This audio download was recorded by one of the world’s foremost experts of behavioural change, Anthony Robbins’ Master Coach James Murphy. To take up coaching with a Robbins Research International coach will normally cost you around £350 per hour – because you read my blog you can get this one hour session with James for a very limited time for FREE!

THIS WILL BE OF HUGE BENEFIT TO YOU IF:

• You don’t tend to achieve all the goals you set

• You don’t have outcomes in each area of your life

• You often have loads of great ideas and plans, but don’t always follow through with action

• Want to know the process of building momentum towards your goals, so that you can consistently follow through on any goal

• Want to know how to take action towards your goals, even when you don’t feel like it.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

• How to define an inspiring purpose for your life

• How to create a ‘code of conduct’ for your life – uncover the values that drive the deepest levels of your behavior

• How to set and achieve goals

• How to get yourself to take action, even when you don’t feel like it

• The “Motivational (American!) Football” technique developed by James to get you the result every time

• How to shift and change your FOCUS to stay motivated long term.

James developed these techniques based on just under 20,000 one-to-one and group coaching sessions that he’s conducted, and he’s used them himself to train for marathons (he’s done 6 and is currently training for an ultra-marathon).

As you learn these techniques I want you to ask yourself “How can I use this to achieve my personal goals in the same way James uses it to achieve his fitness goals?”

HOW TO GET AND USE THE FREE DOWNLOAD:

• Fill in the box below and press the “Subscribe” button:
  

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• Check your email inbox, and follow the instructions to get the download

• It’s a 1-hour session with a lot of information, so listen to it once to allow your mind to absorb it

• The second time you listen to it, have a pen & paper with you, and sit down and DO the exercises James suggests – they are powerful and they work.

• Take Action towards your goals and improve your life results!

The moment you set your goals, you set in place the obstacles that will stop you from achieving them. The first step to self-coaching, once you have some meaningful goals is to identify the four types of obstacles that you will face in the pursuit of your goals. Here are the four types of obstacles:

1. Mental Obstacles

These are usually in the form of limiting beliefs, or conflicting values that prevent you from taking intelligent action. You almost certainly have both of these, but they will only become important if they stop you from achieving one of your goals. NLP offers a variety of ways to overcome them, from sub-modality shifts to parts integration and Time-Line Therapy to eliminate ‘Limiting Decisions’. Stick with this blog, and I will soon walk you through each of these.

2. Emotional Obstacles

Being in a dis-empowering emotional state is enough grind your actions and results to a halt. The only ways I know of to overcome these obstacles are to use your ‘Emotional Triad’ and go through a specific sequence of questions that will get you to learn what you can from the experience, and release the disempowering emotions as and when they come up. There are also techniques from Tad James’ Time Line Therapy that will work to allow your unconscious mind to let go of negative emotions.

The objective here is not to permanently remove the emotions from your life, but to understand the message that emotion is trying to give you, decide on what actions need to be taken and thus minimize the time you spend in that dis-empowering state. This is emotional intelligence in action.

3. Physical Obstacles

These could range from you body not being trained to associate pleasure to taking the required goal-achieving actions (like not wanting to get out of bed), or not having enough physical energy, to being in a dis-empowering physical environment.  There are specific strategies you can use that focus on changing the people, places and things that surround you to create a physical environment that is empowering and gives you the space, time and energy you need to creatively undergo your projects and achieve your goals.

4. Spiritual Obstacles

Regardless of what you believe about life, at a certain point your faith and hope must out-weigh your fears and doubts. This will actually go a level deeper than your mental beliefs and work at the level of what the meaning of life is for you. Personally, I have noticed that it actually doesn’t matter what religion you follow, or what sect of that religion you prefer. What matters is how you personally interpret that religion/spiritual tradition to connect to ‘God’, the ‘Universe’, ‘Energy’ or whatever you call it. Is your interpretation of spirituality one that causes you to be the Cause of the consequences in your life, or one that causes you to be at the effect of all the environment around you? This will ultimately have a radical effect on whether you become an achiever or an excuse-maker.

How to Overcome these Obstacles

There are specific self-coaching strategies you can use during the process of moving towards your goals, that will help you to overcome each of these four obstacles. Although I have a great passion for sharing these strategies and getting people to coach themselves as much as possible, it is beyond the scope of this post to go through each one of them in detail. So, I will leave you with a few options of how I can provide you with the most value right now.

