Why People (Even Trained in NLP) Don’t Always Get Around To It

© Richard Bolstad

Paradoxical Results

NLP is the study of success. And yet, as an NLP trainer, I notice that by and large the people who become most successful after NLP Training are those who already were beginning to succeed.

Some factors outside of learning NLP itself seem to have a powerful effect on whether they actually achieve the success they want in the real world. People who study NLP usually get better at talking about success. Why do they not always get better at achieving it? Why, in fact, do they sometimes collect more rationalizations for their failure to achieve? Interesting to you? That’s what this article sets out to answer.

A friend commented to me one day that it was rare to find someone who achieved as many of the things they planned as I do. Actually, many of the things I intend to do never happen, at least in the way I first intended. But if you listen to people talking and keep track of it, you may notice that most people are actually doing only a very small percentage of the things they want to do. Research in the workplace reveals that the correlation between what people believe they will get done and what they actually do is 0.2 (ie they are about 20% right). College students take on average three weeks longer to complete their senior thesis than what they thought were their most “realistic estimates”. They take –on average- one week longer than their “worst case scenario”. (Dunning, Heath and Suls, 2005).

What enables us to “get around to it” when we actually do?

Defining Action

“As we start the new year on this first day of January, January 1^st, the first day of the new year, we remove all negative thoughts, and remind ourselves how competent, intelligent, and… Who am I kidding? I’m sorry, I give up.” – Stuart Smalley, who is described as “a caring nurturer and a member of several 12 step programs (but not a licensed therapist)” in Al Franken’s parody of motivational books “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!”, 1992.

Action Theory is the branch of Psychology which studies how people get to do a very specific kind of behaviour – behaviour that they intend to do as opposed to behaviour that “just happens”. Cranach et alia define “action” as “goal-directed, conscious, planned and intended behaviour by an actor.”  (1980, p 77). In Action Theory, action (by definition) emerges from intention, which in turn emerges from motivation. Action Theory, like NLP, has studied the concepts of values, needs, beliefs, identity and spirituality as motivation engines. It’s interesting to get an outside perspective on these NLP terms (values, needs, beliefs, identity and spirituality).

Feather conceives of values as “organized summaries of experience that capture the focal, abstracted qualities of past encounters, that have a normative or oughtness quality about them, and that function as criteria or frameworks against which present experience can be tested…. they are not affectively neutral abstract structures. They are tied to our feelings and can function as general motives.” (Feather, 1990, p. 159). To simplify, values:

1. Are abstract concepts formed from our previous experiences.
2. Give us a measure to compare our present experiences to.
3. Are criteria saying what we believe “ought” to happen in our present experiences.
4. Have an emotional rather than rational structure.

Nuttin says needs are both “the dynamics of growth and development inherent in human being.” And “a category of required relationships of the individual with his world” (Nuttin, 1984). Chapman and Skinner further explain that the development of motivation is also dependent on our beliefs about the chance that our actions can help us reach our goals, and our beliefs about the effect that these goals will have on reaching our needs and values (Chapman and Skinner, 1985, p.204). For example, it may occur to me that I could tidy my office. Having a tidy office, then, is my goal, and I may imagine that this will help me meet a value of mine to have “order” in my life. My motivation to do the action of tidying will depend on

• my belief that I am capable of tidying my office.
• My belief that tidying my office will contribute to the feeling of order that I value.

Such beliefs, Action Theory suggests, depend as much on a person’s self-assessment as on an assessment of the environment in which they will act. People use their sense of “identity” to make such assessments, in a sense asking “Am I a person who is able to do this?” Identity is an emergent property constructed out of all the previously mentioned responses (values, needs, beliefs, motivations, goals) as well as a personal history to make sense of this cluster. Marcia defines Identity as “an internal self-constructed, dynamic organization of drives, abilities, beliefs and individual history” (Marcia, 1980, p.126).

