Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares a radical idea. It’s a funny, personal and moving talk.
Please share this with a friend!
-Mark
NLP In Business
February 10, 2009 By
For many of us out here on the front lines of entrepreneurship, there is one constant that either makes us or breaks us…
And that’s US!
As cartoon strip character Pogo said many years ago “We have met the enemy and he is us!”
Ultimately, wherever we are is the result of our thoughts, beliefs, values, decisions, and actions (BTW “inaction” is actually the action of not doing anything).
Since NLP provides us with easy to use maps for recognizing and changing our own blocks, patterns, behaviors, fears etc. it makes a great tool for business people. What I love about folks in business is that they “get” that if something is costing them, they have to change it.
My business clients “get” that if they spend $100 dollars to clear something that’s holding them back and hurting their company or their success and they make an additional $100 dollars, then it wasn’t a “cost” it was an investment that just paid for itself. If that $100 investment brings a return of $200 or $1,000 then it is a “no-brainer”.
Typically, I find that when people clear the block that has held them back they go on to exponentially increase their income and their effectiveness as leaders in their respective fields.
Two examples that come to mind of people who have made revolutionary change in their lives as the result of learning NLP are Michael Guerin and Rob Bronson.
Michael has been kind enough to share his story with my readers on a number of occasions as well as on the phone and in an extensive video interview.
The bottom line for Mike is that before he worked with me he could barely use the phone. He literally had a phone phobia. He also suffered from agoraphobia so basically, he couldn’t get out and meet and greet new clients and he couldn’t call prospects on the phone! Not a recipe for success in business! We did my basic NLP breakthrough process and within hours he was on fire! As he said in his interview with me, “It was really strange because it was like the old pattern was just gone! As if it had never existed in the first place…”
Mike has gone on to increase his Credit Card Merchant Processing business so much that he is now training other associates to work for him. He has also expanded into helping other business owners make sense of online interactive marketing. In this severe economic climate Michael Guerin’s businesses are thriving and growing by leaps and bounds. That’s the power of NLP to help us get out of our own way.
Which brings me to Rob Bronson. Rob is my good friend and technical adviser. This blog format and all the videos I’ve been doing is the direct result of Rob using my own NLP stuff on ME! I had a lot of technological RESISTANCE. which Rob helped me to release!
I first got to know Rob when he took my “Reluctant Sales Person” training a couple of years ago. And immediately started implementing the tools and techniques he’d learned there. As a genius level technical guy, Rob had a little trouble relating to the rest of us non-geek types. Through the NLP sales training he learned how to speak another person’s language and how to communicate the way other people preferred to communicate so that he could maintain rapport and get his message through in a way that could be well received.
Rob learned how to get out of his own world and to enter into the world of his client.
A year ago Rob and Mike and I began to meet every Monday in a “Master Mind”. We would frequently spend the entire day learning about internet marketing and search engine optimization, blogging, copy writing and basic business tools, techniques and philosophy. We also continually put NLP into practice and shared our successes and challenges. We supported each other and acted as sounding boards for each other. Personally it saved my business and my sanity on a number of occasions.
At one point Mike did not even have his own website up. At one point Rob was living in someone’s basement. At several points, I was tangled up in my own “stuff” and they helped “coach” me through the tunnel and out to the sunlight.BTW we all need the help of other people. NLP does not make anyone invincible or perfect.
It was a year of stripping the paint down to the surface and sanding and honing ourselves. and then as the financial storm clouds gathered back in the fall of 2008 something magical happened, Rob and Mike began to form a partnership that was all about helping other people in business save time and money and benefit from what they had learned and put into practice…
Now with their new business Best Web Presence they are so busy I haven’t seen them in weeks. They are signing up clients left and right at a time when there are thousands of “Chicken Littles” running around screeching “The sky is falling! The sky is falling.”
The point of my story is that there is a set of tools and techniques that if used properly will enable you to clear through the clutter of your own thinking and patterns of behavior. Once you clear the personal blocks that are holding you back, fasten your seat belt because things can change rather quickly. At this time last year neither Rob, nor Mike nor I knew how far we would have journeyed from where we began. It truly has “turned out better than they could possibly imagine…”
Does rapid change seem to be pretty scary to a lot of folks? Sure. But that’s a subject for another post…
If you are curious about how NLP can help your business please call me at 203-804-1208 or e-mail me mark [at] markshepard.com. You can also learn more about NLP Certification here
Please share this post with anyone you know who may be struggling with their business or who may be ready to break through the blocks and experience more success.
