everyone else started getting worried, too. A lot of the old American military systems were also using very old snippets of code. What would happen if a nuclear missile computer got the date wrong. If the distance of a potential incoming missile were to suddenly become a minus number, would that mean that an attack had already occured and automatic retaliation was required?
Y2K was the worry of the decade and it showed. People started stocking up on food. They bought guns and gas masks. They expected World War Three, an earthquake, a famine, and a tornado to all hit simultaneously.
All the computer experts got paid huge sums of money that year to sift through these old snippets and to find any potential problems. People even worried that programmers might introduce new problems as they tried to Y2K-proof old code that was difficult to understand.
And at midnight 1999, many many people were very scared and very worried. What happened?
In a word – nothing.
Worry is a useful signal – a way of helping us to check that we have done things right and that we are prepared. But most of the time, nothing happens. The horrors that we can dream up are generally far worse than reality. So the next time worry comes to you – remember that it is like a telephone call to your unconscious mind. Go ahead. Answer the call. Check that things are ok. Make the appropriate response and then move on to a new exciting era.
©2010 by Brian Cullen
Years ago, I carried out my doctoral research into the songwriting process, in particular looking at how songwriters move from that first spark into a complete song. It was a whole lot of fun working with the songwriters (particularly for the first five years of the research!), and through interviews and workshops, I learned a whole lot about the process.
Every songwriter is different, of course, but one important lesson that emerged from the research is that spending a long time on writing does not necessarily produce a better result. In fact, it was almost the exact opposite. Songwriters who wrote quickly were the ones who were both happiest with their songs and also the ones who had the most success and favourable response in both live shows and recordings.
This slightly counter-intuitive result is probably due to a couple of factors. First, writers who write slowly tend to be critical about their work as they are writing. These writers question every line to the extent that they get in the way of their own creative processes and either fail to finish the song or over-analyze it so much that it has lost that initial spark that made it interesting. When a writer works very quickly or with a time limit, the critical filter becomes suspended, and often amazing things can happen. When we let the unconscious mind really loose, creativity can really flow. It is always possible to edit a song later, but applying the critical filter too early can mean that a song will never be finished.Second, songwriters who write slowly end up writing far fewer songs – simply because each song takes so long to write. And another important finding in the research was that good songwriters are the ones who have the experience of writing many songs. It is through songwriting that a songwriter develops his craft, and the writer who writes 100 songs will be far more flexible and creative than the writer who has written only 5. Writing more songs also increases the chances of writing really great songs. Like any other area of creativity, songwriters who write a lot may have more bad ideas but they are also much more likely to have more good ideas, too.
An Australian songwriter, Leon, was one of the faster writers and although he had little time available for songwriting or recording, he managed to use that limited time extremely effectively. Leon was working two jobs and raising young children. He said that he would write a song in his spare ten minutes in the morning, often while he was shaving or doing something else. Then he would rush into his garage studio and record a basic track on guitar and vocal. In the evening when he came home, he again had about 10 minutes before he had to rush out to his second job, so he would rush into the studio and add a keyboard part and a backing vocal. While his recordings were not perfect by any means, he very successfully wrote many great songs and produced good’sounding demos in this way. I asked Leon how things would be if he had a full day to write songs. “Oh, if I had a whole day, I’d do nothing – I’d probably sit around and watch TV or just chill out.”
I have had similar experiences myself. I had months and months to write six songs for a children’ education project. I worked slowly on demo after demo and nothing was really working. It was only on the day that the producer emailed me and said, “we need to talk”, that I realized how serious things had become. I knew that I was about to be fired if I didn’t do something. Once again, a time limit was a wonderful thing. I went into my studio at 8am, worked until midnight with hardly a break. By the end of the session, I had written six new songs, recorded all the tracks, added the vocals, and uploaded them to an online server for the producer. When he called me from New York at 3am, he said “where did these songs come from – I love them!”. Where did they come from indeed – good question because I hardly remember the day at all. I was working in a trance-like state with far far greater efficiency than my normal capabilities. The time limit focused my mind, let my critical filter and conscious mind take a break, and let my unconscious mind do what it is good at – creating stuff quickly and efficiently.
So often, people say that they don’t have the time to get things done. Yet sometimes, a deadline or limited time is exactly what is needed to get things done. There’s an old saying that if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. So if you’re a busy person already, maybe you’re exactly the right person to do that special thing that you have been putting off.
Every day when he opens his lunch a man says “Not peanut butter and jam sandwiches again, I hate them,” At the end of a week of complaining a colleague asks, “Why don’t you ask your wife to make you different sandwiches next week”? “Oh I’m not married” the man replies, “I make my own sandwiches”.
Our minds are like school playgrounds that are surrounded by secure high fences – they keep children in, and others out. Any bullies in that playground mean that the other children can’t escape for long. This particular bully uses verbal abuse, shouting, teasing, and threats (rather than physical violence). The children are all fenced in together, and ideally, they have just got to learn to accept and learn to be with each other. So neither can we escape our thoughts, we cannot stop them, but perhaps we can learn to live with them by seeing them differently. Along comes bully, and takes on 3 potential ‘victims’ who all react differently.
Victim 1 – believes the bully, distressed, reacts automatically (bully carries on)
Victim 2 – challenges the bully “hey I’m not stupid, I got 8 out of 10 in my spelling test this morning, you only got 4” (bully eventually gives up)
Victim 3 – looks at the bully (acknowledges the thought), then walks away and goes off to play football with his mates (dismisses the thought), then changes their focus of attention.
Next Autumn, when you see geese heading south for the winter, flying in a “V” formation, you might consider what science has discovered as to why they fly that way. As each bird flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the bird immediately following. By flying in a “V” formation, the whole flock adds at least 71 percent greater flying range than if each bird flew on its own.
People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going more quickly and easily, because they are travelling on the thrust of one another.
When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to go it alone and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird in front.
If we have the sense of a goose, we will stay in formation with those people who are heading the same way we are.
When the head goose gets tired, it rotates back in the wing and another goose flies point.
It is sensible to take turns doing demanding jobs, whether with people or with geese flying south.
Geese honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.
What message do we give when we honk from behind?
Finally – and this is important – when a goose gets sick or is wounded by gunshot, and falls out of the formation, two other geese fall out with that goose and follow it down to lend help and protection. They stay with the fallen goose until it is able to fly or until it dies; and only then do they launch out on their own, or with another formation to catch up with their own group.
If we have the sense of a goose, we will stand by each other like that.