NLP Coaching

Soul Work NLP Training VIDEO

Caitriona and Michele / Five Changes, Hypnosis, Mindset Mentoring, NLP, NLP Coaching, NLP Training, Workshops and Retreats /

April 10, 2017

Soul Work NLP Coaching Certification

We’re so excited to be doing the Soul Work NLP training again this year. And to teach ways for coaches, speakers, team facilitators, healers, and conscious leaders to explode their skill and earning power.

Of course, there are lots of great coaching training programs available today but nothing teaches you how to help your clients, students, or team quite as effectively and rapidly as this.

We hear words like ‘miracle’ and ‘magic’ from our clients and from our students more often than we can count.

Coaches, consultants, workshop facilitators, and speakers graduating from this program have felt confident doubling and tripling their fees with the work they are now empowered and skilled to perform.

For Dates and more Information about Soul Work NLP

Here’s what some of our graduates are saying about this program:

I’ve invested thousands of dollars in other high-level coaching programs .. and I’m blown away. I will use this material above all the others .. I can’t recommend this training highly enough.
— Kathleen Mulcahy. Santa Monica CA

The decades ahead of me are in no way going to be the same .. I have learned tools and techniques that have transcended anything I could have imagined .. they have given me a great opportunity to grow myself, my marriage, and my business. If you are interested in learning skills to help people overcome limiting mindsets, beliefs, and attitudes that have been holding them back then do this training! Caitriona Reed and Michele Benzamin-Miki are masters at rapid change .. I recommend this training to coaches, teachers, healers, therapists.. there’s no application I can think of where you couldn’t use what I’ve learned in this training.
— Geoff Laughton Boulder CO

I teach and coach actors, and also coach executives in public speaking. This NLP training will be transforming my entire practice. This is information that I will use every day. Thank you! Thank you!
— Jeffrey Marcus, Los Angeles CA

I studied with Richard Bandler (one of the original creators of NLP). After meeting Caitriona and Michele a few months ago, I wanted to continue training with them. This past two weeks has changed me at the core. I am so excited to share the tools that I have learned with my clients and also to apply them personally. I am going to be forever grateful for these learnings.
— Kathleen Nelson Troyer, Half Moon Bay CA

I can’t even imagine NOT having done this training. Everything has changed.
— Emily Steinberg, Austin TX

For More Information about Soul Work NLP

If you are interested in this training, or would like to attend, but the dates don’t work, please contact us for information about future trainings

Wishful thinking will get you nowhere ..

Caitriona Reed / NLP Coaching, NLP Training, Videos /

January 14, 2015

There’s a reason why affirmations are hit-or-miss, a temporary stop-gap, and why New Year resolutions usually fall by the wayside. Willpower might work in a pinch, but not for very long, and you’ll wear yourself out with it. And affirmations can be like blowing into the wind.

Without the brain-mind science to support them, these things are little more than wishful thinking. There’s a science to how well-considered outcomes, and clear intentions, turn into reality. It’s what visionaries and evolutionary leaders have always done, often intuitively, in order to realize their goals.

In this video we take you through the basic process of fully immersing yourself in you desired outcome, experiencing it as though it were happening here and now,and then distancing yourself from it, and sending that energetic “inevitability package” to yourself at that future time.

If this sounds weird or unlikely, know that skepticism, and wishful thinking are even weirder strategies to navigate a life where the positive impact you have in the world is dependent on your positive aspirations.

Let 2015 be the brilliant year in which you actualize realize real change
for yourself and others!

NLP as a messenger

Caitriona Reed / Coaching, NLP, NLP Coaching / NLP Coaching, NLP Training, spiritual practice /

September 10, 2014

Podcast and Blog

“What do you want meaning for? Life is desire, not meaning.” —Charlie Chaplin

It was many years ago, when I was living in London; early on a summer Sunday morning. The sun was just touching the rooftops. The streets were quiet. I was woken by loud banging on the door of the flat downstairs. The banging went on for several minutes. I got up and opened my door, and called down that my neighbor was away for the weekend, and anyway, you shouldn’t go around waking people up at the crack of dawn! A young man came up the stairs, walked into my flat, sat down and said, “Wake you up? Wake you up? Nothing could wake you up, mate!” Then he stood up, walked back downstairs, and left the building.

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I went back to bed and imagined that perhaps the stranger had been a messenger. Perhaps he was giving me a messages from the universe. Was there a hidden meaning here, something he knew, that I didn’t? Or had I, like him, simply had too much to drink the night before?

I told the story to my friends and it became an ongoing joke. So it has stuck with me, a reminder to ask what ‘waking up’ could even mean.

We all invent our own unique meanings for life, and for the things that we experience. It’s how we make the map that we navigate by. That summer, in the late 1970’s, I had spent the past several months at silent meditation retreats. I was learning to question a lot of what I had previously taken for granted. ‘Meaning’ was already up for grabs.

Milton Erickson, the man who helped make hypnosis acceptable in the world of medicine and psychiatry, and who was to become one of the original inspirations for NLP, said that everyone walks around in a trance of disempowerment, and that our work is to change that trance, to a trance of empowerment – in other words, to wake up. His genius in helping his clients was in his ability to recognize the maps they used to navigate the world, the meanings they gave to things. Waking-up was simply waking up to the possibility of making new meanings, new maps. and opening yourself up to doing things in new ways.