- Mark Shepard, NLP Trainer, Songwriter, Visual Artist, Author, Speaker…
Hideous Favoritism Disease – NLP Reframing
February 2, 2009 By
One of the major techniques of NLP is something called reframing. Essentially it is a way to take any limiting belief or behavioral pattern and turn it around in such a way that the persone either has an “aha” moment or it causes the problem to disappear entirely.
The reason reframing can be so powerful is that few people are aware of how strongly language affects our experience of what we call “reality”. By changing the “frame” around a problem it doesn’t just give you a new perspective (although that’s certainly part of it), it can actually make a profound and observable neurological shift.
I had done a series on NLP reframing in my newsletter sometime last year and it was picked up on by a couple of guys in Ohio, Aaron Torres and Paul Binkley who have been learning NLP on their own and practicing it’s applications at the auto factory they work in.
I hadn’t heard from these guys for a while and was delighted to get an e-mail from Paul Binkley with another great story. So here it is in it’s entirely with Paul’s permission. Thank you Paul! I definitely look forward to doing an NLP Certification in Ohio soon!
Please note: I’ve added a few comments in red to give you a little insight into what Paul is doing outside of conscious awareness.
Mark,
Long time no see. Thanks for the ongoing email and updates about your work.I had an opportunity this week to help a coworker reframe a major life circumstance. and I thought you would like to hear about it, partly because it is a success story of mind over matter and because I had the presence of mind to offer it, in part, because of your invaluable contribution to my own perspectives on life, the universe, and everything.
A female coworker, 33yrs old apx., confided in me how angry she was that her mother, whom she asked to watch her dogs while she was away for the day, upset her greatly for about the millionth time over the same issue of playing favorites among her three daughters.
It seems that my coworker had left $30 for her mother to order her favorite pizza with everything on it while she watched the dogs at her (my coworkers) house.
Her mother, not wanting to spend the day alone, invited her favorite daughter over to her not so favorite daughters (my coworker) house, to keep her company.
This is where the problem begins.
The mother, desiring to bless her favorite daughter, gave the $30 to her favorite daughter instead of buying her favorite pizza for herself.
My coworker on hearing this, was outraged.
She went on to present to me all manor of evidences supporting her claim that her sister is her mothers favorite child ( they were many and convincing proofs). We often have major amounts of “evidence” for why a certain belief or perception is true. And then started telling how her sister (the favored) was totally dependent on their mother for everything and made no effort to have a life outside of her dependency on their mother, and how her mother was also equally her mothers ( my coworkers grandmother) favorite and just as insanely dependent on her to do everything for her.
She went on to explain how her mother does nothing for her own benefit to a point of serious health risk from obesity, attributing this to her dependency on her mother.
She nearly cried while confiding that her mother, during a day long visit on Christmas day, had not used the restroom all day and stank of urine.
When her mother got up to get something to eat, my coworker noticed a folded towel on her mothers chair, which she first mistook as an added padding then, on inspection, realized her mother had urinated on the folded towel.
The thought that her mother would employ such a method to circumvent needing to visit the restroom, grieved my coworker profoundly. I would like to mention that her mother is not reported to have any health condition relating to bladder control.
Harder to believe than the above:
Here’s the underlying Limiting Decision:
My coworker admits that her own sense of self worth, her practiced state of mind, is dominated by her interpretation that she is less of a person because she is not her mothers favorite.Here’s what she’s not seeing about herself. This is currently outside of her conscious awareness:
My coworker is about the hardest working, self-sufficient, commonsense, take care of business person I work with (outside of Aaron Torres of course). She is nothing like her mother or her sister or her grandmother.Here Paul is associating her into the problem in order to “light up the neurological net”:
I asked her to imagine what her life would be like she were her mother’s favorite. She couldn’t do it.I suggested she(if she were the favorite) would be as pitifully helpless as her sister. How would she like that?
She convulsed with disgust at the thought. The fact that she convulsed with disgust at the thought is proof that she is indeed associated into that experience. When we say “associated” we mean that the person is looking through their own eyes in their internal representation of the situation. they are “in” it.
I told her that the next time her mother favors her sister over her she should thank God that she is not under the generational curse of being mothers favorite.
“I never thought of it that way” she said. Exactly!
