I hope that your world is rocking at the moment. Spring is a fantastic time of year in the UK, with the leaves coming on the trees, the plants and shrubs starting to grow again. I am extremely excited in particular this year as some of my plans are coming to fruition and I hope to be able to get some really positive, life enhancing material out into the world throughout the remainder of this year.

As well as running our highly successful series of NLP training courses I have been writing a book, it is called Mind Management and Mindfulness. I am in the process of getting it published, so it should be available in the next couple of weeks (or sooner on Amazon Kindle). I’ll keep you posted in case you are interested.

Mind Management and NLP

Of course, NLP provides many tools that we can use in our mind management, some of which are revealed in my book. One of the key benefits of NLP processes is that they are quick to do and learn, and also they work really quickly. If you have a  problem or some sort of unwanted behaviour, then you really do not want it hanging around, do you? So NLP works really well in this type of situation.

Mindfulness

My book focusses on providing the tools to get the results that you want in life and specifically beating anxiety, stress and depression. This is where mindfulness comes in.

When I had a proper job (I just see it as having fun now) I used to work long hours, managing staff, budgets etc. I used to spend the week travelling from location to location in the UK, spending several nights a week in hotels. I enjoyed it at the time but looking back it was fairly stressful. It was the quantity of work and number of individual tasks that made it that way I think.

In order to deal with the workload I spent hour after hour when I was driving around  planning, prioritising and managing my workload. Effectively I was living in my head. I found it really difficult to switch off. When I was supposed to be relaxing my mind was still in overdrive with thoughts whizzing around ceaselessly. I found it tricky to sleep and even at weekends I would either be working or thinking about work. It never became a health threat to me, but it would have done eventually.

Fortunately I discovered some techniques that I could use to quieten my mind, relieve the stress and ensure that I was still able to remain focussed on what I wanted to achieve. These techniques are called Mindfulness.

What is Mindfulness? 

Mindfulness is a buzz word in psychotherapy at the moment, the reason is that anyone can learn to do it and it helps everyone, almost straight away!

The essence of it is that in our head we can be in one of three timeframes, past, present, or future. When we are in the past, then we are reliving memories. When we are in the future then we are planning or imagining future events, the rest of the time we are in the present. In the present we make use of our senses, paying attention to the world around us. In the present our mind is quiet and calm, there is no worry or anxiety, we are not consumed by thoughts of the past.  This is otherwise known as being in the now. Present moment awareness.

The aim of Mindfulness is not necessarily to be permanently in the now. This is nearly impossible and it also means that planning can be a problem!  The aim of Mindfulness is to enable you to get control over your thoughts, so that you are not spending unnecessary hours worrying about things that might never happen. The aim of Mindfulness is to give your mind and body a break from the stresses of everyday work and life.

Benefits of Mindfulness

Mindfulness teaches us to relax, it teaches us how to watch our thoughts so that we can decide which ones to play with and concentrate on. Over time Mindfulness enables us to find peace with ourselves and with others.

Like anything, Mindfulness takes practice to perfect but you can feel the benefits immediately. I now use the techniques all the time and our students have been getting some amazing results with our Mindfulness classes. Some students have described it as “learning to live again.”

I will share more with you soon and I will let you know when you can get a copy of the book and resulting online guided Mindfulness programme that will follow.

Just a final reminder that our online NLP training courses are still hugely discounted so if you are thinking of learning NLP then the time is now to go ahead.

Let me know your thoughts on Mindfulness and if you have had an experience with it that you would like to share then I would love to hear about it.

To your success

Anthony