The Drama Cycle

On Sunday the 15^th of June Thomas presented the JumpStart session at the Mastering SAP Technologies conference in Brisbane. Participants learned how to create an environment where their project teams can bring their best game and heard about the latest strategies that enable teams to deliver their best work.

The audience was particularly interested to hear about the Drama Cycle which is a model of human interaction explaining how people communicate ineffectively with each other by variously assuming the roles of victim, aggressor and rescuer in a given problematic situation. Thomas explained how to break out of this inefficient cycle and assume the position of an observer, which is essential in order to resolve challenging situations and move forward again.

When people are spinning their wheels in the Drama Cycle they become unproductive and are unable to come up with solutions for the problems in front of them because they are stuck in the problem.

Have you ever heard anyone say “This person/situation/drink/policeman makes me mad!” or “Your behaviour/attitude/way of thinking is so wrong!” or “I always have to take care of everything around the house/the car/the bedroom.” That’s someone going round and round in the Drama Cycle.

In order to give their wheels some traction again and help them to move forward you can use a powerful NLP questioning technique called the Meta Model.

Instead of commiserating, apologizing or agreeing simply ask: “How does what’s happening here cause you to choose to feel mad?” and “Who says it’s wrong?” and “What would happen if you didn’t take care of everything?” This will cause the person to start moving again and take the position of the observer, where solutions can be found easily and problems are solved.

The Meta Model is a questioning technique used in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) to uncover generalizations, distortions and deletions. It allows you to get past the fluff and discover the actual meaning of someone’s communication.

If you want to learn more about NLP please click here.

NLP for Business Coaches Training

Listen to Alice Haemmerle from A Perfect Mind being interviewed by Taki Moore about her latest NLP training specifically designed for business coaches who want to take their game to the next level.

A Remote Control for your Brain

How’s life? Had any positive thoughts lately? You know, the kind that make you feel good! If you have read our earlier posts you will know that what you think, the things you keep in your mind, will determine how you feel: happy or sad, excited or flat, motivated or bored. That’s how simple it really is: think upbeat thoughts and the rest will follow and good things will come to you.

What’s preventing you from doing this all the time? What comes between you and the positive thinking? The things that happen in your life? Your partner was grumpy, your boss yelled at you, the mirror in the bathroom was more honest than you wanted it to be? Come on, you wouldn’t let petty little things like these get you down and allow your thoughts to stray from the path of power, would you? Truth is, there is always stuff going on around us that seems to have been designed to make life harder, more complicated and more of a drudge than it really should be and all this stuff doesn’t make it easy to stay positive and upbeat.

It’s as if we’re riding a bumper car and we know exactly which way to go in order to live a happy and fulfilled life but there are all these other cars that keep bumping into us, and boy, does that make it a challenge to stay on course.

Anything that happens around you (including the bumper cars) is received through your five senses. Your brain takes this information and converts it into a picture for you, adds some sound and feelings and presto… you know what’s going on! Get a taste of it: think about a time when you were extremely happy, a specific event, let’s say you just won the lottery (having won the lottery you are reading this lying in a hammock on your own private tropical island of course): what’s the picture that comes up? Are there any sounds? Any feelings anywhere in your body? You can play this with any event in your life, real or imagined ones and you’ll always get that mix of picture, sound and feeling.

Everyone gets different pictures, sounds and feelings, even about the same events, and everyone’s pictures, sounds and feelings have different qualities, like TV sets whose volume, colour and brightness controls are set differently.

Depending on how the controls are set on your TV you can watch the same movie and yet get a totally different experience of it: add more colour and volume and you’ll get excited, drain the colour, reduce the brightness and turn the volume down and you will barely be able to stifle a yawn.

Besides owning the biggest and most expensive Plasma TV you can imagine you are subscribing to all the cable channels available on the planet as well. This means that in order to focus on the channels that actually count, such as the sports channels for example, you have to get past all the noise such as the history and celebrity drama channels. Your brain is taking care of this for you: it uses filters to narrow down the number of channels you are watching on your TV. This adds to your personalized experience: if you are watching a game on ESPN and your friend is watching the same game on Fox chances are that you will have different versions of the same events to tell the next day over coffee.

