Hidden in plain sight

I have two lipsticks which I love, one a rich red and the other a more sedate browny-gold. Getting ready to travel up to London and work at a training seminar of NLP diploma candidates, I began the hunt; where is the lipstick I need!
I spent as long as I could afford before it was necessary for me to catch the train. I gave up, the lipstick had vanished, so I wore the other one, but continued to think about where the favoured one could possibly be. I began retracing my footsteps in my mind from the last time I used it, to the last time I could remember having it. No joy.
In the end, work over took thought, and the lost lipstick left my mind.
Several days later, I was looking once more for the same lipstick, when I stopped, and re-looked in the place where it should be. There, hidden in plain sight, was the lipstick, the only difference was, it was facing the other way round, so didn’t have the visual clue I was used to looking for. I had presumed what to expect and had filtered out the possibility of there being another view.
I sat and worked with a student who had thrashed around with a piece of mathematics for several days and had got no-where.
With a great flourish, he re-explained his method and all the alternatives he had tried, each one becoming more protracted until with complete satisfaction that it ‘could not be done’, he leant back in his chair and challenged me to find the solution.
I pointed out he had missed a minus sign in the question, hidden in plain sight.
Leaping forward he scrutinised the question, threw his hands in the air and said, “How did I miss it?”
Amazing how we do, but we do, and in that gap drops a lot of information which, if we has noticed it, hidden there in plain sight, it could have helped us or even made us rich.
In Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich, he talks about a man who, whilst in the deserts noticed a piece of gold. Mr Darby recognised a piece like this could mean more so quietly he went and collected what he required and began a hunt in the area. Very quickly he found enough to make it clear there was a possible gold strike and buying the land he sunk a shaft. He found a profitable vein and followed it down making him a very wealthy man.
One day the vein seemed to stop, and sinking all his money and as much as he could borrow, he sunk the lot into drilling machinery to find the vein again.
To cut a long story short, Mr Darby failed to find the other half of the vein, but what was hidden from plain sight was the geological evidence of a fault line which had shifted the other part of the vein three feet further down than he drilled.
Mr Darby went away broke and dejected, selling all he could to recoup his money.
And the gold vein? Well the man who came a long and bought the gear (and land) got a geologist in.
He was advised to drill a little further and there, three feet down was the vein, making the junk man, the owner of one of the largest gold mines in Colorado.
Hidden from plain sight was the greatest gold strike of its time.
So we can lose objects, we can lose fortunes, we can miss read and we can miss hear, but we can also fail to hear altogether.
If we do not see what we expect then do we see what is there at all? Like the leaf which looks like the injured bird, we make presumptions from not only what we know but also from what we expect.
If we don’t expect a pleasant comment from someone do we hear it when it comes?
So too are our goals and wishes. If we want something to happen do we expect it to come at us in one way, following only one route, and do we miss it because the way we see it is unfamiliar and therefore not expected?
Is it like the lipstick, right under our noses but not as we expected it to come?
Or are we so wrapped up in the finding and the procuring we haven’t realised a small error in the original plan which is preventing the whole thing from rolling out in front of our eyes?
Or do we have everything we could possibly want right there, just a matter of a few feet away as long as we have the courage to keep going for that little bit longer?
As the saying goes, everything we could possibly want in life is there, hidden in plain sight.