I went on to thank God out loud ) quite loudly) right there on the spot that she was not her mothers favorite(note the embedded message). Paul is also using this person’s model of the world. If he was talking to an atheist or a new ager he might not thank God he might say it in a different way. For the Atheist he might say “Thank Goodness!” for the spiritual but not religious peron he might say “Thank the Universe.” It’s all about speaking the language of the person you’re working with
The grimace she had been wearing all day turned to a beaming smile. The great thing about NLP is using our sensory acuity skills we can actually look at another person and see the shift. In other words we can get immediate feedback as to whether something worked or not. Sometimes it’s a subtle color shift other times it’s pretty noticeable. If we get the shift great! if we don’t get the shift, “there’s no failure, there’s only feedback” and we simply try a different approach.
I reiterated the suggestion to say out loud to herself how thankful she is to not be the favorite, next time she recognizes the hideous manifestation of favoritism disease. Speaking the phrase out loud creates an auditory and physiological anchor so that the shift can be “locked in” to her neurology and made available for re-triggering the new insight whenever it’s reinforcement is needed. Also, labeling the old problem as “Favoritism disease” links the old thought pattern in a powerful way to a disease which locks in an “away from” strategy unconsciously.
She said she would.
God bless,
Paul
special thanks to Paul Binkley for sharing this story! Any other examples out there of powerful reframes? ether leave a comment here or e-mail me directly with your own stories and experiences at mark [at] markshepard.com
Please “Digg” or “Stumble” or “Facebook” or “Twitter” this! Thanks!
Mark
p.s. to learn more about NLP and how you can use it to “reframe” your own “problems” into “opportunities” visit Modern Jedi NLP Training
Failure
January 27, 2009 By
“A man is most efficient and will more quickly and easily succeed when engaged in work that he loves, or work that he performs in behalf of some person whom he loves.” Napoleon Hill, “The Law of Success” p.80
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the journey I’ve been on and what lessons there may be not only for myself but for those of you who, like me, seek to make a positive difference in the world at the same time that you support your self and your family doing meaningful work that you enjoy and even love.
(I’ve posted an inspirational song today that relates to this post over at www.MarkShepardSongs.com as well)
In his book “The Law of Success” Napoleon Hill shares a story from his own life. He had turned down many lucrative offers for employment in order to pursue his passion of researching and writing the law of success. His wife and family were opposed to it. There was no steady income. No guarantee. They openly or not so openly insinuated that he was being foolish and selfish.
At one point Hill had a conversation with a prominent business man, Don Mellett, who came right out and asked him. Now that you’ve done all this research on the Law of Success, how much money have you made?
Hill was embarrassed to admit that he had be so deeply absorbed in the research and writing that he had not turned his knowledge yet to the task of bringing in money. Here was the author of the Law of Success basically broke! He felt like a failure. He felt what we in NLP call “incongruent”. He was “walking his talk” but it had yet to show up in a tangible form in his external reality.
“What?” Mellett exclaimed, “a failure?
“Surely you know the difference between failure and temporary defeat,” he continued. ” No man is a failure who creates a single idea, much less an entire philosophy, that serves to soften the disappointments and minimize the hardships of generations yet unborn.”
Mellett and Hill became business partners that day and formed a “mastermind” that literally created the “breakthrough” Napoleon Hill had labored for so many years to prepare the ground for.
The whole point of Hill’s essay was two fold.
- There is truly a difference between failure and temporary defeat.
- He was trying to express the notion that one should always do more than one is paid for because eventually the law of the universe will return the investment exponentially.
Last Saturday I performed for free at my local Starbucks. There was a time when the background noise and the coming and going of people would have thrown me off. I would have chosen to make myself feel bad about any number of things in the past. But for me last Saturday it was awesome! In every way it was a triumph!
All the personal work I’ve done with NLP on my internal beliefs and filters were perfectly tested by the evening. What was important was that I sang for 2 hours without a break and it felt like 10 minutes. I sang song after song from memory and the experience was fun. In the past it was like walking on glass. but I actually had fun. Any of you out there who have overcome a major fear or phobia can relate. The old resistance was totally gone. There was no nervousness. I was totally relaxed.
So as I look back over my life I can choose to see 30 years of missed opportunities or I can look back and see that I was doing exactly what I most needed to be doing to prepare me for the moment when “all of who I am” lined up behind the single idea that I was placed here on this earth to share a message of hope, empowerment, healing, love, learning, and transformation with whoever is ready and open to hear it. My music is simply a method of delivery that engages the emotions as well as the ears.
And ultimately it is not the end goal of millions of people hearing the music and the music positively impacting their lives that is the measure of “success” it’s the process and journey itself that is success.
In NLP we have a belief “there is no failure there is only feedback” Anthony Robbins made the now famous analogy of the Jet airliner flying from LA to Hawaii is off course most of the time. It gets to it’s destination through the constant adjustments and corrections along the way.
