THE SIX HUMAN NEEDS : DAY TWO - UNCERTAINTY

Yesterday I blogged about the first of the six human needs, certainty. So let''s continue by looking at the second.

Simply because the human condition has got a great sense of humour, after our need for certainty comes our need for uncertainty, or to put it another way, variety.

This is obvious when we look at how we spend our leisure time. Most people do not want to go on holiday to the same place over and over when there is a whole world to explore (of course there are exceptions). We enjoy comedy, because the unexpected makes us laugh and lighten up - It gives us new perspectives. We want to watch different types of shows on TV. We are adventure seekers and don’t always want to know what is around the next bend.

When we don’t get enough uncertainty or variety in our lives we can become complacent or frustrated. Sometimes we get confused by thinking that our lives lack meaning when actually we are just bored. This is such an easy thing to remedy – DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

QUESTION: When was the last time you set some time aside to just have fun, or to learn something new? What have you wanted to do for a long time that you could start planning for today?

Develop your spontaneous side. Organise a trip to somewhere you’ve never been or have never thought of going. Enrol on an evening class. Just get involved in something. In the river of life you will often get caught up on a rock and stop going with the flow. When this happens you probably just need a gentle nudge to get you moving again. Finding something different to do can often be that nudge you are looking for. Keep a notebook near you at all times and use it to write down new things that you’d like to experience. These can be as simple as seeing a particular film at the cinema, or as big as planning a world tour. This way you’ve always got a starting point whenever you find yourself in a rut.

THE SIX HUMAN NEEDS : DAY ONE - CERTAINTY

Over the next week I’ll be sharing with you some detail around the six human needs. These are the fundamental drivers that determine how we get motivated to live our lives.

With each of these Needs I’ll also pose a challenging question to encourage you to think about how you take positive action to bring more balance into your live.

So without further ado, let’s get started.


HUMAN NEED 1 - CERTAINTY

In order for us to function efficiently in the world you need to be able to get out of bed in the morning and have the luxury of taking certain things for granted. Perhaps one of the first things you’d want to take for granted is that there is a bed to get of in the first place. Others will include: that there will be enough food to eat and clean water, the car will start, you’ll still have a job when you get to the office, your partner will still want to be with you when you get home, you’ll get a pay check at the end of the month.

I’m sure you’ve experienced situations where these basic areas have not been so certain, like when the boiler breaks down, or the car dies, or you lose your job; or you home. Suddenly those details that had sat in the background of your awareness become the only thing you can focus on.

QUESTION: What in your life do you really value but take for granted? Is there anything you have neglected for a while that could really do with some attention?

Take care of these details. Prevention is better than cure and you don’t miss your water ‘till your well runs dry!!

NLP HELPS WOMAN OVERCOME STAGE FRIGHT

Even the people we consider to be the best in the business (whatever their field may be) are prone to mental sabotage sometimes. Many top entertainers and performers with years of experiences still go through the same old routine of “bricking it” before going on stage. Now, obviously in most cases there is no logical rationale as to why they should still get nervous, after all they are still in the business because the public love them. The reason why these pre-performance jitters continue to exist is because these individuals are anchored an automatic pattern of behaviour that lets them know its time to perform.

You’ve probably heard of actors redirecting their nervous energy into their performance and this can often bring them greater successful. For other talented people though, the mind plays such a tormenting game that they simply freeze and cannot function at all. Stage fright is common and also very understandable. As this article shows (from the 3News website) the key to overcoming it is to interrupt the automatic limiting behaviour and to install more calming and positive response choices. NLP is great for that!!

Most of us have suffered from stage fright to some extent. When people are
asked what they fear the most, speaking or singing in public is often rated in
the top 10.

Edwina Halliwell always loved amateur dramatics and singing, but in her
teens a horrible audition changed everything.

Two years ago she had planned to sing for her husband at their wedding.
Again the nerves returned and she froze.