Leshan Li is an Action Theorist who adds another dimension to this system of motivation, by referring to what NLP would call spirituality. He says “In Chinese Taoism, the concept of self means “Tian-Ren-He-Yi.” “Tian” means sky, nature, the law of the nature, the environment. “Ren” is human being. “He” means “combine”, and “Yi” means “as wholeness,” “unity,” “oneness,” or “entity.” “Nature-Human-as-an-Entity” is one of the fundamental points of view in various traditional philosophies of China…. The highest human desire is a harmonic, simple, organic coupling of structures, or the consensual relationship [between the way of action of the human being and the way of nature or the Tao].” (Leshan Li, 1999, p 20-21). Here, Leshan is suggesting that our highest motivation is in fact spiritual; it is to feel that our own action path is harmonised or naturally linked with the path of the universe around us.

This clearly links action theory to Robert Dilts’ neurological levels model as used in NLP (O’Connor and Seymour, 1990, p 88-92):

Intention In The Brain

The notion of “action”, remember, is based on the idea of behaviour plus intention. Kuhl et alia say that “intention is the symbolic representation of one´s current goal.” (1991, p. 83). Action Theory pays attention to the way that “desires” or “wishes” are transformed into intentions, in order to generate action. In the last decade there has been quite a bit of research into where intention happens in the brain. Chris Frith and colleagues at the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology in London had subjects lying under a PET (Positron Emission Tomography) brain scanner for two hours while they performed a simple task; lifting their finger. Sometimes, the researchers told the subjects to lift the left finger, sometimes to lift the right finger, and sometimes to decide themselves which finger to lift. When the person made their own decision, the neurologists saw a very specific area of the brain light up: the area where autonomous intentions are created. This area is at the side of the frontal cortex (Carter, 1998, p 24). In clinical depression and in cases of schizophrenia where apathy is the key symptom, this same area of the brain is chronically under-active (Carter, 1998, p 160). The depressed person does not use this ability to create “intention”. Conversely, abandoning intentional actions leads to a shutdown of this area and to depression.

The frontal cortex of the brain was first studied in the 19^th century, when an American railway worker named Phineas Gage had a steel rod blown through the front of his skull as a result of a mistimed explosion. Gage survived, but the injury transformed him from a purposeful, industrious worker into a drunken drifter. His doctor described the new Gage as “at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned… a child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, yet with the animal passions of a strong man.” (Carter, 1998, p 25-28).

What is interesting to me as an NLP trainer is that Phineas Gage still had the ability to construct plans; he simply was unable to commit his mind to them in a way that allowed him to carry them through to completion.

Challenge 1: The Magic Of Failure Or The Magic Of Success

“I will drive an ice cream truck in Tahiti. Go ahead. You tell my inner child that’s unrealistic.” – Stuart Smalley

When people are not so good at setting and achieving their outcomes, they sometimes look to NLP to help them. That makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, they sometimes think that NLP will give them a magic trick that helps them to reach their outcomes while they stay the same as they were before. They imagine that NLP is supposed to do its work almost without their participation. Actually, NLP is intended to show you how to change yourself so that you can achieve your outcomes. In a previous article (Bolstad, 2005, p 10-12) I mentioned that NLP Practitioners are often more introverted rather than extroverted. When NLP consultants don’t get enough clients to come and see them, they often revert to their time-tested introverted ways of solving the problem. They tidy up their house and visualize abundance, they read more inspiring books and write new affirmations. These are all useful things to do. It’s just that they are doing anything except getting out and talking to people! This is not “NLP”; it’s just another way of avoiding change! NLP involves modeling excellence and doing it.

On one Master Practitioner training, I had a young man come up to me and express puzzlement about the failure of his goalsetting at his NLP Practitioner training. He had placed a goal on his time line, which was that within a year he would be in a loving intimate relationship with a woman. “Well,” he said disappointedly, “It didn’t work!”

“Wow,” I gasped, “So what places did you go where you might meet women?” 