We are meaning-making creatures. It’s what we do. It’s how we learn, communicate, and create. As children it’s how we define who we are, and who we will become. It becomes a problem when the meanings we attribute to things make us feel bad or do harm to others. Fear, and our longing to make the world safe, causes meaning to coagulate into fixed beliefs, and fixed beliefs to become assumed truths.

It’s clearer if you consider the words of Charlie Chaplin,
“What do you want meaning for? Life is desire, not meaning.”

Meaning hesitates, desire acts. Meaning doubts, desire loves. Meaning is a mirage, a trap, that takes you round in circles. Desire goes straight to the source. It’s the old dance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, between Logos and Eros. It’s NOT a battle between opposites. Desire is not a pathway (as some fear) towards losing control, or to indulging in unbridled appetites, and losing yourself to addiction. Desire is how you cultivate your creativity, vision, integrity, and sense of being connected to the whole.

If there’s a clear message from the universe it’s that you have a choice as to how you shape meaning; so that the meanings you make, carry you forward, rather than hold you back; and NLP is a useful messenger that brings you the skills to help you turn desire into creativity, and your vision into reality.

Spiritual NLP

Caitriona Reed / Anxiety and Stress, Emotional Intelligence, Hypnosis, Mindfulness, NLP, NLP Coaching / Branson, Fritz Perls, Korzybski, Meditation, Milton Erickson, mindfulness, NLP Training, Orah, spiritual practice, Virginia Satir /

September 2, 2014

Blog post and Podcast

NLP, Neurolinguistic Programing, has had a huge impact on public speaking, education, business, and therapy for over forty years. For those of us who can see its all-pervading influence, it’s hard to imagine how things were before NLP became part of the current human environment. NLP continues to evolve, and to provide cutting-edge skills that help top leaders, speakers, sales-people, creative artists, teachers, and therapists become better at what they do.Yet, to most people it still remains invisible.

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I first came across NLP through the recommendation of a Buddhist monk I met in Sri Lanka in the 1970’s. I began by reading the handful of books then available. Later in the mid-1980s I attended my first NLP seminar. The trainer was remarkably uninspiring and dull, but I was intrigued, and started using elements of NLP in my Hypnotherapy practice, even though I wouldn’t fully appreciate its brilliance and power until years later.

When NLP is being used well, you don’t notice it at all, because NLP is more than just a technique or a skill. Actually, it’s not even really a modality in the usual sense. It’s like a chameleon. When used well it can enhance any situation to help you to communicate, influence, heal, or effect change in yourself or others, remarkably quickly and effectively. It has been called “an attitude followed by a trail of techniques.” But the techniques are only the beginning. In the hands of an experienced practitioner, NLP is a truly improvised art.

Much of contemporary Neuroscience only affirms what NLP-trained therapists, teachers, leaders, and group-facilitators, have been doing to help people change their lives for forty years, based on precise observation and intuition.

NLP was born from the simple inquiry, “Is it possible to reproduce the results of the very best contemporary therapists (at the time that was Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson) by copying what they did?” NLP was created by learning the art of copying effectively (Modelling), and then from the specific details that were discovered from doing so. The emphasis on modelling, or emulating, what works, rather than getting rid of what doesn’t work, sets NLP apart from many other approaches to change that rely heavily on theoretical analysis and the diagnosis of what’s wrong.

Modelling in NLP doesn’t stop with the luminaries that inspired its creation. There’s no limit to what, or who, you can model in order to be effective – visionaries, innovators, therapists, healers, scientists, artists; Socrates, Mozart, Mother Teresa, Einstein, Korzybski, Jimmy Hendrix, Oprah Winfrey. NLP existed long before the term Neurolinguistic was coined. It’s as ancient as the first time someone systematically began to exemplify or copy others in order to improve their own performance. Contemporary NLP is simply the ongoing refinement of how you can do so most effectively.

The Spiritual Side of NLP Training

Michele and I both became serious about NLP after we had been teaching meditation and leading retreats for many years. We were feeling stagnant. We needed a change. We were noticing that many people used meditation not to transform their lives, but to reinforce who they already were, and what they already believed. In the words of our teacher of many years, Thich Nhat Hanh, they were practicing ‘bomb-shelter’ meditation.

The effect that we noticed NLP had, both on ourselves and on our students and clients, was that it accelerated deep transformation and change in ways that meditation alone usually could not.

Here are three examples of some of the many ways \NLP supports systemic and spiritual change.

Big Picture Thinking

Among the principles we teach our clients and students is the importance of seeing the big picture. When you see the big picture and have greater perspective, you have more choices. Having more choices, you learn to recognize the opportunities that life is continually giving you, as well as the long term consequences of your actions.

Most errors of judgment, missed opportunities, regret and unhappiness, are the result of failing to see a bigger picture. I remember a French movie I saw many years ago. It is the story of an illicit claustrophobic love-affair in a claustrophobic provincial town. The two protagonists eventually murder their respective spouses. At the end of the film, when they are arrested, the detective ask them, “Why couldn’t you just elope?” They had failed to see the obvious solution. They had missed the big picture. How many times do we miss the big picture because we are so focused on the problems immediately in front of us that we miss the obvious solution?

