I saw a paper in the weekend with the headline ‘panic Saturday’! With so many people out rushing about for last minute Christmas presents, this has become known as the day that everyone rushes around last minute to buy gifts – and often the things they really want are gone because someone else got there first. So how come so many people often leave it until the last minute to do their shopping, when they could be doing it any time of the year?
In NLP we are always on the look out for patterns – and Christmas shopping could be an example of such a pattern!
Do you know people that when it comes their own plans they leave things until the last minute, if at all? I have know many people with wonderful ideas who put them off because life ‘gets in the way’ and then they either never get around to them, or else leave it so late that someone else does it first!
Knowing what you want is one of the most important things in life, and we always start with this at the beginning of any training. Enjoying the journey is just as important. When we know what we want, but fail to do anything towards these outcomes, often there is some sort of internal conflict involved. Being really clear about our values and their order of importance can be one of the most valuable exercises.
Values are those things that are most important to us – the things we are willing to invest our time, energy and resources into having and avoiding. Our values are largely unconscious and the best way to elicit them is by observing how we spend our time and energy. Another way is to consider an area of your life and ask yourself ‘what is most important in the context of x?’. Take some time to do this and come up with a good list, then order that list in order of importance. The items at the top of the list are the values that most dominantly drive our behaviour. These are things that are covered in depth on a Master Practitioner training.
