Who are the mentors who have helped you?  Did they challenge you, push you to move beyond your limitations – imagined or real? Or did they just console you?  Did they expand your universe or just reinforce your existing beliefs?

There is a lot of confusion about how a coach is supposed to help you. If you are looking for someone to talk to, to simply feel better about yourself, then you’re not looking for a coach.  A coach will challenge you to make changes towards permanent positive change, new ideas, and new behavior. They will also give you the specific tools so that you can do it. They will hold you accountable to put those tools to use, and to keep using them. Anything less, and you are cheating yourself.

There’s also big myth about self-sufficiency, and self-determination,  and a false idea that we should all be able to go it alone. There’s confusion about independence and interdependence. There’s a difference between being pushed out of your comfortable nest, and being able to fly with exquisite skill. A good coach will push you beyond your comfort zone and give you the skills to thrive there.

The most accomplished and successful leaders in every field have always  been mentored. Professional athletes have coaches, effective organizations have consultants, even great spiritual teachers have advisers and guides! Artists, writers, musicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors .. you name it .. the best of them acknowledge the life-changing impact of their mentors,

Why would you imagine that you deserve less, or could achieve your best with less?

Perhaps you run your life by other myths, that you’re not good enough, or that you don’t deserve it, or that you can’t afford it. But your logic is backwards. You become good enough by stepping up, you come to deserve it by claiming it, and ultimately, if you want to become and do what you’re truly capable of becoming and doing, you can’t afford not to get the help you need and deserve to make it happen!

The work of a coach is not to help you feel comfortable with your limitations, real or imagined. It is not even to help you understand those limitations, however valuable understanding can sometimes be. It is to help you  focus your energy so that you move beyond those limitations altogether, and to sustain that movement so that you, and everyone around you benefits.

.. And aren’t all limitations imagined ones anyway?

So, are you coachable? Ask yourself:

1. Can you learn? Can you let go of what you thought you knew? Can you listen and take action based on what you hear? Can you stand directly in front of the things you have avoided because they terrified you, and learn from your fears? Can you trust .. which means, can you trust yourself, your dreams, desires, ambitions? Can you trust that life works for you, not against you, as soon as you start living and thinking for yourself.
2. Can you change? Can you risk losing what you thought you depended on? Can you risk losing who you thought you were? Can you risk failing in order to achieve a greater and deeper success. Can you understand that true success is not a zero-sum game. When you win, everyone can win? Can you get out of your own way? Can you stand face to face with those old fears and trust that they may be your greatest teachers, not just something to ‘overcome’, but true guides and teachers.

A few years ago I began working  with mentors who really challenged me to question my own belief system and the self-imposed limitations that were playing out in my life, as well as in my work as a teacher and mentor to others.

I realized that I had a ‘sacred’ duty to provoke, challenge, and question even more than I had been .. and to provide concrete tools, practical perspectives , and real-life skills with which people might sustain permanent change in an ongoing way. Anything less than that was merely misplaced kindness!

Genuine kindness sacrifices temporary comfort for long term achievement and ongoing, ever-evolving, fulfillment and creativity; to become a true reflection of this wild and marvelous adventure of living!

Do you believe that? If it were true, what does it say about choices you may have made? We always get what we want and expect, whether we think so or not!

Of course, that doesn’t mean that outside influences don’t play out in our lives. They do, all the time. But how we negotiate and transform those influences is determined by us. It’s not a question of whether or not obstacles, challenges, and disappointment exit. They exist in abundance. The question is how you address them, and how your attitude and predisposition may be influencing their perceived impact.

This is something that every mature teaching system agrees on, from Buddhism to New Thought. More importantly, simple honest observation bears it out every day.

Without an intention, nothing is actually ‘accomplished’

This does not mean that your life must be dominated by your goals. Learning to be present, to be mindful, to have awareness in everyday life is essential. It is not a question of one being more important than the other. It’s not either or. In fact, it has been demonstrated that people who are on track with their goals and vision, and who are taking action to achieve them in a deliberate and conscious way, are more able to release anxiety and fully live in the present moment, which translates to fully enjoying life – this is something else that simple observation bears witness to every day. Just think of the people you know who are getting things accomplished in a steady measured way with deliberation and joy, clear intention and a clear plan.

There are two keys to sustaining intention and vision. The first is CONGRUITY —  being in agreement with yourself, embodying your ‘bliss’, and living with the integrity that allows you to live from the inside out. That means NOT fighting against yourself, living your truth, knowing your values and priorities, and trusting them.