Awareness and Meditation

Mindfulness and Meditation have become part of our collective culture in ways that we could never have imagined a few years ago. Although we no longer teach mindfulness or meditation as we used to, we have taken elements from traditional Mindfulness training skills and combined them with elements from NLP – Expanded Awareness, Anchoring, and the use of Sub-modalities – to help people develop sustained focus and awareness. (You may not know those technical terms yet, but you’ll certainly appreciate them when you understand what they mean)

The results have been extraordinary. We have seen students raise their grade-point average by one or two points; and we have seen how NLP, in conjunction with enhanced awareness, can address chronic anxiety, emotional trauma, as well as panic attacks and phobias.

Emotional Intelligence

Most people are controlled by their emotions, even though they’d like to think that they are not. Suppression is often the only option they know. But when you learn that emotions are messengers, and that the information they bring is always relevant, you can free yourself from being held hostage by them.

Every emotion is connected by association to other emotions, memories, and expectations. When you learn to navigate through the intricate tangle of your emotions and mental states, you create a chain of positive emotion that can liberate you from the emotional maze that the majority of people spend their lives in. This is a central aspect of NLP – how to be the architect of your own emotional state.

Spiritual Materialism

Michele and I tend to avoid the word ‘spiritual’ because it creates a division. The biggest so-called un-spiritual experience can also provide a priceless opportunity for change; and transformational change is inherently ‘spiritual’. Whatever broadens your perspective teaches you something you didn’t know before, and if you’re really paying attention it will enhance the quality of your life. Creating a split division between spiritual and not-spiritual is how we have created war, environmental destruction, and our own human alienation from the fabric of life on the planet.

I knew a dedicated spiritual seeker who meditated in a closet because the birds outside the window disturbed his meditation. As an ardent twenty-year-old meditator I would swear at the neighbors’ children for disturbing my tranquility. I had no idea that ‘truth’ and ‘spirit’ are everywhere. Decades later, to my surprise, I noticed how going back and forth between the serenity of Manzanita Village and Los Angeles made no difference to my mental equilibrium. Apparently something had rubbed off on me.

‘Truth’ is not a rule book, or a story about an extra-terrestrial supreme being. Truth is what is useful to help you lead a better, more beneficial life, for yourself and others, here and now. Your spirituality is whatever leads you to do so most effectively.

Because NLP helps you to obliterate emotional baggage, break through limiting beliefs, presumptions, and self-negating behaviors, and to recognize your greater potential, it is a very real spiritual discipline. Perfectionism and self-judgment are obstacles that get in the way of understanding that everything you experience is a way forward. Inherent to NLP is the recognition that there is no failure, only feedback. When you are able to learn from the feedback you become like an engineer of your own human potential, and you move forward, spiritually, and in every way, because every way is connected.

Where we meet with clients

Caitriona Reed / Dreams, NLP, NLP Coaching / Cavafy, Ithaca, photos /

August 26, 2014

A new hypnosis-coaching-mentoring office

We named this building Ithaca, because Ithaca is the island home of Odysseus, where he returned after the challenges described in the Odyssey; and also because we wanted to bring the spirit of the ocean a little closer. Ithaca is a metaphor for homecoming. The work we do with NLP Coaching and Hypnotherapy clients is like their homecoming ..

Like stepping through a doorway into another dimension .. and coming home to remember the power of your spirit, your creativity, your purpose, and the ease with which you can master your internal states.

.. and then look back at the world through fresh eyes and return.

(NLP Coaching clients meet with us here when they come for their two day customized Breakthrough Mentoring Retreat as part of their ongoing programs with us)

There was a time when everything was customized, handmade. We made this building in the old way; straw-bales and adobe. The exterior clay walls are covered with handmade mineral paint we mixed. The lime and ferrous-sulphate reacts with the adobe clay to form crystal particles that are resistant to erosion from wind and rain. It also reflects the changing light in a way that is entirely unlike commercial paint.

Likewise the work we do inside is customized, hand-made, transformational, beautiful ..

And there’s always time for goofing around. Michele painted the flags, and from time to time became completely entangled in them .. as you see

Texts are from Hesiod, Homer, and Cavafy and translated by Caitriona.

ITHACA —Constantin Cavafy

As you set sail for Ithaca
hope the voyage is long,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Cannibals of Lamos, monstrous Cyclops,
wild Poseidon’s fury,
don’t be afraid of them.

You’ll never even see them
if you hold your thoughts high,
and allow the sweet excitement
of spirit and body guide you.

You’ll never meet
Cannibals, Cyclops.
Poseidon’s storms
unless you bring them along
inside your soul,
unless your soul
sets them up
in front of you.

Hope the voyage is long.
Summer mornings
will carry you
into sparkling new harbors,
of pleasure and ecstasy.

Places seen for the first time
upside-down islands
waterfalls
tumbling into the sky.

Sail there!
Trade with the Phoenicians,
for mother of pearl and coral,
amber and ebony, agate and jade,
attar of roses, and frankincense,
every perfume you can find,

Lay anchor in Alexandria
trades stories with the wise ones.

Always guard Ithaca in your mind
but don’t hurry.
You are destined to arrive.
Don’t hurry the journey,
don’t hurry at all.
It’s better that it lasts for years.

You will be old
when you reach the island,
rich with all that you have become,
not expecting anything of Ithaca.

Ithaca gave you the ocean.
Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor do not blame her,
wise as you will have become,
so full of experience,
you will have understood by then
what these Ithacas mean.