Seizing the remote control of your TV gives you the power to direct your experience so you can control the other bumper cars and keep them from throwing you off course: next time something frustrates you grab the remote and adjust the size and location of the picture you get in your mind, the volume and location of the sounds and the size and location of the feeling in your body. While you’re at it change picture from colour to black and white or the other way around. How do you feel now? Has the feeling of frustration changed? If not, keep turning the control buttons: the quality of your experience, negative and positive, is regulated by the way it is represented in your mind. If you change that representation your experience changes too.

Can you see how you can make anything in your life bigger this way? Every sad, upsetting and annoying incident can be more remarkable than it really is. Every happy, exciting and motivating experience can be turned into a more exceptional one too. You really can make a mountain out of a mole hill. You are holding this power in the palm of your hands, or more specifically, right between your ears.

The other element shaping our emotional state is how you hold your body. Ever tried to be sad and depressed while having a grin on your face? Go on, think about something sad and put your biggest smile on, put your shoulders back and look up to the ceiling (or the palm fronds swaying in the soft ocean breeze above you, seeing you have won the lottery…). How sad do you feel? You can’t feel sad while smiling? Well I guess that’s too bad, isn’t it?

Your experience of what happens in your life together with your physiology governs your emotional state, which in turn determines which actions you take and what results you get in your life. Everything you achieve in your life is right within your grasp, so sit up, take that remote control firmly into your hands and use it!

If you want to learn more please get in touch with us on our website.

A Radically New Approach to Goalsetting

Have you set your goals for 2009? If not, how are you going to know that this will be your best year yet? You didn’t plan to make this your best year because of the challenging economic outlook? Just take a step back: what is the reason for you thinking that times are bad, the recession is here and worse may be around the corner? Right, you have read, heard and seen it in the news.

Bad news sell so well that the mainstream media have turned themselves into a giant bad news manufacturing machine and the only way for you to get back in charge is to switch off the TV and radio and keep the papers folded. Read the movies and sports sections and watch reruns of Friends or Kath and Kim on DVD, that’s one way to start making the world a better place!

You still haven’t set your goals? SMART ones preferably, specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic and timed? Timed, as in the ones with a date! But you’d rather not set goals with a date because that’s too much commitment and it makes you feel bad if you don’t achieve on time? Alright, that’s fair enough, you want to feel good about your goals and not like a failure if things don’t work out according to plan.

So how about a general outline of what you want to achieve in your life? Something like a 10 Point Plan to Your Personal Happiness rather than a commitment with deadlines that could lead to disappointment.

Give it a go, it’s easier than you think: simply write down what you want to have happen in your life, what you want to experience, who you want to be with, where you want to go, what you want to see, how much money you want to have and what you want to do. All without any dates! Just write down everything that makes you feel happy in life, then condense it into 10 points, or 7 or 14 whatever works for you. Only add dates if you’re totally comfortable with it.

Make the whole thing a pleasure to look at, nice fonts, great colours, pretty bullet points and add some pictures or an inspiring background. Print out several copies, laminate them and leave them on your desk and in your bedroom, hang them on the walls, put them in your wallet and use them as bookmarks.

Whatever keeps the 10 Points on the top of your mind and frequently reminds you of what’s really important to you. Make a picture roll about them on your phone so you know you always have your dreams in your pocket and in the palm of your hand.

Of course a general idea of when you want to have your dreams come true will help, for example “next summer” or “in 2011″ or “in this lifetime”, but all of this is optional as long as you make sure to frequently read, regularly take a look or at least occasionally glance at your 10 Points, just so you remember what it’s all about.

Can you see how approaching goals in this way will eliminate frustrations and make the journey more pleasurable? Write down your 10 Points and enjoy making 2009 your best year! Here’s to your success!

Let us know how you go with this radically new approach to goal setting via email or post a comment below!

If you want to learn more please get in touch with us on our website.

What Are You Thinking?

How are you feeling? What are you thinking? What have you been thinking just a moment ago? And how did you feel then?

