From a self-leadership perspective, the answer lies in the question – to change we must change our ‘selves’. ‘Self’  is a matrix of frames of mind which includes our self beliefs and values which make up our ‘identify’ and we tend to conform to our identity. In short you behave to meet your expectations of how your ‘see’ yourself.

Ignoring the philosophical problem of who is the self that sees the self, the key to making a change in behaviour and a resoltion that sticks is to see your self in a new way.

In Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) there is technique known as the SWISH pattern and Positive Psychology has a similar intervention known as Best Possible Self.

The Swish works by imagining yourself as “the you for whom there is no problem”. For example if you procrastinate to exercise, overspend on  your credit card or lack confidence with new people, then you construct a ‘mental image’ of the you that can easily and successfully handle these, and other, situations. Once you have a rich and comprehensive idea of what the ‘new you’ would look like, sound like and feel like, you ‘step into’ this identity and believe and value this as the you that will move into the future.

Best Possible Self is similar with a diary option. 1 ) Imagine yourself in the future. 2) Imagine everything has gone about as well as it could have, and you have gotten most of the things that are important to you. 3) Spend 10 to 20 minutes of free writing describing this person.

You have heard of self-fulfilling prophesy, so why not write the prophesy you want fulfilled? Personally I am going to combine both techniques to ensure my 2011 is my best year ever. What about you?

At our self leadership programs we emphasise the importance of turning ideas into action or closing the ‘knowing-doing’ gap. Zurina is the embodiment of this principle and once again she has demonstrated her commitment to transform thoughts into reality.

Zurina loves taking photographs and one year ago decided that she would like to make her passion a career – not a new concept but the difference is how she executed this idea. In April 2009 she charged for her first professional shoot, today (12 months later) she is a busy photographer and is having her first gallery exhibition, ‘Shades of Pink’. The exhibition showcases 30 pieces of her work around a theme and for the benefit of the Breast Cancer Foundation;  plus, 150 people have bought tickets for tonight’s charity launch!

The exhibition was put together in 3 months during which time Zurina was also a mother of 2 toddlers and a director of Self Leadership International. When I asked Zurina to share with our blog readers her secret for being able to manifest so quickly, she answered that she uses many of the steps of the NLP Well Formed Outcome Pattern. Here are the steps she used:

1. Visualise the big picture – what will the end result look like.
2. Cover off the details such as; pick a realistic but ambitious date for the exhibition, locate a suitable venue, come up with a list of topics to photograph.
3. Identify the required resources such as; sponsors for the event, volunteers and subjects to be photographed.
4. Take action – start shooting and editing.
5. Make Adjustments – when things do not work out quite as planned make changes and then take action again.
6. Be consistent – do a bit or a lot every day.
7. Create excitement about the project – this translates into the marketing which resulted in paying customers whilst maintaining relationships.

There is of course a ‘secret’ ingredient that she believed it could be done. It is my experience that many a good idea never reaches frution because of a lack of self-belief, planning and action. Do you have a good idea locked inside you?

Since the 1970s, futurists have been telling us that the world is changing, that the change itself is changing, and that the changing change is also accelerating.  And much of this change is how the world is getting smaller.  When I first read Alvin Tofler in the 1970s (Future Shock), it seemed like science fiction, but no longer.  The predictions that life on this planet would one day be like a village, a global village—that day seems to have arrived.  Thomas L. Friedman calls this “the flattening of the world” in The World is Flat (2005).  In that book he identifies ten “flatteners” beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall to the introduction of Windows to open-sourcing, outsourcing, offshoring, insourcing, and so on.

The world is not only smaller, it is faster.  News today occurs on thousands of cable and internet channels—24/7 / 360 days of the year.  News today travels around the world not merely in hours or even minutes, but in seconds.  In moments, information about political crisis, armed invasions, tsunamias, earthquakes, Britany Spears, the price of oil, a suicide bomb explosion, etc. can be in our email inboxes and on hundreds of news programs.  So today we have the “soft” science of economics is governed by other “soft” sciences (psychology, linguistics, wealth, etc.) that is now influenced and affected by more and more variables.  And that means the world is becoming more and more systemic.

As a soft science, economics is influenced as much by beliefs, frames-of-mind, representations, interpretations, emotions, values, states and meta-states as it is by anything tangible like houses or mortgages.  What is the value of a house?  Above and beyond the materials that go into the construction and its cost, the supply of houses, the demand for them, the value depends on what people think, how much they want them, how much sellers think they can ask for, etc.  It depends on fallible human states and meta-states.  That’s why they can be so over-valued that they can mess up the economy.

Similarly with the human decision to lend money to a buyer for a mortgage.  It depends on the criteria they set for determining who they can trust to be dependable in repaying the loan.  And once a mortgage company creates a subprime loan for people with no or little down payment, who don’t have the financial resources, but who believe that the value of the house will increase at such a rate that it will have, say $100,000 equity in 12 months, and then someone sells these high return loans to Wall Street who then offers them on a world market … then people can believe and feel confident about returns, and borrow more money on the assumed value of the increased and increasing equity and somewhere along the line we all move to La-La land assuming that if we believe it or think it, it will happen.