So this week I ask you, no I implore you, to have some faith in your own process of learning and growth. Look back at your life and instead of seeing “failures” and “mistakes” see lessons and learnings and experiences that led you to new insights and understandings. Write down what you’ve learned. And ask yourself again and again the powerful questions that will lead you where you most want to go.
“What can I learn from this?”
“How can I use this lesson to move forward?”
“Why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine?”
We are all in this together. No one has all the answers. No one has it “easy”. Our muscles grow stronger through resistance. The “resistance” in your own life and work can serve a great purpose if you will only allow it to.
Napolean Hill went on to make a fortune with “The Law of Success” and his even more famous book “Think and Grow Rich” his words are still inspiring millions long after his passing.
If he had gone the “safe” route and gotten a steady job to satisfy all those well meaning people in his life, the world would have been a poorer place.
So those are my thoughts today. If you found any of this helpful please share it with a friend who could use some encouragement in these challenging times. It also helps to spread the word if you’d take a moment and “Stumble” or “Digg” or “facebook” or “twitter” this post
Courage!
Mark
Good Luck? Bad Luck?
January 12, 2009 By
An old Zen Koan or story:
There was a farmer who had a beautiful Mare. One day the he she got loose and ran away with a herd of wild horses.
The farmer’s neighbor said “Oh. What bad luck!” To which the farmer replied. “Good luck? Bad luck?”
Some time passed.
One day the mare returned and it soon became clear that she was going to give birth to a foal.
The Neighbor said, “Oh What good luck!” To which the farmer replied. “Good luck? Bad luck?”
The mare gave birth to a strong colt and the colt grew fast.
Some time passed and the colt was ready to be trained. The Farmer’s son began to train the colt and one day fell off and broke his leg.
The Neighbor said, “Oh what bad luck!” To which the farmer replied “Good luck? Bad luck?”
Some time passed.
There was a war and the army came around looking for young men to be soldiers. Because the Farmer’s son had broken his leg and walked now with a bad limp, he was not taken to fight.
Good luck? Bad luck?
Whatever happens in our lives we are the one’s who decide what it means.Often the very things that seem like the worst things turn out to lead us or push us to where we most need to go.
If you are overworked and overwhelmed in your business it could be the best thing that ever happened to you if you consider that it might be a message to approach things differently.
To find out how you can get high quality help with no financial outlay join me on an informational call Wednesday, January 14th at Noon Eastern time. I will be interviewing Michelle Demers and Julie Braun of www.SuperInterns.com to find out how they use college interns to literally run their businesses and how you can too.
Register for the Noon call here (it’s FREE!)
If you can’t make that call they will be doing another one at 7:00 pm eastern the same day, Wednesday, January 14th
Register for the evening call here (it’s FREE)
Remember every challenge carries with it the seeds for even greater success! Good luck? Bad luck? Only you decide!
Please leave a comment below or share this post with someone who may need to hear it’s message today!
Thanks!
- Mark
The Biggest Mistake Business Owners Make
January 7, 2009 By
What is The Biggest, Huge-est, Most GIGANTIC Mistake Business Owners Make?
- It’s not about having an inferior product or too much competition.
- It’s not having too little capital
- It’s not having some wacky idea that no one wants and then trying to get every friend relative and innocent passerby to “drink the kool-aid”.
- It’s not having a great idea that people don’t “get” or a great idea that’s ahead of it’s time.
- It has nothing to do with how smart or creative you are.
- It’s not starting a business with absolutely no clue how to sell (although that’s a biggie and if selling is a problem for you check out www.ReluctantSales.com )
- It’s not any of the dozens of personal and professional challenges most self employed entrepreneurial types struggle with.
The Biggest, Huge-est, Most GIGANTIC Mistake Business Owners Make is simply this:
Trying to do everything. Not knowing how to delegate. Not having systems in place so that other people can do the things you are not good at. Spending precious time on tasks and projects that could be delegated instead of focusing your energy on what you do best and on what brings in the money.
When you try to do everything in your business you are bound to fail. Even the smallest business is a ravenous, many headed serpent that one person can never hope to keep fed.
Note: Even though a key concept of NLP is that “there is no failure only feedback”. In Business, the “feedback” of less money coming in than going out or of the owner rushing around from dawn until the “wee hours” can only go on for so long until something has to change. Either
- the business ceases to exist due to lack of money or
- the business owner gets totally exhausted, burned out or sick or
- the business owner finally wakes up and does something different.
