Be all you can be

This story reminds us that our expectations play a significant role in the results we create.

A Chicago school teacher was faced with a 6th grade class which was full of misfits who were so intractable she suspected they had learning difficulties. In desperation, she broke a school rule and looked into her students' files. There she found their individual IQ scores - and was amazed: most of her students had IQs in the high 120s and 130s. That's pretty close to genius.

Armed with this knowledge, the teacher decided they needed more, not less challenging assignments. So she upped the level of homework and doled out stern punishments for misbehaviour.

By the end of the semester, the turnaround was dramatic. Her class was among the best behaved and most successful in the entire grade.

When the school principal asked the teacher how she had achieved such a turnaround, she confessed to accessing the school files.

The principal decided to overlook her rule-breaking, but did add some insight of his own. As she turned to go back to her classroom he told the teacher: "By the way, I think you should know: those numbers next to the kids' names? It's not their IQ scores, it's their locker numbers."

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NLP in business

What is NLP?

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a way of understanding how to organise your thinking, language and behaviour to produce successful outcomes in whatever area of your life you wish to change. Everyone is different: we each create a unique, internal map of the world from incoming data which we filter through our five senses. NLP provides an extremely powerful methodology of changing and directing the resultant behavioural patterns to our greatest advantage.

Neuro : the nervous system - how we experience and process information through the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell)
Linguistic : verbal and non-verbal communication which we use to encode and give meaning
Programming : the underlying patterns through which we achieve desired goals or results

Our behaviour stems from our thought patterns, memories, values... If we can educate ourselves in self-awareness, we can transform our subjective experience and become happier, focused, more effective. With the help of your NLP therapist you can change your mental maps to lead a fuller and richer life.

Neuro Linguistic Programming was created through the work of Richard Bandler, a mathematician and John Grinder, professor of linguistics who were exploring rapid ways to achieve excellence in communication. Their approach was to model people who were acknowledged experts at what they did (such as the great hypnotherapist, Milton Eriksson, and top therapists Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir). Because they studied the underlying structure of how these leading lights ‘re-presented’ strategies and beliefs in their minds, they were able to develop a set of guiding principles and a range of techniques. They were modelling the best… and creating a roadmap in the process. As a result, not only does NLP offer a way to quickly and efficiently change belief patterns and behaviours, the process itself can be ‘content-free’.

Put simply, NLP is the shorthand for a set of techniques that can literally transform your life in minutes and hours, rather than weeks and years.