Then reality hits.  The balloon payment on the loan comes due and people begin to default on their loans.  This lowers the confident feelings of others about the loans, which is communicated by the sensational bad-news “News” organizations thereby creating more fear and worry about the home mortgage market, then a negative spiral begins and suddenly market value drops around the world.  And the nature of the world— smaller, faster, and more systemic is amplifying all of this.

There’s now one more quality.  It is more psychological. Did you notice the number of states and meta-states in these descriptions?  How many did you notice?  We call all of this economics, yet it is actually psycho-economics. The psycho- part is the role of people’s assumptions and interpretations of value or dis-value, their emotional states of confidence or fear, of optimism or apprehensiveness and how these states play such a critical role in economics.

Apparently the banking industry has lost a trillion dollars worth of value and the US Congress has voted to spend more than a trillion dollars to deal with it.  A trillion dollars!  How much is that?  On one program someone said that if you had a trillion dollars in one dollar bills, it would be 67.8 miles tall (over 100 kilometers).  Or if you went out on a spending spree — and you could spend a million dollars a day (a million!!) — and you started today, it would take you more than 2,000 years to spend it.

Okay, so if the economy or the banks lost a trillion dollars, where did all of that money go?  Who got it?  The weird thing is that much of it didn’t go anywhere.  Much of it existed on paper as a record of the way people were thinking, expecting, valuing, feeling confident or worried, etc.  One day people made certain evaluations about their trust and confidence in certain homes, businesses, markets, and futures and presto— there was a trillion dollars of value.  At a later time, they lost confidence—and a trillion dollars of value disappeared.

What is this downturn about?  Perhaps it is just a market correction, perhaps it is another aspect of the flattening of the world, perhaps it is a call to recognize the role of our meta-states in creating our social realities.  Whatever it is, it is a call to your resilience, state management, and ability to know that your highest asset is your ability to add value.

I think it is also a call for a belief in responsible abundance.  That is, if our psycho-economics play such a crucial role in all of this, we now have to resist the temptation to play into the hands of the negative press.  It is the psychology of the press to sensationalize whatever they can and turn facts into negative catastrophes.  After all, if in the small, fast, systemic, and psychological world—our beliefs, fears, worries, hopes, optimism, resilience (and many other states and meta-states) are now key factors determining whether we set in motion a negative downward spiraling or an upward positive spiraling —then we have to be more responsible to fear-mongering, fear-spreading, negative-forecasting and more committed to intelligent optimism that fosters resilience, persistence, and hope.

What’s needed is an army of people committed to actualizing their own potentials and those of others.  What’s needed is a community of people who believe in an abundance of possibilities and potentials—if people are given a chance.  What’s needed are a global village of people who will resist the negatively-oriented media and do their part to unleash more and more possibilities.

“We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: if you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren’t managing their employees’ careers; knowledge workers must, effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.”  –

Self Development is intrinsic to self-leadership as leadership and learning are inseparable. So as Drucker says, we must take responsibility for our own growth and success – we must be the CEO of our own mind and body.

Self Development includes, developing healthy self esteem, self knowledge, self image, self belief and self confidence so that you can develop your unique talents and abilities and contribute.

Through Self development and self leadership we can find meaning and significance in our lives, attain states of self efficacy (Bandura), flow (Csikszentmihalyi) and self actualisation (Maslow).

• Self-efficacy is the belief that you are capable of performing in a certain way to attain your goals It is the belief that you have the capabilities to execute the courses of actions required to manage prospective situations. Self-efficacy is the opposite of helplessness (Seligman) it means you are the captain of your ship and you can set a course and navigate obstacles to reach your desired destination and win the prize.
• Flow is that mental state in which you are fully immersed in what you are doing doing; you experience  feelings of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. You experience flow states when you challenge your abilities with an appropriate task, so that time goes away and you are fully in the moment. Surprisingly we find we are happiest when we are full engaged by work rather that slacking off and resting.
• Self actualisation is the desire to become everything that you arecapable of becoming and to find meaning in what you do. Self actualisation is the big “Why” question, it answers why you are here and why you are doing what you do.

Some organisations view self development in human capital but in the current financial climate it is more likely that your self development is up to you.

What are you doing about your self development?

• Are you regularly reading books or blogs that enrich your mind?
• Are you associating with people that challenge your thinking?
• Are you attending seminars or webinars that expand your perspective?
• Are you spending time in quiet reflection and evaluating what’s important to you and your community?

At Self Leadership International we include self development and positive psychology in all our programmes, in addition we teach certification programmes in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), NeuroSemantics and Coaching.

• NLP is essentially a model of learning and demonstrates that we can model human thinking, behaviour and communication.
• Neuro-Semantics is about translating great ideas into reality, about performing our highest meanings, about enriching our performances with the most compelling intentions, and getting to the heart of things via communication.
• Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them. Clients say that coaching brings out their best by helping them focus, break down tasks and clarify their values.

Through these technologies you can learn to lead your mind and body to create the results you want in your life.

To your highest and best!

Happy Year of the Ox, Andrew and the Team at Self Leadership International