Know What You Want

You can have anything you want, but you must be clear and precise about what that is. If you ask the Universe for something but are vague about what you want, it will say, “Well, if you don’t know, I certainly don’t either.”

People who are really successful got where they are because they had goals. But in order to achieve those goals, they had to have a reason.

And not just any reason. It had to be something that so drove them that they had the power to get past any and all obstacles in their way.

To achieve your goals in business, you must be channeling all of your energy with a laser-like focus.  Don’t set goals that are so far away as to be essentially out of reach — you’ll only get discouraged and lose whatever momentum you have.

But at the same time, a goal must be something of a challenge to be worthwhile and to help you grow. Ideally, a goal should reach just a little ways beyond your comfort zone — something more than you’ve previously achieved, but not such a stretch that it seems ridiculously unrealistic.

Use your senses to get feedback for how you are doing. Stay in the present moment and look at what is actually going on around you, not what you’d like to be happening, or whatever is happening in your daydream.

Stay flexible – the more options you have for action, the more chances you have to succeed. As mentioned before, you can’t keep doing what you’ve always done and expect different results. Keep yourself flexible and always changing until you find what works.

As you learn more about NLP and start using its principles on a regular basis, you’ll begin to look at things more holistically — that is, you can view individual elements as part of the larger system they’re in.

A system typically involves various people and a combination of events, thoughts, actions, and feelings, working to some degree of either good or bad.

If you can view the big picture, you can see how a particular system is working, either for you or against you, and you can take the appropriate action.

One thing about modeling is that you don’t spend too much time consciously thinking about what you “should” be doing. Too much thinking sets up barriers that may interfere with the process.

In non-business settings, it may be better not to be too specific about the changes you’re after, since your unconscious mind may know better than you do.

Of course, as discussed earlier, if it’s a business-related goal, then you will want to be as specific as possible! But any positive changes you make in areas of your life outside business will inevitably spill over and positively affect your business workings.

NLP in Business

In business, you face challenges every day. NLP can help you face those challenges more effectively in your business, as in the rest of your life.

(If you’re more happy and effective in the rest of your life, this will automatically spill over and positively affect your business — and vice versa.)

When Bandler and Grinder first started developing NLP, they were fascinated that, given a group of people all with similar education, background, and values, there would be a huge variance in how happy, productive, and effective each person was.

They decided to take the top producers, the most effective performers, and study them to see if they could discover exactly what they were doing differently.

If there was something that could be isolated and quantified somehow, then perhaps they could learn to duplicate that behavior and be just as competent and effective. This is generally referred to as “modeling.”

First they looked at the seemingly obvious factors such as education and personality traits.

Then they determined that the way that a person communicates holds the key — verbal language and nonverbal body language.

Obviously, our five senses are the main avenues by which we receive information from the outside world.
As we first develop as babies, we learn to use our senses through a combination of heredity and environment.

As we grow up, we automatically catalog each new experience, first attempting to match it to a previous experience, and then storing it as something apparently new (to us, anyway).