This chick is funny and totally right on target. Your assignment? Watch this video. Then Watch your thoughts and start thinkin’ different thoughts that feel good…Now of course I’m not suggesting that you do this every single day. Oh no! I would never suggest that you even begin to notice how good it feels to speak much more kindly to yourself…but definitely watch this video. Now!

There will be a test….:o)

• The student would have a chance to learn a vital, low cost marketing skill that would help his/her practice.
• The fact that the student was answering in a public forum would challenge them to truly think about what they were learning.
• Since blogs are so much more search engine friendly than regular websites, it would enable the prospective NLP practitioner to begin to show up in Google searches.
• It also occurred to me that it would help spread the word about the Modern Jedi NLP training as well.

One of my students, Josh Kronlund chose to answer his quizzes on a free blog he set up in minutes.

Check out what happens when you google “Josh Kronlund NLP”

Here are the screen shots captured on 09/24/09:

Screen Shot 1: this first group shows mentions of Josh in my blog (which you are reading)

Screen shot 2: is still the first page of google and Josh gets a couple of direct listings for his blog.

Now, admittedly there is a lot to the art of blogging and getting search engine ranking.

I learned most of what I know about blogging and using it as a marketing tool from Rob Bronson & Michael Guerin.

If you want to boost your business you definitely need to learn this stuff. Here’s how:

Mike & Rob are offering a new course which they are beta testing (which means it will be at a fraction of it’s value)

Check it out here and tell them I sent you. (actually they’ll know where you visited their site from and they’ll teach you how to know that stuff too.

here’s the link: http://howtostartablognow.com/

Comments? Leave em below!

all the best,

Mark Shepard, Modern Jedi Guy

I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts below!

Learn more about the NLP Certification Training

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I don’t know if this happens to you at all or if I’m the only one.

I take risks. I believe that in order to truly live my dream I have to put new ideas and tools into action. Sometimes it works out right away. Other times things take a lot longer than it looked like it was going to take. This is NOT failure. It is feedback.

For example: When I finished my NLP trainers training in the Summer of 2003 I thought that I would be teaching my first NLP practitioner course the following month.

It took me something like 5 years to achieve that goal.

Not because I was sitting around watching TV and wasting my time, but because there seemed to be some higher, wiser plan in effect. In order for me to be a congruent trainer, I had to first get some real life experience working with clients of all kinds. Perfect (in retrospect).

But to the people in my life at the time, my lack of earning power IMMEDIATELY after the big training was proof that I was a fool. NLP was supposed to suddenly enable me to start making big bucks right away. And I have seen people’s incomes skyrocket right after an NLP session or a training.

But for me, for my particular life’s purpose of integrating my music and my personal development work, it wasn’t an instant catapault to fame and riches.

Somehow I managed to make it through those first lean months and began to build a practice.

There was so much I didn’t know about marketing, and business. So much I had to learn “on the job”. Because I was so focused on building my practice, I didn’t do as much to get Music/Storytelling gigs that year… so my income actually went down even though I was feeling like I was on track with implementing my goals.

Working towards living my dreams.

Well, as the old saying goes, “Success is Messy”

In the last year or so as I’ve been putting new ways of doing business into practice, getting the word out on the Web. It’s been a huge learning curve, one that has often required 100% of my attention and energy.

If anyone looked in at certain points along this path it might seem to an outside that I was chasing after some “pie in the sky” dream. I am chasing a dream. But it’s not “pie in the sky”.

My dream is to create steady and increasing income from the many areas I’m interested in and passionate about in a way that contributes positively to the lives of others.

NLP, Sales training, storytelling, music, hypnosis, art, personal development, healing, creativity, education, leadership, motivation, Time Line therapy techniques ™ relationships, transformation and on and on. It’s a multi-dimensional approach that sometimes defies “branding”.

