If you’re a student or young professional, you’ll probably spend a number of years living with people. You’ll either be flat sharing or in student accommodation. You’ll be living with people just because you all have to, basically because rent is high, and you can save a lot of money by sharing. The down side to this of course, is that you have a handful of people who may or may not start off as friends, who all have totally different maps of how the world should work, sharing a living space. This will often lead to pointless arguments, and kitchen – feuds.
Here on some tips on sharing a living space from someone who has pissed a lot of people off by accident. Be wise. Learn from my mistakes.
1. DON’T BOTHER SHARING FOOD COSTS
It always seems like a great idea. It always breaks down after a few weeks, and it usually results in an argument, followed by everyone agreeing to not share food costs. Save yourself the time and energy.
2. SHARE THE COST OF CLEANING PRODUCTS AND TOILET ROLE
Everybody uses these equally, even if not everyone does an equal amount of cleaning.
3. ALWAYS CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF
You may not have particularly high cleaning standards, but you can guarantee someone in your flat does. Everyone has a different limit for how much mess and cleaning they will tolerate.
4. SET CLEAR BOUNDARIES
This will happen naturally as the year goes on, as each flatmate accidentally annoys the other. Nobody wants to purposely get on your nerves, so it will serve you to kindly show them what boundary to not cross.
5. KNOW THAT IF YOU HAVE NO BOUNDARIES, YOUR FLAT-MATES PROBABLY DO
They might mind if you go into their rooms, eat their stuff, use their computer, even if you wouldn’t mind them doing that with you.
6. IDEALLY GET A CLEANING ROTA AND STICK TO IT
If everyone cleans one area of the flat/house once a week, you’ll keep it in pretty decent shape. If not agree to get a cleaner in weekly to do the communal areas and split the cost.
7. IF YOU’RE LIVING WITH A DIRTY PERSON…
They’ll probably be part of the generation of men raised by women, who haven’t learned to clean their stuff up. They’ll be of two types. Either they’ll be willing to learn what they’re doing wrong and how to build better habits, or they won’t. Find out, and decide how much you’ll tolerate and if it’s worth you living somewhere else, given the recent blogs on how your environment effects your mind.
8. AGREE ON BILLS AT THE START OF THE YEAR
It’s probably best to put each one on a different person’s name, so everyone has a stake in paying on time.
9. NEVER PUT ALL YOUR NAMES ON ONE CONTRACT
This is a landlord scam to take advantage of students by making them stay in the flat for as long as possible. It stops you from leaving with one month’s notice, because your current flatmates will have to pay your rent and/or find a replacement.
I know it works, because I’ve done it… and it works. Each time I follow these five steps exactly as they are laid out, I get above 70% for my essays, which is a 1st. Each time I don’t get a 1st, it’s usually because I didn’t follow this system, or followed it but skipped over parts (which is very tempting), or because I was just a little lazy towards the formatting at the end.
I think one of the key reasons people procrastinate is because they often don’t know what their outcome is, they aren’t focusing on all the reasons they have to follow through, or they haven’t worked out the NEXT ACTION to move forward. When writing essays, by following this plan step by step you should never be left not knowing what the next action is.
Here are the five magical Steps. Read them, and use them, then email or call me to let me know when you get your 1st.
STEP 1: INTERPRET THE QUESTION BY ANALYZING EACH KEY WORD
Notice the ‘key words’ in the essay question, and brainstorm what you think they each mean (use wiki if needed). This will create your ‘key word concepts’
develop your ‘overall essay concept’ by answering the essay question based on your own opinions, based on what you understand from the ‘key word concepts’ (without doing any reading or research)
brainstorm essay plan – everything you know about the subject, based on the new ‘key word concepts’ and the ‘overall essay concept’ – Ask yourself: “what am I curious to find out, in order to fully develop/shape my argument?”
Get curious and create sub-questions: “what do I want to know to test out my essay concepts?” Come out with as many questions as possible
STEP 2: RESEARCH THE QUESTION, GUIDED BY YOUR ANSWERS FROM THE ‘INTERPRETATION’
determine which sections of which books, and which online articles are directly relevant to answer the questions from STEP 1.
Read the sections that are most compelling to develop an argument, based on the interpretation phase.
Make your questions direct your research.
STEP 3: PLAN
Create a detailed outline, including only those aspects of the research that are directly relevant to the essay question, and the sub-questions that will help you argue the essay question
Relate each point in the detailed outline back to the essay question, to form a very powerful argument
Make notes of each of the references that will be used in the final piece of work, so you can easily find them when you need to.
STEP 4: WRITE THE ESSAY
Write the essay at the pace of at least 1000 words per day (this worked for me – the writing is the easiest part when you know what you’re on about – by the end of my degree I was at about 500 words per hour)
Write the essay entirely on the basis of the detailed plan – use language skills to powerfully articulate the points in the final version.
Make each paragraph start by linking the main point back to the essay question.
Strong introduction saying exactly what argument you will make
Strong conclusion based on the premises laid out in the essay paragraphs.