There was a look of surprise on his face. “Oh,” he explained, “I’m more the introverted sort. I don’t go out many places.”  

Now, to me, that just doesn’t make sense. When I wake up the morning of an NLP Training, I know I need to actually get up and do some things (get dressed, drive to the venue etc). I don’t lie in bed thinking “Well, if the universe really wants this NLP training to happen, it will manifest itself where I am. People will find me, and accept me the way I am.” Similarly, the day before the NLP training, I need to set up the room, and check my plans for the training. I don’t just sit around thinking, “Well, if the universe wants this training to happen, the room will be suitable… and whatever happens there will be right for us in some way.” Furthermore, a few weeks before the training, I want to get out advertising so that people can find out about the training. I don’t just lie there thinking “Well, if the universe really wants this training to happen, it will happen.”

Of course, when my whole “being” is aligned with my intention to run a training, it is much more likely that “magical” things will happen. Two weeks before my second NLP Practitioner training, I realized that I needed four more people to make up the numbers. I put that goal on my time line. Within two days, the four people contacted us, and two of them said they were calling because they had a dream that they were on my training. That seems pretty “freaky” to me. However, if I didn’t do any advertising, I think that would be a good hint that something inside me wasn’t quite aligned with the goal of making up the numbers for a full training. And, returning to the Master Practitioner who didn’t go out to meet people, I think that is also a hint that something in him wasn’t quite ready to reach his goal of a loving relationship. He reset the goal, did some action, and was married within the year.

Lynn Timpany (2005, p 3) tells a very similar story: “At a recent practitioner training I was having a conversation with one of the participants who was extolling the virtues and dramatic impact that goal setting had on him. He told me that he was really clear about what he wanted to do in life and that he had a clear outcome for a healing centre where people could come to be rejuvenated and revitalized and benefit from the wonderful tools that NLP has to offer. He was very excited and inspired. I said “And what are you planning to be doing NOW about making that a reality?”  (a denominalisation type question). He looked at me in total bewilderment and aghast horror and said “Whaddya mean?  Get a job!!??” ”

Lynn suggests that we ask our clients not just what they will be doing differently once they have achieved their outcome, but before then, “And what will you be doing and thinking differently in any now moment when you are totally aligned toward this outcome?” (ambiguity intended)

This emphasises an important difference between fantasising and “manifesting” real results. Both are useful, and Robert Dilts emphasises that in successful creativity, the “dreamer” state is followed by a “realist” state and then a “crtic” state (Dilts, Epstein and Dilts, 1991).

Solution: Plan regular, sustained action in the material world to reach your goal. Use the amount of actual action you are doing as a measure of your inner congruity with your goal.

Challenge 2: Living Other People’s Fantasies Or Living One’s Own Vision

“Say it. “I am a genius!”…. Everybody’s a genius! In their own special way. It may be the way you tie your shoe or… I don’t know, the way you breathe…. How about that, Critical Inner Voice! You’re not so smart now, are you? Ha ha!” – Stuart Smalley

One significant reason why people do not reach their own goals is that they get sidetracked into other people’s goals. “Just follow our proven system and the odds are substantially in your favor to become an enlightened millionaire. All you have to do is read this book and travel the path.” Say Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen in their now famous book that almost parodies all previous get-rich-quick books. I got myself on television again last year as a result of their book. Two young New Zealand women, one of them well trained in NLP, took up their challenge and decided to become millionaires in a year. The two women had the support of some extraordinary mentors, including some of New Zealand’s own self-made millionaires. Their results are important. Over the course of the year, they re-adjusted their goal and set about earning money in a much more pragmatic way, by seeing clients. I think this was a brilliant adventure for these two people to embark on and their learnings were phenomenal. My actual concerns are about people who have read the “One Minute Millionaire” or some similar book, and yet not learned those lessons.

