Hi All,
A special welcome to those who have just joined us from the August NLP Practitioner 1 week intensive. This was such a fabulous course that we intend to run most of the courses like this next year. A BIG thank you to the assistants who worked so hard that week too.
We are now looking for bigger premises and welcome all your ideas - central, quiet and air-conditioning a must.
We still looking for comments and feedback on our new website - www.braintrainacademy.co.uk - so please take a look and let us have your thoughts.
Love and Light,
Dawn & Thom
What’s new at Brain Train Academy?
NLP Practitioner Certification - 7 Days: - (3 Wknds over 5 weeks) - Wknd 1- 13th-14th Sep, Wknd 2-26th-28th Sep, Wknd 3- 11th-12th Oct, 9.30am-6pm, 21 Hill St, Edinburgh, EH2 3JP
NLP Business Practitioner Certification - 2 Days 1st-2nd Aug 08, 9.30am - 6pm, 21 Hill St, Edinburgh, EH2 3JP
WeightShed - 1 Day: - 4th Oct, 10am - 5.30pm, 21 Hill St, Edinburgh, EH2 3JP
NLP Taster Night & Practice Group: - 25th Sep, 7pm, 21 Hill St, Edinburgh, EH2 3JP
NLP for Parents - 4 Nights : - 4 x Thurs Nights - 2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd October 2008, 7pm-9.30pm, 21 Hill St, Edinburgh, EH2 3JP
Article of the month:
NLP is first and foremost an Attitude! By Dawn Flockhart
The process of all human change begins within us. We have tremendous potential for excellence. We all desire good results from our efforts and most of us are willing to work hard and to pay the price that success and happiness demand.
We each have the ability to put our unique human potential into action and to acquire a desired result. The one thing that determines the level of our potential, that produces the intensity of our activity, and that predicts the quality of the result we receive is our “attitude”.
Attitude determines how much of the future we are allowed to see, hear & feel. It can decide the size of our dreams and influence our determination when we are faced with new challenges. No other person on earth has dominion over our attitude. People can affect our attitude by teaching us poor thinking habits or unintentionally misinforming us or providing us with negative sources of influence, but no one can control our attitude unless we voluntarily surrender that control.
No one else “makes us angry.” We make ourselves angry when we surrender control of our attitude. What someone else may have done is irrelevant. We choose, not they. They merely put our attitude to a test. If we select a volatile attitude by becoming hostile, angry, jealous or suspicious, then we have failed the test. If we condemn ourselves by believing that we are unworthy, then again, we have failed the test.
If we care at all about ourselves, then we must accept full responsibility for our own feelings. We must learn to guard against those feelings that have the capacity to lead our attitude down the wrong path and to strengthen those feelings that can lead us confidently into a better future.
If we want to receive the rewards the future holds in trust for us, then we must exercise the most important choice given to us as members of the human race by maintaining total dominion over our attitude. Our attitude is an asset, a treasure of great value, which must be used accordingly.
Having the right attitude is one of the basics that success requires. The combination of a sound personal philosophy and a positive attitude about ourselves and the world around us gives us an inner strength and a firm resolve that influences all the other areas of our existence.
“Be the change you want to see in the world.” Ghandi
Dawn Flockhart is a trainer at Brain Train Academy. She can be contacted for Executive & Personal Coaching by emailing dawn@braintrainacademy.co.uk
Success Stories:
Of Miracles and Bizarre Coincidence, By Thom Shillaw
This is a tale of amazing healing and uncanny coincidence. The story begins on an ordinary Tuesday evening as I walked my two dogs in the local park. I bumped into a chap that I had met there several months before. As we exchanged pleasantries, he recalled seeing a newspaper article about the woman that I removed colour blindness from. He asked me for help with his vision and I agreed to see him the following week.
A strange mood crept over me that evening and I could only think of that same woman that I had given hallucinated spectacles for during our last Master Practitioner course. The results were that she could see long distance without wearing spectacles.