We also have a saying in NLP: “The most flexible communicator controls the system.” As the owner of a business (even if you are a Reiki master if you are working with clients you are a business owner), it is your communication to yourself, your clients and the people who work in and with your business that must lead and control the direction of your enterprise…(beam me up Scotty! I just wanted to help people!)
Here’s the catch 22!
When you are starting a business on a shoestring and a prayer, how do you get the kind of help that can enable you to grow your business if you have no extra wads of cash laying around?
You need the help to grow your business but you can’t pay for the help until your business grows! Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place! (In NLP We call it a “double bind”)
Can i share a personal example?
Last year. September of 2007 this idea hit me really hard between the eyes and it wasn’t pretty. For 25 years I’ve been self employed and always struggling. In retrospect I was close to major success and breakthroughs several times but I literally got worn out and burned out to the point where I just couldn’t personally sustain things and then it would all fall apart. Then I would give up in disgust and go start a different business from scratch and make the same mistake all over again.
July of 2007 I taught my first full blown NLP practitioner certification training to a small group of students. It was great! I loved teaching the class. I loved sharing the powerful life changing concepts of NLP and Hypnosis and Time Line Therapy™ but the gargantuan effort of preparing for the class, creating workbooks, cd sets and ordering all the other supplies and finding a place to have the training and getting the students in the seats and all the registration procedures and then correcting the exams and creating certifications and sending them out and then preparing the Master Practitioner level program and teaching that one weekend a month in addition to performing and booking all my own gigs and cleaning my house and seeing private clients and going to networking meetings and taking courses on how to do all this stuff better…
left me…
totally…
and…
completely…
exhausted…
and while I was so busy doing all of that stuff. I didn’t always have time to keep an eye on the bottom line and so all of a sudden even though I was working my brains out…I was out of cash flow….oops! 
(
Does any of this ring a bell with any of you out there? Are you getting the picture? Can you grasp my concept here?
I mean you can have all the Modern Jedi Mind Mastery training in the world, but if you try to run a business, any business, all by yourself you will eventually crash and burn….
Yup. I know what I’m tawking about…uh huh and it ain’t pretty…
Now, there is no failure. There really is only feedback and so we “passionate ones” pick our selves up off the ground and dust our selves off and start asking ourselves some really good (if hard) questions.
Like “What is the weakest link in my business?”
“Oh… Shit.
It’s………………
…………………………………………….ME!”
Now stay with me here because I will get you to a powerful solution and it’s going to solve a bunch of your challenges all at once.
So last year, I started a master mind group. Michael Guerin and Rob Bronson were the charter members and we began meeting every Monday just to run ideas by each other and to challenge and support each other and to learn with each other and to help each other see the stuff that we were too close to see in our own businesses.
And it made a huge difference. It was the first time in 25 years that I wasn’t alone trying to figure stuff out. I had a team.
For example: At one point Rob Bronson “pushed” me kicking and whining and complaining to move all of my websites to GoDaddy.com and saved me $6,000 per year. At one point I pushed Michael Guerin repeatedly until he fired his web designer and started taking charge of his online marketing. Mike and I “pushed” Rob Bronson to get his butt out of a really negative situation in his life and business and on and on and on…
So at some point you must form your own Jedi Council or Master Mind Group.
This was so cool that I started inviting some other people to join us and one of them was this amazing woman named Julie Braun, she calls herself the “Marketing Guru”. www.juliebraundesign.com
Julie was doing huge, major, multiple marketing projects on a scale that made my head spin. She was doing events and PR and entire marketing campaigns for small to medium sized businesses. She was providing services that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But she wasn’t working with Fortune 500 budgets. She was affordable. How did she do it?
It turns out that years ago Julie mastered the art of engaging INTERNS. UNPAID INTERNS.
Now these are not slaves. These are not college kids who come to your business to do all the yucky work like filing and photo copying (you just may have to pay for that kind of stuff. Do not even think about doing that crap yourself. You can’t afford it any more).
Julie was setting up specific projects, real honest to goodness projects and allowing students to truly get hands on experience. So she was able to do often times 10 times the work that she would be able to do alone.
She had learned a way to not only leverage her knowledge and expertise but her time and resources in a way that enabled her to Work “on” her business as well as “in” her business. Her only investment was her time and attention and she developed exactly the skills working with interns that all of us entrepreneurs MUST develop any way if we want our businesses to succeed. The ability to delegate intelligently. The ability to manage other people. The ability to lead. The ability to generate and incorporate intelligent feedback.
All without a huge financial risk putting pressure on your learning curve.