Firstly, as an NLP trainer, what seems most unfortunate about the “One Minute Millionaire” approach to me is the risk that belief in other people’s fantasies replaces belief in one’s own ability to act and get results. Remember I said earlier that “the development of motivation is dependent on our beliefs about the chance that our actions can help us reach our goals, and our beliefs about the effect that these goals will have on reaching our needs and values”. Firstly, having a goal of earning money does not mean that our needs and values will be met. If your goal is to be happy, then being an instant millionaire is not the proven system you might have thought. “Positive psychology theorists marvel at studies showing that quadriplegics, as a group, have a higher sense of well-being than lottery winners. The lottery winners, we can guess, were swept up in materialism and betrayed by it, while the quadriplegics had to adjust to their conditions and in so doing learned to appreciate the fact of being alive. More, quadriplegics must struggle daily – must work for everything they attain – while lottery winners may lay around snapping their fingers and expecting others to deliver contentment to them.” (Easterbrook, 2003, p 222).

Secondly, the focus on other people’s achievements is one of the most effective ways for destroying one’s own motivation. I have talked to people who “give up before they start” because they compare their own achievements with the most successful people they have heard of, and then convince themselves that no action of their own will enable them to achieve those goals. “I know NLP. Why aren’t I as rich as Tony Robbins?” they ask. To add to the effect, often they compare themselves to several people at once. “All these people are achieving all these things,” they say, “And I’m achieving nothing.” Actually no ONE person is achieving “all these things”. If they reality tested and associated into the experience of the most successful people, they might well find that each successful person’s achievements are only in certain areas… that in areas such as health, or loving relationships, or spiritual awareness, the person who has achieved certain career goals may not be so successful at all. Since his sensational rise to fame, Tony Robbins has coped with a heart attack and a divorce. There’s lots to admire in Tony’s work, AND I’m not sure it’s safe to envy him unconditionally.

David and Roger Johnson (in Kohn, 1986, P47) reviewed 122 research studies on how co-operation or competition affect individual success. In only 8 of these studies did competition seem to help. In 114 studies, people co-operating were far more successful, and felt better about their achievement at the end. Airline pilots who are competing against each other fly less safely than those who co-operate. Scientists who are competing for honours make less scientific advances. Robert Helmreich studied large groups of PhD scientists, business-people, students, and airline pilots showing that competitiveness was negatively related to achievement in every case. Helmreich’s most dramatic results were in the business sector. He points out that the higher success rates of businesspeople with a co-operative attitude “dramatically refute the contention that competitiveness is vital to a successful business career.” (Kohn, 1986, p 52-53). The reason is very simple.  Competition requires paying attention to how the other person is doing.  Success requires paying attention to how you are doing. The competitive businessperson is like an athlete running a race while looking over their shoulder to check the other runners.

One of the characteristic results of being other focused is that a person finds themselves pulled from goal to goal depending on who they associate with. They attend a course on NLP and they want to be an NLP trainer. The next week they attend a course on Psychodrama and they want to be a psychodrama director. The following week they attend a course on real estate investing and they want to be a real estate agent. There is a saying that chi kung trainers in China often quote: “The master always makes the same choice.” It’s true in any field. The most successful people in a field tend to be those who stick to their choice and stay in that field. They become masters simply because they keep doing it until they get it right. When people expect everything to go perfectly the first time, they easily convince themselves that their latest scheme is not going to work.

Solution: Simplify. Set your own goals and stay with them. Keep making the same choice. Do one thing at a time. Compare yourself only to your own goals, rather than to anyone else.