Campbell Live followed Ms Halliwell on a personal journey to enter the
spotlight once more, as she prepared to enter her kind of hell by walking onto
the stage at the comedy classic in Auckland.

She is usually a bubbly, confident person, until I ask her to stand on
the stage.
"Feel really nervous, legs are like jelly," she says. "I
just want to get off the stage."
Many famous performers have suffered from
stage fright. At the peak of Sir Laurence Olivier's career he became worried he
would be too tired to remember his lines. Barbara Streisand did not sing in
public for 27 years after forgetting the lines to several songs at a concert in
1967.
Fifteen years ago Ms Halliwell loved performing and singing until she
went to an audition and froze when she tried to sing.

Karen Ross knows what she is going through. Ms Ross uses NLP or
neuro-linguistic programming techniques to help individuals and
organisations, here and overseas, change their behaviours.

It is about the brain and how it works with the body.

"It's about how we learn, our behaviours, our thoughts, our feelings,
our habits are created, and by knowing how they're created we know how we can
change them," says Ms Ross.
At the moment Ms Halliwell associates the stage
with fear.

"The way it's stored can be changed quite easily," says Ms Ross. "It
was probably set up in a matter of seconds, so that gives you can idea of how
quickly it can be changed," says Ms Ross.
First she helps Ms Halliwell
imagine what it will be like when she is performing and enjoying it. She then
introduces the idea of a 'trigger point' to help her relax.

Ms Ross identifies a point on Ms Halliwell's hand and connects that to a
sense of calm. She encourages Ms Halliwell to touch that point when nerves start
to take over.
But will it make a difference? Two weeks later we went
back.

It went "really well", says Ms Ross. "We've had two sessions together
and she's ready to sing."
So ready, she headed to the Ivory Lounge in
Auckland, determined to sing for her husband Duncan, something she had wanted to
do at their wedding two years before.
And as quickly as it came, her stage
fright disappeared. She sang to her husband, and while the nerves were still
there, the person who could not even stand on a stage was now singing to an
audience.

It was an incredible change, and even she could not quite believe it.
"Oh my god, I can't believe that, it's just amazing."

The therapy had helped Ms Halliwell confront her fear, and changed the
feelings associated with performing in public.

"When I'm working with a client I can't be sure until we make some
changes, whether that one thing will generalise and help the person feel relaxed
with everything or there might be more than one thing," says Ms Ross. "And in
Edwina's case, it was one thing."

"The difference between before the coaching and after is now, I really
just wanted to do it and I didn't care what it sounded like, it was just really
important for me to do it," says Ms Halliwell. "And it was just such a dream to
get up and sing in front of all those people."
It might not have been her
greatest performance but it was certainly one of, what she hopes, will be many
more.

"It's been really great to see and watch the confidence build up," says
her husband Duncan. "You couldn't hold her back this evening, which is a major
transformation from where it's been before."

www.lifehappens.co.uk

IS NLP HERE TO STAY?

There has been a long running debate in the field of psychology as to whether neuro-linguistic programming is just another personal development fad or if it is a revolution in the understanding of human behaviour that is here to stay.

Even as an NLP practitioner I think this is a very healthy debate to have. I am absolutely convinced that NLP provides positive life transformations when applied in the way its creators intended it to be used; I have seen it happen time and time again with my own clients. However, many people have a distorted view of what NLP is all about because their exposure to it has come in the form of inexperienced ‘dabblers’ who have missed the point.

I have attended many trainings and seminars where NLP is cited as one of the methods being employed, but then the facilitators only go on to talk about concepts and presuppositions. NLP is something that needs to be experienced before it can be completely understood. I could talk all day about how the mind makes associations and links emotions to external stimulus and you would either buy into it or you wouldn’t. However, if I were to guide you through a physical Anchoring technique that allowed you to access a positive emotional state anytime you wanted in the future you would have no choice but to see the truth of how NLP is aligned to the way you work. Only when we have a true experience of something can we stop having opinions about theories and start utilizing the tested facts.