Go ahead, close your eyes (just for a moment – I know you can’t read with your eyes closed, duh!) and think of a really exciting time, make it as exciting as you like, go on, no one’s censoring your thoughts, yes, X-rated is fine, make it as EXCITING as you feel comfortable while still sitting at the screen. Now open your eyes (I sure hope you did this without this instruction otherwise we’d be sitting here for a very long time and your colleagues will start wondering exactly what kind of website you are looking at). How do you feel now? Does your heart beat a little faster, is your breathing shallower or is it deeper? Are your cheeks flushed and are you sitting more upright? If not, you haven’t been thinking EXCITING enough – go back and do it again, and this time really go for it!

What’s the difference between your emotional state now and how you felt just a moment ago when you started reading? Is there a big difference? You’re actually feeling better and life looks brighter? What caused this to happen? And how quickly did it happen? Just in the blink of an eye? Just because you made a choice to think about something EXCITING? That’s how simple it is? Do you want to learn how to do this all the time, automatically, without even thinking about it?

Do you want to have this energy available at your fingertips so you can snap into it whenever you need to, say when you really want to get that raise or when you’re coming up to the last mile and you feel like you’ve already done a hundred?

Our life is a succession of emotional states which closely relate to what’s going on in our head. So whatever is on your mind will determine how you feel. What’s on your mind in any given situation is dependent on your previous experiences and personal history. If you have run a marathon before and know you can make it you will feel very differently about an upcoming race than a first-timer. You’ll feel different because of, you guessed it, what’s in your mind.

Do you remember a time when you felt fantastic? How easily did you get things done? Did everything just come to you? And the other day, when you felt a bit down after what happened at work, how did the rest of your day go? Was it easier or harder to come home and connect with your partner or the kids? Easier or harder to do your workout? So what you goes in your mind does not only affect how you feel, it actually determines what you do and how you do it. Didn’t think that Thinking was that important, did you?

What you think determines your life and gets you where you want to be, and sometimes where you don’t want to be. So who’s putting these thoughts that make you feel happy or sad, romantic or lonely, motivated or lazy, in your head? You are doing it, you choose what you think, don’t you? Of course it’s easier to think motivating thoughts if you surround yourself with motivated people and you’re more likely to look at life as an exciting adventure if you create your environment accordingly. Whichever way, it’s your choice.

Lance Armstrong, the 7-times winner of the Tour de France, one of the most grueling endurance events in the world, says in his autobiography “Every Second Counts”: “Time is limited, so I better wake up every morning fresh and know that I have just one chance to live this particular day right, and to string my days together into a life of action, and purpose. If you want to know what keeps me on my bike, riding up an alp for six hours in the rain, that’s your answer.”

So, what’s keeping you on the bike?

Do you want to learn more about emotional states and how to control them? Contact us on our website and make sure to subscribe to our NLP Peak Performance blog!

Do You Like to Play on Valentine’s Day?

Made your plans for Valentine’s Day yet? Or did you manage to do what one of my friends did and inadvertently organize a poker night for the evening of the 14^th? True story! We promised not to tell his wife…

Anyway, I’m sure all the guys out there know what’s good for them and have come through with plans for a romantic evening, and the ladies are ready for a candlelit dinner!

Playing games is good fun any day, but what about a game that sets the right mood for Valentine’s Day? At A Perfect Mind we use a lot of Neuro Linguistic Programming in our coaching, or NLP for short, which has been developed about 35 years ago by a couple of university professors in California through the process of modeling (not the runway kind guys, sorry!). John Grinder and Richard Bandler examined what made some of the leading therapists and coaches of the time so successful and allowed them to get results that were head and shoulders above their peers. They observed closely their physiology and the language they used when working with their clients and came up with a set of rules which allows others to model or copy these behaviours and produce excellent results themselves.

So in the spirit of modeling (it’s perfectly understandable if you have Baywatch on your mind right now guys…) here’s a little game to play which will help you to really enter into the spirit of Valentine’s Day. Have some fun with it!

Step 1: Brainstorm some of the great lovers from times past, from the movies or any couples you know who fall into this category.

Step 2: What do these great lovers do, what do they say, what do they think, how do they treat each other, how do they interact? Describe them in as much detail as possible and split whatever you come up with into male and female columns, and you may find that they have much in common.

Describe the properties of your ideal lover to each other. What would the perfect lover be like, in your eyes and as far as you’re concerned?

