Monday 27 November 2017

Halfway to my coaching qualification

For the past 8 days I've been studying for the NLP Master Practitioner course with Performance Partnership here in London (with David Shephard and Sally Davies), as well as eight fellow travellers on the path. And I couldn't overstate just how life-changing the journey has been so far - I've had high hopes and expectations anyway, having done the Practitioner with him two years ago, and that was already mind-bending, but this now is material that blows pretty much everything off its hinges - things you thought weren't "possible" as well as things you thought were "normal" - and obliterates them all. And all that while being very entertained and laughing a lot, and bonding with the other students, who're all brilliant.

It takes quite the wizard to show you the tricks and spells in a way that you can use them immediately - not a demo or exercise that doesn't go well and all of it leads to further understanding. I know I'm not the same person I was two years ago and the amount of growth I've done is huge, with tremendous effort to clear all my negative emotions after being betrayed by two very close friends  and finding my personal centre and equilibrium. This stuff now takes me at least a few steps further - after dealing with all the negative stuff of the past two years, and clearing out what those events have shaken loose, I'm now clearing what remains of the rubble - some Lego bricks strewn across the carpet I didn't see before and sometimes step on. I thought I was doing pretty well already, but it's nice to be able to cross your carpet at night without encountering one of those little bastards. It did take getting down on my hands and knees and looking for them everywhere with a nice strong torch/flashlight.

The biggest discovery, I guess, is that of choice. A lot of my emotions were purely reflexive - hit me, I rage. Break agreements, I rage. Betray me, and I rage. That's over now. I can contain the emotions and turn them into a whole range of choices. Hit me, and I can hit back. I can smile and laugh. I can walk away. I can sue you. I can decide it's not worth the effort. Everything I do is 100% my choice and I own every single one I make. I've gained freedom and flexibility. It doesn't mean letting people get away with hitting me; it means I have choice ranging from whole-hearted forgiveness to fucking their shit up. And that's pretty new - having it rationally and intellectually is different from having it emotionally in every fibre of your being.

In minor news, during the course, I found the key to resolving my emotional eating (and already losing weight due to that), and developed a theory how to kill writer's block, which I'm about 90% sure will work, though I haven't tested it yet. Just that last part could be a business model, and I'm pondering how to do that too.

The idea is to move out of corporate and into coaching over the next few years (I see the early 2020s), and that goal is now so close I can taste, smell, hear, see and feel it. It's within reach. And I still have one week to go on the training which will be about trance and therapy and massive breakthroughs, so I need to do a bit of homework for tomorrow. Writing five metaphors for trance induction should be easy, I'm a writer, metaphor is what I do, and I love trancing myself and others.

On the writing front, I'm going to work on an non-fiction book about all of this, and I'll be involved with editing NLP books to roll this out to more people and empower them on a vast scale. I'd expect to be able to finish the writing of Witches of London - Julian before the year is over and I might tinker with two German translations as well and get everything ready for 2018.

I've never in my life been so excited about the future. 

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