Magic Bullets or Bottomless Pits

Caitriona Reed / Coaching, Hypnosis, Hypnotherapy, NLP, NLP Coaching, Podcasts / change, Hypnosis, nlp /

August 23, 2014

Article and Podcast

Three Approaches to Change

Did you ever experience something that felt as if it had transformed you to the core of your being? Was there ever a time when you were certain that an old issue that had been nagging you for years was gone forever?

A powerful insight has shifted your understanding, and it’s as if you are stepping into a whole new way of being and living!

Then things gradually slip back to how they were before, as if nothing had really changed. Except that now you are even more frustrated, cynical, and disappointed than before.

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Hypnotherapy and NLP Coaching

People often come to NLP or Hypnotherapy as a last resort. They have had no success in dealing with issues like chronic pain, or emotional addiction, or the self-destructive mindset that results in continual personal and professional disappointment. They may have visited numerous healers and professionals and it all helped to a certain degree, but nothing has addressed the root of the problem. They have learned to cope, but they haven’t t learned to change.

Often something entirely different happens through hypnosis to tip the balance; and a year, or ten years later, they are still enjoying the fruits of that shift.

How is it possible that hypnosis and NLP Coaching work when other modalities fail? I remember a client who was suffering from chronic back-pain. She had gone through multiple surgeries, and years of visiting pain-clinics and psychiatrists. The pain had worn her down, and she felt completely powerless to change it. It was affecting her work, her health, and even her ability to sustain a romantic relationship. She was about to break up with her boyfriend of several years.

The hypnotic state gave her the ability to reclaim the part of herself that she had only known as ‘pain’. Think of this as a metaphor, because it may be the best way to describe how hypnotherapy works. We disown our ‘problem’, and try to fix it by getting rid of it. But it’s like cutting off a limb because we sprained a joint. We separate ourselves from the very thing that can make us whole. You might think that this wouldn’t apply to a physical symptom, like pain. But after the organic cause of the pain has gone, there is nothing there to support it except the habit, and the unconscious need, to recreate it. This is even more true when it comes to issues like your mindset, negative emotions, self-limiting beliefs, or addictive behaviors.

There’s no blame in this. You do the best you can at any given time. Hypnosis is simply a way to give you more options and choices.

After her first session my client’s pain disappeared, never to return (the last time we spoke was ten years after our work together). People call such things miraculous! But how it works is very simple. Hypnosis has the marvelous ability to help us address unconscious dynamics while we remain conscious. Hypnosis is not like sleep. It is simply a way of bypassing the filters that our conscious mind uses to process experience. Hypnosis is a natural state of mind that you experience several times a day – every time you go into a daydream, for example.

The Hypnotherapy process allowed my client to address the reasons why she had unconsciously perpetuated the pain. Of course, had there been physical reasons for the pain to persist, I would have referred her to a physician or a chiropractor. The fact that the pain disappeared so rapidly, and that she remained pain-free, told me that it was no longer a physical issue.

We continued to work together so that I could teach her how to use the hypnotic state to empower herself, and to apply it to every area of her life. I taught her different ways of self-hypnosis and gave her the tools to cultivate her creative unconscious, set a vision and develop the strategies and skills for attaining it, and to learn how to master her own psychology. After all, if she could overcome chronic pain that she had been told was incurable, what else could she do?

Three Approaches to Healing and Transformation

Personal transformation and healing depend on your expectations. They also depend on the expectations of the person who is mentoring you.

George Estabrooks noticed in the 1940’s that the client “tends to fulfill the expectations of their therapist.” In our Hypnosis and NLP Training we emphasis the importance of setting no limits on the results you can expect from a client, to expect miracles. When you do that you will constantly be astonished by the positive results you get with clients.

If a therapist sees you only through the filters of neurosis and pathology, they will be incapable of seeing anything beyond that. Teaching you to cope with your ‘pathology’ will be the best you can expect from them.

If you have a physical illness and your doctor sees your body as something separate from the rest of you, they may be able to treat your symptoms, but they never actually ‘heal’ you.The symptoms will probably return when the conditions for them occur again.

If a coach sees you through their own preconception of success or failure, they will be insensitive to your own unique gifts and the journey that you are on, and they will unconsciously set limits on what you can achieve, based on their own projections.

Three approaches to change

The Bottomless Pit Approach: The old-school approach to transformation is that life is long and arduous and filled with difficulties. You must spend half a lifetime as an apprentice, years in therapy, decades of arduous spiritual practice. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with dedication and ongoing training. But the idea that deep change must take a long time is simply not true. Some of the unspoken assumptions that drive that idea are:

Life is always difficult and complex.
Learn to accept things as they are or you will be disappointed.
People don’t change, they just become more of who they are.
Your problem is so complex that no one can really fix it, but you can learn to manage it.

The Magic Bullet Approach: Fueled by wishful thinking and a desire not to have to take full responsibility for the miracle of your life, the magic bullet approach is characterized by attitudes like:

If only I could find the right person, technique, mentor, place, etc.I know it will fix everything.
Here’s a new bright shiny object. It will will give absolutely, positively give you everything you need.
I had an amazing experience doing such-and-such, or with so-and-so, and I want to have that experience again (and again, and again).
If you do more of what you are doing things will eventually work out. (I will be healthy, have the relationship I desire, have all the money and success I want)

It’s not that magic doesn’t happen, nor is it true that some things aren’t hard. It’s that having a strategy is essential, for everything important that we do.