I once had a conversation with a business man who had been very successful as a mortgage broker. At some point he had decided to build a company with other mortgage reps working for him. At first, his income went down because he was no longer writing deals. Eventually as he brought more and more mortgage reps on board and he earned a percentage of each rep’s volume, his income soared.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that in any endeavor that is true and congruent for you, there will be times when your family members or friends will try to give you advice. Unfortunately their advice will come from their model of the world which may be an old framwork for you that you are letting go of.

You must acknowledge their loving intention and appreciate it. However, you must also ignore their advice and continue to move beyond it. Even if it causes a temporary rift in the relationship.

Dreams are fragile at certain stages of their fulfillment. Stay with it. Keep doing what you know is right and true. Turn down the noise and the distractions around you and burn the boats. There is no returning to the way you used to be. Sometimes it takes longer to get to where you want to be. So what?

Every outcome that does not look like success is an opportunity to put another piece of the puzzle into place. Eventually it will come together.

Am I saying ignore solid, advice from people who truly know what they’re talking about in fields that are similar or related to what you are trying to accomplish? No. Other entrepreneurs or other people in your field who have done what you are attempting to do, have earned the right to give you guidance. I am only talking about people who have been employees all their life giving an entrepreneur advice about how to run his business.

Just like I know very little about ice skating and would never dream to give an ice skater advice about how to do a leap or a spin, people who trade hours for dollars or who are not able to tolerate the uncertainty of being in business (or sales) haven’t earned the right to give advice in this area. Are they bad people. No! Their intention is one of love and care and concern. It can still wreak havoc with your self confidence if you are going through some tough challenges.

What you do freaks them out and scares the hell out of them. That’s why they are chained to a steady paycheck. Sometimes in the entrepreneurial or artistic journey there are times when the cash flow just isn’t there. Those are moments of your greatest opportunity.

Worrying about someone based upon the false belief that imagining the worst and trying to protect your loved ones from their mistakes is the worst kind of projection.

For 40 years I’ve been pursuing a dream of using my music to positively impact the world. That journey has led me in a lot of different directions, first working on my self and my internal blocks and next learning how to reach out to other people in ways that may be non-traditional. The learning curve has been steep and at times breathtakingly difficult. Every step of the way, no matter how challenging, has been perfect and exactly what I was ready to tackle next.

• 75,000 people have watched my “How To Stop Anxiety” video series on YouTube.

• More than 25,000 people all over the globe have watched the video of my song “Together We Can Change The World” sung by Rilee O’Neill..

• The songs I wrote for Letters To Daddy have been enjoyed by several hundred audience members as the play was performed this past Spring by two different theater companies.

• 5,000 people follow me on twitter. http://www.twitter.com/markshepard

• Several dozen people have enrolled in the Modern Jedi NLP Practitioner Trainings I’ve taught

• Over 6,000 people have seen my Motivation Song on YouTube (see it at the end of this post).

Step by step. Goal by goal. Putting my plan into action.

Have those accomplishments resulted in a steady stream of income? Not yet. Have they touched lives in a postive way? Yes.

Am I on track? Yes. Am I as much a household name as Tony Robbins? Net yet. Do I always know how I’m going to pay this month’s bills? Nope.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Our backs are to the sea, the boats have been burned. There is nowhere to go but forward into the unknown.

So dare to dream folks. Dare to take action to fulfill your dream. Dare to find mentors to model yourself after. Dare to lovingly ignore the advice of parents, relatives, friends or anyone else who doesn’t “get” what you are all about.

Dare to believe in yourself even when outside events seem to conspire to get you to doubt.

Feed the Faith. Starve the Doubt. You gotta have some trust that it all works out…(better than you can possibly imagine)

Just in case you need a little motivation…

Please leave a comment below or share this with someone who many need your support today!

- Mark

7 very nice thoughts. But typical of what the dating and relationship industry does. They tell you 7 nice things you “should” do that if you really did do them would definitely help you. BUT…

In the midst of an emotional storm these “sensible” and “logical” bits of advice basically get lost.

