Board Breaking

Board breaking was the Grand Finale at the Mind Transformations 12-day NLP practitioner training.

The participants were each provided a wooden board.

On one side, the participant writes a specific desired outcome - an important personal goal that is yet to be accomplished.

On the other side, the participant writes the three main obstacles that must be addressed in order to achieve that desired outcome. These are the three inner demons that stop us or slow us down as we head towards our goal.

The participant then steps forward, prepares herself mentally and physically using the following strategy.

The participant places the board between two columns of cement blocks.

Rehearses the stance and movement.

Get into the mental state of confronting her inner personal demons head on, feeling the tension rising.

Get into position, poised to strike - physically and mentally.

Summon strength and GO! breaking the board neatly in two.

The moment the board is broken, a deep sense of great relief floods the body. A feeling of finally standing up and breaking through against the inner demons that limit our lives fills us with great pride and confidence.

The board breaking exercise is a metaphor for confronting and successfully overcoming our inner personal demons that are preventing us from taking that all-important first step towards achieving our desired outcome.

The exercise puts us in the state of being strongly motivated for ACTION! towards our goals.

My personal reflection of the board breaking exercise.

The wooden board is a deliberately created metaphor of our inner personal demons.

In our lives, there are metaphors of our inner personal demons which are part of us. We cling onto them unconsciously just like Linus holding on to his old blanket.

What are the Linus Blankets in your life?

Linus Blankets come in many shapes and forms. Besides objects, they can be a person, a group of people, a job, or even an idea about yourself.

What do they represent? How and when did they become a part of your life? Why did you need them at that time? Do you really still need them now? Can you let them go? What will you lose, if you do let them go? Can you trade them in for something else that will free you? Open your world? Open your eyes to opportunities that have always been there?

Dumping our Linus Blankets has the same effect as breaking the wooden board.

Please share your thoughts with us.

We love to hear from you.

WHO AM I, REALLY?

Who had big dreams when you were a child?

Who let some of these dreams fall by the wayside?

I did.

You too?

Why?

What stopped you?

One big reason why we let go of our dreams is because we forgot how great we really are. We underestimate ourselves.

Note I said “forgot” because we all once knew how great we were, but only later forget.

How did we forget who we really are?

Because we learn.

It is how we humans are.

We were born perfect and when we were babies, we all knew we were perfect. Our authentic self is perfect like a shining diamond.

Has anyone seen an under-confident baby?

There are no under-confident babies. All babies have charisma.

As we grow up, we learn. We are incredible learning machines. We learned to walk, we learned languages, we learned who we are, the people around us. We learned that we have hands, a nose, ears, legs. We learned all the things that allow us to function as a human being.

Together with all the useful things in life, we also learned some nasty things that diminish our authentic self.

Together with the useful things, we learned nasty from our parents, grand parents, uncles, aunts, people in authority like our teachers, school principals. Later, we learned from our friends, bosses, and we also teach (and mislead) ourselves.

Our negative learnings form a layer around our true authentic self. It is like a layer of sticky horse poo on a diamond.

Horse poo are false statements from others that are installed into our minds as limiting beliefs, as if they were true.

I can remember a few from my childhood.

One day, our secondary school principal came to our class and told us this:

“No student from this school has ever been to university. None of you will go to university.” For years, I accepted that I was not good enough for university as “fact” and never questioned this statement.

I only realised how false this statement was years later when I met university graduates and saw how they were not much different from us. I later went on to university and also post graduate studies.

On the first day of soccer training at my secondary school, the teacher picked the eleven tallest boys to form the school soccer team. There was no try out at all. The selection was over in the ten minutes that it took to pick out the taller boys in the classroom.

The teacher then told us that the school team has been formed and those not selected can stay on – as ball pickers, if we wished.

I was deeply disappointed because I am passionate about soccer, and I was a pretty fast and good winger. Since then, I lost interest in playing soccer, believing that small build people are hopeless as soccer players.

Of course, this was not true. There are many accomplished soccer superstars that are about the same height as me (5ft 7in). Look at Lionel Messi (5ft 7in) and Maradona (5ft 5in) just to name a few.

Everyone has some horse poo covering our true selves. What are yours?

So what happens?

Over the layer of other’s horse poo, we add our own layer of bull poo (bullshit).

We mistakenly thought that the horse poo is our authentic self. We’re misled into believing that the inadequate, insecure, frightened person is really us, when it is actually just other people’s horse poo.

So we try to hide other people’s horse poo with our own layer of bull poo. This we call our “personality”. We’ve got to have “personality”, we thought. This is just the glittering appearance we show the world. It is exaggerated and puffed up, and it is unauthentic.

Sometimes I catch myself acting in an unauthentic way. We know it when we are acting this way, it makes us feel lousy inside. Others know it too.

So what should we believe in? What should we do?

Do we want to believe that we are born with a special talent. That we are diamonds. If we do, we will seek out our talent, nurture it, develop it, and excel in it. We are going to make a significant contribution to our community.

Or, do we believe in the layer of horse poo. That we are not good in this, not good in that. We are too much this, and too little that. That we are not worth much, or won’t amount to much?

The price we pay is that we feel we are too fat or too thin, unlovable, unworthy, undeserving, incompetent, can’t do anything right, can’t have want we want.