The Five Changes Approach: Integrated Praxis and NLP Coaching

Praxis simply means putting what you know into action consistently and strategically. It doesn’t mean preparing for something. It means that what you are doing right now is already having an impact on your life.

It means using the appropriate tools and skills and continuing to use and refine them on an ongoing basis. Unlike the ‘bottomless pit’ approach, you’re the one with the power. You’re the one taking responsibility for your actions and for the results of your actions. Unlike the ‘magic bullet’ approach you’re not just hoping for a miracle to suddenly change everything without your having to commit to making the change happen.

In the Third approach big changes can happen quickly, but you are developing the insights you get from them to adapt what you do, to course-correct, and go deeper on an ongoing basis. When you find the support and mentorship that works for you, you know that it works as a collaboration, because you know that no one else can ‘fix’ your problems for you. They simply give you the support, the skills, and the perspectives that you need.

Anyone with enough time and patience can learn to give their car a tune-up or rebuild the engine; but unless you are a car mechanic you’d be better off getting someone else to do it. This applies even more when it comes to getting the perspective for your life and business that you simply can’t get on your own, simply because you’re too close to them.

The Third approach is not a compromise between the other two approaches. Energy and consistency are required, but not in order for you to bury yourself in the process.

When change happens it’s not because you stumbled on the right magic formula. The obstructions we put in our own way are not be as insurmountable as they seem, but we can’t fix them by driving blindly into the dark and thinking that if only we could go faster we’ll get where we need to be.We won’t fix them by giving our power away, or by hoping for a miracle. There is an art to it, and it really is possible to master that art. You just have to start taking the steps to do so. Want to take the time to talk?

Why Most People Undervalue Themselves and What It Costs

Caitriona Reed / Coaching, Mindset, NLP Coaching, Podcasts / nlp, NLP Training, Value-money-self-worth /

August 13, 2014

Article and Podcast

I grew up in a middle-class family. At aged eight, to my dismay, I was sent to boarding school, feeling confused and abandoned. At the start of each school term, before putting me on the train, my well-meaning parents gave me pocket money for the months I would be away. It wasn’t long before I began to confuse money with love.

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THE FORMATIVE YEARS: As a rebellious adolescent I saw myself as a vagabond, and a starving poet. Then, as an aspiring Buddhist, and later when I became a professional Buddhist Meditation teacher, I believed that self-denial was inherently virtuous. Add to that a lifelong commitment to social justice, driven by misplaced guilt and confusion about my place in the world. Then add to the mix the shame that I had carried for years as a closeted transsexual. Everything that I valued and believed in had become mixed up with feelings of worthlessness and confusion, especially when it came to money.

On the surface my life was fine. I had a great partner, interesting and creative friends; I traveled and led workshops in Europe and the US. It was only later, when I hit an invisible wall, that I could look back and see how much of a gnawing disquiet there had been. I hadn’t believed in the truth of what I was doing because what I was doing was not in alignment with who I was. I felt like a fraud.

My world-view was supported by beliefs like:

If you’re a good person you make do with what you have.
Money is bad.
Wealthy people are greedy and exploit others.
If someone has money, someone else goes without.
Making money means compromising your integrity.
What is truly valuable in life has nothing to do with money.

By the way, do any of these sound familiar to you?

By the time I finally grew tired of reaping the rewards of these beliefs i.e. frustration, disappointment, denial, and fear, I realized that they had completely blocked any positive impact I aspired to have in the world. As long as I still held onto those beliefs, even unconsciously, any action I took to circumvent them was just like beating my head against a wall.

Sure, it’s easy to understand that beliefs are self-constructed, and that the only power they hold over you is the power that you give to them. But it’s one thing to recognize limiting beliefs; it’s something else to transform them on a deep unconscious level!

AN AWKWARD GAP: It was painfully obvious that my own limiting beliefs were incompatible with my new work. I was no longer a Buddhist Meditation Teacher. I was now an Executive Life Coach using NLP Coaching and I had even started to teach NLP Certification Trainings. I aspired to work with clients and students of the highest caliber; people who truly recognized the value of investing in themselves, who were committed to transforming their lives and the lives of their own clients. But how could I start attracting such clients when I had not yet learned to value myself and my work, and hadn’t transformed the beliefs that still guided my unconscious life?

I had invested hugely in trainings and mentorship. But it just made me more aware of how blocked was. It wasn’t just about money, thought money is often a good barometer. Our new business model and our new aspirations were simply not working.

All the training, qualifications, skills and marketing gimmicks, even a lifetime of helping other people, means nothing until you fully embody beliefs, values, and actions that correspond to your potential and what you aspire to accomplish in the world. Unless you completely transform your old limiting beliefs on the deepest unconscious level they act as a deadweight, dragging you down.

Then I hired a mentor who said: “How many people are you screwing over by NOT being able to sell them on your services?”

Those words turned everything around. It was both a challenge and a relief. It was no longer about me. It was about what I could actually do for others (and help them do for themselves) if I could just get out of my own way. How can you serve other people by playing small, or by pretending that things are okay when they’re not, or feeling so unclear about what you do that ‘selling’ feels like a lie?

