“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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A Confident Future - New Possibilities

Well this past weekend, snow notwithstanding, we had our second ITS 25th anniversary Celebration Day and I was really struck with how celebration is also about moving forward in time and celebrating possibilities for the future. One of the themes of the day was very much about confidence and how important it is to understand what kind is needed, where and when, and how there are different kinds. I’m particularly struck by this because later next month I’m going to be talking to about 400 independent financial advisors who have a one day conference put on by MDRT (Million Dollar Round Table) which is an organisation specifically for financial advisors. 

The theme of the day is ‘A Confident Future’ and in the present economic circumstances it is a particularly interesting theme because it is of course rather important to know how to boost confidence, whether it is your own, or indeed clients’ confidence in you. Arguably it is one of the most important business skills you will ever develop and the interesting thing is that by using some of the more recent discoveries in the neurosciences, harnessing those with some of the techniques developed with NLP it is perfectly possible to say that whether you want to boost your own confidence or clients’ confidence in you this is now a learnable skill there is no two ways about it. But actually that wouldn’t be enough because if you want to enjoy a confident future you will also need to know what to do when things don’t quite go the way you'd imagined and this is a time when people experience a loss of confidence or even a crisis of confidence. So I think in a funny sort of way the real test of confidence is when it is in some way challenged.

Nobody is just confident all the time. Part of the art of being able to have that resilience, that capacity to bounce back is recognising how important innovation is to being able to be confident about the future; your own and others. This shows up in a mind-set, it is not just about trying very hard but it is a way of thinking. Again, it is learnable. 

Here is an example, there are so many I use when I am talking but here is one: Pretty much everyone I know uses a microwave and you take it for granted but a microwave has a very curious history. It actually came out of the Second World War not by design at all, it was the direct result of one man having an understanding of possibilities. Specifically what happened was there was a man called Percy LeBaron Spencer and he was involved in designing combat radar equipment. At the time, the heart of radar equipment was a magnetron which was a huge piece of equipment, very precision made and consequently very few were made in any given working day which was a bit of a problem for the allies. For instance, in 1941 the production line was about 17 a day and by the end of that year the US had entered the war and a different way of doing it had developed so it went up to 100 a day but that is still very little. By 1945 they had figured out a way of generating 2800 of these a day. While all of that is going on at the same time in 1945, Spencer just happens to be standing in front of one of these operating magnetrons and he has got a bar of chocolate in his pocket and blow me down he finds that it has melted. For a lot of people that would just be a source of aggravation, but of course what happened for him was he became curious and begin to think about possibilities. He went to get a bag of popcorn, puts is close to magnetron and low and behold a few moments later it begins popping. He then goes to get a pale of water, an egg and starts boiling this egg which dually explodes and splats itself all over one of his colleagues. So then he realises this huge potential here and he focuses on how this could be used for cooking. No one had thought of this. The first microwave ovens based on this principle were six feet tall weighing 350 kilograms, so huge they had to be cooled with water and it was not until 1955 that the first domestic microwaves pop up.

But you see there is a mind-set, a way of thinking. It is innovative, it is confident and it creates new  possibilities and that is so much of what we need. That is partly what I’ll be doing with these independent financial advisors but it is also what we’re going to be doing with ITS throughout this coming year. New possibilities, I’ll tell you more soon.

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New Year…Some Truly New Possibilities!

Here we are at the start of a new year. Already half way through January. How are those new year’s resolutions by the way? It is around this time that many of them seem to evaporate or don’t quite happen in the way that you imagined. I hope that yours are still with you  because I know that for most people when they make them they are real aspirations, they are things that would make a big difference if you can make them happen. If you’re wanting some assistance to be able to achieve this then this Sunday is a special time for me because it will be a time of real celebration as we start the second 25^th anniversary celebration day for ITS and one of the things we will be doing is looking at what neuroscience can do to help us make resolutions that actually work. Gosh, what a concept. I think I said in the last update, that this was the year of neuroscience and it most certainly is because I am delighted to say that we now have got  to a point where Professor Patricia Riddell and myself have been able to draw together the many strands that comprise the field of research that is neuroscience and apply it to ways of working that are going to be useful to people in ordinary everyday life. We have a certificate in Applied Neuroscience which will be happening later in the year, but before that just a happy day together with people, some of whom I have not seen for years and I gather loads of people are coming this Sunday.