So I thought I’d weigh in with a few NLP tools for getting over an ex. Trust me on this. These work and I’ve had to use them…a lot (damn, I’m not quite sure I like how that sounds).

Anyway here they are and feel free to apply them to anyone who you need to “get over”, could be an ex boss, or even the old “Critical Parent” a lot of us walk around reacting to.

NLP “How To Get Over Your Ex” Tool #1:
When you think of your “Ex” do you have a picture on your internal mental screen? Where is it? Typically it’s in the center, close, in color and bright. Just notice though where it is for you.

Solution: Now. Shrink it down and push it farther away at the same time you make it dim. Now how do you feel? If you’ve actually done this, the intensity should have gone down in a pleasant way. Repeat as necessary until when you think of your Ex, there’s no “charge” or their picture stays small and dim and far away.

NLP “How To Get Over Your Ex” Tool #2:
When you think of your “Ex” do you keep seeing the movies of all the good times you had together? The wonderful first attraction and hot sex you used to have?

Solution: Drop those old internal “home movies” of all the good times to the lower left hand corner of your internal screen, shrink ‘em down and make them disappear. Blip! Now pull up the reel of all the selfish, annoying, frustrating, unnacceptable things you experienced that caused you two to be “Ex’s” in the first place and put them on an endless loop right in front of you, close, and bright. Guaranteed you’ll stop thinking of all the “wonderful” times.

NLP “How To Get Over Your Ex” Tool #3:
one of the problems with getting over an ex is the false belief that you’ll never find anyone better. We can get vulnerable to our ex’s good qualities (and they do have them) when we get lonely or run pictures on our mental screen of being alone. So other than actively getting out and meeting lots of new people which is a different subject altogether, in addition to dimishing the pictures of the ex and running movies of the bad times to remind you why you’re not together anymore…

Solution: You need to pull up a vision of what you want on to your internal movie screen. Is there a whole line of eager suitors waiting for the chance to get to know you? Are you happily persuing your own passions and interests and having fun in your life regardless of a significant other? Well that’s what you need to be doing now. See yourself in the picture doing all the things you would be doing if you were the kind of person who would attract the kind of person you most want to attract.

Really. Create a movie in your mind of exactly the kind of person and relationship you really and truly want to have. You may need to make a list here. Every time you find yourself saying “I don’t want….” turn it around into what you do want. Take all the positive qualities you want in a partner and make a movie of that. Bring it in close and make it big and bright.

How does that feel?

The next step is to figure out where to find people with those qualities and to develop the skills of rapport building and modern Jedi NLP persuasion power so you can fish where the fish are and invite them into the boat with just what bait they find delicious (you). This is where I shamelessly plug my Modern Jedi NLP Training where you can learn a lot more of this stuff.

So practice these three NLP “Getting Over Your Ex” tools and leave a comment below to let me know how you’re doing with them.

I also do one on one coaching over the phone and can typically help you with this kind of challenge a lot faster than you may think possible.

Have you ever shared an idea with someone who totally “got” what you were saying right away? I don’t know if you can remember a time, a specific time when you learned something new and just couldn’t wait to run and tell your best friend about it. Maybe you saw a great movie or TV show and just had to bring someone else into the experience. Chances are there was no hesitation on your part. You learned something or discovered something, got excited and shared it.

Then perhaps you shared it with someone else and they just weren’t impressed. They didn’t “get” it. Or worse like Little Miss Crankypants (yes that is a reference to a song I wrote recently) they metaphorically popped your balloon.

Or, could you kind of tell they were just humoring you and hoping you’d talk about something else?

All of a sudden your wonderful, shiny new discovery started to get a bit tarnished.

What if you had the ability to keep your passion and excitement and communicate it to other people in a way that you the results you wanted?

How do you learn to influence other people so easily, positively and effortlessly it seems like magic?