WHAT I LEARNED: It was like an instant download that bypassed all my old resistances. It declared, “Get over yourself. Do the work that reflects your full capacity! Do what the world is calling you to do! Embody who you ARE. Don’t rely on tricks, second-hand information, or marketing and sales gimmicks. Stand by who you ARE so that what you DO is obvious. Then sell that!” Actually, it’s not even ‘selling’ anymore in the way that people usually think of selling.

Everyone’s story is unique. I don’t think mine is particularly unusual. Okay, so I am a woman of transsexual experience. I faced a big challenge and had to make some big changes, but don’t most people have do that at some time or another, in one way or another?

We live in a society that gives us a lot of mixed messages about money. Most of us inherit ideas and beliefs about money and self-worth that do not serve us. I’m sure that I’m not alone in some of those old beliefs I adopted about money and value.

A GOOD QUESTION: Someone once asked, “If you are uncomfortable when someone is selling something to you, ask yourself, in what ways are you NOT selling yourself?”

When Things Change, They Change Very, Very Fast

Once at a training seminar, we were being guided through an NLP pattern designed to identify and change an old limiting belief. After identifying the old belief, you design a new one to replace it. I had identified one of those old beliefs from my childhood, that: “Money is hard to come by.” I chose to replace it with a new belief, that “I am a People and Money Magnet.”

At the moment the NLP exercise ended, someone who I had met at the seminar turned and told me how grateful she was for something I had said to her the day before. She had decided to train with that same seminar company and to designate me as the recipient of the commission that would be generated. In the two or three seconds that it took her to tell me, I had earned $2500!

How is it that when you change your mind, something changes in the world around you as if the world were fluid in ways we can’t usually recognize? I don’t like magical thinking. But when magic happens, it’s hard to deny it.

On another occasion, my partner Michele and I had made a thirty thousand dollar commitment for training and mentorship that we hoped would transform our business. We did not have the slightest idea where the money would come from. It was a leap of faith. Then within two weeks we received an unexpected gift of just over thirty thousand dollars.

Once we had made the decision and taken the leap; in other words, once we had made the decision that WE were worth investing in, the money found its way to us.

I don’t know how this sort of thing happens, but it does. And it seems to be in direct proportion to how you perceive and value yourself, and your work in the world. That’s the magic, right there!

My first Hypnotherapy teacher used to say, “It was a happy day for fools when modesty became a virtue!”

As a child I was very shy. I would blush to speak to more than two or three people at one time. If the phone rang I would walk away, rather than speak to some unknown friend of my parents.

Invisibility has merit only for those who have been brainwashed or coerced into submission, resignation, or perpetual fear, and who imagine it is safer to keep quiet than to speak. This has nothing to do with being introvert or extrovert. Some of the most visible and influential people in the world are, by nature, introverts. They have simply learned to balance their personal lives with their need to serve the world in the most effective way.

If someone’s sense of purpose makes you uncomfortable you say that they are driven. But they are no more driven than a well-tuned engine that is working at maximum efficiency.

So many people undervalue their gifts. The powerful catalyst they can be for others remains invisible. They live with false modesty, cheating themselves and others, ashamed to call out to the world and affirm their presence.

WHY PEOPLE UNDERVALUE THEMSELVES AND WHAT IT COSTS. NLP PERSPECTIVEs:

People continue to undervalue themselves because they have not found the means to identify and transform the beliefs that hold them captive; or the fire to do so.

What it costs is everything, the world! Because the world is cheated of seeing you stand in your power and beauty – brave and free at last, living at your peak, giving your best, living in sustainable joy, enjoying generating the value that you know you are worth. For more click here

NLP Training Keys

Caitriona Reed / NLP Coaching, NLP Training, Podcasts / business strategy, mindfulness, NLP Training, personal congruity, personal development, Sisyphus /

August 6, 2014

If your life, your business, your relationships, and everything else, is consistently flowing well, then you probably already have the two things that I’m going to write about in this post.

If you don’t, then you may be wondering why your life is often so much more challenging, frustrating, overwhelming, and disappointing than you’d like.

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In Greek mythology Sisyphus was condemned to roll a huge rock to the top of a steep hill. Before he ever reaches the top it rolls down and he must begin again. Sisyphus was sentenced to do this for all eternity for the sin of arrogance and pride. He believed that he was cleverer than Zeus himself, the father of all the Gods.

The classical myths are metaphors for life. You may recognize Sisyphus in the person who never reads instructions, or who doesn’t ask for help from others. He is the person who starts a business without a business plan; or the person who engages on an important project without addressing his own unconscious conflicts, and hidden agendas. Like Sisyphus, he, or she, is doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Many of our own clients find us because they have something in common with Sisyphus. They may have recognized that there are unresolved mindset issues; unconscious habit patterns, gut reactions that are holding them back, limiting beliefs that are still playing out and getting in their way. They know that unless they get help addressing them, they are doomed to continue repeating them. Or they may be lacking clarity about their true capacity, the direction they want to take, and how to get there. They may be still tolerating intolerable situations, their own counter-productive habits and behaviors. They may have realized how much they themselves are getting in their own way.

People ask us whether our company mentors people for Business or for Personal Mindset issues. The truth is, life is business, and business is life. Regardless of the work you do, you are the boss of your own life, or you can be, or you should be. And if you’re running your own business, then you definitely must be, as it will be disastrous if you’re not.