Success is even sweeter at 11 years old

I have had the pleasure of tutoring a group of ten year old's ready for their 11+ examination because down here in sunny Kent we still have the old grammar school system. Teaching them algebra, geometry, statistics and the necessary numeracy as well as the verbal and non verbal reasoning all in time for an exam which happens in the first 3 weeks of them returning after the summer holiday in year six is hard on them, and me. By the time it crawls round to late August and all their friends have been out playing for nearly five weeks, they are ready to stop.
We all sigh a huge sigh of relief as they troll off for the last time and we say our goodbyes, good lucks and hope all goes well.
So here we are, the time of year when the results are published and the children start their calls to me, excited and expectant of the next stage.
They have applied for their grammar schools and await the news as to whether they have got in, but for the moment they bask in absolute success of passing and all the possibilities it will bring.
Forgotten the hours of work when others played, forgotten the tantrums as the work got harder and they stretched to the point of bursting; now is their time and they bask in it.
They talk to their friends and tell them of their success, they tell them of their new found excitement of what comes next and parents sigh a huge sigh of relief as they know, for now, the pressure is off.
"We'll be back!" they say and note the fact I teach GCSE and A level. "There will come a day when we call on you so don't move!" they add and the news spreads like wild-fire, she's done it again, turned worried little ten year old children into confident, successful eleven year olds.
I send out congratulatory cards and wish them the very best, I tell their parents of the huge jumps they have made in their NFER scores, and the schools promote them into top sets, to keep stretching them for that final part of the journey; the final year of the primary where they are now the big fish in the pond. They are getting ready to jump into yet a bigger pond and swim upstream to success which awaits them there and old students come round to tell me and them what its like and they stand, stare and wistfully gaze into distant lands.
Success in the eyes of an 11 year old is indeed sweet and one of the greatest pleasures of my profession.
To make a difference at the start of their lives and know what they have learned will go with them (for I teach them strategies of how to learn and absorb not just tell them what something is) they have learned one of the best games in life - the finding out of how something works and then applying it elsewhere making the learning theirs.

What is it in you I see as a reflection of me?

Its great when friends come round and share time and laughter, even more so when that friend has made such a transformation, not only in herself but in her children as well.
It started a while ago when I started tutoring her two children; the eldest, a girl, showed promise way in excess of her school curriculum ( I knew, I taught at the school) and watching her move around from one lesson to the next it was clear she was cocooning herself from the unpleasantness of the others around her.
"Whatever you do," I said to her mother, "you have got to get her out, she is drowning here!"
Within the year R*****l was out and into another school where she is now flourishing and already stretching herself to new heights. She has her first set of GCSEs under her belt and is going for the remainder this year.
Since then I have worked with the mum and we have dealt with the issues from the past in both her and her daughter; now two glamorous women stand before me!
Today she came round and looked at me, I knew there was something.
"OK, so here it is," she said,"Ra*****l really annoyed me and I don't know why."
She went on to explain what had happened and as she was recanting it, a recognition came over her face.
"No wonder it annoyed me, that is still in me. Oh, gawd I thought I had cleared that one." She turned to herself and grinned, "So some of the old Sharon is still floating in there. Nope, we are not going back to victim mode, it stops here, now, what is it in me my daughter was flagging up for me to see?"
She went quiet for a while, then giggled, "Yes, that's it." And she went on to recant all of what it was. Within half an hour a taller, happier Sharon walked out of my house.
"Your teaching is great," she said," I would never have got this far with me or R*****l if it hadn't been for learning all about this."
With that she reached forward and gave me a hug, "Right when we going to hit the town, I feel a shopping trip coming on...."

The song that flagged the change

Many moons ago, a new girl group was formed, they rose to the top so quickly they reached iconic status within months. Their music was everywhere and even if you didn't want to, you found yourself singing the lines, humming the tunes, recognising the song from a few bars. Who am I talking about? One of the first girl groups, The Spice Girls.
To say I was NOT a follower is an understatement, but, yes, I listened to the radio, the music channels and I, like millions of others became very familiar with their songs.
I watched the old classic, Top of the Pops one night and all I can hear to this day is, 'what do you want, do you really, really, want?'. It has haunted me ever since.

OK so let's look at this in a different way.

For some reason my unconscious mind flagged this up, over and over again, until I listened. It was telling me I really wasn't happy with what it was I was doing and was attempting to get me to stop running long enough to recognise it.
Truth was, I wasn't, I was teaching and had in all honestly lost all will to live. The pressures of government targets, syllabus limitations, OFSTED expectations, Senior Management directives, cover work setting for an unfilled timetable, marking their books as well as my own, my own classes, the tutor group and their pressures and problems, parental needs and expectations . . . somewhere in there I got lost. I was a teacher 24 hours a day and knew nothing else; surely there was a better way to live?
'What do you want, do you really, really want?' kept echoing through my mind until in the end, the physical body blew its best gasket (the heart) and called it a day.

