Getting ready…
If you are like many people, in a week or so you'll be sitting down and writing out your New Years Resolutions. I will be doing something like that too. I like to prepare for that a couple of weeks in advance by considering a couple of questions so that when I sit down to contemplate the new year I've seeded the ground a bit. Here are four questions to ask yourself as you prepare:
QUESTION #1: What am I no longer willing to tolerate or compromise on in my life?
QUESTION #2: What are my basic core beliefs?
QUESTION #3: What specific things do I need to be doing for my behavior to be more aligned with what I truly believe.
QUESTION #4: What would I be willing to give up to have more of what I truly want?
I won't provide many examples because I don't want to limit how you might think about these questions, but Question #2 might require a bit of explanation. For this I try to think about things where my internal thoughts don't seem to match my external behavior. So I might really believe its important to serve in my community, but I never really do. Or do I really believe its important? I mean watching TV is pretty important to, right? Or I might believe that be truly successful at the level I want I'd need to eat a healthy diet, but I eat at McDonalds twice a day, or....what is it for you? And what does it take to begin doing more of what really matters?
Happy New Year!
Book Review – Aspire!
I have recently been introduced to the book Aspire! Discovering Your Purpose Through the Power of Words by Kevin Hall. 
I love to be surprised and this book surprised me in many ways. There is so much in the personal development community that has become tired and re-hashed, but I found this book to be a breath of fresh air. I was originally very skeptical with the premise that understanding the origin of words could make any real difference in ones life, let alone help someone discover their purpose in life. In the past when I've heard people pontificate about the origin of a particular word it has sounded like an academic exercise only of interest to those who enjoy reading dictionaries in their spare time.
NLP Eye Accessing Cues
Last week we described the basics of NLP Representational Systems and how to identify how another person is representing their own internal model of the world. This week we are going to refine this a bit more by showing how the eyes reveal important information and and we'll follow that up with an article that will really explain how to put all this information together into useful applications.
Eye Accessing Cues
In the early days of NLP, Bandler and Grinder noticed that people who were visual tended to look up when accessing their thoughts; auditory people tended to look sideways; and kinesthetic people tended to look down. These are somewhat generalizations, but are surprisingly accurate. In addition they noticed that if you ask someone a question that requires that they acccess an image (e.g. "What did your first car look like?") about how something looks that they are remembering they will look to a different side than if you ask them to "make up" up an image (e.g. What would George Bush look like in a mini-dress and stiletto heels?"). So for the first question, it's quite likely (better than average chance) the person will look up to their left (at least for a moment), but for the second question they will look up and to their right. The same basic pattern applies for accessing auditory representations. It's useful to distinguish between what is called "Auditory Analog" and "Auditory Digital" as well. Digital refers to words and analog refers to anything else you would hear including tones, tempo, pitch, etc. So when someone is generating internal self-talk they will tend to access Auditory Digital (down to the left).