What we do for our clients, and what we teach our students to do for theirs, is to address these two key touchstones:

1. Congruity. Truth is not about subscribing to an external belief system, and then doing your best to fit your life into it. Truth is being in agreement with yourself, with your own mind and heart. Congruity is the expression of that inner truth. It’s having an open line of communication between your conscious and unconscious mind.

Truth is knowing what you want, and doing it, with your eyes wide open, with integrity, and by your own clear choices. You will still continue to learn, you must still address all the challenges that emerge; the fears, the beliefs that no longer serve you, the old habits, and whatever breaks your connection to your own intuitive intelligence .. in other words, you still have to deal with the untidy flow of life and all that it brings. The difference is that when you are fully congruent, you know you can’t fail. You can only learn. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?

People sometimes call this “Living Your Life’s Purpose”. Only you can find that road. Only you can know what it is. It is uniquely your own. It is the expression of the congruity between inner and outer; conscious and unconscious; body, mind, heart, and spirit. It is the whole of you traveling together.

The alternative is to continue like Sisyphus, on the endless uphill struggle that repeats itself time after time. You can’t do it on your own. You need consistent support. Sisyphus never asked for help, so his task never ends. That was his his mistake. There are many things we can get on our own, but perspective is not one of them.

Consistency. Success is achieved by using strategies that work, and consistently following through. It’s not magic. It’s not an accident. There’s an old story about a person who had acquired a new farm, but who grew frustrated by the labor of clearing land for new fields. He sold the farm. The new owner continued the work of clearing the land, and found, just beyond the limit of where the first owner had stopped, untold quantities of diamonds. If the original owner had continued for just a little longer his efforts would have paid off a thousand fold. But he gave up just short of realizing success. How often do we lose sight of our goals because we’re overwhelmed, or because we don’t have a clear system or a clearly defined goal. So we stop just shy of realizing it. In the story the goal was to make a farm. If the original owner had just followed through, he would have exceeded all his expectation, beyond his wildest dreams.

There’s an order and a sequence to most things. You don’t go for a PhD before you have graduated; you don’t launch a business without a clear business plan. You don’t sign up for a marathon without making a training schedule. You don’t ask someone to marry you on a first date. And you don’t get busy just for the sake of doing something and to avoid the discomfort of the unresolved issues I was talking about in the previous section. You have to deal with them first.

Worse than not having a clear plan is thinking that you don’t need one; or thinking that things will work out, or that someone will come to your rescue.

Doing what you do consistently doesn’t mean following a monotonous routine. On the contrary, it means continually adapting and changing, but doing so in a consistent way. It means doing what works and making it work better. If it stops working, change it.

These two keys, Personal Congruency and Consistency, are essential for you to NOT be like Sisyphus. Sisyphus’s pride was such that he never asked for help, never admitted that he was anything other than infallible. He was self-centered, short sighted, and his own worst enemy. Don’t be like that!

To be personally congruent and to be consistent in the things you do for yourself, for your clients, and in the world, is living your purpose. Living your purpose is living at choice, living by your own best values and having the greatest possible positive impact.

Five Changes NLP Training and NLP Coaching and Mentoring are centered around teaching, and helping you implement, these two keys for your own, and your clients’ well-being.

What You Should Know About NLP Training

Caitriona Reed / NLP, NLP Coaching, NLP Training, Podcasts / nlp, NLP Training /

July 22, 2014

Everyone Should Know About This!

NLP Training is a little like getting your hands on a user-manual for your imagination, or a handbook for your mind, or a practical guide to Neuroscience in action. What if old limitations that you had come to believe were who you are, turned out to be things you could easily change – quickly, decisively, and permanently? What if you could utilize the same powerful creativity, focus and energy that had marked the most decisive moments of your life? (You know the ones we mean) What if happiness and freedom became the very air you breathed?

Imagine hearing about a shortcut that halves your daily commute time. How long would you wait before using it? Would you have to give it some thought first? Would you argue that you weren’t the sort of person to take shortcuts? Perhaps your driving instructor had showed you a route when you first learned to drive, and out of loyalty to him you prefer the longer route? Perhaps the long route is familiar and you’d rather not bother with changing it. After all, you’d been using it for years, and it has served you perfectly well up until now.

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Three Reasons for Taking the Five Changes NLP Training

1. For Yourself

The Map is Not the Territory – Alfred Korzybski

What we know, how we experience the world, what we take to be real, is more fluid than we were taught. We grew up learning rules to help us navigate our map of the world. We assumed that the map, and the rules that made it, were absolute. What began as necessary boundaries, like training wheels, turned into limitations. Add to that all the emotional and behavioral patterns we learned from those close to us, and we end up with a map of a reality that is far away from what is actually possible.
Unlimited happiness, creativity, and freedom are all within our reach. We are like the elephant, trained from infancy with a chain tied to his foot. He gave up trying to pull free long ago, and resigned to a life of captivity.

Freedom means becoming your own mapmaker. In other words, it means becoming master of your emotional state and your creativity, how you respond to experience – with choice – rather than reacting with long forgotten decisions, like the elephant, who still thinks the chain can hold him.