STEP 5: REVISE, EDIT AND REFERENCE PROPERLY
Go through the whole essay and make a list of ‘works cited’
Write a Bibliography, based on everything you’ve ever read that is relevant to the essay topic, and some of the other main texts that you know are relevant.
Use the ‘Harvard System’ Document for help, or whatever system your university prefers you to use. The book this was adapted from has a whole section on explaining exactly how to do citations according to the different systems.
It’s key, in terms of motivation, to have some long term vision to pull you through short-term set-backs and rough times. That’s why it’s key to create your Qur’an vision. You can’t hit a target you can’t see. Creating your vision is as easy as pie. Just grab your Coaching Journal (or a piece of paper) and brainstorm answers to the following questions:
Where do I ultimately want to be in terms of my relationship with the Qur’an?
What is the ideal amount of time I would like to spend each day with the Qur’an?
On a really busy day, what is the minimum amount of time I would like to spend y with the Qur’an?
How much of the Qur’an do I ultimately want to memorize and understand?
Which books about the Qur’an, which Tafsirs, and which interpretations do I want to have been through before I die?
If I could choose how much of the Qur’an I will know before I die, and in how much depth I will know it, what would my ultimate vision be?
How, specifically, will I know when I’ve reached my ultimate Qur’an objectives?
How many ways do I know about how to study the Qur’an, and how many of them do I want to master before I die?
For your entertainment, here is the first week of a 16-week training plan you can get online. Follow me on my journey to discover how well it works in real life.
This is the first week of a 16 week training program I’m on to reach my goal: six-pack abs. If you want to read about Mens Health, go here.
With the advent of NLP, we now know that we can reproduce any particular behaviour in any particular context in order to create the results we want in life, using a process called ‘modeling’. It’s simple: you find a successful person, find out what they’re doing that nobody else is, and copy them. Success leaves clues. More often that not, those successful clues are not in the specific behaviours that the successful person uses, but are in the mind-set and psychology that created those behaviours.
Let’s turn to the cover of Mens’ Health magazine for a striking visual example of the result that most men want to create in their lives – the Cover Model body. If all we needed was the knowledge of how to create that result, and the training plan that the cover model used, anybody who bought and read the magazine would have wash board abs… if only it were that easy. Anybody who has ever bought the magazine knows that you only get the results when you actually stick to the training and eating plans in the long term.
So, what’s stopping us from doing that? In a word: Beliefs. One of the main differences in the psychology of successful people to the rest of us is the beliefs that they hold about themselves, and that area of their lives. So, what are the beliefs that the world’s top fitness model has about health and fitness?
Conveniently, Owen McKibbin (the most frequent Cover Model of Men’s Health Magazine) was kind enough to tell us his beliefs in a book he wrote which you can purchase from amazon here:
To save you the money on the book, (and the embarrassment of having one of your house-mates noticing you’re going to bed every night reading a book with a picture of this guy with no shirt on, on literally every page) here are the beliefs and priciples that Owen McKibbin lives by:
I Believe that cardiovascular and strength training are equally important for everybody – no matter which you prefer, no matter which is trendier at the moment, and no matter what type of body you have.
I believe in eating right as an essential component of fitness, not merely a support strategy.
I believe that exercise done in hard, short bursts will get you into better shape, and get you there faster, than long, slow efforts.
I believe that weight-lifting sessions targeting the big muscles must be interspersed with workouts that focus on strengthening the smaller, more injury-prone muscles and joints.
I believe that muscles should be developed for function, not just display.
I believe that an overemphasis on crunches and sit-ups is not the way to work your midsection and achieve wash board abs.
I believe in drinking buckets of water all day long.
I believe in stretching as a fitness necessity, not just a warmup, cooldown, or ancillary activity.
I believe in rest, but not necessarily rest days.
I believe in clean living.
Owen goes into each of these in a bit more depth, but in short these beliefs are clearly reflected in the way he lives, and the physique he’s produced as a result. Imagine acting on these beliefs daily, such that every morning, before breakfast you complete an intense 30-45 minute workout routine (three weight-training, three cardio, and one stretching/yoga each week) and then supporting yourself with excellent dietary habits. Wouldn’t you expect your body to look something like his after a couple of years? Or, based on the last blog, after 1000 hours of training (about 7 years of working out 30 minutes per day)?
Here’s your coaching challenge:
Record everything you eat everyday for the next week, and every exercise session (if you do any). Based on your week’s log, what beliefs do you hold on to that are reflected in the way your body looks and feels? What are your excuses for not working out? Are those beliefs serving you to create your version of physical excellence? Beliefs drive behaviour. You are in charge of your mind, your beliefs, your emotions, and your results.
If you want better life results, than those you’re currently getting, you know what to do: 0208.133.4520 – you’ll leave the free Fitness Coaching Strategy Session with a realistic written plan to build massive momentum towards your physical goals over the next 3 months… after all it only takes 3-4 weeks of daily training to make working out a habit, and 7 short years later, I might be writing a blog about your appearance on Men’s/Women’s Health Magazine.
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.
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…
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.