The first, cheapest, and possibly best option for a lot of you, is to sign up or bookmark this blog. It is my goal to update it with some articles, podcasts, and videos each week, and update you all by email once per month on the most popular material.  More or less every post will be looking at how to coach yourself to shift and overcome each of these four obstacles in the context of each of the six major areas of life (career & finances, relationships, personal development, spirituality, and health).

The second option is to sign up and attend one of our live trainings, or tele-seminars, details of which you can find on this website. My next event is on NLP Self-Coaching to Achieve your Islamic Development goals, and you can sign up by visiting www.iidr.org

The third option is to utilize one of my 90-day personalized one-to-one coaching packages to achieve a specific result you want in life. Most of what we cover in results coaching is focused on supporting you with the particular strategies you need in order overcome whatever obstacles you are currently facing, to achieve your goal. Once you go through a coaching program, you can use the strategies you learn for the rest of your life, to continue achieving similar goals.

I was really excited when I read about this rule of how world – class experts are distinguished from the rest and when you read and apply it, it can change your perspective of how you approach your own personal development and how you choose to contribute to the world.

The 10,000 hour rule was put forward by Malcolm Gladwell in his book ‘Outliers’, and states that one of the key factors that distinguishes those people whose achievements fall outside of normal experience from everyone else is this rule, which helps answer a question that has been raging for generations.

The question is: what distinguishes the highest achievers in the world, from the rest? For many people, this question guided the development of NLP through the process of modeling. In the pre-NLP days, the answer to this question was simple: they are just born that way; they are naturally talented. A few skeptics, often confused for blind optimists, would argue that there had to be other tangible external factors that shape individuals – you may know this as the old ‘Nurture vs Nature’ debate.

The theory put forward by Gladwell, for which he uses examples of Bill Joy (the guy that re-wrote the code for UNIX and some of the original code for accessing the internet), the Beatles, American Ice-hockey players, Mozart, and Bill Gates, and I might thrown in Michael Jackson (R.I.P). His theory is that to be truly successful, you do need opportunity and background – the opportunity and background that you create, or that is created in your life to enable you to spend… drum roll… 10,000 hours dedicated to your craft.

That’s about the amount of time that each of these people spent working alone at their craft before they ever achieved anything great. The Beatles performed for that number of hours live before they became famous, Mozart’s first masterpiece was created after that long composing, and the software geeks turned billionaires spent that much time writing code, to be able to become authors of modern life as we know it.  Let’s be clear, this is a theory, but it seems to be a pretty good rule of thumb.

Now, let’s apply this to our lives.  My first question is, what area of life would you like to dedicate 10,000 hours to in order to contribute to the world in a way that no-one else has?  For me, it is undoubtedly doing one-to-one and group Coaching sessions. It’s my mission to continue to do this until I’ve logged over 10,000 Coaching hours, and then I’ll do it more, and bigger, and better, with my own techniques that have developed out of my experience. What is it for you? Brian Tracy calls this defining your ‘major definite purpose’ – the one goal that is most important to you right now. There cannot be two.

My next theory is, if it takes 10,000 hours to become a world-class expert, then it takes 1000 hours to become truly competent at anything. Think about it. It takes roughly 1ooo hours to become a black-belt martial artist, it takes about 1000 hours of intensive language learning before you become roughly ‘fluent’, it takes about 1000 hours to understand and memorize every verse of the Qur’an – as I recently discovered with one of my Muslim clients ;o)

So, my question is, what are your personal development goals, that you are willing to dedicate 1000 hours towards? AND, how would you like to schedule those hours over the next 5,10 or 20 years? Remember: there are no unrealistic goals, only unrealistic time-frames for achieving them in a balanced way given your other life goals.

This is one way of quantifying some otherwise difficult to quantify personal development goals. Obviously, I would advise you to have other criteria for your goals too, and you will probably fulfill your ‘evidence procedure’ (the evidence that let’s you know you have your goal) well before that time, but you will not achieve any of your long-range goals, if you are not willing to dedicate roughly that much time to it.

While you work on your one major definite 10,000 hour purpose in life, it is essential for you to dedicate the other hours in the day, week, month, year or decade to the other areas of your life in order to live a balanced life. Most of us over-estimate what we can achieve in 1 year, and under-estimate what we can achieve in 10.