Step 3: Now step into the shoes of the respective lover archetype you just described and look through his or her eyes: if you were the perfect lover, what would see, what would you say to yourself and what would your partner say about you, how would you feel and what would you do? Keep that picture in your mind and seal it in, just like closing the lid on a Tupperware container.

Now open your eyes, and if you’re not passionately kissing each other by now you’ll have to do it all over again…

Do you want to learn more about the process of modeling and NLP? Contact us on our website and make sure to subscribe to our NLP Peak Performance blog!

The 7 Secrets to Achieving Great Goals

Have you set your goals to make 2009 your best year yet? I’m not talking about New Year’s resolutions, which on average, research shows, only last for three days. I am talking about your life’s desires for this year, things once accomplished will make a big difference for you.

Have you given up on setting big goals like that, because you have done it before and it never worked? The reason why many goals remain unattained is that you have to decide consciously which goals you strive for and at the same time have to rely on your unconscious mind, where all your memories, beliefs and emotions come from, to get you there.

There are a couple of reasons for this: first, your conscious mind can only pay attention to so many things at the same time, which means that very soon after you determined which dream you wanted to make reality you will have to hand it over to your unconscious mind for safekeeping and further processing: it wouldn’t do any good to keep staring at your goal all day long because you’d miss major turns along the way and could end up where you didn’t want to go. Life wouldn’t be much fun either if all you’d do is focus on the future and the steps it takes to get there: love, happiness and enjoyment are all in the present and who wants to experience a life without these, even if all other goals have been achieved?

Only your unconscious has the ability of acting in place of your conscious self and keeping an eye on things while you’re not looking. This is the second reason why goals remain elusive: if your unconscious doesn’t support what you consciously desire you are on a losing wicket: no way will you get the help you need to keep going when obstacles appear in your path and when you have some growing to do: change is after all the most important part of moving towards your goals. If you wouldn’t need to change as a person, and in your behaviors and attitudes, you’d have and be everything you wanted right now: first you have to become the person who has or is whatever you desire. Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world” and this applies to your personal life as much as it does for nations. Stories abound of instant millionaires who squandered their fortunes within months and ended up more miserable than before, because they were handed something they were simply not ready for. This process of getting ready for your goals can only happen in your unconscious, where all learning and change takes place.

Would you like to know the secret to achieving great goals by enlisting the help of your unconscious mind? Here are the 7 steps to do just that:

1. You have to Know Your Outcome: write down exactly what you want, and be very specific about it. Describe it in sufficient detail as to make it measurable: just wanting to have lots of money or a new car is not enough: lots of money could be a bag full of 10 cent coins and a new car could be resting on bricks without wheels in your backyard. You need to be able to tell when you have you want.

Describe it as if you have it now and add a date by when you expect to achieve this goal: saying things like in three months or next year will not work because the three months will just keep rolling ahead in front of you. Remember: your unconscious mind is like a child: very eager to help and needs to be told exactly what and when you want it.

One more very important point: the goal has to be stated state it in positive terms. Don’t write down what it is you don’t want, say it the way you want it: “I don’t want to be poor” or “I don’t want my boss to hate me” is not going to make a good impression on the unconscious mind.

2. Feeling a strong Desire for what you set out to achieve is crucial: you have to really, really want it!  Be honest with yourself: is it really something you want to have or be, is it for you alone? Will the achievement of your goal make a big difference in your life and are you are you excited about the prospect? How determined are you to get it? Napoleon Hill in his book “Think and Grow Rich” talks about “white hot desire” – do you have something like that to show? Your unconscious mind will not reply to lukewarm demands: it will always take the path of least resistance and it won’t step up to bat for you unless it knows it’s worth the effort.

3. What is the Purpose of achieving your goal? You have to know why you want it! A strong enough Why will help you overcome challenges and get back on the horse when necessary. Going for great goals is not always a walk in the park and sometimes you need all the help you can get: a strong enough Why is the fuel you need to keep going against strong headwinds. Make sure as well that what you are after will be good for you and the people around you.

