Guide to becoming the person you want! Find out about your mission in life!

“Make sure your journey through life unfolds with a passion that energizes every fibre of your being.”~Kelly Gerling, NLP master practitioner

What is a mission?
Finding your mission is about finding who you really want to be. Common belief about pursuing your mission tends to be associated with hard work, but many high achievers will call it a labor of love. When you have a compelling mission in life, you are able to show enthusiasm and excitement in what you are doing.

Shape it!

Being true to your mission means resisting the influence of society on your future. Let us break free and create our own outcome. We can trail new paths for ourselves, and in no means other people will determine our future. You are the author and your life is a book. The preface is your mission. Be ready to create your own chapters, this is your book, it isn’t co-written. The chapters will represent your future decisions or goals that will bring you closer to fulfilling your mission.

Finding your mission
Finding your mission is a bit about of a quest to know yourself. It is about learning about our values and beliefs. It is about looking for ourselves or looking for the person we want to become.

Kelly Gerling gives us 6 steps to help you create your mission:
1. Tap in your excitement. Know your desires. Feel your own excitement as you think of these passion
2. Look at the goals and see them being achieved. See it, feel it, and asked yourself what do you value about that. What is the most important value?
3. Direction. See snapshots of your ability and that you want to become. See how your values fit. See colourful and bright images of what you can do in life.
4. Adding rich detail. Add some music that gives your mission some importance. These feelings flow within you and guide you.
5. Stepping into that mission. Live it, feel it as you are in that moment in the future. Exercise your mind a delightful way
6. Self-examination. Come back to the present. How does this mission relate to me and the environment? How does it affects the people around you?

Blast off with action steps. You can call them goals. Read my post about goal setting for more information

Steven Spielberg wanted to enrich and improve the lives of people by creating movies. He is living his mission. Steven Spielberg, started his own mini movies at the age of 16 and went to universal studios to show the editors his work. This is what we call action!

How to use body language to influence people?

While words pronounced are perceived at the conscious level, body language are non verbal signals that are caught at the unconscious level.

According to a research conducted by the University of California, the impact of your communication depends on 55% of body language, 38% of voice tone and 7% of words. If you sound under confident during a presentation, people will not listen to what you are saying. Body language and voice tone also determine the way your words are interpreted; you need to be congruent so that your message is interpreted in the desired way.

Using gestures to influence

We will use the power of anchors to trigger the desired response from people. Say you have to present an idea to someone. When you talk about important aspects, do a particular gesture using your left hand. These repeated actions will be non-verbal signals that the other party will understand unconsciously. They will understand that when you do this particular gesture using your left hand, you are outlining an important point; thus they will be more in tune with your message Their attention is a resourceful state that you can stimulate just by a gesture. You can use words and other gestures as a stimulus for other resourceful states; you might want your audience to feel relaxed or simply happy. For example each time you tell a joke, and they laugh, you might do a particular gesture or word. When the discussion gets to a state that this state would be valuable, just fire the anchor.

4 Steps

In her book, “NLP for work”, Sue Knight gives us a few steps on how to anchor others:

1.Identify the state you want to anchor

2.Decide what anchor you will use; word or gesture

3.Do it 4-5 times

4.If the discussion gets to the stage when this state would be valuable, fire the anchor.

During your next negotiation or presentation, apply these concepts and notice their response. Liked that post and want to push your communication skills to the next level, read “How to build trust and influence people” .

Become a skilled communicator by telling stories!

The power of metaphors

You want your message to impact on people and be remembered. I suggest you use metaphors, they are powerful and memorable. Sometimes a concept might seem complex, and thus on the conscious level , it might encounter some resistance. Metaphors can avoid these conscious blocks and step into the unconscious mind.

Complicated and important aspects of your message can be coded into a metaphor. People will more likely remember stories than statements full of jargon. Metaphors can make an intricate subject look simple.

Saying No

Metaphors allow us to communicate a disagreement in a non-confrontational manner. By telling a short story, the other party might not take it personally.

For example you might say; A friend of mine chose this option once and it turned out to be not profitable since he lost all his investment.

Inspire em’

Public speakers love to use metaphors , it is an effective way to influence and motivate people. A story has a longer lasting effect, since it can be easily remembered. People look upon stories as a great source of motivation. A story well told, can be visualized in rich detail, and be compelling enough to get the desired outcome.

