The Money Mind

Many of the world’s leading figures in coaching and personal development have drawn similar conclusions about the key steps to financial success. They have observed and modelled millionaires and billionaires. And they have used this knowledge to train and inspire people from all walks of life to achieve greater wealth.The coaching I offer my clients is based on this knowledge.


Beliefs about yourself and money

One of the biggest barriers to financial success can be holding limiting beliefs about yourself, about your capabilities or even about your worth. You may already be aware of these beliefs and perhaps you would like some help overcoming them, or maybe the beliefs have been there so long that you are barely conscious of them. It is as if they operate as presuppositions at an unconscious level undermining your efforts to make more money.

Having a coach, even for a brief time, can really help you tackle your beliefs in a constructive way. So you can uncover what it is that has been holding you back and so you can replace them with useful beliefs. Many coaches now offer that kind of practical support.


Is this just affirmations

This isn’t just about saying a few affirmations, this is about designing the right kind of beliefs for you, supporting those beliefs with compelling evidence and then making the beliefs feel strong and sustainable. So you feel motivated to express these beliefs with real conviction, because you have made them absolutely true for yourself. You make them so true that you can easily imagine the consequences of these beliefs as you design your future and work towards it naturally and comfortably. I sometimes call them "felt beliefs", because you don't just think them you actually feel they are true too.


Hypnotising yourself

When you use coaching and NLP for this kind of work you effectively become your own hypnotist, because you design your own hypnotic programming. You will have designed the new hypnotic suggestions yourself based on your own unique values, so it is easy for your unconscious mind to adopt these suggestions, especially as you will be reinforcing them with your imagination. And this feels good too because your unconscious and conscious mind will be working in harmony, moving in the same direction towards predetermined goals, predetermined by you.


When you become your own hypnotist you create powerful effects on your own mind, probably a hundred times more powerful than the world’s greatest hypnotherapist could ever achieve.


Motivating yourself

When you have performed this kind of transformation at the level of beliefs it is then much easier to give some attention to your motivation. There are some terrific techniques in NLP for you to install powerful motivation strategies, so you get a boost of energy and willpower at those key times and places or during those important tasks.


Having a useful attitude

Through coaching you can also learn some useful attitudes towards money. It will be your choice whether you adopt them or not. They are based on the attitudes observed in many successful wealth creators, so we know they work.


Some of the attitudes offer you a major shift which can generate changes very quickly and surprisingly easily, and without undermining any of your important values.


Other attitude changes can be more subtle and yet they still have a powerful effect when adopted and sustained, for example have you considered the difference between “loving money” and “acquiring money”. Successful wealth creators are familiar with this distinction. They are very comfortable acquiring large amounts of money without any need to love or worship the stuff.


Making the connections between money and everything else

As you adopt useful beliefs, motivation and attitudes and generate greater financial success and freedom, you will naturally want to develop greater flexibility in your behaviour and habits.


Any kind of financial success is produced from some kind of creativity. You might want to explore your unique skills and abilities to make sure you are using them to good effect. Wealth can naturally flow from creative and productive activity, especially when you are flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances and as you recognise the variety of ways you can meet other people’s needs and desires with your unique skills. Any good coaching programme will offer you tips and techniques to maximise your creativity and ability to generate wealth for yourself by offering something useful to the world.

These are just a few ideas to stimulate your mind and imagination. There are many excellent books and websites about this subject, so it is worth doing some research or you are keen to make these changes for yourself. You could start with Paul McKenna's book "I Can Make You Rich"

Meanwhile you are also welcome to contact me by commenting here or by visiting my webpage - Coaching to help your Financial Properity.

May you prosper with abundance :-)

NLP and Conflict Resolution

What might NLP and coaching offer to Conflict Resolution

I wonder if you have noticed some of the common characteristics of conflict, whether it be a momentary disagreement or something that has lasted a while.

The "Conflict State"

When you have been in conflict with somebody, and especially during the peak moments of that conflict, emotions were probably running high, you were in a different state to normal – maybe tense, anxious, angry. Maybe you were aware of the emotions at the time or maybe you were more aware afterwards when you calmed down and were able to reflect.

At some point, during or after the dispute, you realised your emotional state undermined your ability to resolve the issues with the other person and it probably impaired your reasoning at the time. The other person might have noticed you were in that state too, or maybe not. Maybe they were so absorbed in their own particular state they were unaware of yours. But, either way, they were probably effected by your state and they were responding accordingly.

The "Conflict Trance"

These kind of states share the characteristics of a trance. They involve fixed attention on one thing, closing down awareness of everything else and an ability to shut out a whole load of “unhelpful information” by a kind of selective reasoning. And, like a trance, you can go deeper and deeper ignoring more and more of what is going on around you. But, unlike meditative and therapeutic trances, the altered states in a conflict limit your choices, your imagination and your ability to communicate. In fact, in these states, you might have age regressed, generating behaviour reminiscent of childhood, like a tantrum or a sulk.

So most of the time you would prefer to be in a calm state, seeing things clearly, reasoning easily with the people around you. Then you feel relaxed and confident, smiling and enjoying the responses of other people as you get pleasure from a natural and easy connection. And you can think clearly and rationally, making agreement more achievable.

The "Resolution State"

This is where NLP (neuro linguistic programming) and coaching can really make a difference. Because you can learn to have greater control over your emotional states when dealing with other people. There are a variety of ways to do this, including a method called anchoring, a kind of “on/off switch” for resourceful states, such as calmness, confidence, focus.You can use anchoring, and other useful techniques, to help those around you too.

Maintaining rapport and preventing conflict

You can also prevent conflict by learning to elicit and maintain rapport with other people, even strangers and even people you don’t particularly like. This is very useful in the workplace where you sometimes meet people you don’t particularly like. You still have to do business with them so it really helps to create rapport, and you might end up liking them too.