I genuinely think that if I had never experienced NLP first hand, in its intended form, I would be one of the skeptics who think it is a fluffy gimmick passed its sell by date. The fact that I have experienced it, on too many occasions to count, means I can see why NLP is going to continue growing, evolving and changing lives.

This is a fascinating article by Mike Levy on the Training Zone website:

In his recent book, 'Tricks of the Mind' television
illusionist Derren Brown says that NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) is "The
Frankenstein grandchild of Ericksonian hypnosis". More than 30 years after the
publication of 'The Structure of Magic', the seminal work on NLP by Bandler and
Grinder, has the set of techniques come of age or had its day? Is there any
scientific proof to underpin the claims made by practitioners? And if not, does
it matter?

Evergreen questionsThese, says Michael Breen, are
evergreen questions: "They were asking them back in 1988 and they come up every
10 years or so." Breen, who taught NLP with Bandler and Paul McKenna, has
predictably strong views about the current state of NLP. "It's no use asking
about scientific validity: NLP is not and never will be a science. It is a
discipline that people will take pot shots at and then steal its contents."

Breen who spoke at last year's NLP Conference, says that the
discipline does not look for absolute truths: "NLP looks for clues to see what
works in human behaviour. NLP cannot be controlled – the best new work is coming
from people nobody has heard of. And that is how it should be."

Elusive qualityThere is, says Breen, an inbuilt and elusive
quality about NLP which depends hugely on the skills and insights of the
practitioner: "It is not about a corpus of knowledge or a set of testable
qualifications. NLP was created to create new stuff, not to copy other people's
work."

His point is that for him, NLP is a facilitating tool that
opens up endless possibilities when it is in the right hands. "It is a
behavioural skills set, an art, a discipline that when used well can have
amazing results."

What excites Breen most about his discipline is
what his students can do with the tools: "Someone who takes what they learn
about NLP and goes on to do something completely new with it: that is what
really turns me on." He cites a student who developed his own set of tools based
on Houdini's famous escapes. "It's a lovely little tool and it works – that is
NLP."

"The best practitioners are those who already possess
competencies that can be built on. However, no two practitioners should ever do
the same work. That is why NLP is not a science."

Flourishing in
the downturnSue Knight, best-selling author of 'NLP at Work', agrees: "NLP is a
study of what works best – the most important test is: does it work for you and
achieve the results you want?" Knight, a speaker at this year's NLP Conference,
thinks that the discipline is flourishing with the present downturn providing
new and exciting opportunities.

"NLP is perfectly suited to these
times. What makes excellence in leadership and how do we best deal with business
adversity are some key questions today. My programmes on leadership here and in
India are bursting at the seams. The crash in the financial world is a
demonstration of what happens when you do not have excellence in leadership.
People are now looking for new ways of leading business. NLP answers that call."

Never strongerFor Knight, NLP is now far from marginal: "Looking
back over 20 years as a practitioner, there was a time when most people on my
courses paid for themselves – now almost all are backed by their employers." So
Knight believes that NLP has never been stronger.

Marielena
Sabatier, co-founder of Inspiring Potential, agrees with that view. She is
another keen advocate of NLP. A few years ago, she took her MBA and immersed
herself in the no-nonsense world of high corporate finance. Then came a complete
change of career – running a thriving coaching company whose focus is leadership
development and interpersonal communication skills. But isn't NLP a little too
fluffy for her? "Not at all. It has so many uses – improving inter-personal
communications, challenging the presuppositions behind the way we see ourselves
in the world, helping us to become more tolerant of other people's viewpoints. I
find that NLP really opens the mind to new possibilities."

Lack of
evidence?Is she worried then at the lack of hard scientific evidence behind NLP?
"No, it is an amalgam of already tried and tested therapies and ideas. To me,
NLP really explains how the brain works – and I'm the kind of person who, if it
doesn't make sense, I go back to the roots of an idea." That said, Sabbatier
regrets the sheer number of NLP schools out there: "It makes a single
accreditation body less, rather than more, likely to succeed."