If now’s the time for you to focus on your major definite purpose, or personal development goals, why not do a free Coaching Strategy Session turn those dreams into results. If you have one goal that you have not yet been able to achieve in your life, you will be empowered to make more progress towards it in the next 3 months than you have in the last 3 years.

Call us on 0208.133.4520 to take action now!

I was recently interviewed by a member of the Spanish Board of Psychology who was doing research to find out exactly what coaching is, and whether the Spanish government needs to regulate it through the Board of Psychology.

As we sat down together, over some snacks and a drink, it became very obvious to me that she had absolutely no idea what Life Coaching is, what it does, and how it is different from training, teaching, psychology, psycho-therapy and counseling, and where NLP fits into the picture.  This made me realize that most of you probably aren’t completely clear on this either.  So, in what follows, you’ll find as comprehensive a definition as I can muster.

Imagine your life as a line that goes from -10 to 0 to +10. On this line, 0 to -10 represents the past, 0 to +10 represents your future.  Coaching is completely focused on 0 to +10; taking you from where you are now in each area of life, towards a future that you design.  Coaching does this by getting you to focus 100% on your goals.

The moment you commit to your goals, you lock the obstacles that will block your achievement of them in place.  These obstacles may be mental, emotional or physical in nature.  Coaching supports you in overcoming these obstacles. Only 20% of coaching focuses on using the best strategies to move forward and improve your life; the other 80% focuses on the psychology of following through on the action you decided on during the coaching session.

The simple process of making these action commitments to someone who will question you if you don’t follow through is often reason enough to take action.  The fact that the coach is highly trained and skilled (see coaching tools) in supporting you in goal-achievement makes the process even more powerful. It’s very easy to lie to yourself, but very difficult to lie to your coach.

I know from experience that I probably would not have been able to complete the London Marathon in 2007 if I didn’t have my coach’s daily email accountability to keep me focused during the 3 months of training. Holding a limiting belief like ‘I can’t do it’ might be okay with your friends but it is simply not an option when talking with your coach – because they’ll challenge that belief and interrupt your limiting patterns of thought/emotions/actions.  When those patterns are interrupted enough times, they don’t replay – kind of like scratching a CD.

So, Life Coaching is future – oriented and action – focused.  The underpinning logic of Coaching is that you need to believe in yourself just enough to take the most intelligent action that will move you towards your goals.  Belief + Action = Success.  That’s the Coaching formula.  You need to believe you can run the marathon, and train everyday if you want that level of fitness.  You need to believe you’re worthy of finding your soul-mate and take action everyday if you want a loving, lasting relationship. You need to believe you can be the top sales person in your company, or achieve that first class degree, or whatever your secret life dreams are AND you need to take consistent action every day to achieve your version of success.

The final metaphor I’ll give you this week for Life Coaching is the old adage ‘Knowledge without Action is insane; Action without Knowledge is in vain.’

You already know how to improve every area of your life, and if you don’t, you have the resources to find out how – all that’s left now is following through with action.  That’s where Coaching comes in.

Needless to say, by the end of our 3 hour interview, the lady from the Spanish Board of Psychology was completely blown away with the simplicity and effectiveness of the process in improving one’s quality of life.  You will be too – your “Coaching Strategy Session” is free!  +44(0)2081334520

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.

…choose my life, choose my future, choose my friends, choose my own goals, and choose not to tell the pessimistic family member with a personality complex. choose my life partner. choose to have kids or choose not to. choose to marry, choose divorce, choose to walk away or choose to keep fighting. choose to make my own mistakes, live with the consequences, and love every minute of it. choose to meditate, visualize, and be grateful for my new life. choose to never look back. choose Excellence over Perfection. choose Freedom through Discipline. choose a career. choose a job. choose to do what I love, be the best and get paid for it. choose a percentage to save and give to charity. choose to be rich. choose a six-pack over a chocolate bar. choose exercise over sleep. choose a healthy life over an early diet. choose books over television. choose to study instead of procrastinate. choose my own deadlines. choose success and choose to fail a thousand times before I get there. choose to do it my way. I choose…

www.myliferesults.com

THE PROMISE

Imagine welcoming in 2010, having kept all your New Years Resolutions: Follow the tips and techniques in this blog, and you will.

I am about to share with you some of the most powerful techniques to improving the quality of your personal and professional life.

When you follow the steps in this blog, you will almost certainly achieve your new year’s goals, in much less time than you ever thought possible.