Challenge 3: What To Do With Your Time

“There’s so much stuff I have to do. My laundry…. I have to make a list, then lose it! But you know what? I’m going to see a movie. And not one that will in any way broaden my horizons. I’m going to see a comedy.” – Stuart Smalley

While the universe has unlimited possibilities, each day has a specified number of hours to actualize some of these possibilities (twenty four, in case you’re keeping track). One of the most significant ways not to get around to action is to have too many competing outcomes. Dr Ned Hallowell of Harvard medical school is a psychiatrist specializing in hyperactivity studies (1994). He suggests that our culture has come to glorify the symptoms of hyperactivity (trying to do several things at once) and that many people who underachieve are simply “unable to focus”. Glenn Wilson, a psychologist at King’s College, London, has some research which demonstrates that this problem is more about the strategies people learn than about their “brain chemicals”. Wilson carried out clinical trials commissioned by the IT firm Hewlett Packard. He studied the effect of having office workers respond to emails as they arrived at their computer, rather than leaving them until a chosen time. They experienced increasing tiredness and inability to focus. The (temporary) attention reduction was comparable to an average IQ loss of 10 points (Wainwright, 2005).

Emails, text messages, and phone calls are examples of “urgent” tasks that trick us into confusing “urgent” with “important”. A task can be very urgent and yet completely unimportant, as when, for example, when an email tells me that I must reply immediately to buy a winning lottery ticket. Some people have used urgency as their main motivation strategy. They know that they do things that are urgent, so they delay things until the feeling of urgency is strong enough to trigger action. Imagine a businessperson who responds in this way. They get their work done just before each deadline. The risk is twofold. Firstly there is the risk that they only do what is urgent. By only responding to what is urgent, they miss out on doing things that could be of enormous long term benefit, such as planning a new marketing strategy for their business. Secondly, there is the risk that they also do a lot of things that are urgent but are an almost complete waste of time. An example would be sending away for free information about office products which are on special this week; when they already know they do not want to purchase those products. The task has to be done this week if it is to be done. It is urgent. It is also completely unimportant.

By listing all the tasks I want to get done at a particular time, I can classify them in four quadrants (Tracy, 2004). Tasks that are urgent AND important to me will be done first. In the payment example, paying an overdue electricity bill would probably come into this category. Next in priority come tasks that are important but not urgent. These are the tasks that often get left out altogether. For example, paying off my credit card debt is important because it saves me a lot of money, but it is not urgent because the nice people at the credit card company will keep lending me the money as long as I pay a small amount each month. The third priority is to do those things that are urgent but not important. These can be done if I decide to. Some of these can be deleted from my list (as with the generous offer from the lottery on my email spam). The fourth quadrant contains things that are neither important nor urgent. In payments, this might include buying clothes that are on sale, “just in case I might wear them later”. The more I can delete of these non-urgent and non-important tasks, the more time I free up to do what really matters.

The Four Categories For The To do List

Of course, there’s a crucial presupposition in this diagram: the assumption that I know what is important to me! People who get things done tend to be clear what they want to get as a result of their actions (this is a core part of action theory, described above). NLP Practitioners have often listed their values hierarchy for some key areas of their life… they have not always used this values list as they look down their list of “to-do” projects. (Sometimes they don’t even have a “to-do” list).

There’s another important part of the time-management process. It’s estimating the time required to do each task. Remember that people sometimes compare themselves to “everyone else” and feel bad about not having achieved the combined results of 100 other people. Well, using a similar strategy, it’s possible for people to plan 100 tasks for the same day (taking one task at a time, imagining themselves completing it, and thinking how good that will be, and then imagining the next task being completed, but not noticing that they are planning to do it at the same time as the last one). The person can then tell themselves off for only doing the one task that was possible in the 24 hour day.

Once you start allotting time to your to-do list you may discover that you repeatedly underestimate the amount of time that each task will take. This feels good when you do the estimate (because it means you can imagine achieving more) but it’s just not so much fun later. I remember working with a student who was always late for his classes. When I asked him how he planned his time to get that result, he explained to me that whenever he imagined traveling to the university to his class, he visualized getting green lights all the way and finding a parking space right outside the building. This sounds like wonderful visualization. In the real world, there tended to be an average of ten minutes waiting at red lights and searching for a park each day. He was routinely and reliably ten minutes late for class. Another thing that happens once people start estimating times is that they discover how much time it really takes to do everyday tasks such as preparing meals and getting dressed in the morning. These routine tasks are often done in unconscious mode, so that they become invisible, and so people wonder where the first couple of hours of every day disappear to.