No
profession!Accreditation is something of an anathema to Breen but he is excited
about the future of NLP: "Not in terms of more paper qualifications. There
should never be an NLP 'profession'. Without all that NLP has reached the point
where it has percolated through the culture," he says. "It is everywhere but it
doesn't necessarily smell like NLP – and that is exactly as it should be. NLP is
essentially about transformation and in that quality, the very nature of NLP
must keep evolving and transforming."

The future, says Breen, will
be online – NLP will be democratised and that could be bad news for traditional
classroom approaches. New technology will hit the NLP profession very hard –
putting learning into the hands of the learners will mean that NLP will change
its form, content and mode of delivery." Breen, for one, cannot wait for the
next 30 years.

For more information:For those looking for research
underpinning NLP, there are a number of respected papers such as the one
produced by Ashley Dowlen, an Associate at Roffey Park. His 1996 paper 'NLP -
help or hype? Investigating the uses of neuro-linguistic programming in
management learning' is a good overview of the evidence. He finds that, "...the
use of language patterns to enhance effective communication tends to get support
and appears to be among the more reliable evidence. The use of the 'outcome'
technique receives some support, as does the meta-model questioning method. The
evidence on the ability of NLP approaches to bring about change in emotional
state is far less conclusive. In general terms, the eclectic nature of NLP may
be its strength, particularly if the collection of approaches is new to
potential users, and in general terms there are a number of references to the
value of NLP techniques for developers."

For the whole report see
the Emerald Insight web page: www.emeraldinsight.com

There are more research findings at: www.eanlpt.orgAnd www.inspiritive.com.au

About the interviewer: Mike Levy is a freelance journalist and
copywriter with 20 years' experience. He is also a writing and presentations
coach. He especially loves playwriting and creating resources for schools. Mike
is director of Write Start Ltd. For more information go to: www.writestart.co.uk

LIFE HAPPENS: visit me any time as www.life-happens.co.uk

PEOPLE WHO ASK BETTER QUESTIONS GET BETTER ANSWERS

Regardless of the reasons why people seek out a coach or therapist, the solution to their problem, or the answer to their question, is always made clear as soon as there is a shift in their thinking. The most fundamental principle that underpins the work I do with people is “thoughts are things” - as you think so you become, and with your thoughts you create your world. Your thoughts are the key drivers to the emotions you feel, and your emotions ultimately drive your behaviour.

Apologies for oversimplifying but the only difference between someone with high self esteem and someone with no self esteem is that the former just thinks better thoughts. Of course the ability to think confidence creating thoughts takes practice, commitment and sometimes a bit of coaching, but it is an ability that everyone has.

The most powerful way we direct our own thinking is by asking ourselves questions? You do it thousands of time a day and scarcely notice it, and it is the way in which you pose the question that determines the quality of the answer you get. This is particularly important when you are asking questions about yourself!!!

I came across this recent article called “Improving Your Most Important Relationship in Life” by Robert Stuberg, writing for Success Magazine, and it perfectly illustrates how poorly structured questions can often create a domino effect of negative thoughts and feelings. Here it is…

Our thoughts control our lives. You’ve undoubtedly heard that sweeping
statement. But do you consider that to be a true and accurate notion? Let me ask
you this: What do you think about yourself? Because if our thoughts control our
lives—and to some extent, they do—shouldn’t the thoughts we have about ourselves
be positive? That brings up the question everyone must ask themselves: What
thoughts do you have about yourself that are controlling your life?

The most important relationship in your life is the one you have
with yourself. And if you let those negative thoughts affect how you think, feel
and act, how can you expect to build healthy relationships with anyone else? You
must put yourself first when it comes to maintaining positive relationships.

Now stay with me for a moment. This idea of putting a relationship
with yourself first isn’t a selfish one—in fact, in some ways it’s a selfless
act. The starting point for having a great relationship with anyone else is
mastering this all-important relationship. In addition, if you aren’t making the
progress in life that you would like to make and are capable of making, I’d be
willing to bet that what we are going to discuss will show you why. So let’s
talk about your relationship with you.