Now? Well I am not in a school, I run my own business with my own expectations and syllabus. I create and innovate the way I wish to, and cause children to excel in the way they can when given the space in which to express their skills to the limit. I give guidance and advice to parents who want the very best for their children and I have a life of my own!!!

The song led me to change the whole of my perspective on life and gave me one. If you were to ask yourself the self same question what would you come up with? What would you have to change before your body said, enough, and led you down the road to STRESS, HEART DISEASE, NERVOUS DISORDERS and other gentle signs you are living a life outside of your desires?

Mind the gap between the platform and Iran

It hadn't even reached 7:30am and there was I getting onto a train to work in London for the day. Clutching the regular sized station tea in one hand and my bag in the other I sat down in the first available seat, only to spend the next couple of minutes getting organised and settled.
I have always loved the journey up to town but if you knew me well, you would know I am an owl by preference not a lark, and anything before 8:30am is a bit of a no-go area for me. So you can imagine, that duvet was still hugging me from a great distance and I was sitting next to people who were sniffing and sneezing—just what I really wanted!
It then dawned on me, does this train stop at London Bridge or is it the fast one through to Waterloo? I glanced up and looked at the board, it was still scrolling through the information; please mind the gap between the station and Iran. I stopped, looked again and yes that’s what it said. I watched again but slowly, keeping my eyes on the scrolling set of dots representing letters and then I saw why I had been caught; the tops of the letters had been chopped off by the cover which had slipped on one side. I grinned widely and the man opposite me looked up and, I suspect, thought I was laughing at him, because he blushed deeply and lifted his newspaper higher so hiding my face.
The irony of the mistake just tickled me and the smile failed to leave; how intimidating that is for commuters, who were averting their eyes everywhere so as to avoid the possible eye contact with this woman.
How many times have you found yourself doing something similar? You see a leaf or a piece of rubbish in the road and from behind the wheel of the car you wonder whether its an injured bird, or a snake. In Spain this summer, there was a rock I could see over the balcony and it looked remarkably like a cat crouched down watching something.
We have distorted what is there to fit in with what we presume is there and we get all the emotions associated with our presumption.
Our ability to distort is amazing and we use it as a way of distilling down the information which is continuously coming towards us. As John Cassidy Rice said, if a woman having a baby consciously registered everything that was happening throughout the birth it would take years for the mother to process the information and the baby would probably be six or seven years old when it was born!
We cannot process the millions of pieces of information which is always coming towards us at any one time so we generalise, delete and distort it down to about seven pieces per second (a lot less than the 16 million per second scientists now agree we are bombarded by).
So, I am going to ask a rhetorical question, what do we distort?
Our interpretation of the world around us.
Think about this statement;

We do not see the world we only see what we think the world is like.

and now consider this one;

We presume every one sees the world the same way.

