| HUGGS |  |
Some outcomes are more important than others. I like to call the most important ones HUGGs (Huge, Unbelievably Great Goals). Not all the outcome conditions apply to HUGGs. They are large-scale outcomes and cannot be specified exactly.
HUGGs have the following qualities:
HUGGs can shape your life. Because they are long term and aligned with your core values, you will often achieve them in unpredictable, even paradoxical ways, or they will almost seem to ‘fall into’ your life like magic.
HUGGs often have an ‘away from’ element. If you do not achieve them, it hurts. This makes them more motivating. They often have an edge to them, too, like a deadline or set of conditions. For example, one friend of mine left his job to start a company of his own. He gave himself five years to make it a success. If it did not work out, he would find another job in his old profession.
The most powerful HUGGs often involve removing elements from your life. Sometimes the biggest leverage comes not from doing things to achieve them, but from stopping doing things that are in your way.
Examples of HUGGs:
HUGGs are creative. They produce ongoing effects and they express your values. You create them, they are personal, you do not copy them from other people.
Keep track of your goals and review them regularly. Reward yourself when you get them and enjoy those times. They are what you have worked for and you deserve them. Enjoy the achievement and enjoy the journey. Collect those moments like beautiful pictures for a photograph album or press cuttings in a scrapbook. Go back to them. Use them to motivate yourself in the future. Let them be a source of inspiration, learning and pleasure. Never be in a position to think, ‘I’ve worked hard to get where I am … Where am I?’
| BELIEFS | |
Beliefs are the rules we live by. They are our best guesses at reality and form our mental models – the principles of how the world seems to work, based on our experience. Beliefs are not facts, although we often mistake them for facts. We have beliefs about other people, about ourselves and about our relationships, about what is possible and about what we are capable of. We have a personal investment in our beliefs. ‘I told you so’ is a satisfying phrase because it means our beliefs were proved right. It gives us confidence in our ideas.
Some things are not influenced by our belief in them – the law of gravity, for example, will not change whether we believe in it or not. Sometimes we treat other beliefs – about our relationships, abilities and possibilities – as if they were as fixed and as immutable as gravity, and they are not. Beliefs actively shape our social world.
Beliefs act as self-fulfilling prophecies. They act as permissions as well as blocks to what we can do. If you believe you are not very likeable, it will make you act towards others in a way that may put them off and so confirm your belief, even though you do not want it to be true. If you believe you are likeable, then you will approach people more openly and they are more likely to confirm your belief.
NLP treats beliefs as presuppositions, not as truth or facts.
Beliefs create our social world.
Treating beliefs as presuppositions means NLP treats beliefs as principles of conduct. You act as if they are true and if you like the results, then you continue to act as if they are true. If your beliefs do not bring good results, you change them. You have choice about what you believe – though the belief that beliefs are changeable is in itself a challenging belief to many people!
Beliefs have to be acted on if they are to mean anything, therefore beliefs are principles of action, not empty ideals.
Beliefs and Outcomes
You need to believe three things about your outcomes:
It is possible to achieve them.
You are able to achieve them.
You deserve to achieve them.
Possibility, Ability and Worthiness are the three keys to achievement. Remember them as the PAW Process.
Possibility
Very often we mistake possibility for competence. We think something is not possible when really we do not know how to do it. We all have physical limits, of course – we are human, not superheroes. But we do not usually know what these limits are. You cannot know what they are until you reach them.
You cannot prove a negative, therefore you can never prove that you are incapable of anything, you can only say that you have not achieved it yet. Once it was considered impossible for any human being to run a mile in less than four minutes – until Roger Bannister did it at Oxford on 6 May 1954. Then a strange thing happened – more and more athletes started running a mile in under four minutes. Today Roger Bannister’s ‘impossible’ achievement is commonplace.
