Do you ever have those moments when you really FEEL the meaning of something, rather than just know it in your head?
So much has been written about positive thinking that I would have hesitated to put anything down with my name at the bottom,
until I read a fascinating book last year called Unstoppable, by Adrian Gilpin. Reading this book gave me one of those Aha! moments. The whole world seemed to shift a fraction to one side, as if a different focus had been set on a camera, or I'd seen the other side of one of those optical illusion puzzles.
The insight was that we can choose how we interpret events in life.
As an NLP practitioner I had for some time been able to re-frame a situation, for example:
I've failed becomes That didn't seem to work, I'll try something that does.
What we need to do is to start to develop different, more useful habits. When you were little, your mother probably made sure you washed your hands after you used the toilet, and looked both ways when you crossed the road - excellent habits which I have held on to.
Some habits are less obvious, because we copy them from our family. For example, in the working class household I grew up in, the poor always struggled and the rich always did well. No-one ever mentioned that maybe the rich were doing something more helpful than us! I love Alan Sugar's anecdote about a conversation with his father. The teenaged Alan had bought a van-load of goods for £50 and sold them for £100 (a profit of well over a week's wages at the time) and his father said "That's all very well son, but who will pay your wages?"
The observer sees most of the game, and we can all have a smile at the expense of Mr Sugar senior, but what about our own bad habits? How often do we think or say something like:
