Speaker: Welcome to the nlpcourses.com show where we push pass the height and pull back the velvet curtains of creating a successful life with NLP. Dive in into physiology, neuro-science and linguistics so that NLP becomes a practical tool at home and in your career moving beyond the techniques so that you can make a name, make money and make a difference. Tune in weekly if you care more than others, think twice as we send out on our quest to uncover the secrets of successful people in all walks of life. Make sure you had over to nlpcourses.com to subscribe to receive our newsletter and receive free transcripts of each show. Here's your host NLP master trainer John Cassidy-Rice. John Cassidy-Rice: Hello, welcome to this week podcast. My name is John Cassidy- Rice and I had the pleasure to be your host for this session. We're going to start to build on the concept that we started talking about back in podcast one, two and three. How can storytelling service so that we can create better goals and achieve our goals a lot faster and to bring them into reality in a way that was natural and how our brain processes information. So if you haven't listened to those first three podcast we're having for a little while, I recommend go and listen there first as a primer for this session. Here we're going to start to explore. What do office do to create compelling stories. Stories that we really want to read and the key is in the preparation because if we're going to create a goal, something that we wish to spend and invest our life in, do you suspect, if we put some pre-work into it and it become compelling and really motivates us, it would be easier to achieve those goals. Yes, I think you're right. So what we're going to start to do is explore how do we create a compelling story? What is the pre-work to create compelling stories and the pre-work to set in a goal that will light our souls on fire? Okay we've got a couple of ideas from story telling. One of those is once you had an idea, what you didn't do of it and you develop that
into a concept and once you've got the concept, you can then start to build the characters and in the later sessions, we will probably explore what it means to have a theme and a plot for your stories and how apply to goal setting. But really at this stage, I'd like to just play with that how you develop an idea into a concept that would grow out into a character and what those would mean to goal setting? Okay, so let's just take this idea of an idea. So, from the goal setting point of view, we know an idea will be, it could be to loose weight, be wealthy, to communicate better. Now they're not goals as such yet, you just had an idea. So from a story telling perspective, what do we mean by idea? An idea would be a story about the titanic and maybe you expand that a little bit to raise the titanic but that is not a concept or developed yet. It's just an idea. Maybe you have an idea of writing a sci-fi or we could say, it's a story about a fighter pilot or story about a cheating husband or a cheating wife. It could be a story about a dishonest lawyer. I noticed they are all just ideas and when you have an idea it's a good start in place if we need the ideas to start with. That makes a lot of sense. Sometimes what we find during goal session though is we have an idea and think it's the goal. Now when you refer to an idea in that generic sense, you're using the word as a noun rather than in a precise way which is kind of good enough for that elevator talk. But it's not enough to really stimulate young conscious mind to stop processing. So our goal then is to take this idea and expand upon it and when we start to explore possibilities and create a concept does that for us. So Clive Cussler had the idea to write a deep sea adventure, just an idea. Only when it come out this notion that you could raise the titanic did this idea vote into a concept that created the ability for Clive to expand on the story and create a thriller that was very different than we're seeing before and that's our goal around taking an idea and turn it into a concept. So, how do we do that? How do we take an idea and start to turn it into a concept which are the way of brainstorming and coming up with many ideas and create a richer deeper goal and why do we do that is to use question and a particular question we're going to use is the "what if" question. Now, we as human beings have been designed to answer questions. So the "what if" questions opens up possibility for our goals and remember, this is the pre-work that we're doing before we sit down and write a goal. So, what we want to do is generate lots of possibilities. Now when you pose the "what if" question, it immediately leads to another "what if" and then another and so on until you have a string of "what ifs" and from these questions, it merge and begins to expand and define the goal or if you're a writer the story in both in detail and big picture. So for writers this become a extraordinary powerful story development tool, the "what if' question. For us setting goals, it becomes extraordinary powerful goal development tool. What we'll start to find is that also gives us the landmarks or the mini goals for when we get round to set in our goals. So let's take an example from story telling first before we start to apply this to
our goal setting. Now I'm going to take an example, that's from a book called Story Engineering by Larry Brooks and I highly recommend that book and I'll put a link in the show notes so that you can get to that book and it's also an extremely good book and expanded on this idea or concepts. So it has an example that he's put together himself around Dan Brown's book, The Da Vinci Code. He's using it as a starting point to explore the "what if" principle and let me stress this, Larry does in his book that this is Larry's ideas and not Dan Brown's ideas. Okay so let's say you've got to starting of it, what if Leonardo Da Vinci planted clues to his views on Christianity and the scriptures within his painting of the Last Supper? Okay so that's our starting point and it's a good place to start with the "what if" game. Now as we attach the "what if" questions to the Da Vinci Code, we expand on it and it gives us different options and ideas around that. So in the book Story Engineering, he says, what if Christ didn't die at the cross after all? What if there's a highly secret group of men who's life mission is to preserve a secret? And what if they're willing to kill to protect it? What if there are other secrets? What if the favorite holy grail is in fact the womb on Mary Magdalene baring the child of Jesus? What if the child survived? What if Leonardo Da Vinci was a member yet of another secret group that knows this all to be true? And what if Da Vinci gave us the clues to this fact in his paintings specially the Last Supper? What if the museum creator at the Louvre is killed because of what he knows? What if members of the secret group of priest are being killed and out of effort to expose the truth behind the churches 2000 year old conspiracy deceit, etcetera? I think you get the idea. Like I said, go and get Larry's book on Story Engineering and to read the rest of the, what he proposes to "what if" for that story. So that's great. So as we expand on our idea using the question "what if", notice stimulates our own conscious mind which would be excellent for goal setting. So the "what if" question is starting to develop the story, the idea in our case, like I said, to stimulate the unconscious mind. The next thing the authors, they intend to do is to create a characters of characters and they do this and create in the back story, the characters ark and the world view, goals and motivations. Now what we mean by that is the back story is all that's happened in that character's life. So what led you to this point? Speaker: Sponsor of this week's nlpcourses.com podcast show. The NLP practitioner training, designed to transform you now. Attend the first day, completely free, find out more, head over to the website to secure your place with the next NLP practitioner. John: Now what's probably more interesting for us as we go through and develop character is the, in story telling what they call the character ark. So what lessons does the hero or the villain, normally the hero has to learn so that they can grow and change of the course of the story and that brings us to why this character part of developing goals is so important. Who are you going to become once you've
achieved the goal? Until you want to be that person or like we said, so what values would you have? What would you need to believe? What behaviors would you now need to invest in? How the world view change your goals and your motivations? and how would your decisions be different once you've achieved that goal? Okay so what we see there is from a story creation point of view, there's a lot of work that needs to be done before you start to write the story and there's various ways to write so we're going to understand this. We'll talk about preparation and you have an idea, you develop the idea into concepts which deepen and stimulates our own conscious mind to create a story and then adding character and we see from a goals end process. Why don't you stop from an idea and thinking that is a goal? Can we develop that with the "what if" questions and then start to build character and who is it that you're going to become. Right, so let's put that into some context. Let's take three of different types of ideas that people often start with. One is an idea of loose weight. Like we said, it's not a goal yet, it's not an idea. Maybe to be wealthy is another idea and to communicate better. So let's take those and develop those so that we are ready to set goals. Okay, let's take the first one to loose weight. Okay then so, what if in loosing weight, I had the same amount of food? What if I do it without ever becoming hungry? What if it was fun to loose weight? What if I get my mindset right? What if I loose a pound a week? What if I had a step by step plan that would make it very successful? So what we're starting to do now is taking the original idea and expand out with this "what if" game. Maybe it's not quite the Da Vinci Code but it's still could be the genesis for a story that you really want to leave or you'll go. Okay let's take one of our other examples. Wealthy, what if I won the money? What if I wrote a book? What if I become the best in my field? What if I help other people become wealthy and they help me become wealthy at the same time. What if I run multiple businesses? That work expanded on the idea. Okay so let's take out communication. What if I change my language? What if had a goal for each conversation that I engaged with? What if I practice what I preach? What if I put myself in the shoes of the other person? What if I learned story telling? What if I found out what great communicators do and do the same? What if I took an NLP course? Uhm, now that's an idea. Great, so what we've done is taking an idea and start to brainstorm that idea and gives us a deeper meaning what is it that we want? And we use the "what if" question to stimulate different thinking. Now could you spend too long doing the what if and start to begin the meanings in returns. Yes I think we could but even just in that little bit I've done, there's examples. Really help expand the idea what we mean by loose weight, become wealthy, etcetera, and start to open up possibilities and then you would take all that information and start to organize it and play with it. Our next part within our story telling process was to create a character. That character ark, so where are you now?
What are your values? What are your beliefs? What behaviors are you engaging in? And then, if once you've got that all written down is who would you become having achieved those goals which is the character ark i.e. the process, the journey that you would need to go through to achieve those goals? So starting from where you are now, so let's take our example of loosing weight. Maybe now where you're at is that you eat lots of fast food, you've very rarely, exercise and you get the picture where you are now. So what's important to you maybe is instant gratification without you realizing and you believe that you can't be healthy. Where as we feel story ark your character ark who do you become? Well you become somebody, who likes healthy food? And you'll somebody who now tracks the results in life and maybe you're somebody that exercises and you created the way of living that supports your health and that you're somebody now who considers long term goals and that you're disciplined. So let's expand that into a wealthy one. So where you are now is you might do, let's say do the minimum amount of work, you're a bit of a dreamer, never put things into action, where as to become wealthy and when you are wealthy you become a person who has an idea and puts in the time to take that idea from your head into the, into reality. You work hard, you're not just somebody who talks about it but you work hard. Yes, I've, you heard about this works matter but some people forget that to work is in that and just try to do everything smart. So you put in the time and you work hard, you plan, you develop your communication skills so you can take the vision in your head and ignite other people with that vision. You care more than others think wise. You're good to be with and you take the time to learn how to understand numbers and finance and you want to make a difference in the world. Okay that is that somebody who you want to be. Right, so great communicator. Where you are now and you might be shy and reserved and you might not be good at expressing yourself, you want to become a great communicator, so that now means the person you become is you become interested in other people. You ask about them, yes if you want to be interested and become interested. I realized I could be full of cliches. But the cliches are for a reason and you prepare for meetings, you prepare for conversations, you'll go focused and that means in the conversations, you know what you want to say. You become people focused rather than self focused. Maybe you want to help other people and you're learning machine, you devote two or three hours a day to learn and to read in your books, to taking courses. Do you want to be that person? Wow! What we explored in this session really is how much work authors put into preparing to write the story and that we are proposing the idea that we, when we're setting goals, should actually prepare before we can sit down and write our goals down. What a noble idea and something that could have a huge impact in your life. In this podcast, we're just being kicking around an idea that I've
had in my head for quite a while now and so I'd really like your feedback. What's your ideas about taking a goal and before you write the goal, is to acknowledge the difference between a goal, a concept at the character in which then creates a theme. I think I got that right, a theme for a story that we could develop into a goal. As always play with ideas. Any questions please let me know how I can serve you. Until next week, see you then. Speaker: Thank you for tuning in. You were just listening to nlpcourses.com podcast show. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review and make sure to head over to nlpcourses.com to subscribe to our newsletter. Where we keep you updated with in depth NLP topics. Subscribe and stay tune to the upcoming episodes of neuro linguistics, programming and beyond. Take your NLP training to the next level Click here for the NLP Practitioner Click here for the NLP Master Practitioner Click here for the NLP Train the Trainer