[Video] Making sense of lockdown with the SCARF model

I had the pleasure of speaking at an online event organised by Thabiso Mailula of the Subconscious Frequency Academy back in the summer of 2020 and thought you might be interested in hearing what I had to say about how the SCARF model can help you make sense of lockdown. If you haven’t come across it before, the SCARF model is a piece of neuroscience that focusses on the social concerns that drive people’s behaviour.

Your Mind in Lockdown

After making this video, I looked further into the neurological effects of lockdown and wrote a free guide containing a number of practical tools and insights to get you back on track. The aim is to help you use your brain to get back to working at your best – regardless of the turmoil around you.

For instant, free access to ‘Your Mind in Lockdown’, click here and enter your details on the next page…

[Article] What’s wrong with being a perfectionist?

My friend called in for a cup of coffee and a chat and found me doing the ironing. I made coffee and she pulled up a kitchen chair as I resumed my work. Although she was telling me her latest news I noticed her watching closely as I transformed a crumpled heap of fabric into an immaculate, crisp white shirt.

“You’re good at ironing.” It was as much a question as a comment.

I excused my ability to execute this mundane household task with such precision and finesse: my Mum taught me when I was young, I was a keen dressmaker in my twenties, the window-dressers in my retail career showed me…

Why not just acknowledge the compliment?

Instead I made it a fault:

“I’m so good at it, it takes me ages. I used to have to pay someone to do it badly for me!” It’s kind of a joke. Or is it?

The real truth is, I’m a perfectionist. Almost whatever I do I want to do well. Really well. Perfectly, in fact.

And it was never an issue until I started joining personal development programmes in my thirties. There I learned that perfectionism is regarded as a disorder. It attracts pitying glances and patronising comments. I played the game and pretended I wanted to rehabilitate.

But I never really changed in that respect. I learned a lot about myself and about what drives me. I discovered how to manage my emotional reactions and respond to other people’s. But secretly I still wanted to be perfect.

So, for all the other un-reconstructed perfectionists out there and everyone else who didn’t even realise it’s supposed to be a bad thing, here’s my guide to the ups and downs of being a perfectionist.

It’s a problem being a perfectionist if:

  • You obsess over small details and never feel that a job is actually complete
  • You can’t get started on a job because you’re anxious about getting it – not wrong – just not perfect
  • You get annoyed with other people who don’t share your desire for perfection
  • You constantly feel that nothing you do is good enough

It’s okay to be a perfectionist if:

  • It makes you keen to learn and practise new skills
  • It motivates you to work hard and do your best
  • You enjoy the results – high quality output and a sense of satisfaction
  • You feel proud of your achievements

You see, the thing I realised recently is that the idea that Perfectionism is a Bad Thing is born of the belief that nothing can ever be perfect. Therefore seeking perfection is a waste of time and energy and creates stress.

I hold a different belief. I believe that perfection is attainable. In my opinion, that crisp white shirt is perfectly ironed.

I also believe that it’s good to strive towards unattainable goals. Far better that than slouching towards something you can do with no effort and can derive no satisfaction from achieving.

Those of us who get labelled as perfectionists may sometimes suffer stress because of it. But I’d rather keep my high standards and my drive for perfection than descend into the well of mediocrity that seems to be the outcome of all that well-meaning personal development advice.

[Video] How to assess your own development needs

Sometimes people come to me and say: “I don’t really know what I need, but I know I need something.” Which is interesting – because how would you know that you need something if you have no idea what it is? And yet somehow we do.

So I got thinking about this and I believe there are some ways we can figure out – for ourselves – what our development needs are…

[Video] The truth about NLP Practitioner training

The modular way we run our NLP Practitioner training programme at Brilliant Minds means the course lasts for 20 days and is spread out over 5 months.

So at the end of the 10th day (about 3 months in) on our most recent course, we asked 5 people if they would tell us how they were feeling about the training, what they were getting out of it, and how it compared with what they thought they were going to get out of the course.

Then we went back to them right at the very end of the course, after 20 days, and asked them to tell us how they were feeling about the whole experience then.

This is what they said…

 

If you’d like to find out more about the Brilliant Minds Executive NLP Practitioner training programme, here’s the link: https://www.brilliantminds.co.uk/executive-nlp-practitioner/