Granted, as busy as we are
and wanting to please others who are important to us—spouses, family members and
friends—it can be easy to overlook the importance of the relationship we have
with ourselves. But if we can’t get along well with ourselves, we won’t exactly
have good relationships with all those other people in our lives. The first step
in managing your relationship with yourself is to determine what you actually
think about yourself. You might be surprised with what you discover. All too
often we reserve our harshest criticisms and our most negative thoughts for
ourselves. And those thoughts are precisely what often stand in our way of
achieving those things we most want in life.

In my seminars and
private-coaching sessions, I ask people where they believe their negative
thoughts originate. This always becomes a fascinating discussion. Nearly
everyone says their thoughts originally develop from their parents, the way they
were raised and influences from their varied life experiences. Certainly, all of
these things and many, many more are part of the answer. But there is also
something much more significant that is often completely missed.

The questions you ask yourself can control your thoughts. We are
constantly asking questions such as, “What should I do in this situation?” “How
will this affect the outcome that I am working to achieve?” Even questions such
as, “Is this the right thing to do?” will lead to all kinds of thoughts about
good and bad or right and wrong. Truly, the questions we ask and the thoughts
they lead to are endless. Questions can begin generating thoughts that don’t
really serve us well. These types of negative thoughts slowly chip away at the
relationship we have with ourselves.

When you continue asking
those disempowering questions for months, years, even decades, your whole life
becomes ruled by those negative emotions. You would never want to build a
relationship with someone else on that same negative pretense, so why are you
doing that to yourself?

Let me give you an example of how one
question could be in conflict with the relationship you have with yourself, and
how it could derail you on your quest for greater success. I’ve discovered that
many people have overwhelming, generalized questions such as, “What are they
thinking of me?” Imagine having that question constantly roaming around in your
mind. A successful client told me she’s had this question since she was a little
girl, and although this client has achieved some great things in her life, she
still hasn’t found peace, happiness or any level of fulfillment. She says she
feels that no matter what she does, it doesn’t feel like enough. That derisive
question constantly fl oats through her mind. Here is a Fortune 500 executive,
earning an amazing amount of money and receiving constant praise for her work,
and yet she feels like no matter what she does it isn’t enough. She’s making a
great contribution to others by serving at a very high level, but she is not
happy on the inside. This reminds me of the old saying, “Success without
fulfillment is failure.”

I think the answer to her challenge can
be found in this main question that she’s been asking herself for years. Many
questions have a presupposition, and wouldn’t you agree that her question
contains the negative thought that people may not be thinking good things about
her? In actuality, people probably respect and admire her, and hold her in great
esteem.

The ultimate problem with this question is that it puts
other people in the driver’s seat of your life. While a question like this might
motivate you to get other people to think good things about you, you will never
know for sure what other people think. And, most important, do you really want
to base your life on what other people think of you?

Now I realize
that this example may not illustrate your question or situation, but I hope it
gets you thinking about what your question or questions might be. What negative
questions do you ask yourself?

People transform themselves
immediately once they discover the underlying questions and corresponding
thoughts that are controlling their lives, especially the main question that
they may have been trying to answer for decades. You may find you can figure out
your main question by yourself, or you might want to consider working with a
coach who understands this process. The truth of the matter is that we are often
too close to ourselves to see and understand exactly what’s going on.

There’s a great line in the play by Shakespeare titled The Life and
Death of Julius Caesar where the character Cassius asks Brutus if he can see his
own face. Brutus replies: “No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself, but by ref
lection, by some other means.”
So often, a question that you’ve been asking
since you were a child is standing in the way of achieving a great relationship
with yourself. That means it is also standing in the way of achieving your
ultimate ideal in life. There is nothing more important than uncovering the
questions and thoughts that are controlling your life so you can once and for
all take control of your destiny.