It’s been a while since I last blogged, and it was a while since I blogged before that.  Blogging regularly was, ironically enough, one of my New Years’ Resolutions.  Despite all the fancy NLP skills I learned, which helped me improve some areas of my life, and which I used to help clients with their goals, I wasn’t following through on one of my own goals.  So, in order to build up some integrity and get myself to follow through, I used the most sensible strategy I could think of: I called my Life Coach.

I mentioned to James that I started this blog but with finals, a dissertation, my new workout program, a long-distance relationship, providing a valuable service for my coaching clients, and all the rest of it, the blog had fallen to the bottom of the pile of ’stuff’ that was taking my attention.

James made two valuable observations.  First, by attempting to make my blog some kind of encyclopedia of NLP and Coaching, I wasn’t going to achieve my real goal (which we discovered in the coaching session) of communicating effectively with emotional impact and providing real value for people, helping them improve their worlds.  If you want information, you’ll go to Wikipedia, or read a text book (and I’ll recommend some NLP textbooks later).

The second observation he made was that  my old blogging strategy was having a negative effect relating to my own psychology, and perhaps you can learn from it too.  By essentially making this blog information about NLP Coaching, I was unwittingly making it boring – not only for the readers (some of whom may have found the information interesting), but more importantly, for me!  Funnily enough, one of the first things you learn when you read books on NLP and personal development is that you will only follow through on something if you associate more pleasure to taking action than pain.

This is true of all the actions you’re not taking which you need to take to achieve your personal goals too.  Why don’t you follow my coach’s advice and change your blog!  Why not figure out what’s stopping you from taking action towards your goals – maybe when you clearly define what your goal is and why you really want it on an emotional level, you’ll figure out other strategies that will make it easier for you to take action than the current strategy you’re determined to use, but is failing miserably – just like my rigid ’sensible’ blogging strategy that left this space empty for the last 3 months!

Now, I know some of you were looking forward to the ‘how to do goals/rapport/Swish patterns/NLP’ stuff, and I’ll still be throwing it in as time goes on, but I’ll contextualize all the ‘NLP stuff’ into real life examples of how I’ve used it to improve my life, so hopefully it will give you some great ideas and empower you to change yourself for the better too.