The good news about personal development is that you are never done, and the bad news about personal development is that you are never done. Personal development is a life-long undertaking. Fundamentally it is the art of becoming you, the best version of you that you can be. No one else can tell you who that you is. You need to discover it for yourself.
Whenever I take on a new 1-2-1 client, I explain that I am trained in four disciplines. Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), Time Line Therapy™, Hypnosis, and Coaching. NLP is about how people think and produce their behaviour; it is a practical psychological tool kit that has some change techniques included. Time Line Therapy™ is good for letting go of negative emotions from the past and changing limiting beliefs. Hypnosis is useful for talking directly to the unconscious mind. Personally, I use hypnosis to reinforce other change work, or where access to the unconscious mind through the conscious mind is limited. Coaching is a process model that sits above the other three disciplines.
Although I have a broad big picture process that I apply most of the time, I also aim to treat everyone as an individual. So with each person I use whichever tools seem to be the most appropriate for them and their situation. I am also acutely aware that I do not do the change work, the client does. I can listen and restate or paraphrase where they seem to be in both their life and their situation; I can even help them to see this differently by reframing it. I can also guide them through change techniques, but at the end of the day I know that it is the client who creates the change, not me, nor the change processes or techniques themselves.
Having said all of that there is still a huge amount of change available for people who are in the right place, who are prepared to be honest with me, honest with themselves, and who feel able to follow instructions. The reason for this is that there are things about ourselves that hold us back that we can do something to change. Our beliefs and definitions about ourselves and the world determine our emotions, and these together produce our behaviours. By applying the most appropriate modality, we can change our beliefs and definitions, and we can let go of our negative emotions. Doing this frees up our mental and emotional capacity to find or learn new behaviours. This is the case regardless of what has happened to us in the past. Why, because whatever happened in the past is not happening to us now. So the problem is no longer what happened in the past. The problem is our relationship to the memory of what happened in the past, and this we can change now. This is what Time Line Therapy™ processes enable us to do. Because we can re-access troubling memories, change our perspective on these, and in so doing learn something new about them using the intelligence and experience we have now. All of these tools, and there are other good ones too, mean that change is easier than we tend to think it is.
The purpose of change is to become more of who we are. A guiding principle first articulated to me by Wayne Dyer through his hugely successful book, Your Erroneous Zones is: If you don’t like aspects of what you do or who you are then change them, if you can’t or won’t change them, then live with them, because that is then who you are. Much like a sculptor, you need to chip away the things which are not you; ideas, beliefs, definitions, and behaviours that you picked up unconsciously in the past. A skilled artist can see the beauty within a rough block of stone, they then remove what does not belong to allow the beauty to shine through. Be the artist and free your own beauty, I know you can.
“A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.” Leonardo da Vinci