But do they? Not everyone will see the stick which looks like a snake, or read the sign as ‘Iran’ and not ‘Train’; not everyone will presume the same thing from what the doctor has said, or the neighbour intimated. . . . but we presume they do.
So let’s take this to another level; let’s say there is a conversation going on between two people about where their relationship is going. One has distorted it so it appears sad, bad and ending, the other that it is obviously going through a rough patch but it will get through, how will their conversation sound? Where will it go and what are the possible ramifications of the differences in their distortions of the actual situation? It could be that one of them isn’t getting something as often as they would like to satisfy a need within them, and as we know our desire to satisfy ‘need’ is very strong.
There is always the good humoured comment, ‘Women come from Venus whilst men come from Mars’. What it is saying is exactly right, there are fundamental differences with the way men and women view the world, what is a priority to one is not going to be a priority to the other. Biologically we are programmed differently so as to fulfil our roles of hunter and mother, so our view of the world will be different even though society has created superficial change in this respect. Let's face it not many men go out with a club and bring home their kill fo rthe partner to gut and skin!
So taking this to another stage let's think about couples when they first get together. Initially couples only ‘see’ the similarities and spend much brain time comparing like with like. It is important to create a relationship with someone who is like yourself because that is what makes the unconscious most content.
"YOU are so like me, you must be wonderful!"
It is only later as the couple get used to one another the differences become noticed and then these can make the difference which either make it better or break it down. But the people haven’t changed in any way, what has been deleted and distorted has and that is the difference.
"YOU were so wonderful when I first knew you but you've changed!"
It is an internal change in sorting, they haven't changed, you have in the way you sort and think and prioritise those 7+/-2 pieces of information.
So where does this take us? We are looking at how the brain sorts information into what it deems important. As we age we change our perspectives and as these change so too do our sorting processes. The ‘seven year itch’ is a classic example of this. A couple have been together for approximately seven years (to a Kinesiologist this is one cycle in a person’s life) and there is irritation building between them. They have changed since they met, they have grown wiser and have experienced more, so their filters change to absorb the new information around them. This shows up in the comparator they run between themselves and their partner who may now be running a set of filters which no longer interest. What does he or she do? Well often it’s the time when affairs begin, there is a need to satisfy something which appears to be missing so the ‘grass is always greener’ comes into play. Yet, if the couple stopped and acknowledged the growth and absorbed that into the way they related to one another the partnership would grow.
Question: you are in business and your partners and yourself make no changes in the business over seven years, would the business still be growing? Would it still have the same fire it had on conception? Would the enthusiasm still be running?
Answer: I would expect the business would have gone to the wall or at least be approaching it and the partners would be sick of each other’s inability to grow and develop.
So what is so different between a business and a couple coming together to run a household?
Distortions are useful because they help us generalise out things in our lives and make it easier for us to adapt to minor changes. Here is an example.
I have been with T-Mobile for many years now and have always had a Nokia phone. I like them and the way they work but each time I have up-graded, the way in which it is presented and the extra features which go with it mean I have to re-learn the way to use it. However, I have distorted and generalised the way to make a phone call or send a text, I immediately look for that common thread, and because I stick to the same make it is there. In this instance the distortion acts so as to filter out other possibilities. Clever use of marketing here which I can assure you will know all about this and more besides and cash in on it so as to keep the faithful exactly that.
I watched the screen in the train as it scrolled through its various messages; each time it came to the platform I saw how just by losing the top of one letter completely threw me. I wonder how many other distortions would catch me today?

A dummy in the conversation

Mothers are mothers the world over; it doesn’t matter what language they speak, when they are engrossed in conversation and dealing with the baby at the same time, it’s the baby who gets the shortest straw.
I watched as mum continued a deep and meaningful conversation with her partner and holding the baby in one arm offered the dummy with the other. Each time the dummy came close the baby struggled and pushed the hand away, pulling down towards the beach and everything which was stimulating below. Mum didn’t give up, she just restrained and then re-presented; again the baby struggled and pushed the dummy away only more violently with kicking as well as arms and hands. Again the mum continued her conversing and waited. This went on for about 2 or 3 minutes by which time the fight seemed to have gone out of the child and it gave in with a look of disquiet but accepted the dummy. Without a second look the mum pushed the dummy into the mouth, then without taking her eyes off her partner placed the child into the push chair. The child squirmed and struggled but had lost the fight.
It made me wonder how many time we ignore and presume in a similar way when we want something done. Do we ignore the comments of the other person and railroad straight through?
I thought back to when I was teaching and the number of times I probably did exactly that; was it for their benefit or like the dummy was it just a way of getting my way? Did I bend their will to mine and was it beneficial to them?
The baby kicked and struggled pushing the dummy out of its mouth once more. It began to ‘chatter’ in the way babies do, no screams, no crying, just happy chatter and the dummy was pushed back.
Mm, so do we do the same? Do we push back the chatter, the comments, the expressions of others because it suits us not to hear or possibly not to listen?
My job is to give time to those who need to be heard; if we all allowed this would we need people like me? Would we not be that extended support system which doesn’t place the dummy into the mouth just to get peace and quiet?