Whether you’re inviting people to a party or asking someone out on a date or selling your products or services or convincing your teenager to stay away from drugs and alcohol, the ability to influence and persuade are just about the most crucial skills anyone can have. Don’t you agree?

Some people just seem to come by it naturally. For the rest of us, it takes conscious, persistent effort to learn and integrate the many beliefs, behaviors, skills, and mind sets that enable us to become masters of our communication.

Now, you could take my Modern Jedi NLP Training now available in a convenient,  affordable On-Line/Hands-On format.

or you could check out this 7 day persuasion program I recently discovered by AJ Kumar.
AJ Kumar’s 7 day Persuasion course

Or you don’t have to change what you’ve been doing…if it’s working for you and you’re getting everything you want out of life why change now?

You know the truth though. What you’ve been doing ain’t working that well is it? Frustration is a great motivating force! So Get EXCITED!

Why my Dad is so FRUSTRATED

I was talking to my dad the other day. He’s 81 years old and healthy as a horse. He swims a half a mile 3 times a week. He looks like he’s 60. He has a trim muscular body with no flab at all. He’s sharp and alert. He just did the swimming leg of a Tri-athelon. For the last 30 years he has passionately and thoroughly studied everything there is to know about health, nutrition, natural healing etc.

He has vast amounts of knowledge about health and nutrition but little experience in getting other people to STOP and:

a.  Listen to him

b. Value his expertise

c. Take his advice

d. Make the changes that in some cases could save their lives!

He’s so FRUSTRATED.

Can you relate? He wants so much to help people and to guide people to a place where they can feel good physically. He walks his talk. But he wants to be more than just a “good example”. He wants to actively influence other people in a positive way.

Now a lot of 81 year olds would say, “oh well. Too soon oldt, too late Scmartt”. Not my dad! In fact, I would be willing to bet that after he reads this blog post, he’ll sign right up for my NLP Training so he can learn how to actually get his message out to people who most need and want to improve their health and well being. And you know I’ll help him and by helping him I will indirectly help people I wouldn’t otherwise have any hope of influencing. That’s why I get so excited about this stuff that I have to share it with YOU!

Or maybe he’ll order  AJ Kumar’s 7 day Persusuasion course

After all AT AGE 81 he has a lifetime of knowledge to share and he only has another 30 years to get it out! )

Please leave a comment below to let me know your thoughts about persuasion.

-Mark

p.s. What would you think about some guest blog posts from my dad the “Modern Jedi Health and Nutrition Specialist”? Let me know.

Let’s see….NLP, EFT, EMDR, CHT, PDQ, LMNOP….Sheesh!

Well here’s the scoop: EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique. It is weird. And it WORKS! In my humble opinion EFT is one of my best NLP tools and you can’t really think about NLP success without having EFT in your transformation tool kit.

Check out the Video to learn more

or

click here to Get Your Free EFT Starter Kit

Hi mark I am wondering before you do swish patterns and other NLP techniques, don’t we really have to clear our fears with the Timeline Therapy Techniques™?

When we worked together 1:1 and I was able to allow joy to come in my life for the first time, it was a good start but my other issues about living life and business issues are still coming up.

When a fear comes up should I do Timeline on myself with the issue to get it clear first?  In other words what is the checklist to follow for tools to use when a fear arises that is holding me back?  I feel at this point I  should be able to use the tools I am learning in your course and what I picked up at our breakthrough session .

I really understand that we are the only ones that can cure ourselves.  Thanks so much.

-Name Witheld

Here’s my response:

An important Key to NLP Success: As long as we’re alive stuff will come up. It’s like your Unconscious Mind  “gets” that it can release stuff now and so it keeps offering up new “layers” to be addressed. I also want to remind us all that when we do make a major shift to not discount it or negate it just because there is still more work to do. There will always be more to shift. That why it’s so cool to have a wide choice of NLP tools to choose from.