Or, do we believe in our own bull poo. We do things to gain other’s approval, validation and acceptance, but deep in our hearts we know that it is not us.

For some fortunate people, someone comes along and point out their true self to them.

But, we don’t need to wait for others to clear the poo for us to find our true self.

We just need to take the leap of faith and believe in our true, authentic selves. Believe that you are worthy and deserving.

Your true self will shine from inside out, just like a baby’s charisma. You had it when you were a baby, and it is still in you. You will find that people start to respect you more for it.

I'll be sharing with you some tools to help you rediscover your authentic self and to live your life to its fullest potential.

Try it, because you are made of amazingly sterling stuff, don’t you agree?

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF

 

Click on this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2nAqRjEgd0 to watch Jamie Smart tell us about our Authentic Self.

“Have you ever heard a quote by Marianne Williamson that says “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

It’s our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

You see, there is a model of how human beings are.

You see a little kid, a little baby. Little babies are very, very confident. They have a natural kind of energy that shines out of them

You can think of that you. You were all babies at one point. As being like a diamond. Just perfect, totally authentic, totally open, totally shining.

You know, you take a baby. You guys are a bunch of cool guys. If we brought a baby in here, you’ll be 50% kind of repulsed because it’s a baby, and 50% going “aahhhh….” Because babies make people shine. It’s this baby thing, its kind of weird.

So, we got that naturally within us, all of us. And the cool thing about babies? They ask for what they want. They want something, you’ll know about it.

They are not going, what have I got to do to get this and that thing. They’ll let you know right away. And they are amazing.

Babies don’t realise that they are anything other than they’re completely fantastic.

Here’s what happens.

We learn. We learn all kinds of things. All kinds of good things because, what we are in essence is, learning machines. We are amazing learners.

See here’s the thing. Whenever, I travel to London, I use SATNAV now (satellite navigation i.e. GPS). I tend to use SATNAV. But I used to use the A-Z. The A–Z is a map of London.

It’s a map of London, but it’s not London. It’s just a map. London is far too big to be contained in a book that fits in my glove box. It’s got far too many things in it. Far too many qualities, it’s got buildings, its got people. It’s got millions and millions of things that could never be contained in a map. A map’s useful for navigating it but it’s not London.

Now here’s the thing, do me a favour. Just touch your nose. Do it. Isn’t it amazing?

Now here’s the thing, if you don’t think so, then you have not been around me long enough. Here’s the thing. There was a time when you couldn’t do that. When you didn’t know how to do that. There was a time when you didn’t even know what the word nose meant. When you didn’t even know that, that was your hand. Well that’s my hand, your one was yours. You didn’t know it was your hand. You didn’t know that there was a relationship between, and you learned it, and you learned it fast and you learnt it without going for any courses or reading any books. You learnt the way about the different parts of your body. You built a map of you, of your body, of your world and the important people in your world.

And, the first time you heard the word “milk” you didn’t even know what it was. It was just a sound, not distinct from your mum coughing or anything else. But then very, very quickly, you learn to associate that sound with that warm, nourishing yummy liquid. And you did that with all the words you ever learnt.

See, your body is designed for a world of things and experience. Not for a world of words. But you can translate the words I’m saying so quickly into the things that makes sense to your deeper body and mind. That it happens automatically. So what you did, was you built a map of you. And that map of you contains all the ideas that you have about yourself and the world. And each of those ideas, you imagine like a shining light, like a light bulb. Each of these ideas is like a cobweb. Maybe it’s the idea that it is not OK to get angry. Where it’s not OK to do certain things. Or that you can’t do this. You can’t do that. Or you shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do that.

And what we get, is like a layer of shit around the diamond.

Diamond’s still there, and there’s like a layer of horse poo around it.

So what we then do, is we build a personality. And the personality goes on like nail polish on the outside of the horse poo.

Nice metaphor, hah. Just stay with me on this one.

So, the diamond. That’s who you really are.

That shining, amazing light.

So, horse poo is who we fear we are.

And the nail polish, the “personality” is who we pretend to be.

Which gets us where? Well, here’s where it gets us.

We show the personality, cause what we don’t want anyone to see is the horse poo, cause that’s what we fear we are. “Oh, mustn’t let them see the shit. Oh, pretend everything is great.”

All we need to do is to clear that (horse shit and nail polish) away so that the light can shine through.

The light of who we really are. The light of our desires.

You know. Here’s the thing. In a while I ask you what you want in this area of your life, I'll call love life, relationships, women or however you want to think about that.

What is it that you want? And some of the things that you want, I’m guessing that you’ll be happy to share with the room. And there may be things that you want that you feel you mustn’t let anyone know, “Oh my god, if they find out that I like to do that they would stone me in the car park”.

So we pretend. We pretend to be other than who we are. And no where is this more often the case, than when it comes to meeting women.

So we pretend to be someone whom we are not. And what do women say? They say, “Just be yourself”. We’ve asked a thousand women for advice on men, on about how to be more successful with women.

They say, “Just be yourself”.

Well, who do they mean? They don’t mean this (the glittering nail polish). They mean be who you really are.

Be honest. Be authentic.

Just be yourself.

Beliefs

Beliefs

Beliefs

Beliefs