If you want to improve the quality of your life, which is the promise of NLP Coaching, the first step is to decide what you want. In NLP, we start with the end in mind.

So, in the first blog of this year, we’re going to be traditional and focus on New Years Goals – where do you want to be this time next year in each area of your life? If the only resolution you make this year is to go through this revolutionary NLP-based goal setting process, you will gain much more benefit than doing the same things you did last year, to no avail. Remember: If you do the same actions, you’ll get the same results, so if you want new and better results, you need to be flexible enough to do new things.

THE PROOF

To demonstrate the power of this process, let me remind you of a famous study on goal setting:
A study was done by a research company to discover what happened to the graduating class of Yale in the early 50’s. These students filled out all kinds of surveys regarding their life-style and did so periodically for 20 years. Guess what the shocking results were.

10% of the students, twenty years on were happier, healthier and wealthier than the other 90% and the top 3% had more money than the other 97% put together. Guess what the top 3% of Yale graduates had in common – it wasn’t their job, or their field of work, or their family status… you guessed it – the only thing that they all had in common was that they each created clearly defined written goals for what they wanted to achieve over the next few years.

The study was repeated in the 70’s with the graduating class of Harvard, with very similar results – again it was the top 3% setting written goals and raking in the money. So, let’s get going.

By modelling the most successful people in the world in different fields and specifically those people who actually achieve their goals, NLP Masters discovered the patterns of successful goal setting. Follow the steps in this blog, and you’ll be vastly more likely to achieve your goals.

By the way, there’s something most motivational speakers don’t tell you about achieving goals. Once you’ve set your goals, the journey has begun. To achieve them you will probably need perseverance, daily discipline and good old fashioned consistent hard work. If none of those things sound appealing, fear not – NLP Coaching will keep you on track with an arsenal of techniques to keep you motivated and to rapidly modify any limiting behaviour or beliefs, to help you achieve your goals.

THE PROCESS

One of the main reasons for setting goals is to live a life of balance, rather than one of denial and pain. So, you will almost certainly want to set goals in the following areas of your life:
• Career /Contribution – including things you do for money, and/or voluntary work you take seriously
• Finances/Income
• Physical Health
• Relationships
• Personal Development – including new things you want to learn, books you want to read etc
• Spiritual Development – whatever your metaphysical beliefs are, you will benefit massively from taking regular time out to nurture them
• Environment – your living conditions have a great effect on all the other areas of your life.

Now, pick one area and follow these 5 steps to create your New Year´s goals.

STEP 1: Get into a great state, pick the area of life you want to work on, and get EXCITED!

These are your life’s goals, and this is the most important process to go through to create the life you desire. You can’t set a great goal if you’re not in a great state. So, stand up, splash water on your face, and grin from ear to ear before moving on to step 2.

STEP 2: What is most important to me in my [enter the CONTEXT eg. Physical Health]

Just brainstorm the answer to this question and the words that come out will be values. Values are just words that have intense emotional meanings associated with them.  One word answers are preferable. Things like ‘lean, ripped, powerful, energy, strong, fast’ are all good, but go ahead and come up with 8 or 10 words on your own, and choose your top 4 or 5.

If your goals aren’t in line with your values, you definitely won’t achieve them.

STEP 3: What do I need/want to do, or have in the next year to be more [enter your top 4/5 values from step 2 eg powerful, strong, ripped, slender, lean]

Dream big dreams! Don’t let the ‘how’ thoughts limit your imagination! We’ll take care of that stuff later, for now just decide what you want.
For example, “make healthy food choices; workout everyday, have 6-pack abs, have 14” arms, play football with the lads every week” etc.

STEP 4: Take your top few items from the list that excite you the most.

Put them on a time-line, and make them specific and measurable – they are your new goals. So, how will you know when you achieve it? What will you see, hear and feel in order to know you have achieved it? Commit with all your being to the goals you’ve just set.

STEP 5: Take an Action and Celebrate!
Take an action that will commit you to your new goal. This is even more important than creating a plan for the goal – the plan is the easy part, but taking bold action will create the momentum to propel you in the right direction. After all, even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there… so take action!

You’ve just done something the other 97% of people will never do. I highly recommend you repeat the process for the other 6 areas of your life. Make this your New Year’s resolution, and do it today! This blog will give you all the tools you need to follow through.