68 Part I: Introducing NLP
conditions in the earlier section ‘Becoming smarter than SMART:
Creating well-formed outcomes’.
- Take action.
Unless you take that first step, and then the following ones, nothing’s
going to happen to help you move towards your outcome, no matter
how clearly you define it.
- Develop sensory awareness.
If you have the awareness to see, hear, and feel what isn’t working, you
can modify your behaviour to steer you towards the desired outcome.
Chapter 6 shows you how to develop sensory awareness.
- Maintain behavioural flexibility.
This step ties in beautifully with the following NLP presupposition: ‘In
interactions between people, the person with the most flexibility of
behaviour can control the interaction.’ Or more directly: ‘If it ain’t work-
ing, do something different.’ Head to Chapter 2 for a detailed explanation
of this powerful presupposition.
If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you
always got.
Spinning the Wheel of Life
This section helps you to identify whether you’re satisfied with your life, and
if scope for improvement does exist, which areas need to be worked on in
order to get your life back on track, simply and effectively.
Take a look at the diagram of the wheel in Figure 4-1. If you were to label the
wedges of the wheel with words that indicate the most important areas of
your life, what areas would you choose? Do they tie up with those we entered
in the figure? Typically people select labels such as work and career (includ-
ing working within the home), finances and money, friends and family, rela-
tionships, personal growth and learning, fun and recreation, spirituality, and
physical environment.
Taking the centre of the wheel as 0 and the outer edge as 10, rank your level
of satisfaction with each life area by drawing a straight or curved line to join
each number and create a new outer edge. This new perimeter of the circle
represents your personal wheel of life. The ideal situation is obviously to have
all the sections at 10, giving you a beautifully round wheel, like the one in
Figure 4-1.
