Visioning and Review is, in my opinion, one of the most useful habit structures you could make for yourself. It takes ideas from what is called Well-Formed Outcomes in NLP and from The Law of Attraction. The idea is to habitually create a vision of what you want out of life situations and to review your progress towards that vision. This habit has additional benefits to learning.

Building a Vision

What do you want? What would you see, hear, feel, taste and smell if you had it? What would it look like if you were watching yourself now that you’ve achieved it? What would it look like if you were looking out your own eyes having achieved this for yourself? Who would be there with you? Where would you be? What does this feeling of enjoying what you have already achieved, feel like? What would happen if you made the sounds louder, the vision bigger and brighter and the feelings more intense?

Having built this vision, having been there, is this still what you want? If not make any necessary changes and repeat the above. Stop when you have it perfect. Give this vision a name, and make a gesture to go with the name. This grounds it in a real-time visual, auditory and kinesthetic anchor.

Motivational Structure

So… this is what you want. Now, why do you want it? What does getting this get you? What does getting that get you? What does moving towards the vision above move you away from? Why do you want to move away from that? Repeat these questions as far as you can. Can you see the reasons that you are moving toward pulling you forward and the things you are moving away from pushing you forward? Can you feel both of these forces helping you move in the direction of you vision? What does it sound like to be moved like this?

Actioning

Thinking back on your vision, how does the version of you who achieved what you want to achieve differ in their behaviour from what you have been doing until now? How are their habits different? How do they look at the world differently than how you have been? If you were the you that achieved what you want, what would they decide needed to be done next? What the smallest, easiest, simplest thing that could start your path towards being that you? Now… dive in! Start doing those things.

Review and Re-Vision

Time has past. You’ve been acting on your vision, working towards it. Maybe it’s been a day, maybe a week, maybe a whole month. Time to review your progress. What has happened in relation to your vision? What has gone well? What hasn’t gone as well? What kinds of actions and styles of action on your part lead to things going well? What lead to things not going as well? Knowing what you know now, how would you change your behaviour? Where and when are you likely to be in a situation where this new understanding is going to be useful? What would happen if you applied this there?

Given your new life experiences, do you need to make any changes to your vision?

Building Habits

There are a variety of ways to build habits. One is to build the strategy of the action and then anchor it to the context where it will be useful. Another way to build a habit is simply… to do simple actions consistently and slowly add more parts later. I’d like you to do both of those with the Visioning and Review Process.

What would happen if every day when you get up you remembered and tweaked your vision? What would happen if every night before you go to bed you did a quick review of your progress? Try it for two weeks and find out.

Relationship Debugging

Your relationships are some of the most important things in your life and when they are troubled it can affect every other aspect of your life. I help you clean up the channels of communication to get more pleasing and fulfilling relationships for everyone involved.

Creative Process Coaching: From Concept to Draft

Do you have an idea burning to be expressed? A dream project that you just don’t know how to start? I can help you chart the course from concept to draft, help you build a method to create and express that idea.

Captivate your Audience: Build a Community, Tell your story

Social Media has opened up a wide plain of new ways to communicate with your clients and audiences and I can help you find a way to bootstrap that process.

Life Transition Coaching

Going through a major life transformation and feeling bewildered, befuddled and maybe a little afraid? I can help you get a handle on your emotions, survey this new territory and create a vision of the future you want.

Social Confidence Coaching

Do you want to have a more active social life but find yourself getting overwhelmed? I’ll help you build the skills and locate the opportunities you need to meet and connect with new and interesting people.

Custom Solutioning

Got a problem not addressed above? I’ll give you a half hour free session and we’ll see if I can’t come up with a custom plan for working on it.

PS

Direct any and all inquiries to coaching [at] edwardewilson [dot] com.

I moved recently. The act of moving forced me into a position of rethinking how I have been living my life in terms of Who I am and Where I am. The simple fact that I am in a new environment required that I change how I act to maintain congruence between my self and my environment

This lead me to the idea of CASE. CASE is the congruence of your action, self and environment. By examining and adjusting how your actions express yourself in relation to the contextual environment you are in you increase your effectiveness and reduce stress.

No matter where you are it takes place in the context of an environment of other factors. This extends from where you live and work to social media environments like twitter and facebook. As the environment you are acting within changes, different actions become appropriate and effective. It’s not a good idea to act in a bank like you do in a bar.

Congruence is a kind of balanced matching between elements. When your action is congruent it fits, it fits with you and it fits with where you are. There are different ways to congruence but however you do it, your actions get easier and more effective.

I’m thinking about self primarily in terms of capabilities and desires. What are you trying to acheive and what are you capable of doing towards those ends? If you aren’t taking these factors into account you’ll never really be congruent, you’ll be subsumed in your environment. People do this all the time at work. They’ve adapted to their jobs but forgotten why they are working there.

Of course, the key to this is your actions. It is through your actions that you express yourself and your intentions. It is your actions that must be adapted to pursue those intentions in terms that fit the environmental context.

When I moved my actions had to change. The resources available to me had changed. But the move provided another opportunity. It allowed me a context where it made sense to think about how my actions reflected what I wanted, where I was and whether there was congruency between these factors.

But you don’t need to move to get the same opportunity. Just take a moment to think about the environments you act in, and what you want, and whether your actions encourage congruency between these things or incongruency.

