I get all sorts of queries from prospective clients.They ask different types of questions, like:
“How do you help me?”
“Are you going to screw with my head?”
“Will this hurt?”
“Can you fix me?”
“How long will it take?”
“If I engage your services can we do things a different way?”
“Why do you recommend breakthrough sessions instead of one-hour coaching sessions?”
“What is it that is different about them?”
“Why are they costing so much?”
These are only a few of the questions I get asked. Of course I answer them to the best of my ability and sometimes that leads to new clients and sometimes it doesn’t. For some reason there seems to be a prevailing thought that we should be able to fix ourselves when things go wrong in our lives, or when we are not happy with a certain aspect of it. Yet when we get physically sick, we don’t self diagnose and self prescribe – at least most of us don’t We don’t go to school and self-educate, we don’t start a new job and again self-teach. Howeverwhen it comes to our emotional well-being we seem to think that we can do it ourselves when we often don’t have all the tools required to do so and end up making the same mistakes over and over again. Even when we acknowledge that we do require help we don’t value ourselves enough to spend the money it takes on it. We will happily spend it on a family member, but not on ourselves.
If I said to you that we could work together (and you are coming into this willingly) in three sessions 2 three-hour sessions and one four-hour session and you could make dramatic positive changes to your life during those ten hours
(preferably within the same fortnight) or we could work together in one-to-one coaching sessions (usually one a week) which lasts for an hour at a time where you can make small gradual changes and that that will probably take at least twelve hours (three months), which would you choose? Most people say they’d run with the first option. Then they ask for costs and at that point they start to talk themselves out of it. They say that it’s too dear, or that they don’t have the spare time, or they don’t have that type of money and request the one-to-one coaching instead or don’t follow-up on it at all. They often don’t look at the overall cost of the one-to-one coaching which is two hours longer, so will be more expensive in the long run.
What a family member of mine did when they went for a breakthrough session with an NLP Master practitioner was put the hourly rate aside for six weeks then rang and made an appointment for two weeks away so that they had all the money to pay for their breakthrough session.Each week they said as they put the money away, “this is my big investment in me and I am worth saving for”.It’s like saving up for a holiday, a car, a wedding, a new house or an
expensive item that we want to buy in the shops. Yet when it comes to looking after our own well-being we find excuses to not do it. Maybe it is because we have become so materialistic that if we can’t see it now! -it often being a tangible product, we distract ourselves with something that we can see now…and go with that instead. What I do is very, very effective, and it’s fast! That can be every bit as unsettling starting out as the problems that are not being dealt with. The changes are often like “lightbulb” moments, in that the options that are uncovered by clients are so simple, that they are completely amazed that they hadn’t seriously considered them before. They were there, just not consciously and with what I do the client brings it into their conscious thinking. It’s not magic, but the effects are magical.
I will often hear a prospective client tell me that they would love to engage my services for a family member or a friend, because so-and-so has a problem that needs sorting. When asked does so-and-so acknowledge that that is a problem, the response is typically “Of course not! If they did they could fix it!” If so-and-so doesn’t see it as a problem then it isn’t a problem, for them. It is only a problem to the person who sees it as a problem. A perfect
example of that was a girl I went to school with. She had a donkey-like laugh and she laughed often. Some of her friends thought she had an embarrassing laugh, but she didn’t notice and kept on laughing. So who had the problem? The girl with the donkey-laugh or her friends? Her friends did, she didn’t care, despite being told it was loud and noisy, it was just the way she laughed, they on the other hand, chose to be embarrassed by the loudness of her laugh. The other point in all of this is that one person is electing to have someone else “fixed” to their liking, instead of changing their perspective to accept that person’s behaviours.
One of the things we practice and believe in NLP is:The map is not the territory. In other words people are not their behaviours, they are more than that. When I was smoking, I wasn’t just a smoker, I didn’t stop being a mother, sister, daughter, neighbour because I smoked. Smoking wasn’t a problem for me, until I wanted to stop and found it difficult to do on my own. But until I wanted to change, it just was not a problem. It is the same with your friends and family members. I recall a few practitioners telling of occasions where clients have come to them because a family member has suggested they need to see someone to fix a certain behaviour.When asked how that behaviour was a problem for them, they’d responded that it wasn’t, but that XXX had said it needed fixing.The practitioners telling the client that they couldn’t help them, but that they could help the person who sent them instead!!
So…..are you worth it…. emotionally and financially? How much better do you want your life to be? What is it worth to you to be living the life you want?