I find that when I clear something with timeline it typically stays cleared if I have gotten the root cause event. Sometimes, I’ve had to go back and clear a slightly different limiting decision that seemed to have the same root cause.

I prefer to do time line therapy techniques ® to clear the limiting decision and chain of negative emotions first. Then I’ll use the swish pattern to “program” the new response I want into my neurology. If you do a Swish pattern enough times it’s cool because the old negative “knee-jerk” trigger will now bring up the desired state or picture.

It’s hard to give a “check-list” of first do a. then b. then c. I tend to follow my intuition with what to do when.

What I love about NLP, Hypnosis, Time Line and EFT is that I can do a lot of things on my own to clear stuff that comes up at the moment it gets in my face. That’s one reason I truly believe in teaching my clients how to take charge of their own change rather than see me as the “curer” or “healer”.  That said, sometimes though we just can’t get enough leverage on our selves to shift something.  At those moments it can save a lot of time and angst to get help from a trained practitioner of NLP.

In those cases, I find it a lot easier to have someone else do it with me. That’s yet another benefit of the NLP Training because you not only learn how to do the NLP techniques on your own for yourself and for other people, but you actually get to take turns with the other students in being the “client” in our 4 day bootcamp. So you can clear a lot of your own stuff in the process of learning NLP. You also make friends with other people who “get” you and who are interested in clearing their own issues and blocks. So it makes a lot of sense to come to the training and then do trades afterward with the students you meet.

If I’m in a moment of  “challenge” and I just need to shift something immediately, I  use EFT.  I tap and speak the “set up phrase” LOUDLY! It seems the more emotion I have towards clearing something the more powerful EFT tapping is. If you’d like to learn more about EFT click here:  Get a free EFT Starter package

Here’s an example:

“Even though I thought I’d cleared this @#^&*$%!@$*%$!@# problem, I deeply and completely accept myself!”
I do a couple rounds unashamedly focusing on the problem and wallowing loudly in the whiny victim mode as much as I want while tapping the EFT acupressure points. I have so much fun with this that often that’s enough to snap me out of my funk!

Then I start feeding in positive how and why questions like:
“Even though I haven’t yet found and released the root cause event of this challenge, why do I deeply and completely accept myself?”

Finally I just tap on

“Why do I deeply and completely accept myself and why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine?”
“Why do I love myself? Why do I attract all the resources and assistance I need to clear this once and for all?”
Why do I resolve this in a way that’s even better than I can possibly imagine?”
etc.
Usually EFT clears  pretty much everything from headaches to limiting beliefs.

If it doesn’t do the job for a particular issue I will next use swish patterns and other NLP submodalities techniques to get relief.

If I’m still not shifting the issue, then I will call one of my students/colleagues and get them to do Time Line Therapy with me. Sometimes I can do Time line by myself but I tend to space out and drift off unless someone is there keeping me on track.

Depending upon the issue, when I can’t get enough leverage on my “stuff” by myself, I call Joann Dunsing or Joe Schroder or Kathy McAfee or Kim Kasperian.

Remember that Tiger Woods has a coach and Michael Jordan had a coach. One of my greatest and most humbling lessons is that sometimes it saves a lot of time and money to get with someone who can get you the results you can’t always get on your own.

I have even just handed the Time Line Therapy™ script to someone who knew nothing about it and just had them read the damn thing. It worked like a charm because it kept me on task. The script doesn’t do the clearing, we do. So as you learn various techniques approach using them on your own issues or “stuff” with an attitude of wanton curiosity and playfulness.

I hope that answered the question and was helpful for those of you who are working to “Defeat The Dark Side In Your Personal And Professional Life. Master Your Mind For A Change with NLP!” )

Why does it work out better than you can possibly imagine?

-Mark Shepard, NLPT
Certified Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP, Hypnosis & Time Line Therapy™

p.s. Any questions or comments? Leave them below. Please pass this post along on Twitter, or Facebook or StumbleUpon etc.