PS

I can help you apply this in your work or personal life. And will do so for money. Email me at coaching [at] edwardewilson [dot] com with any inquiries.

Almost everyone seems to have a problem remembering names. This is something that I’ve become much better at over the last year. As I’ve said to people who have asked me why I’m so good at remembering names, I’m good at it because I used to be so bad at it. I made a decision that I would get much better at remembering people’s names. What follows are some of my tricks and tips to improving your name memory.

That’s the first step, making remembering of names very important for you. I was just coming out of a relationship and I was meeting a lot of new people in a context where I’d see a lot of them again. Remembering their names was a key part of integrating into that social context. I made sure to ask people’s names, to re-ask if I forgot and to use their names as much as possible. If I were to see them again I would attempt to use their name, even when I wasn’t sure.

You can always pre-frame an attempted remembering by making it a half question. For example, “I’m really bad with names, was your name Sandy?” If you are right they’ll be happy, if you are wrong they’re usually happy you tried and will correct you. Almost everyone has had the experience of having trouble with other people’s names so people tend to be very understanding and helpful when things are framed this way.

The next thing I do is visualize the person’s name just above their head. I see it a bit like an old computer game with the characters name in a box above their head. Other people visualize a hello-my-name-is name tag on their forehead. I’ll visualize their name above their head and take a mental snapshot of the now labeled face. We remember faces easier than names in part because most people have an easier time with visual recall than auditory.

To enrich this visual cue, you can also say their name again and this time, feel how your mouth moves when saying it. Try to connect the sight, the sound, and the feeling together. This might be weird the first few times you do it but it can become second nature after a while. By connecting all three senses together the neurological representation of the person and their name is very rich and you have much greater odds of recalling it.

Then I work on creating vivid associations with this person and their name. The more things you remember that the person and name are associated with, the more tied into your memory they become. I aim to connect their name to six things as a target. You could connect them to the context where you met them, mutual acquaintances, shared interests, what they do for a living, the meaning of their name, etc. The richer and more varied each of those associated bits are, the better. I like to visualize an image of each of those associations connected to their name a bit like a mind map.

After meeting someone a brief review of what you know about them, or what you associate with them, can vastly improve your later recall of their name. After I got back from something where I meet a lot of new people I like to run through who I met and what was interesting about each of them just to solidify them in my head. Reviewing twice, once after meeting and once after leaving helps.

The last little trick I do is the circle of names. Basically when you are meeting with a group of people  I go through and say, out loud or in my head depending on appropriateness, the name of everyone in order of where they are positioned in space. I usually go around clockwise. This connects spatial organization and ordering to the memories. Everyone is linked to the people on either side of them and by their position in the whole group.

With those four tactics, making names important to you, visualizing their name, building rich associations and the circle of names, I vastly improved my ability to remember people’s names. And you can too. Try them out and let me know how it works for you. Feel free, also, to share your best trick for remembering names in the comments.

If you like this article feel free to give it a thumbs up on stumbleupon.

Meta skills are skills about other skills. These are the skills that form a foundation that other NLP learning is based on. The meta skills are abstract and are like a particular way of organizing your more direct skills. If you have the meta skills, acquiring sub-skills will be easier and more focused. Mastering the meta skills is a major landmark on the path to NLP mastery.

Outcome Focus

Outcome focus is going into any situation or interaction knowing what you want out of it. It is having a clear and positive intention for the interaction.If you don’t know what you want how will you know if you get it? With out this the rest falls apart. The main thing in order to get it is to think before any given interaction, what do I want from this? The next thing is to apply the wellformedness conditions for desired states. They are in brief the goal must be stated in the postitives, initiated and maintained by the person who desires it, defined and evaluated according to sensory based evidence, made to perserve the positive by-products of the present condition, and appropriate to fit your existing relationships. I like to make a picture, or movie, in my head of the outcome I want along with the sounds I’ll hear and the feelings I’ll feel.

Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking is the ability to compare where you are now with where you want to get and have an idea about what to do in order to move you in that direction. Strategic thinking also involves an understanding of the larger process leading from the starting condition to the desired outcome. Having strategic thinking makes the process of leading situations towards your desires more directed and effective. To get strategic thinking, first you want to have your various behaviour patterns trained into unconscious competence so you don’t have to think about them. Next, you want to unpack the larger structure of what is being presented to your sensory acuity. You are building a model of that larger structure in your head. Then you compare what you are being presented with your desired outcome. Finally, with your understanding of the larger structure try a technique that might move the situation in the direction you want.

Sensory Acuity

Sensory acuity is training your senses to pick out of whatever situation you are in that which is useful to you. Having sensory acuity allows you to get the information you need from people’s communications and allows you to experience things more fully. It is a vital component of knowning if you are getting the response you want. You get sensory acuity by learning what to pay attention to. For example, learning to sort for incongruities, eye accessing cues and tonality shifts.

Behavioral Flexibility

Behavioral flexibility is having a lot of options for the actions you can take and being able to switch tactics easily and smoothly. Having behavioural flexibility allows you to more easily get to the results you want. If something you try doesn’t work, you can simply try something else. You get behaviour flexibilty by learning many skills to the point of unconscious competance and bing willing to jump in and try things. The more patterns you are comfortable using with unconscious competance, the more flexible you can be.

If you like this article feel free to give it a thumbs up on stumbleupon.