First he cites Newsweek: “To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).”

And then Marc Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy who said  “One thing we know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other. Intuitively, you know this is true. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist, scientist and inventor, and each specialty nourished the other. He was a great lateral thinker. But if you spend your whole life in one silo, you will never have either the knowledge or mental agility to do the synthesis, connect the dots, which is usually where the next great breakthrough is found.”

Take these statements together with Norman Doidge’s book about the plasticity of the brain and how learning new skills develops new real estate in your mind and you have all the reasons you’ll ever need to grow in fresh and unexpected ways.

If you like being creative that is…

Being an expert communicator I pulled out all the stops and dug deep into my NLP tool chest: observing the principles of great negotiation I first defined the desired outcomes and made sure they were well-formed. I carefully designed the win-win I wanted to achieve, agreed with myself on my fallback positions, practiced the agreement and relevancy frames in front of the mirror, read up on the hierarchy of ideas, recalled the pertinent points of the Milton model, rehearsed the Meta model questioning techniques with my dog, disassociated myself from the problem (to keep a cool head), fired off my clarity of mind and purposeful determination anchors and further steeled my resolve by focusing intensely on what I wanted.

Thus prepared and appropriately fortified (can you get drunk on NLP knowledge? ) I confidently strode into the meeting which my daughter graciously had agreed to fit into her busy schedule. No she doesn’t have a job yet (here’s another “Talk” we have to have, sigh) and it’s school holidays right now – it was the old “I have plans with my friends, don’t you understand!!??”.

After the event I was painfully reminded again of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s words: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. With all that preparation and aforethought I had put into our “Talk” I had expected full achievement of all my objectives, but found myself walking away from the meeting with a middling feeling.

With my NLP communication skills I know I can deal with the most obstreperous adult, and I felt equally equipped to deal with a teenager, after all they are just young adults, right!? But after our meeting all I felt was stumped: points had been made (and they were all good), common ground had been found (even if verrry reluctantly), plans had been prepared, actions had been defined and I still wasn’t sure who got their way more. Maybe that’s the true definition of a win-win outcome: You have one when you don’t feel you lost and you know you didn’t win.

The message I took away from all this? Teenagers are not like computers: you can press all the right buttons and in the end you still can’t tell if they “work” any better. And yes, they’re not like adults either!

But I do believe I got at least some of my message across: she’s at home studying right now while her friends are out playing. Goodness, did I win something after all…?

And of course: without all my NLP inspired planning the Talk would probably have turned into an argument and deteriorated from there all the way to the “Walkout” (note the capital letter again ) which would have meant a lose-lose for sure, and I guess you can always tell when you got one of those.

All the best!

Thomas

It’s a good reminder of the fact that a 1 degree change of course doesn’t make much of a difference the next day or even in a month but gets you to a totally different place over time. Best to start with these course corrections right now then…

So next time you are thinking about walking to the kitchen for a glass of water or a cup of coffee, or taking the stairs instead of the escalator – just do it! 

This article first appeared in the New York Times on February 23, 2010 under the title “Stand Up While You Read This” and is written by Olivia Judson. I thought I’d share it right here with you because you’ve got to read this! To read it on the New York Times website click here.

This is where it starts:

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

That, at least, is the conclusion of several recent studies. Indeed, if you consider only healthy people who exercise regularly, those who sit the most during the rest of the day have larger waists and worse profiles of blood pressure and blood sugar than those who sit less. Among people who sit in front of the television for more than three hours each day, those who exercise are as fat as those who don’t: sitting a lot appears to offset some of the benefits of jogging a lot.

So what’s wrong with sitting?

The answer seems to have two parts. The first is that sitting is one of the most passive things you can do. You burn more energy by chewing gum or fidgeting than you do sitting still in a chair. Compared to sitting, standing in one place is hard work. To stand, you have to tense your leg muscles, and engage the muscles of your back and shoulders; while standing, you often shift from leg to leg. All of this burns energy.