I got so inspired by that I immediately found a Yale student who wanted to learn NLP, he ended up editing my first year’s NLP training audio series. He got to expand his knowledge base and I got a project accomplished that I just didn’t have time to do. That was my “big toe in the water experience”
Now over the years, Julie has really fine tuned all of the details and concepts of using unpaid interns in her business to the point where it was just obvious she had to share the goods with those of us who were struggling with this whole “solopreneur” thing.
So Last summer she and her business partner Michelle Demers www.totalbusinessfitness.com created SuperInterns.com it’s what I call a “Turbo Booster Zoooom course” designed to get you up and running with unpaid interns fast.
To be honest, I signed up for the first one but because I was too “burned” out from teaching my 2nd NLP training and some personal stuff going on in my life, I never got to class. BUT they recorded every call and I finished the course later while driving in the car. My point is you can learn this no matter how busy you are.
(BTW Michelle met Julie in a different Mastermind group – are you getting that you need to “mastermind”?)
The Super Interns Crash Course will be offered again in a few weeks and if you are in business for yourself (or if your employer doesn’t have the budget to hire the help you need to do your job right) THIS IS REQUIRED. You owe it to yourself to take this.
This is:
“Save Your Business (And Possibly Your Sanity) 101″
Are you with me on this? I know we all have the attention spans of 2 year olds these days but this is vital so PAY ATTENTION:
Whether you take the course or not this is so important that you MUST at the very least know about it. I could not live with myself if I didn’t share this information with you. It’s that important to your success and sanity.
So I’ve invited Julie and Michelle to share their stories with me on a telephone call next Wednesday, January 14th from noon to 1:00 PM eastern time.To Register Click Here
They are also doing an informational call of their own that evening, January 14th at 7:00 pm eastern time. to Register Click Here
- The Call at Noon will be me interviewing them (you will also be able to ask questions).
- The call in the evening is totally their show. So you have some choices.
The calls are free and whichever one you can make, it will be well worth your while to take an hour to find out how you can get some relief from the grind of being the sole practitioner or sole proprietor or solopreneur. It could save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars and possibly enable you to truly catapult your business to the moon. It’s also one very creative way to move forward even in spite of the dire economic forecast and the worst economy in 100 years.
It is also of interest if you have college age kids or know some college students of any age because many colleges require internships precisely because the right internship could make all the difference in whether your children get a dull, low paying, soul crushing job right out of school because they have no experience in the “real world” or get to work closely with the CEO of a growing international company.
I sat down one day and figured out that I need about 10 interns in my business right now.
so if you know anyone who is interested in or is actively studying these or related fields:
- Arts Management
- Internet Marketing
- Psychology, NLP, Hypnosis, Personal Transformation and Change
- Music,Theater, Storytelling
- Graphic Design
- Direct Marketing
- Sales Skills
- General Business
- Health and Healing
- Peak Performance
Call me! 203-495-8808 or e-mail me at mark [at] markshepard.com
Registration page for 12 to 1 pm call –
“How to Get Free Help for Your Business” hosted by Mark Shepard Click Here
Registration page for the 7 to 8 pm call – “Unpaid Interns to the Rescue!”
(Super Interns general call) Click Here
Just for registering for either/both calls you’ll get a free ebook “251 Great Internship Projects!” .
If You already “get” that you need the course you can click here to: Register for the Super Interns Crash Course: How To Put Unpaid Interns To Work For Your Business – early bird special ends Friday 1/9!
BTW when you do decide to take the course, be sure to mention my name and you will get $50 bucks off of the already too cheap price of the course.
Please leave a comment below and share this with as many people as you can
Thanks!
Mark
Resolution Time
January 5, 2009 By
Well here we go again. The New Year officially feels like it begins today with everyone heading back to work after the holidays.
For me the last few weeks have been all about choices and the direction I’m being sometimes led and sometimes pushed in (okay sometimes it feels like being shoved).
I’ve gotten a number of moving e-mails inspired by my last two posts so I thought it would be appropriate today to share a few thoughts about goals, and living your dreams and interpreting the events of your life in such a way as to make sense of things…
Ever since I was 8 years old I’ve wanted to be a singer/songwriter. You all know that by now. You also know that for some strange reason the very personality traits that made me really good as a song writer in only about 2 years of applying myself to it, took me basically the next 30 years to learn how to live with and how to get out into the world. Sensitivity and creativity don’t always make the best business partners.
In my 20′s a friend gave me a copy of the classic book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill.
This is a book that basically says the same thing as “The Secret” but about 50 years earlier.
