I found myself a little bit “off” over the last few days. I’ve been concentrating different time slots on different aspects of my business and found the changing from one aspect to another quite unsettling.

It is also the Easter school holidays, so I have my youngestaround all day instead of half the day and it means adjusting my working times around her. So it has been affecting me in my day to day life too.

I’m very lucky that I have a lot of friends who are in the same business as me, so now if I have a problem that I want to sort out and I feel a bit “off” or “stuck” I’ll telephone, email or skype one of them and arrange to interact with them until I get a solution; and they do the same with me, we basically support each other when required and it works very well.

There was a time however, when I first qualified as an NLP practitioner, that I thought I had solve all my problems by myself each and every time one arose and that led to a lot of added problems. I felt at first that since I had developed all these extra skills that the ordinary person on the street doesn’t have, that I should be able to use them in a detached manner and act as if my problem was someone else’s and find the solution. What I hadn’t considered was that I like everyone else can get caught up inside the problem and not see past the boundaries of that problem to the solution and having someone to just air it with can often give focus to the solutions that I just couldn’t see under my nose.

I’ve also come to realise that in spite of having these skills and learning how to use them effectively, we are still just human beings and can get caught up in ordinary day to day living and forget to use these skills from time to time. It is often when I have helped a client with an issue that I look at a particular issue in my life and wonder if I can apply a similar type solution to similar type issues in my life. I might not have a problem with the issue, however I can sometimes see a new way of dealing with the issue that I might not have considered before.

I think as Coaches it is very important to remember that we are human too, that we get good days and we get not-so-good days and if we get careless we get bad days too. The big difference is we have to skills and/or the contacts to help if required to deal with the not-so-good days before they become bad days.