Dealing With Dream Thieves

September 8, 2009 By

What to do when the people you care about express their care for you by giving you advice that is clearly a projection of their fears and doubts…

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.

  • 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.
  • 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

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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

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NLP scholarship winner Tim Shay has something to say…

June 9, 2008 By

Tim Shay was awarded the 2008 Gar Rowbotham Memorial NLP Scholarship to attend the Moden Jedi NLP Mind Mastery Certification July 12-20, in Connecticut. He was deeply moved by being chosen to recieve the scholarship and wrote this letter.

Dear Mark, Scholarship Applicants, & our friends/family that have sent such positive references:

I sincerely thank you. I am honored by you. Seriously, we have all taken a chance on this contest. We have invested time, emotions, thought and shared our stories for the world to see. We all have had great reasons for doing so and we have had times and events in our lives to validate learning NLP and TLT. I am honored to have been a party to such worthy contestants. Not that it was just a contest but more of a communal choosing or induction. Contests have winners and losers. We can all win in this scenario in the long run.
I hope to meet all of you in training and I am confident that we will be good friends. As a friend I would like to add my support to your goals as well. Anything I can do to help any of you achieve your dreams… Anything I can do to help you gain perspective…. Anything I can do to enable you to help yourself and others…. I will do without hesitation.
I would also like to add a more specific Thank you here to Mark and Staff. I am grateful for the opportunity you are affording me and I am certain that we are going to have a great time! I am looking forward to meeting you and as I learn and grow I will certainly reciprocate this act of kindness in the present and future as well. Your actions and choice to teach me does not and will not go unnoticed. You are helping me to help others and that is a noble act in and of itself. In short, I appreciate you and your efforts as a musician, educator and I wish you many successes.

Also, a note of thought about anyone who is “on the fence” deciding whether or not to take training. Do it! You can! Have faith in yourself! Have faith in the people that support you! Have faith in human kind! We all have choice!……..

Mark, I truly believe that your trainings and services are such a tremendous value that people cannot afford not to attend. I have done the research. I have done my homework.

Folks, if you don’t think you have the time; then you need the training. Time lining is about the subjective structure of time (from what I have read). If you don’t feel that you have the time, you are creating the “reality” of not having the time.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. Don’t we? All time. All possibilities. And what does that say of money? It has been said that “Time is Money” for so long that it is a form of cultural hypnosis now. So learn how to manage your states, time, money and beliefs in 9 days?!?!?! The possibilities are endless! The necessity should be evident!!!

If anyone believes in their limitations about not coming to training; they NEED to come to training.

The only limitations that we have are the ones that we have learned and we can…. and it’s natural…. to have had experiences…. and learnings…. that means that we owe it to ourselves to find our limiting beliefs and behaviors and add more choice to our lives. We can choose excellence. We can chose prosperity. We can choose inner peace.

We can…..

Thank you again.

Tim Shay

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