The second key is MOTIVATION. Motivation is based on emotion, and emotions do not last. So the question is how you live into the marvelous unknown, with trust, enjoying the journey of your life so that it’s unfolding becomes a source of pleasure and joy. How do you become naturally self-motivated. How do you generate motivation within yourself every day. There are ways to learn to do exactly this. This is the not-so-secret secret known to almost everyone you have ever admired, emulated, or been inspired by — from the Buddha to Oprah Winfrey, from Nelson Mandela to the the Rolling Stones

To learn more please visit http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/N88FS76 to complete a short survey and request a complimentary Strategy-Focus phone call.

Podcast at: http://www.hownotwhy.com/?p=432

Your attitudes and mindset,
your ability to be effective as a leader,
your ability to lead yourself,
your ability to live ‘at choice’

… all this depends on your unconscious programming. In other words it depends on the beliefs that have been instilled in you by a process that is very much like hypnosis. Fortunately, mindset and attitudes can be transformed through the use of hypnosis far more rapidly, and with far greater ease, than is often understood or appreciated.

The hypnotic state is a doorway to your unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind is everything you are not currently aware of: for example, that meeting you are nervous about, your love of going to the beach, the excitement you felt on your eleventh birthday, an unkind neighbor, a tune that pops into your mind inexplicably. The unconscious mind is the ten-trillion things that you couldn’t possibly hold in conscious awareness at any moment, but which together make up the climate of your experience.

However, the unconscious mind is more than a memory-bank. Experience is determined by emotions. One person may love going to the beach, another person may detest it. Everything you experience is filtered through emotions and perceptions, and the subtleties of associations through which you make meanings from your life.

Imagine a child being told by his mother to clean his room. Perhaps his mother was having a difficult day and speaks sharply, “Can’t you tidy your room, what’s the matter with you?”

Somehow the child hears that there’s something the matter with him, and years later, on an unconscious level, he carries that message everywhere he goes.  He carries it to social gatherings, and job interviews. He may even carry it to bed. He may have conscious recollection of that day, long ago, when his mother was impatient with him. He may have discussed it in therapy. He may have learned that it wasn’t about him. But still the pervasive belief persists. It will continue until he registers a new truth about himself on an unconscious level as completely as he absorbed that first message long ago.

The amazing truth about your mind is that it can learn and change very quickly. How long did it take for that child to learn ‘there’s something wrong with me?’  He learned it in an instant, and a new truth can be learned at the same speed, but only if it is absorbed on the deepest level, deeply enough to supersede the old patterns.

People often say that hypnosis performs miracles. If you imagine that the attitudes that inform your behavior have to take a long time in order to change, then hypnotherapy is indeed miraculous. The power of hypnosis is the power to access your unconscious mind. Perhaps you have been disempowered by repeated vain attempts to effect change through willpower, conscious strategy, and reason. You may feel that you have a long way to go before you can truly transform old limiting beliefs, but you do not need more information or skills. When you’re ready to effect change, the last thing you need is more time! What you require is very simple. When you can access the same open mind you had as a child at the moment when you heard those fateful words, then you can learn your new truth, “there’s something right with me.”

A skilled hypnotherapist will guide you towards your own natural ability to remember deeper truths about yourself. She will help you access your capacity to write your own scripts, reprogram those old programs.  The truths you recover predate the time when trauma hijacked your original innocence, capabilities, and joy.

Hypnosis is like finding the light switch after fumbling around in a dark room for years.

Sometimes all you need to find that switch is permission from your own unconscious mind. Hypnotherapy is a miraculously effective way to gain permission from, and access the power of, your unconscious mind, to bring about radical positive permanent change.

Hypnotherapy Hypnosis in Los Angeles ‘when you’re ready for change’

Eleven day Training Intensive

Condoning or Condemning?

Keeping things simple can be a comfort. But sometimes comfort does nothing to move you forward. It doesn’t challenge you, or help you to learn new perspectives, and create new possibilities for yourself.

I am talking about the assessments we make of others.

You ask yourself, “Do I agree with you?  Do I accept you? Am I safe around you?”

If  you conclude, “I disagree. I don’t trust you.” You might also inadvertently add “I don’t understand you,” “I don’t like you,” or even “Because your belief system and values are different from my own there may be something wrong with you.”

Sometimes the most interesting thing can be to spend time with someone who is completely different from you. It may challenge you. It may be uncomfortable and edgy. But it  may teach you something new about yourself and your own presuppositions and assumptions.

If you always need others to agree with, it may be because you lack confidence in your own perspectives; or it maybe that you’re just taking yourself too seriously.