We are actually going to kick off with what I think is one of the most important topics in pretty much anybody’s life, namely confidence and how to have it and experience it. I had not really appreciated how important it was until I wrote the book on it and it became a really fundamental insight for me as it is so pervasive to be able to have confidence. I have just recently been asked by MDRT (Million Dollar Round table) which is an organisation for financial advisors if I would speak in their very prestigious  London conference in February  called ‘A Confident Future’. I shall be talking about the business of confidence because I think it is so important for each of us in our own personal lives but also in our business lives. That will, therefore, be part of what I want to share by way of a thank you during the celebration day. I have some very particular tools I want to offer people because I think confidence is something people really don’t understand, they often think they want a lot of it or more of it but in fact we are already confident in some areas and not in others. Understanding the difference and how we can build on what we’ve got and supplement where it’s needed is a skill and it is easy to learn.

I also want to start the year, not just focusing on neuroscience but also discussing how can people build their own dreams which is why I shall be working with Adrian Baker who has much experience in working with people to help bring things into being, be they full-scale businesses or aspirations that could potentially change people’s lives. They may involve generating revenue, they may not but together we’ve been speaking about this for years and we are now ready to roll with it so I see this as an excellent opportunity to make new dreams possible. It is absolutely independent of whatever the economic circumstances of the larger nation’s state may be and we’ve done this in different ways at different times. So all in all I’m really looking forward to a day of celebrating by giving new things to whoever chooses to be there and there will be lots of people from very varied backgrounds.

If you’re interested in how to have those resolutions come to fruition and be part of your life in an on-going way then I shall I be delighted to tell you the basics of success and we will also have a look at the neuroscience that supports it and gives a new understanding for how some things work much better than others. That is all to come, but in the meantime the year is well under-way, it seems to be racing along already and I trust that yours will be a fulfilling and rewarding one in which you will not just be successful but also enjoy the experience of being happy. I look forward to assisting you in that should you be interested. 

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What I did on my Holidays

On my travels I’ve certainly seen some different parts of the world and this past Christmas, Paulette and I were in a place that neither of us had ever spent a festive season in before. If I was to tell you that in that particular part of the world you can walk down the street cast your eye to one side and see a very non-descript parking lot with a sign affixed to a broken down brick wall which says ‘parking lot available for film hire’ with a phone contact number, I guess you could probably figure out what part of the world we were in. Yes, only in LA.

We had a good time and we happened to be there at a rather interesting time because the end of the world was supposed to be happening  according to some people given the complete
misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar which a number of people had
decided to take upon themselves. On the particular day in question we were actually at the Griffiths Observatory which is a wonderful observatory that also has a newly re-conditioned beautiful planetarium. When you walk in the observatory main doors there was a great big design above the doors about the Mayan calendar saying that the end of the world was not happening and that the show inside the planetarium consisted initially of the apparent end of the world. Somebody then says ‘Stop, hold it all!’ and walks down and begins to say ‘no it isn’t ending’. It was a splendid show and we got down to some real science. By the way, the thing about the Mayan calendar, which I find so fascinating, is that it is very striking to me how people often are of an apocalyptic disposition and have a very linear mind set in that it is always going to be a complete end. There is no conception of a cyclical process because of course the Mayan calendar is just going through a process of ratcheting up numbers to come to the end of a cycle; very much as a milometer does on a clock where it gets to 999 and then goes to 000 which of course does not mean the car no longer exists.

I had a very pleasant opportunity while I was there to kick back with Albert Einstein, unfortunately he was only there in brass form but nevertheless a memorable meeting. We then went on to a very extraordinary part of the world, the La Brea tar pits which are quite remarkable. They are pits which are in the land close to the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art and they have an amazing number of animal specimens, about three and a half million in fact at the last count and there are far more than that now. They are the result of fossil fuels that have become liquefied and bubbled up because of the extraordinary environment that is part of the fault in LA, faults that are in the earth. They were absolute death traps for animals who got stuck in them rather like you would in tar and have produced amazing fossil remains that go back 10 to 30 thousand years. You can actually see the excavation taking place, all of this with traffic going by on the highway nearby. So, a very interesting experience and they also have some animals that you can be photographed with if you wish.

A different kind of Christmas which was absolutely in order. I recommend it , getting away and being somewhere different in another world. We had a great time but I am now back and looking forward to a different kind of year as we are moving in to new opportunities. We are celebrating the 25^th anniversary of ITS by preparing for new ventures some of which we will be talking about very soon on the celebration day. You will hear about them I’m sure, if you’re interested, because the world of neuroscience beckons making it something approachable, useable and understandable in a practical way. That’s where we’re going next, tell you all about that soon. Until the next time. 

