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Last week, we saw that avoiding the negative word ‘not’ in our definition of goals sets the brain to go towards the goals, without any confusion. Goals must have contents, and avoid negations: Instead of telling ‘not this’, tell the brain to achieve ‘this’.
Another way to ensure that the brain is on track to achievement is to look for the ‘direction’ embedded in the command given to the brain.
Brain has a tendency to pin you down to familiar territory. Beyond the familiar boundaries, we suffer a kind of blind-spot; an inability to be aware of opportunities.
We can overcome that blind-spot by checking if the desire for development is ‘towards’ something or ‘away from’ something.
When you say I want to get away from this, you are taking about a world you are familiar with. Away from where you are
now! And your mind is stuck, looking at the very situation you do
not want to be in.
To ensure a break from the habit of getting focused on the situation you are in, and to lead yourself forward, you will do well to check if the sense of ‘towards’ is there in the articulation of your desire or want to develop.
I want to move forward towards better health; better employment; better… whatever.
Positive direction is energy
Often you heard people tell you to think positively. NLP, as we said, defines what it means to be positive and teaches you
how to think positively.
An electric battery – a source of power, energy, or tension – has polarities: the positive and negative.
Our life, too, could be energised by a creative tension. A tension you could create in the mind: Think of the present drudgery, dullness, difficulty… Next, you vividly imagine what all you could achieve by your efforts… That creates a tension: to move away from the present
towards the imagined future!
The greater the power of what you want to achieve, the stronger the surge of energy you experience in your mind to lead you forward. Achievers have great capabilities to keep themselves energised by being focused sharply on the life ahead of them: They look forward to achieving…And their goals articulate a sense of ‘looking forward to’.
Children are forward looking
A six months old baby that makes all sorts of sounds it could, is imagining it is speaking to you. It is not depressed by the present: it can not talk to you now.
As if unaware of its present inability, and as if imagining the future has already arrived, it acts. It pretends to be speaking. And its pretensions or playful efforts lead it to acquire skills that adults around it have: speaking, sitting, standing, walking, running...
If a child were to be brought up by animals, and if it never saw another human walk, or talk, it may never try to walk, or talk. What it sees, hears and experiences is what it achieves.
Their experience of sight, sound and feelings offers children the contents of their goals: the direction to their journey forward.
A child picks up the language it hears: There are no difficult language for a child. In every country, children begin to speak around the same age of about one year.
Their unbridled desire to go after, or go towards what they see, hear and feel triggers their brains to operate to full capacity. And they are achievers.
The first step to a valid goal
Hence, the first NLP lesson on goal setting is that you make sure to express your wants with ‘contents’ and ‘direction’: Say, I want to achieve
this specifically; I want to move towards this
specific direction. This is what is meant by positive thinking.
Some examples:
I want to speak a new language in next two years…
I want to achieve a promotion in my job in next one year.
I want to build my relationship with my spouse and children, specifically by being focused on the good in them; and, particularly by taking efforts to make them know that I appreciate them.
I want to experience a sense of well being, reaching this body weight in so many months.
I want to learn a new skill in the next one year: touch typing, playing a musical instrument, using the abacus for calculating, swimming, yoga, or whatever.
The second step to a valid goal: Self Help
Progress and development need goals. And goals need to be specific, and forward looking.
Besides that, a goal should also be built on a firm faith in one’s ability to
achieve: Come what may, I will achieve this.
It is no valid goal to say: I will achieve a promotion, the management willing!
Rather, a valid goal will be: I will build my knowledge, skills, abilities and all the human qualities required for a higher level of employment in my company, and ensure the management promotes me!
Often, we tend to water-down our determination and efforts to pursue our dreams with a ‘god-willing’, or ‘company-willing’ conditional clause!
But great achievers even among staunch believers acted as if everything depended on themselves. For instance, St Ignatius of Loyola says, “We must pray as if all depends on Divine Action, but labour as if all depended on our own efforts.”
The required energy to pursue one’s dreams is generated by this determination to achieve: Come what may,
I will achieve. And I can achieve great things.
Though these points mentioned above look easy and ordinary, they are not at all common among even young people.
Corruption and lack of belief in self
Typically, a young person might willingly procure a hundred thousand rupees of a loan (on high interest rates) to pay as bribe to secure a job that pays him/her four thousand rupees a month: say, as a sales person in a dairy company.
Ask the same person to invest fifty thousand rupees in a dairy that could give him/her a return of rupees five thousand a month, they will ask back, “Where is the money!”
As owner of a dairy, he/she may be assured of increment to income, as the animals yield every year; A fixed salary in a diary may never increase as much.
When they have no dream of themselves owning a dairy, they don’t find any resource. But, when they go into dreams of being a permanent employee in a dairy, and enjoy the comfort of regular monthly income, they can raise double that amount to ‘invest’.
People who don’t have belief in self end up serving others to reach their goals rather than set their own goals and pursue them. They lead themselves to become employees than be entrepreneurs.
Another classical example is the rivalry among siblings in dividing ancestral property. They litigate in civil and criminal courts, dragging on their struggle for endless years – wasting their money, time and energy – as if their survival depended on the stale crumbs of the ancestral property, when they could be busy building empires on their own.
It is, thus, worth checking, if one is really having faith in self when one sets goals. Most of the so-called social evils are but the manifestations of the absence of this belief in self to succeed by one’s own efforts: One dreams of huge dowry from his wife for his development! Another dreams of purchasing a secure job for one’s survival! Yet another commits crimes, thinking that there is no other path he/she could pave for self development!
You will do well to check if you have the necessary self help attitude by observing your personal and social behaviour; check if you depend on external supports for survival and development.
Here is an artist’s rendering of the scene of American security personnel arriving at Hyderabad air port, ahead of the then President Bill Clinton, to give him protection.
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You will do well to check if you have the necessary self help attitude by observing your personal and social
behaviour; check if you depend on external supports for survival and development.
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