Entries Tagged 'NLP' ↓
October 11th, 2006 — Entrepreneurship, NLP, Reflexion
It has become a habit of mine to always ask the question: “What for?†To think about it, this should be the recurrent question. Is it the essence of purpose to any action we undertake?
During my numerous seminars, I used to run, not only will I ask the participants to work out the purpose of their attendance, I would also suggest that they ask themselves sucessively the same question “what forâ€for a couple of rounds to the answers they may work out. I want them to reach the “meta†purpose of their purpose. If you prefer, the ultimate purpose.
I much prefer “what for†to “whyâ€. “Why†could deviate the answer to philosophical thinking whilst “what for†would attempt to discover the ultimate purpose.
Entrepreneurs are too often head down in the action of performing whatever they are doing, without having a clear vision of the purpose of their actions. An external person, usually a consultant, would ask: “What is your mission?†or “do you have a mission statement?†A hazy, blurred answer would often be given. If somebody would ask you “what for, and why are you going to Port Louisâ€.What will your counterpart think if he got a hazy, blurred answer? Either you do not want to give a straight answer or you do not know what you are doing.I would ask you to try this question to your colleagues or friends: “What for, or why do you work?â€
Should you have a well thought of and defined & specific purpose, I am of opinion that you stand a much better chance of achieving the purpose. “Elementaireâ€, dirait Watson.†Stephen Covey always likes to rightly say: “Common sense is not always common practiceâ€.
I came across the book: Purpose: The starting point of great companies by Nikos Mourkogiannis, which I must admit I have not yet read. The extract of the book , of which you may have a copy is well to the point I am driving at. Purpose!
Anybody sensible would always have a purpose for any action. As common sense is not always common practice, you would be surprised how often we do things without a definite and specific purpose. Is it out of laziness or unconscious behaviour? Or we are more concerned with the “how†of the things we do instead of the “why†and “what forâ€. Purpose driven people are more thinkers than doers. To correct this state of things, and to increase our thinking skills, I propose that we train ourselves in perceptual positionning.
October 9th, 2006 — Entrepreneurship, NLP
A model about how we learn.
Learning can be said to take place in four stages:
I Unconscious incompetence
Blissful ignorance
Confidence exceeds ability, we are not knowledgeable/skilful
We don’t know we don’t know.
II Conscious incompetence
We discover a skill we wish to learn – driving a car, riding a bike
Confidence drops as we realise our ability is limited
We need to practise to learn. Often this means not succeeding at first.
This is learning; unfortunately, in our culture it is often labelled ‘failure’. We feel uncomfortable.
We know what we don’t know.
III Conscious competence
We acquire the skill. We have become consciously competent. Our conscious mind can only cope with a small number of new bits of information at any one time.
Our confidence increases with our ability, we have to concentrate on what we know/do
Can do if know how to.
IV Unconscious competence
Lastly, we blend the skills together and they become habits – we can then do them while our mind is on other things.
We have reached the stage of unconscious competence.
Our confidence and ability have peaked, we no longer have to concentrate on what we know/do; this is the start of the next learning curve
We can do, but don’t necessarily know how we do.
In different areas of our life we will be at different stages on different learning curves
A number of us might be familiar with the four stages of learning which has been used for decades and has been highly promoted by a number of training or learning institutions of the like of World famous Thomas Gordon. I personally came across the stages of learning on my NLP courses.
Building a learning organisation as advocated by Peter Senge is one of the pillars any entrepreneur should strive for.
Many researchers now postulate, Thinking that stage four of the model mentioned, as being the ultimate,caps progress. It brings complacency.That is the reason, a fifth stage is now being introduced to perfect the much used conscious/competence Matrix. Some researchers in learning David Baume, amongst others, are suggesting a fifth stage called reflective comptence.
Reflective Competence would be the qualifier to outstanding performances delivered on demand in sports, by Tiger Woods or Micheal Jourdan. This would not be dissimilar to Capabilty Maturity Model as used in software development. The 5 levels defined as: initial, repeatable, defined, managed and optimised.
August 28th, 2006 — Mauritius, NLP
As most of you who live in Mauritius, you would have enjoyed a Holyday today: The Feast of the lord Ganesh, the god of wisdom. I flashed back to the days ,when I used to frequently visit Bombay and attended the feast at Elephanta caves,an island across The Gate of India in Colaba. The eve of the festival day now gave me the opportunity to sleep late so that I could enjoy the late morning wake up.The wake time was spent refreshing my old notes and browsing the web on the new developments thereon.
You will recall that at age 48, I decided to reequip myself with new competencies to further my active life. Indeed, one of the subjects I studied was NLP. You will find at least 2 links to NLP institutions which will explain to you what it is all about and how NLP could help you in your life. These life skills, to which I have been initiated to, worked wonders for me. I now realized how these skills transformed my outlook in life and how the acquired skills were of the greatest help to me during the rough time I traveled the recent years.
Would you like to be more in control of your behavior? Would you like to be more conscious of your moods and act more calmly in a way to achieve what you really want? Would you like to have better communications skills to understand others and be able to influence them? Would you like to be more creative and happier? What about learning to learn?
NLP incorporates a number of techniques and more importantly integrates the latest discoveries in the functioning of the Brain.
This morning when I lazily got out of my bed, I thought that I might have acquired more wisdom: Thanks to NLP