“It’s All Moving Forward Mate!”

The past ten days or so have been really extraordinarily fulfilling because various projects have come to fruition in the way that I could only have dreamt of until their realisation. The weekend before last we completed the first of the new NLP Practitioner and Neuroscience programmes which has just been a blast because it has been so fascinating putting the two together; myself teaching the NLP and Professor Patricia Riddell, who is the professor of Applied Neuroscience talking about the Neuroscience of what we’ve been doing. I’m not too surprised but I am delighted at how people have been absolutely fascinated by this overlap and the kind of rigour that Neuroscience now can offer to an understanding of what it is that NLP can do and has been delivering on.

So there has been that on the one hand and then this past weekend we have just been seeing how  it is coming into its own  in the domain of coaching because we have just done three days together as a kind of double act on Neuroscience and Coaching; the applied dimension of neuroscience and how having an elementary understanding of some of what is going on in the brain can make a huge difference to the way you think about, ‘well how do I function?’ and indeed how do clients function? If you are planning on being a coach this is clearly got lots of applications but frankly a lot of people in the room aren’t planning on being coaches but they do want to know how to coach people in their teams more effectively how to draw out the best in them, how you would use what you could call a ‘coach approach’. The room was amazing, people were just hungry for this knowledge and were enquiring for more about the brain and ways in which they can practically apply their knowledge.

These last three days have just been so inspiring and not just for me, I’m talking for Trish as well. Afterwards she was saying she had been waiting thirty years to be able to do this, it is no good being in the lab unless it can come out and having this practical application. Well, we can see now that the dreams we both had when we started talking about how this could be really are possible.

This morning my kind of Monday weekend I went out for a walk and it was just gloriously sunny. It was the pleasure of just being out and about with a feeling that things were moving in the right direction and that really a vision I had had some years ago had finally started coming  to fruition. As I am on my walk I notice that there is a guy who is delivering a new empty skip to a house which is being built nearby, but I notice what he’s got in his truck which is across the road and is properly stabilised are two skips. One is empty and then that is containing another skip that is full to the brim and what I see the machine doing is raising up both, taking them over and dropping down both then he goes along takes the chains off the bottom one and then puts the chains on the full one and lifts that back onto his truck. I asked him if it was a new way of doing things  as I used to think you had to bring the empty skip, put that down, pick up the old one, put it on the truck and move the new one into place. The man told me that is exactly what you used to have to do, he said it took “Bloody forever, Gov.”. He then said something which I was thought was so, so brilliant, “You know, it’s the new technology, it’s all moving forward mate”. And of course he was talking about his skip but I thought how true and what a great summing of my experience.

So, I think I could say, along with man with the skip, it is this new technology, it is all moving forward and it certainly is. I am looking forward to it all moving forward. Certainly we’ve got plans for the next moves and I’ll tell you about those but for now it is just great to be enjoying simple ways of making good use of the brain that each of us has been endowed with.

So, it’s all moving forward, mate. Until the next time. 

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