One of Hill’s main points is Persistence. If one is pursuing a worthy goal there will be obstacles. There will be setbacks. The main difference between the people who achieve greatness and those who don’t is the willingness and ability to push on even when it looks like nothing is working.
In example after example Napoleon Hill tells of people who gave up inches away from the mother lode. Those very same people, having learned that lesson moved on to create riches and success in their lives despite having missed great opportunities earlier.
So when nothing seems to be working, when you think you’ve exhausted all your resources following your heart that’s the moment to pick yourself up, dust your self off and keep asking the powerful questions.
- “How can I get to where I want to go?”
- “What is it I’m not seeing that when I see it will unlock this block and let me move forward?”
- “What’s the one question I need to ask that will give me access to all my resources?”
- Who can I ask for help who would benefit as much from helping me as I will from being helped?
- “Why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine?”
Sometimes persistence means taking a step back. Sometimes what looks like a “retreat” is really an advance in a different direction. Sometimes the best way through a wall is to take the long way around.The point is whatever happens we are the ones who attach meaning to it. So it’s always up to us to decide whether something is a setback or an opportunity to learn and change our approach.
So today, as you think about the year ahead. What do you truly want for your life? What kind of year would be so awesome and wonderful for you that you will look back 10 or 20 years from now and think, “2009 was the pivot point. 2009 was the year when it all started to come together”
All the experts tell us to write out goals down. Create a “vision board”. Focus on what we want daily. So get out a sheet of paper and in your own handwriting write out at least 3 things you want for yourself this year.
In the next few posts I’ll share with you some powerful tools from NLP and Time Line to literally “program” your future.
but before you grab the paper and pen.
go ahead and play the victory song video below and let it play in the background while you write. It’s all about this and is filled with powerful questions to get your unconscious mind working with you…
Keep writing those goals and resolutions. In my next post I’ll share the next steps…
Please leave a comment or share this with a friend!
Thanks!
-Mark
BTW This song can be found on my Thirsty For the Sky CD. If you’d like to invest in some of my music CD’s (and support the “Life In Song” Project) just click this link: Mark Shepard’s CD’s
Dangerous Questions
December 29, 2008 By
Just have a moment to share one key thought with you today:
What questions do you habitually ask?
The reason for asking is this – Your unconscious mind responds to questions more powerfully than any other kind of self talk. So if you want your affirmations to really create change internally, turning them into a question can make a difference. Noah St. John calls these affirmations in question form: “Afformations”.
What happens is your Unconscious Mind hears a question and begins to activate a process that is hardwired into our neurology. For example if you ask yourself “How can I find a way?” You Mind begins to filter your reality and it begins to find ways to answer you. It begins to draw your attention to answers.
So listen today to what you ask yourself. Are you asking disempowering questions like “Why am I such a __________ (negative label)? or are you asking powerful questions like “why am I in the right place at the right time doing the right thing for the highest good?”
Now, if you’ve been following my posts lately you might recall that a few weeks ago I started asking myself a series of very, “dangerous” questions. I only mean “dangerous” in the sense that the answer might disrupt my comfort zone. Sometimes “danger” is a good thing. Ask any bungee jumper!
The questions were: “If I had only 6 months to live what would I be doing? What would I stop doing? How would I spend my time?
I got several answers.
- Record each and every one of the almost 400 songs I’ve written over the past 30 years.
- Spend as much time with my friends and family as possible
- Share my music with as many people as possible.
- I would stop trying to “be everything to everybody” (Listening to my own song “Motivation” reminded me of that. Listen to “Motivation” here
If those were the answers, the “dangerous” challenge was to do that. Now.Not next year. Not next month. Now.
If you really and truly acted on what you say is most important to you, how would your life change? No matter we “say” is most important, it’s what we “do” that really demonstrates it.
Sometimes that’s that last thing I want to hear!
For me it became clear that renting a large beautiful, expensive apartment was less important than my 3 priorities. But daring to let it go even if I didn’t know where I would be going (even if it made me sad) opened up the possibilities. One idea was to put all my extra stuff in storage and travel from friend to friend, family member to family member, connecting and performing along the way. Performing could mean a guest spot at a local church, performing at a Starbucks, or even on the street.
All of a sudden other places to perform began to show up on my internal radar screen. At one point I performed at hundreds of elementary schools each year all over New England. Lately that has been down to just a few each month. But did it fit my criteria? Yes. So I began to ask questions about how I could re-connect with all the schools I’ve previously performed at…
Performing at colleges is another area of immense opportunity. I had just started to break into that market 5 years ago or so when I discovered NLP and shifted my focus to that…But certainly college students would not only be open to music but they could benefit hugely from “The Way of the Modern Jedi”…
Performing at festivals and local acoustic music venues had been something I’d been “gonna do” for a while…there’s a lot less money in that market and having a high rent made me look elsewhere. With less overhead, less pressure. Time to make contact…
Now here’s the interesting piece, does this decision to truly “surrender” to my music and “honor” my creative work stop me from practicing NLP?