Make your own!
Awake the creativity genius that sleeps inside of you, create your own metaphors now.

In her book “NLP for work”, Sue Knight outlines a few principles to create an effective metaphor:

• Determine the outcome for the metaphor.

• Look for a style, something not close to the reality

• List all the elements to be used and look for an equivalent element in the metaphor.

• Add some spice to the story, by including some suspense.

• Use an enriched language that will appeal to all senses; they can see, hear and feel the story. Also use gestures and vary your tone.

Now that you know the basic principles to create metaphors, use them when you get the opportunity and check the response you get.

Handling criticism- Don’t get offended, get smarter

This is the kind of criticism that does not help. It is meant to bring you down. They are worthless since they are unsupported claims, and usually do not even propose an alternative solution. So they can be ignored. By holding the belief that they are worthless and bring no contribution, you will notice that you would eliminate undesired feelings. Do not take it personally since the person who made this criticism, probably has issues with itself, since it is wasting its time giving empty criticism. You can choose to dismiss the criticism or ask the person to clarify its point.

Constructive Criticism.

Criticism must not be regarded as a bad thing; people have the tendency to see it as such because they believe that criticism is a lack of respect towards someone’s work.

Every behaviour has a positive intention!

Replace your old values by the one above; you will stop seeing criticism as an aggression or a threat against your self esteem. A constructive criticism is important in personal development. Getting feedback enables us to get better, and to see things in different ways.

Your map is not the territory

We have an inclination to think that our truth is the truth. What others have to say can indeed correct and update our map of reality.

Step in their shoes

It is vital do it, since you will never understand the opinion of the other person in your point of view.

Feel what is like being them and how they perceive our actions.

Then be a third person, detached from any emotions, and evaluate the situation

“Manners maketh man”

So be sure to thank the person for their criticism, even if after thoughtful evaluation you still don’t agree with it. Do not forget to ask questions whenever there are doubts. The clearer it is, the more valuable the criticism will be.

I hope these few tips will help you to deal with criticism.

The personal development master blog has an excellent article about accepting criticism. Click here to view the article.

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The power of the unconscious mind

I got inspired to write this post after listening to a tape by Charles Faulkner. He referred to Milton Erickson, who used to tell his patients that they have tried consciously to solve their problems but in vain. He would then asked them to close their eyes and get in contact to that part of them which would keep them balance in a chair, pump blood to their heart and many other things. If you want to achieve, you need the cooperation of your unconscious mind. And I remember that Christopher Howard once said in a tape that 95% of your mind is unconscious. So if this 95% is going in the opposite direction, you are more likely to fail. People fail relentlessly because of that.

How to get this 95% of your mind work for you?-That is what high achievers do!

NLP teaches you how to use it. Even time magazine said that NLP has untapped potential to solve all problems. In my blog, I use the NLP approach to tackle different issues in our life.

Here is a little exercise that will train your unconscious mind to work in your favour

1. Get back to the memory of a frightening experience. Visualize it, use all your senses; what do you see?, aren’t there any sounds like people talking?, and how do you feel?

2. Now change that experience by adding some funny music to that memory. I use to add “Womanizer by Britney Spears”-not really funny but it is kind of funky. And now how do you feel now?

3. Then rewind back, without the music this time, how do you feel now?

You will see that experience has changed. For some people, the bad emotions faded superseded by positive ones. Or for others, they just simply stopped experiencing the bad feelings associated to that past event. You can repeat the exercise several times if you want and use it to change other bad experiences. Check it again later, or in a few weeks, you will find out that this new meanings you assigned to that memory are embedded into your mind.

Shape your future by shaping your memories first.

Yes, you can control the way your experiences are held. The ways our memories and experiences are kept have a great influence on what you become. So I would advise you to recall these bad memories, I know, it can be hard for some people, but it is worth it. Create the future you want, use the power of the unconscious mind to get the outcome you want.

Exploit the resources of your unconscious mind, there is more to tell! Stay tune and bookmark my blog.

The Australian bush fire, a tragedy!

The Expand Yourself blog offers its sympathy to those who lost their loves one in the bush fires. I totally agree with the PM Kevin Rudd, this is a mass murder, and those arsonists who started it have to be severely punished.Lets pay homage to the victims by closing our eyes and offer them a  minute silence. May they rest in peace!

For more information regarding the bush fire,  click here