With a small amount of coaching or training you can spot patterns of unconscious, non-literal and non-verbal communications and explore how the differences at these levels of communication are often the cause of misunderstanding. If you have ever felt like you were speaking a different language to somebody, even though you were both speaking English, you will have a greater awareness of how that occurs and how you can prevent it in the future.

By learning about communication at these levels, by understanding these patterns you can match them. This enables you to state your point of view in a way that is comfortable and familiar to the other person, so they understand you easily. You will be in rapport and speaking the same language. Even when you are disagreeing you will seem reasonable to one another and feel in accord, especially because you will be maintaining a resourceful emotional state too.

There is a wealth of information about this subject and the potential for developing these skills. Here is one website where you can read more about the subject written by leading NLPer Michael Carroll:

Michael Carroll (NLP Academy) on Conflict Resolution

If you would like individual coaching, or for me to visit your workplace, you can contact me on my website as follows:
Lucas Bright Coaching - NLP and Conflict Resolution
Lucas Bright Coaching - Home Page

Confidence & Assertiveness

Getting in the right state emotionally and mentally
I have a feeling social confidence and assertiveness are not nearly as unobtainable or tricky as some believe. Maybe it starts from how you feel, what you say to yourself and what you imagine about others. And perhaps you can change these things so they work better for you. I reckon there are a few core attitudes for creating and maintaining assertiveness.

Here is a list of those core attitudes
Replace fear of upsetting others with eagerness to communicate
Be willing to "get it wrong" sometimes
Challenge and defeat your feelings of inadequacy or inferiority
Build useful beliefs about yourself instead
Create a good emotional state in yourself when dealing with others
Trust yourself
Have fun
Feel good about what you are doing
Imagine a constructive outcome
Be flexible in your communication
Focus on the person (not your thoughts about the person)
Build and maintain rapport
Acknowledge, understand and utilise "unconscious communication"
Make people feel good
Develop your non-verbal communication
Be persuasive
Embrace your charisma

You can find many useful NLP books and articles about each of the above. Alternatively you might enjoy NLP coaching or attending a reputable NLP course, where these skills will be a core part of what you learn.

Here are some useful websites:
Richard Bandler
John Grinder
NLP Seminars
NLP Connections (and forums)
NLP Training (near London)

What exactly is Confidence

I often see people who want more confidence. They naturally assume I know what they mean by "confidence". Even though we talk about confidence as if it's an actual thing (we use a noun to name "it"),  we know it isn't tangible. It's not something we can touch or hold in our hands. So what is it?

The internet is abundant with websites and articles about confidence. You can even feel more confident when you read those articles. It can be very encouraging to read the story of somebody who has changed their life, starting with self doubts and low self esteem, gradually turning things around and growing in self belief and confidence, doing things differently, nurturing more positive ideas about self, feeling better, pursuing goals, maybe getting a new job and developing fulfilling relationships. Sometimes reading a success story can be enough to start you on a similar journey, because that other person's story becomes a model for how you can achieve similar results.

Those successes arise not necessarily through acquiring this thing called confidence, though it can certainly feel that way, but by modelling what confident people do.

In my next blog I would like to explore what we might mean by confidence, what we might really want when we say we seek confidence and how we might know when we have it.

Meanwhile, if you have any ideas about confidence or inspiring success stories, feel free to comment.

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NLP Book Review - Sleight of Mouth (Dilts)

I am often asked by clients in Brighton to suggest books on the subject of NLP. There are many on the market and the choice can be overwhelming. So where do you start?

What is the right NLP book for you?
It seems to me NLP is a vast subject and there is much to study, whether using it for yourself or to help others. Your choice of literature depends where you want to focus. Are you interested in practical techniques such as anchoring and submodalities? Do you want to develop some coaching models? Or are you  interested in what NLP says about hypnosis?

Tackling Beliefs
If you are interested in self help or coaching you will know the importance of beliefs. You might reasonably wonder how best to shift limiting beliefs and how to nurture more useful ones.

You might even wonder if it is possible to do anything about beliefs at all. Sometimes they can seem entrenched and immutable.

SLEIGHT OF MOUTH by ROBERT DILTS
Assuming you, or your client, have decided to change some beliefs, you will probably enjoy the work of Robert Dilts. He has written a practical and thorough guide to the subject of beliefs, from an NLP perspective, in his book Sleight of Mouth - The Magic of Conversational Belief Change.

The book is neatly divided into sections covering a wide array of methods and insights for belief change.

Dilts makes it easy to learn with practical techniques throughout the book, so you can try each method for yourself and gain a greater understanding of each process.

I used the techniques as I went along which helped me remember the material, as well as letting me test its effectiveness.

If, like me, you don't immediately read a book from cover to cover, but dip in and out when you have a spare moment, you will like Dilt's style. It lends itself to "dipping". The length of chapters and sections is nicely bite sized.

Sleight of Mouth is not a definitive book on NLP, nor does it try to be. However, it is a great addition to the resources of any NLPer, coach, therapist or self helper. It is loaded with practical material. Not only will you find it hard to be disappointed you will probably read it over and over, and make it part of your core skills.

Enjoy.

What does NLP offer for Social Skills

NLP can teach us how we speak to people at every level of consciousness

Okay maybe this NLP stuff might sound a bit strange, the idea of speaking at every level of consciousness. Actually, it's very simple because NLP is very logical.

Most of the time, we socialise in automatic ways. People who have difficulties socialising have been doing the same things in social situations for years, or avoided those situations completely. Meanwhile people who are excellent at socialising have also learnt habits. But their habits work more effectively making them feel good when they're mixing with other people.