If you have only two options:

1. Agreeing, condoning, liking, approving, trusting, or
2. Disagreeing, condemning, disliking, disapproving, mistrusting.

then you may be missing a range of other possibilities:

• challenging your assumptions and strategies
• refining your communication skills
• deepening your empathy
• getting over yourself
• having more fun
• learning to be more flexible
• deepening your perspectives

In the world of NLP it is axiomatic that to help other effect genuine change it’s essential to respect their model of reality. Otherwise, how do you imagine you can genuinely communicate with them, let alone influencing them? Beyond that, it’s also to your benefit to do so.

Respecting others’ model of reality doesn’t mean condoning that model; but it does save you the aggravation of having to oppose it, condemn it, or persuade them they are wrong.

What sort of anxiety would lead you to spend all your time only with those who agree with you anyway?

Stretch a little. Spend a little time with people who make you uncomfortable and notice some of your patterns which, once noticed, you can change – if you choose.

You don’t need to know anything about Neurolinguistics, or NLP, to do this. It may just be an expression of you own evolving emotional intelligence.

Eleven day NLP and Hypnosis Training Intensive at Manzanita Village

• To effect positive change
• To create a new business
• To provide a service, product, or information conduit than could have a profound positive impact on people’s lives

I’ve been meeting lots of people with solid integrity and a wealth of creative potential who still feel blocked from contributing on the scale they would like.

Perhaps you are one of them? Are you someone with creative solutions that you are not yet implementing or using to full advantage? Are you frustrated at not getting the full power of your work-message-solution out there where it belongs?

If so, there may a couple of missing pieces that you can add fairly easily.

Two missing elements. An integrated approach to successful marketing.

1. The means to get the word out to an audience that can benefit from your message.
2. The means to clarify, sharpen and refine your vision, so that your message comes across loud and clear.

Number one - how to create a fully functioning website, give it visibility, promote it using the array of means that are available, and gather a list of people interested in what you have to offer. Also, how you can use social media to it’s best advantage, and how you can make use of press releases, blogs, videos etc.

Number two – how to create and refine your vision, get out of your own way, develop a viable plan. and obliterate any emotional or logistical obstacles that are in your way. In other words, how to create the mindset to utilize these tools and make it all work. And then to GET DOWN and make it happen!

Regardless of where you are in your career, if your work and skills are as important as you know them to be, how much longer can you afford wait before getting it out there on the scale you know it deserves? Don’t you owe it to yourself and others to make your best talents and perspectives accessible?

Conscious Leadership Training Global looks forward with excitement to the trainings we will be kicking off in Sydney in April and May of 2010 that will specifically address your ability to make your important work available in ways that allow others to take full advantage of it.

Stay tuned for more. Click here

This morning I wrote a list of some of what we cover on the course. Then I realized that although the substance and the language was different, the essence of what I wrote was much the same as something I might write to describe a personal development training, or even a meditation retreat.

Some of my outline was specific, and included elements that would only appear in a course designed for business or organizational leaders; for example  –  business needs analysis, comprehensive systems for performance analysis, effective assessment in the hiring process etc.

But it also included the following:

• Secret ingredient #1: developing your intuition. You already see (or would like to see) yourself as a leader. Perhaps you are already in a position of leadership. If so, it is because you have a naturally intuitive capability. Now learn concrete new ways to develop your intuitive capability.
• Secret ingredient #2: Rapport and communication: the Principle of ‘Liking”. People follow you because they know that you understand, appreciate, and like them. This is not something you can fake.  However, you can effect changes within yourself that will echo the internal patterns of some of the greatest and most charismatic leaders, so that people will trust you.
• Secret ingredient #3: What are the things that help you focus best?. This is different for everybody. Knowing what helps you focus best and what supports your best performance, and then by systematically reinforcing that focus, you can enhance everything you do.
• Communication is more about listening, and knowing what to listen for, than it is about getting your point across. Everyone has heard that listen is important, many people have not yet learned how specifically to do so.
• Leadership (as described by Nelson Mandela) is often best done from behind, so that people feel they are leading themselves, as they must, to become leaders in their own right.

I often hear people say that personal development and business development are the same. I wish this was always true. I think only the very best training is fully comprehensive. When it is, there’s another ingredient you can add. There is business, personal, and organizational development. Then the next element that seems to insert itself is something you might call ‘spirit’. Of course, spirit is a loaded word, and means different things to different people. You could call it ‘inspiration’, but it’s more than that.

I leave it to you to call it what you like. Suffice to say, that the best training, whatever its ostensible purpose, leads you to greater happiness, greater effectiveness, and greater congruence with your own deepest values – greater ‘spirit’. Call it Jung’s Transcendent Function, call it congruence between conscious and unconscious, or call it spirit–we all recognize it when we are living and working effortlessly towards full capacity.

In this context we believe the Art of Conscious Leadership to be one of the very best and most comprehensive trainings of its kind available anywhere.

http://consciousleadershiptraining.com/