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The Colour of Birds

Well I tend to be an early riser, up about you know, six usually, and this time of year, summer time, in Connecticut especially very good reason for being up early.  Because I remember when looking for a home here coming across the description in the realtors catalogue of this property that we finally bought, it said two thousand three hundred feet of waterfront property.  And by golly it is amazing!  Because although most of it is absolutely unusable, in that you know, it’s steep wooded forest going down to the lake, it nevertheless provides a fabulous habitat for all sorts of animals.  And when you’re out early in the morning, we can go down to the lake, down to the dock, sit on the dock and actually if we’re very quiet and stay there for a while, sometimes you’ll see deer come down to drink form the lake, and it’s really quite magical.  And sometimes the ducks come by as well and I actually came across a book recently on bird watching.  Now I’ve never really had much interest in bird watching, I’m happy birds exist, I like to see them around, but that’s about it.  But I happened to open this and I was flicking through it and there was something that was really striking to me, it started to tell me about why birds are different colours, in terms of how colouration is so important for their protection.  Well obviously you know, you figure that birds have to use camouflage as most animals do and indeed a bird’s survival often depends on its ability to conceal itself, and especially of course females sitting on their nests.  So there’s this thing called cryptic colouration or protective colouring, which means the birds, if still, virtually disappear.  So here’s something that I think is kind of fascinating, when you see birds with streaked or striped feathers, you can be pretty sure that they live in grassy areas and that’s because the appearance is concealed, because the field grasses blend in with the colouration.  On the other hand, birds that have green feathers are likely to be up there in the tree tops and if they didn’t move around so much, you’d never see them- the green matches the leaves.  And then there are the birds with dark backs and light bellies, like sparrows for instance.  And you can be pretty sure any birds like that spend a lot of time on the ground, because the light underside breaks up the overall shape of the bird, so it’s less noticeable, whereas an all dark bird would be far more easily visible.  And of course you know the mottled grey or brown feathers of say an owl that mean that birds just blend into the bark as long as they don’t move.

So, suddenly I had this set of distinctions about ahh we can really understand different kinds of bird colouration here and what kind of habitat they probably inhabit.  And for me anyway, this was like making sense of something which previously had been you know, pretty random.  And I often think that when we can do that, when we can understand some working principles, things become both easier to understand, but I think often more fascinating as well, because it’s not just I don’t know, there you go, it just happens to be pure chance- nothing very chancy about evolution in one sense, because it really is about how you ensure your survival.

So I don’t know whether I’ll be going in for any cryptic colouration myself, I don’t think that’s necessary.  But just looking around the world and understanding it differently, has enriched my morning experience as I sit  on the dock and enjoy a cup of tea and look up in the trees and see the birds. 

So ‘til the next time.

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You, Your World and Your Brain

One of the things I’ve been doing a lot of in the past couple of months is talking with my colleague, Professor Patricia Riddell about the interrelation between neuroscience and change and indeed neuroscience and coaching and neuroscience and NLP and a whole bunch of other things too.  And the net result of this has been that we have both found this very stimulating and so this is the beginning of something which you will be seeing the fruits of certainly in the new year in the form of a major programme that is gonna be neuroscience the real deal. 

But right now one of the things that has really struck us is how there are these simple things that have come out of the neuroscience research that make an enormous difference on how people function and we just wanted to get some of those out.  So this coming week for instance, on Thursday, we are going to be talking for an hour and a half on some of these themes and we’ve been thinking about what would be an interesting sort of area to explore, well we started very detailed and then it became broader and then we ended up with You, Your World and Your Brain.  That’s our working title so we seem to be encompassing pretty much everything, not bad for 90 minutes. 

But there is a lot of correlation here between the way you use your brain, your sense of yourself and the world you create and it shows up in some interesting ways, for instance, one of the things we wanna touch on is how people are frequently much better at empathising with other people than with themselves.  Now you might think that that’s kinda odd, you know, surely you can understand how it is for you, well yes and no, actually the data is in, this is something which is very clear from the neuroscience research, people empathise with others much more effectively that they do with themselves.  Now that’s got a lot of implications if you wanna be effective for instance, because you would need to learn how to empathise with yourself.  And there are ways of doing that that have been tried and tested and surprise, surprise we find that there is a large overlap here with what we found works in NLP.  So there’s an example, that a very simple one but actually a rather profound one of how the way you engage with yourself effects the world you live in and understanding that your brain is not really wired for self-empathy means you can do something about that and your life will be, not only will you feel better, your life will be, I think, much better generally because you’ll be more capable of understanding what’s going on in yourself. 