A hypnotic sight
The following day, I was teaching on our NLP Practitioner program when an assistant introduced me to her daughter. She asked if I could do anything to help her eye-sight. For some reason, I decided to do an impromptu demonstration, that resulted in her daughter being able to read the posters at the far side of the room, a feat that she was unable to do previously without spectacles. I mused at the coincidental encounter and my thoughts of the previous day - coincidence?
Spectacular side-effects
On Thursday morning another one of our delegates mentioned that she had left the course the previous evening and remembered looking at the cobbled street outside our building and feeling drunk. That evening, she had a headache and was unable to wear her glasses. As she looked out of her window that night, she could see more clearly than before. Her vision had improved to such an extent that she did not wear her glasses to drive to the course.
The female delegate told the group of practitioners that her friend had suggested that she have corrective eye surgery for her birthday to remove the need for wearing glasses. It happened to be her birthday the day that I completed that demo - Another coincidence?
Epilogue
So, my friend from the park attended the monthly BTA practice group and despite no previous trance experience and feeling nervous in front of the large audience, we managed to obtain a perceptible improvement in vision. These kind of demonstrations leave an audience spell-bound. They serve as a powerful convincer that there is more to our perceptions than, pardon my pun, “meets the eye.”
As for the apparent coincidences, I have been tracking these type of incidence for months. If one suspends judgment and the pull to explain their presence by compartmentalizing these anomalies into an existing map of reality - patterns begin to emerge. Until next time.
Thom Shillaw is a trainer at Brain Train Academy. He can be contacted for private consultation by emailing thom@braintrainacademy.co.uk
Metaphor of the month:
Who Packs Your Parachute?
We rarely know what effect our life produces, and what it gives to others, though we are sometimes allowed to see some little fraction of it.
Charles Plumb was a U.S. Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent six years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience.
One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!” “How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb. “I packed your parachute,” the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!” Plumb assured him, “It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”
Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat, a bib in the back, and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said, ‘Good morning, how are you?’ or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.” Plumb thought of the many hours the sailor had spent on a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.
Now, Plumb asks his audience, “Who’s packing your parachute?” Everyone has someone who provides what they need to make it through the day. Plumb also points out that he needed many kinds of parachutes when his plane was shot down over enemy territory - he needed his physical parachute, his mental parachute, his emotional parachute, and his spiritual parachute. He called on all these supports before reaching safety.
Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important. We may fail to say hello, please, or thank you, congratulate someone on something wonderful that has happened to them, give a compliment, or just do something nice for no reason. As you go through this week, this month, this year, you may wish to recognise people who pack your parachute…
This month’s practice group: Thursday 25th September 2008
Brain Train Academy, 21-23 Hill Street (Situated in the heart of the city centre between George St & Queen St), Edinburgh, EH2 3JP
- Location Map: click here
- Nearest Car Parks: click here
- Map & Directions from Edinburgh Waverley Station: click here
Q&As
Please keep sending us your questions, which we will answer in the next issue
Book of the month:
My Voice will go with you - the teaching Tales of Milton Erickson
DVD of the month:
Persuasion Engineering - Richard Bandler
YouTube of the month:
Richard Bandler - The Hypnotist - Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s941m7CKft4
Richard Bandler - The Hypnotist - Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RczTTZqBSYw&feature=related
Funny of the month:
In 1986, Mikele Mebembe was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from
Northwestern University. On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Mikele approached it very carefully. He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant’s foot and found a large
piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Mikele worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Mikele stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Mikele never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.
Twenty years later, Mikele was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenage son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Mikele and his son Tapu were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Mikele, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.
Remembering the encounter in 1986, Mikele couldn’t help wondering if this was the same elephant. Mikele summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Mikele’s legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly. Probably wasn’t the same elephant.
For more info visit our website www.braintrainacademy.co.uk