For many people, weight gain is a matter of slow creep — two pounds this year, three pounds next year. You can gain this much if, each day, you eat just 30 calories more than you burn. Thirty calories is hardly anything — it’s a couple of mouthfuls of banana, or a few potato chips. Thus, a little more time on your feet today and tomorrow can easily make the difference between remaining lean and getting fat.

You may think you have no choice about how much you sit. But this isn’t true. Suppose you sleep for eight hours each day, and exercise for one. That still leaves 15 hours of activities. Even if you exercise, most of the energy you burn will be burnt during these 15 hours, so weight gain is often the cumulative effect of a series of small decisions: Do you take the stairs or the elevator? Do you e-mail your colleague down the hall, or get up and go and see her? When you get home, do you potter about in the garden or sit in front of the television? Do you walk to the corner store, or drive?

Just to underscore the point that you do have a choice: a study of junior doctors doing the same job, the same week, on identical wards found that some individuals walked four times farther than others at work each day. (No one in the study was overweight; but the “long-distance” doctors were thinner than the “short-distance” doctors.)

So part of the problem with sitting a lot is that you don’t use as much energy as those who spend more time on their feet. This makes it easier to gain weight, and makes you more prone to the health problems that fatness often brings.

But it looks as though there’s a more sinister aspect to sitting, too. Several strands of evidence suggest that there’s a “physiology of inactivity”: that when you spend long periods sitting, your body actually does things that are bad for you.

As an example, consider lipoprotein lipase. This is a molecule that plays a central role in how the body processes fats; it’s produced by many tissues, including muscles. Low levels of lipoprotein lipase are associated with a variety of health problems, including heart disease. Studies in rats show that leg muscles only produce this molecule when they are actively being flexed (for example, when the animal is standing up and ambling about). The implication is that when you sit, a crucial part of your metabolism slows down.

Nor is lipoprotein lipase the only molecule affected by muscular inactivity. Actively contracting muscles produce a whole suite of substances that have a beneficial effect on how the body uses and stores sugars and fats.

Which might explain the following result. Men who normally walk a lot (about 10,000 steps per day, as measured by a pedometer) were asked to cut back (to about 1,350 steps per day) for two weeks, by using elevators instead of stairs, driving to work instead of walking and so on. By the end of the two weeks, all of them had became worse at metabolizing sugars and fats. Their distribution of body fat had also altered — they had become fatter around the middle. Such changes are among the first steps on the road to diabetes.

Conversely, a study of people who sit for many hours found that those who took frequent small breaks — standing up to stretch or walk down the corridor — had smaller waists and better profiles for sugar and fat metabolism than those who did their sitting in long, uninterrupted chunks.

Some people have advanced radical solutions to the sitting syndrome: replace your sit-down desk with a stand-up desk, and equip this with a slow treadmill so that you walk while you work. (Talk about pacing the office.) Make sure that your television can only operate if you are pedaling furiously on an exercise bike. Or, watch television in a rocking chair: rocking also takes energy and involves a continuous gentle flexing of the calf muscles. Get rid of your office chair and replace it with a therapy ball: this too uses more muscles, and hence more energy, than a normal chair, because you have to support your back and work to keep balanced. You also have the option of bouncing, if you like.

Or you could take all this as a license to fidget.

But whatever you choose, know this. The data are clear: beware your chair.

To read this article “Stand Up While You Read This” by Olivia Judson on the New York Times website click here.

Interesting one, isn’t it!? So now you can feel good about yourself and your (possibly non-existent) exercise regime by simply standing up occasionally, and the walk to the coffee machine turns into a light workout, who would have thought!?

Anyway, good to that it’s the overall lifestyle that counts,  not just a few hours at the gym, because everyone has a lifestyle to change, but not necessarily a gym membership (or don’t make use of it – ouch!).

“It’s the small things we do most of the time, rather than the big things we do occasionally, that make a difference.”

All the best!
Thomas

Gives a new meaning to “speaking your mind” and saying whatever is on the tip of your tongue, doesn’t it? Everything you say paints a picture in the recipient’s mind, so you want to be choosing your words well: are you using colours that shine or is the stroke of your brush too rough? Do you get your message across or do people get the wrong picture?

Food for thought…

All the best!

Thomas

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!