No! It actually makes it more possible because every where I go as a performer I can share my story of how I was able to overcome my performing anxiety with NLP! AND since I have written so many songs influenced by NLP sharing that fact wherever I go and inviting those interested in learning more about NLP could easily and effortlessly spread that work in a congruent way.
Wherever I share my story from the stage of crushing anxiety and the stories of the many people I’ve helped to overcome their own anxiety without drugs or endless therapy through NLP, people can see for themselves the result. So it just may be a more effective way to get the word out…
So that’s just a bit of the process going on over here with me. It all started with asking some powerful questions.
What’s more important is, what are your thoughts? What questions are you asking yourself at the close of this year?
Please feel free to share some of your questions below.
In case you need some help with questions try these on for size:
- If I had only 6 months to live how would I spend my time?
- What’s one simple thing can I do today to live fully and abundantly?
- Why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine?
- What resources do I need to attract to myself so that I can truly make a positive difference in the world?
- What would be the most rewarding thing to do?
- How can I have fun today?
- How can I live fully today?
- How can I ask for help?
- Who can I ask for help?
- What am I grateful for today?
Please let me know your thoughts and comments below.
thanks!
- Mark
p.s. BTW as a result of my last post and being willing to ask for help and willing to admit that “I don’t always have all the answers” a good friend of mine offered me a place to stay for 3-6 months. another friend offered me a place to store my stuff. Another friend appeared who has all the administrative and logistical skills/aptitudes that would enable me to truly focus on what I’m good at…Is work involved? yes. Does it scare me to move out of my comfort zone? yes. But it also feels positive and exciting!
The question that I ask the most is: “Why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine?”
Try it! Write it out long hand!
Kathy McAfee interviewed about using NLP in Presentation Coaching, Executive Coaching and Leadership Training
December 4, 2008 By
Kathy McAfee is one of my NLP master practitioner students. She has taken NLP and immediately applied it to her work helping executives with their presentations, as well as in their corporate leadership development. I sat down with her in beautiful Wooster Square Park in New Haven, CT on one of the first warm Spring days.
NLP Motivation Strategies – Part 2
December 3, 2008 By
An old story: there was a frog that was put in a big cauldron. Because the cauldren was large, the frog felt perfectly comfortable. So even though it could have jumped out at any time, it stayed put. As the pot gradually heated up over the fire…the frog did nothing. The water was warming gradually. By the time the water was so hot that the frog was boiled…he was well, boiled. If the water had been heated suddenly the frog would have had the good sense to jump out.
Ever feel like that frog?
Yesterday we explored the idea of what a “motivation strategy” is. It’s an unconscious process or “program” that enables us to move from a state of “not motivated” to “motivated.” For some people and in some situations it may be a challenge to get out of a “procrastination strategy” and get moving towards taking action.
Whether your strategy is working or not may determine how stuck you get in procrastination as well as how long it may take you to break out of it and get started on cleaning the garage or doing that term paper.
By the way, we don’t need to be motivated to do stuff we enjoy. We usually need an effective strategy to get to the stuff we do not enjoy doing.
So how do you usually break out of a stuck state? Do you move away from the bad things that will happen if you don’t finally buckle down and get to work or do you move towards how good it will feel when you accomplish your task? Or do you do some combination of both?
If you “move away from” how bad does it have to be before you get moving?
If you “move towards” how do you do that?
In other words, do you need the carrot or the stick? And how much of either one do you need to get stuff done?
In working with other people either in leadership roles as managers and team members or as parents and teachers, it helps to know how someone is wired if we want to influence or inspire them to action. Do you need to communicate the cost or the pain of not taking action? Do you need to threaten them with being fired or other dire consequences? Or do they respond much better to the promise of a bonus or a big commission check?
If you use a stick on someone who is motivated by the carrot you risk totally losing them. If you use a carrot on someone who requires a bit of stick to get going it just won’t do the job.
In dealing with ourselves, particularly in our careers, becoming aware of this leverage point can make the difference between success and failure.
- To learn more about NLP strategies and how to elicit and change them in yourself and others check out my NLP Practitioner Certification Training
- To get all pumped up and motivated Watch my Motivation Music Video
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