Solution: Identify and prioritize your values for each area of life. List on paper all the things you want to get done, and classify them by the four quadrants. Do first what is important! Learn to realistically estimate how much time each task will take.

Challenge 4: Some Strange Internal Motivation Strategies

“As my Uncle Frank used to say “Worrying is paying interest on money you’ll probably never borrow.” Of course Uncle Frank was killed on a trip to New York when a crane fell on him.” – Stuart Smalley

Of course, all the goalsetting and organizing in the world isn’t any use if a person doesn’t actually do what they have organized the time to do. When they sit down ready to work on their goals, or walk into the room where they plan to work on them, with the time prearranged and other tasks set aside, some people still manage not to do anything. There are two reasons:

• “Negative” states of mind, and…
• Lack of an effective motivation strategy

We know in NLP terms that both physiology (how we use our body) and cognition (how we use our mind) affect our emotional state. Some people are simply too tired to do much. In 1910, the average American slept 9.0 hours a night. By 1975, the total had fallen to 7.5 hours (Dement, 1997). The 2002 Sleep in America poll, conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, indicates that the average American adult now only sleeps 6.9 hours a night, leading to fatigue, exhaustion and other symptoms. Research shows that insufficient rest adversely affects the frontal cortex’s ability to control speech, access memory, and solve problems. Sleep deprivation directly affects the area of the brain most responsible for action towards goals. In a similar way, regular exercise is a significant factor in creating an emotional state for goal achievement. Just ten minutes of brisk walking lifts emotional mood for 60-90 minutes after (Thayer, 1996, p 23-24). Another physiological factor in goal achievement is diet, especially omega-3 intake. Omega-3 oils are found in fish oil, flaxseed oil and many other natural oils. Their lack in the modern diet seems related to severe drops in attention, and a modest daily supplement has been shown to quickly solve so-called “ADHD” symptoms in children (Richardson and Montgomery, 2005).

Most people have had the experience, at some past time, of their goal achievement being paralyzed by anxiety or feelings of depression. Isobel Menzies Lyth studied anxiety (not just work stress or long term burnout, but clinical anxiety) amongst nurses, and found that it was the core contributor to nurses abandoning their career, to their errors and poor job performance, and even to the social systems that were in place in the hospital – much of what nurses actually did in their interaction with staff and patients involved ritualized anxiety-avoidance (Menzies Lyth, 1988, p 43-85). Of course, for NLP Practitioners, this is all very familiar territory. The importance of learning to let go of regrets about past “failures”, to move away from self-torturing criticism and perfectionism, to be able to leave the future to emerge and to simply be present now… this is all understood in NLP. We have numerous methods to help a person step back into a resourceful state, including anchoring, submodality shifts, parts integration processes and time line healing processes. It is also useful to have psychic first aid techniques (relaxation processes) available to reduce the need for mood altering techniques which may themselves take much more time – techniques such as “retail therapy” or recreational drug use.

In one of the most lucid introductions to NLP ever published, Connirae and Steve Andreas identify four specific ways that people de-motivate themselves, and suggest solutions (Andreas and Andreas, 1989, p 155-165). They are:

1. The Negative Motivational Style. Some people get themselves out of bed in the morning by thinking about all the things that will go wrong if they don’t get up! They imagine being told off, having to do extra work etc until the pictures they see are so horrible that they get up to avoid them! This is NOT the way you get up when you’re on holiday. On holiday you get up by making pictures of all the things that you will be able to do if you get up now! Time to relax, time to see other things, time to enjoy… Thinking about those things is at least as powerful as the “away from” style, and the holiday mode is a lot better for your body (which you will want to live in, in order to keep on getting things done!)
2. The Dictator Motivational Style. This involves shouting at oneself in a harsh voice, telling oneself  “have to” “should” and “must”. We know where people learned this (in their childhood usually), but you may not have noticed that it never worked really well back then either! In fact, it resulted in the “victim” feeling resentful, going slow, and doing whatever it took to avoid things they were ordered to do. If a person keeps using it on themselves, it will reliably generate the same results! If you think of a time when you really desired something, you know that you have a totally different internal voice that is much more motivating than the Dictator’s voice. Change to the voice that sees the holiday pictures and says “I want that!”
3. The “Imagine Doing It” Motivational Style. This one is just a simple mistake.Imagine that you were going on a holiday to a beautiful tropical island. In order to motivate yourself to get there, would you imagine sitting in a travel agent’s office trying to match up flights and considering the costs? Or being stuck for three hours in an international “lounge” in an airport? Or packing and repacking all those things in the suitcase? Not usually! People usually let their imagination take them straight to the bit they are “looking forward to” – the beach. But have you noticed what you do when you want to motivate yourself to do the housework? Some people just imagine themselves bent over a vacuum cleaner. That is NOT the fun part of housework. The fun part of housework might be when you have friends visit and they say “Wow – what an amazing house; how do you keep it so tidy!” … or when you come home from a long day at work and everything is ready to nurture you! It’s much more motivating to see a movie fast forward through the less exciting bits to the exciting end results that you are doing this for.
4. The Overwhelm Motivational Style. Your conscious mind can only manage 7 ± 2 (Seven plus or minus two) bits of information at a time (Miller, Galanter and Pribram, 1960). If you imagine too much at once it will behave like the Windows desktop when too many files are opened. It will go slower and then jam. The surest way to put yourself off doing something like brushing your teeth would be to calculate how many times a year you probably do that (maybe 700) and multiply that by 20 to consider the next twenty years (14,000) and ask yourself what the point of doing it all is. The task would seem daunting if you tried to do it that way. In reality, you only need to brush them once – next time. You will never have to brush them 14,000 times – ever… unless you imagined it. Because only one brushing ever occurs at one time. In the same way, you will never have to “pay all your bills at one time”, or “fix up everything that needs fixing up in your house at one time” or “do all the business marketing tasks you ever heard about at one time”. Real life only allows you to live 60 seconds per minute. If you were feeling overwhelmed, you were simply trying to get more for your minute. It’s more fun to imagine tasks one at a time, and fast forward the movie from this very next task to the end result you want.

Solution: Ensure you are nourishing your body with daily sleep, exercise and food. Take the time to let go of anxiety, depression and self-critical thought, and use NLP change processes to install resourceful strategies. Consciously practice motivating yourself towards enjoyable end results, using a pleasant, almost seductive internal voice, and doing one task at a time.

Challenge 5: Decisions (Revisited)

“This book will not be perfect. Even though I want it to be. Which is my problem – I’m a perfectionist! And that’s okay. It’s my problem, and I am owning my problem!… I will not rewrite!” – Stuart Smalley

There’s one final piece to the puzzle of why people don’t do the things they intend to do. I mentioned it at the beginning and I want to return to it in more detail now… decisions! Highly successful people tend to be able to make decisions quicker than others and stick to them longer than others (Tichy and Charan, 1989). The more important a decision is, the more factors are likely to be involved, the more complex the system you are working in is, and therefore the more you will need to accept that you will be making the decision without a complete catalogue of all the facts. If you want to make more important decisions than you have been used to, then you will need to come to terms with this sense of working in what science calls “chaotic” systems. Another way of describing this is to say that you will want to use your intuition more, and your sense of having all the facts less. In his study of 150 top business leaders, NLP trainer Dr Harry Alder found that this was the core skill they shared – intuitive decision making (Alder, 1995).