So there’s a simple example and we are gonna actually explore that practicalities what do you do in order to be able to have that kind of empathy, how would you be able to best advise another how can you best advise yourself.  In the same way a lot of people have very uneasy relationships with their own internal dialog, you know I can think of many people I’ve worked with that have positively felt persecuted by their internal dialog, but another way of understanding those from a neuroscience point of view is that your inner voice is actually part of how you are enabled to ensure effective communication between one part of your brain and another.  You know there’s gotta be somebody who is introducing parties so to say and getting ideas across.  Now that is a completely different function for internal dialog and again that’s a learnable skill, but understanding why internal dialog would be really valuable again that’s kind of useful and knowing how to do it even more so, the research is there we already know this, so as Patricia and I talk about these things, it becomes very clear that there are a lot of practical pay offs.  And then there are others, we will get to these in the evening, but for instance have you ever had that experience where you recall something that happened that wasn’t so great and you feel excruciating embarrassment when you think about it and then you talk to someone else about it and they can barely remember it even happening?  Well there’s something going on there, that’s how your brain works and there’s particular attention to detail and we want to be able to show people how we can change this and get a radically different understanding of what’s going on.  

Anyway, all sorts of interesting things, I find it very stimulating and hopefully you will to.

So till the next time.

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Never Give Up

Well I’ve just spent an interesting hour casting my eye over the new edition of John Lofty Wiseman’s book, the SAS Survival Handbook, which is subtitled: How to Survive in the Wild in Any Climate.  On Land or at Sea. And it’s full of the most amazing information, that has actually saved lives, and is based on his own SAS experience.  So you know, if you’re ever in the Polar regions for instance, it will be kind of important to remember that if you’re travelling by sea, you do not use ice burgs or distant landmarks to fix direction, because guess what, flows are constantly moving, so they’re highly unreliable.  And so you know, desert, terrain, doesn’t matter, you name it- it’s in here, the way to survive.

But, what I found most interesting of all was the introduction, in which he has a pyramid divided into three layers, showing you what is most important.  And at the top of the pyramid, at the apex, there’s a little triangle and inside is written the word ‘kit.’  Referring to having the right clothing, the right tools ideally.  ‘Kit.’  Underneath that a big chunk, right across the pyramid ‘Knowledge.’  Meaning your skills, your know how, knowledge of the terrain, the lie of the land, anything at all that would be helpful. How do they do things round here?  What is edible?  Etc, etc.  But you know, at the base, is the third and most important area, it’s the one that he says is critical, and he calls it ‘The Will To Live.’ 

It’s the difference that makes the difference, as far as he’s concerned, in everything he’s seen.  Indeed he actually says that you know, if you’ve got the will to live, you can make all sorts of mistakes and still come through because you’ve got what it takes to keep going.   And I think yes, of course this is true in extreme conditions, when it is a matter of life and death, but it’s equally true in somewhat less extreme conditions, when in our ordinary lives, things seem to be tough, or on a knife edge.  And very often the question is do we have the will to live, to go through it and make it to the other side, to keep going?  And it’s why for instance, Churchill said famously at one point, ‘never, never, never, never give up.’  And why is that so important?  Because that kind of perseverance produces endurance and with endurance comes staying power to see it through, even if you don’t know quite how you’re going to see it through.  And so this can take a lot of different forms in everyday life.  And for instance, if you’re running a business, it may take you time to find a way through a particular situation, it may also take time to find the right people to help guide you through a transition or a change.  But if you don’t have the will to live, you probably will give up prematurely, and just in a sense, probably metaphorically, you’ll just lie down and you know, pass out, you’d go to sleep. You die.  But that doesn’t have to be the way it is, and it doesn’t have to be the way it is in pretty much any area of life.  So the question I guess, becomes can you cultivate that will to live?  Is that will a skill?  Is it a learnable skill?  And I think it probably is, because you can learn to become more resilient, you can learn to endure, you can learn to persevere and if you can do that, you guess right, yes, you get to stay alive and you then have the opportunity to come through.

So if times are tough, I think it’s worth remembering this, and that’s true  not just in extreme weather conditions,  but it’s also true in life as a whole.  It might be true in a relationship, it might be true in a personal challenge you’re facing, it might be true in a health crisis, it might be true in a business.  So whether or not you ever get round to reading the new edition of the SAS Survival Handbook, the will to live, which is at the heart of all successful survival, is something I think that pretty much all of us might want to remember and even take the trouble to cultivate. 

‘Til the next time.

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