4. Picture yourself achieving your goal: make a strong mental image of what you will see, hear and feel when you have what you want. Write down what takes place when you are there and paint it in vivid colours creating a strong imprint on your unconscious mind. Describe in as many words as possible how you will feel and who you will be and make sure that what you describe gets you excited about the prospect of achieving your goal. Go on, be as colourful and concrete as you like – it’s for your eyes and ears only! Make sure to write it as if it takes place right now and reread this frequently – your unconscious will carry this image with it and will be excited with you.

5. Take Action: alright, it’s out in the open now: the only way to get what you want is by taking action, which usually means doing something different from what you have been doing so far. Asking alone won’t get you – there is no free lunch! Decide on the steps you are going to take and act on the first one immediately. You don’t need to know in every detail how to get there: every journey starts with the first step and moving ahead will open up new vistas and show you new opportunities to take action along the way.

When you take action be sure to do so from a state of excellence: trust in yourself and your abilities and imagine yourself to be the person who has already achieved the goal – feels pretty good, doesn’t it?

6. Have Flexibility: be mindful of the results your actions get you and change your approach when necessary. Don’t keep doing what doesn’t work: a definition of insanity is to keep repeating the same action and expecting a different result. Flies keep bumping against window panes until they knock themselves out because they do not have behavioural flexibility! Adjust your actions to overcome challenges.

7. Focus on What You Want: what you focus on is what you get and if you focus on what you don’t want, that’s what you’ll get as well! Any doubts or anxieties about your goal are reminders from the unconscious mind to focus on what you want: state your goal in positive terms and keep it in mind that way. Whenever you catch yourself questioning the prospect of success change the course of your thoughts by focusing on what you want with absolute certainty. Focus is like a magic carpet: if obstacles appear insurmountable and scepticism and apprehension come to the fore it will spirit you across.

Can you see how following these steps is a roadmap to your success, how approaching goals in this way will eliminate frustrations and make the journey pleasurable? Go through the 7 Steps and enjoy working on making 2009 your best year! Here’s to your success!

If you want to learn more you can get in touch with us on our website (or just click on our logo).

Great Tasks for Great Leaders

Whenever you look at a newspaper or a TV these days you are urgently reminded of what a bad place the world economy is in and what dreadful consequences it will have for your business or career and your way of living.

Instead of sinking into the news media prescribed doom and gloom you could look at it like this:

Economic downturns are great opportunities: they challenge us to become better at what we do and demand from us to exceed past performances. Even at the worst of times there are businesses making money and people are getting paid for doing a good job.

The question is: how do you stay on the winning side? Or are you actually doing things that hurt your chances?

When the race is on and the going gets tough we all have to do better than we previously have; in order to come out on top we have to start working in more efficient ways, we have to do a better job, use resources more effectively and have greater focus.

It all starts in that most valuable piece of real estate everyone owns: the area between your ears. The best way to make sure you perform to the best of your abilities and use your mind to full capacity is to focus on what you really want, and not on what you don’t want! Here are three steps to accomplish just that:

Step 1: Be very specific in what you positively want to have in your life and keep a clear picture of it in your mind all the time: health, family, relationships, work, holidays, money. Don’t waste time considering what you don’t have yet, instead focus your mind on what you WANT!

Step 2: Stop swallowing negative news: extract only the information you need in order to be more successful and discover the opportunities in everything else. Describe these opportunities clearly to yourself, write them down and focus on them. Bad news sells – that’s the only reason networks and newspapers keep blowing them out of proportion and constantly remind us of them well past their use by date: because bad news makes them money, and for no other purpose.

Step 3: Remember that anxiety is a reminder to focus on what you want! Any time you feel down or the future seems to look bleak remind yourself of all the good things that are already going on in your life and what else it is you want to have and experience. Keep your eye on the prize!

Now is the time to step up and become a leader for your business, your teams, your family and yourself. Use the resources you already have available and look for new ones – because what got you to where you are now won’t get you further, and this time we all have to go further.

Putting into perspective the recession the media keeps telling us is spreading around the world: each decade since the sixties US presidents had to deal with recession, sometimes several times: Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and now Obama – they were all faced with the task of getting the ship afloat again, and from what history shows us, it always worked out.

You were told that the recession Obama faces now is the most severe since the Great Depression? Great tasks for great leaders, don’t you think!?

If you want to learn more you can get in touch with us on our website (or just click on our logo).