Often, people who do not achieve things are operating on the belief that the more important the project, the more perfect it should be. Actually, large and complex systems do not lend themselves to perfection. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in his essay on self-reliance, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” (Emerson, 1983). One can see the anguish that people who demand perfection in their projects endure. In the end, all successful projects are incomplete and imperfect. That is the beauty of life. This is not some complex philosophical truth. It’s just the stuff you learned as a child. It means accepting that some decisions will not be perfect, when looked back at from later on… but they still were often a better choice than no choice. When the ice-cream seller comes by, I may need to choose an ice-cream flavour while she or he is here. Later, I may wish I had stuck to my tried and tested favourite flavour, AND I may still know that choosing some flavour of ice-cream is better than giving up on getting any ice-cream.

Effective decision makers spend less time regretting old decisions; more time planning new ones.

Secondly, by decision, I mean a thought which is irrevocably followed by action, so that the decision and the action are the same thing. By a decision to ski down a ski slope, I don’t mean the thought that it might be interesting to try that… I mean the thought that occurs the moment before a person pushes themselves forward down onto the ski-field!

Thirdly, to achieve things means to keep acting even though you have not reached your goal yet. By definition, if you want to achieve something, it hasn’t happened yet; if you want to manifest some result, it hasn’t appeared yet. People who actually get things achieved and manifest results, then, are people who are able to live in a real situation where their result does not exist, and yet visualize it so convincingly that they keep acting as if it is guaranteed to exist.

People who do not achieve things tend to operate on a belief that if it isn’t here yet, it never will be. They rationalize this by saying, “If it’s meant to happen, then it will be easy.” This is just another way of saying that they are not willing to do the work to make it happen, because they are unable to hold the vision of success in their head when there is contradictory information around them. Most people have heard the story of how Thomas Edison tried over 1000 materials before he found one that would enable the electric light to work, or the story of how Colonel Sanders went to over 1000 restaurants before he found one willing to buy his Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe. They were lucky they didn’t operate on this theory that “If it’s meant to happen it should be easy.”

For those readers who believe that manifesting results is a matter of asking the universe for help (the social-welfare-benefit theory of cosmology) I would suggest the following reframe: the universe is waiting to see whether you really want this result, and will really cherish it. It doesn’t just give amazing results to anyone who has a momentary thought about them; it gives amazing results to those who will stay committed to those results and use them well. Maybe the universe is even sending the most challenges to people who are going to achieve the most extraordinary results. Anyway, who are you to second-guess the universe? If you really want to know what the universe is guiding you to do, check what feels right FOR YOU, in your heart, and keep doing whatever it takes to be true to that guidance.

Solution: Exercise your decision-making “mental muscles” and make major decisions efficiently. Stay with them beyond what is easy and trust that you are developing skills to show the universe what you genuinely want to manifest.

Collecting The Solutions:

Successfully getting the things done that you want to get done requires more than just visioning. It requires using the Intention area of the frontal cortex to convert wishes into actions. People act when they believe that their actions will help them meet their goals, nourish their values, support their identity and allow them to unfold spiritually. The most common blocks to such action can be resolved by the following solutions.

Solution 1: Plan regular, sustained action in the material world to reach your goal. Use the amount of actual action you are doing as a measure of your inner congruity with your goal.

Solution 2: Simplify. Set your own goals and stay with them. Keep making the same choice. Do one thing at a time. Compare yourself only to your own goals, rather than to anyone else.

Solution 3: Identify and prioritize your values for each area of life. List on paper all the things you want to get done, and classify them by the four quadrants. Do first what is important! Learn to realistically estimate how much time each task will take.

Solution 4: Ensure you are nourishing your body with daily sleep, exercise and food. Take the time to let go of anxiety, depression and self-critical thought, and use NLP change processes to install resourceful strategies. Consciously practice motivating yourself towards enjoyable end results, using a pleasant, almost seductive internal voice, and doing one task at a time.

Solution 5: Exercise your decision-making “mental muscles” and make major decisions efficiently. Stay with them beyond what is easy and trust that you are developing skills to show the universe what you genuinely want to manifest.

Richard Bolstad is an NLP trainer and one of the most prolific writers in the NLP field. He is pleased with his ability to get things done. He can be contacted at email richard@transformations.org.nz

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