2. For Other People in Your Life

nlp-training-manzanita-village — Evening Stillness. Manzanita Village – Five Changes NLP Training

Always pass on what you have learned. – Yoda

To be at cause is to respond rather than to react. It is to live by your own choices rather than the choices of others. It is to be the Leader of your own life.

The Five Changes NLP training is specifically aimed at helping you be fully at cause in all the circumstances of your life, with specific tools to give you the resources to continually refine that ability. It is also geared towards you teaching others to do the same with specific tools and skills.
Everything we are and do has an impact on others. You owe it to them to become the best possible influence – no more complaining or blaming, no more bonding through mutual commiseration! From now on it becomes a celebration of accomplishment and possibility. Imagine!

Regardless of your work, you lead by example and you have specific lessons that you can give to others; your clients, patients, students, team member, associates, customers, friends, and family.

3. For a New Brilliant and Impactful Career

There is a solution to every problem! – Keys to Transformational Leadership

As a Certified Five Changes NLP Master Practitioner, you will have a template for working with clients in a therapeutic context as a Mindset and Life coach. The skills you will learn in NLP and Hypnosis will give you the ability to succeed where others with less developed training have failed. We will give you all you need to begin a $500 an hour (and up) an hour business, helping people transform their lives and work, helping people with their own user-manual for the mind. It is one of the most profoundly ‘spiritual’, holistic, and satisfying career choices you are likely to make.

A mentor we knew, who was well-known for speaking directly, often said that the only reason people didn’t change was that they were so attached to their excuses and self-imposed limitations that the imaginary, and blown out of proportion, fear of change stopped them in their tracks.

The reality of our lives is that it is constantly inviting us to change, learn, and grow. It’s what we do best. So why not learn a skill-set that will truly serve you well.

NLP Coaching. How NLP Works

Caitriona Reed / NLP, NLP Coaching, Podcasts / nlp, NLP Coaching, personal development /

July 15, 2014

How NLP and NLP Coaching works

Were you ever in a situation where you felt powerless to change? a situation that had been going on for so long you had started to believe it might never change? Had you even started to wonder if maybe you were the problem?

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Then you learned something about how you could make change happen. Perhaps you learned it though NLP coaching. It was as if someone handed you the key to a closed door that had been locked for so long that you had forgotten there was even a door there.

Up until that moment, you had certainly known you were stuck. You may have even understood something about why you were stuck. But your understanding didn’t help. Insights alone can sometimes dampen your motivation to change, because they make the prospect of actually changing look like one more insurmountable problem. Until you know how to change, any amount of understanding of why you should, or why you got stuck in the first place, doesn’t help much.

Until you learn the ‘how to’ of change, the ‘why’ can actually hold you back.

NLP is the ‘how to’ of change.

In spite its short forty-year history, NLP has roots that go back for as long as human beings have been looking for smart win-win solutions.

Like Hypnosis, NLP has fallen outside the mainstream; and like hypnosis, NLP has aroused suspicion and jealousy for helping people when all else has failed. We have lost track of how often clients have come to us as a last resort –for chronic pain that the doctors had pronounced to be incurable; for addictive behaviors that wouldn’t go away, or kept coming back; or for phobias and fears that nothing ever seemed to help. .. not to mention the entrepreneurs and artists whose success had seemed to elude them until they learned to get out of their own way and to work with themselves, instead of against themselves.

What is NLP?

NLP means Neurolinguistic Programming. The term was coined by Richard Bandler and John Grinder after they developed a therapeutic modality based largely on the work of family therapist Virginia Satir and hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. The underlying insight that drives NLP is that there is a gap between experience and perception; that your emotions, memories, beliefs, as well as everything you experience in life, is made up of patterns in your neurology. Because there is a gap between external reality and our experience of it, we live in an inner world of distortion and separation. In the words of Richard Bandler, “we make it up with words and pictures” hence, Neuro .. linguistic .. programing.

What the creators of NLP discovered is that there are practical skills you can use to bridge the gap between external reality and the words and pictures in our mind, and that those skills can be consistently used to transform self-defeating behaviors, negative emotions and attitudes that have a detrimental effect on our life at home or at work or anywhere else.

NLP is the art and science of providing alternatives to how we imagine the world, of changing internal representations, emotional states, external responses, and ultimately of actually and measurably changing our neurology. NLP is neuroscience in action.

NLP is more than a set of clever techniques. It is learning to be your own source of innovative skill and solution-based thinking.

1. Mindset is the sum of your beliefs, expectations, attitudes, values, and above all, your emotions. A consistently positive emotional state, will determine how well you learn, how effectively you communicate, how much you enjoy your life, and the results you achieve. NLP coaching is a direct way to learn how to master your emotions. Mastery does not require taking control, rigidness or repression. It simply means learning how to bring awareness to the inner patterns that determine old emotional habits, and then making appropriate choices to change them.

2. Reaction or Response? If your emotions are a choice, and your actions are determined by your emotions, including the emotions that support your beliefs about what you can achieve, then NLP is not just mastering your emotions. It also lets you navigate your own course in life. It’s not about taking control of everything that happens. Who would want that anyway? It’s that you can learn to utilize every situation to your own and everyone else’s best advantage. You can learn to respond, rather than react. You can choose, rather than just revert to old habits.

3. Awareness + choice. A well-known (and notoriously inhumane) experiment raised kittens with cardboard tubes on their heads so that they had no peripheral vision. After some months the cardboard tubes were removed and it was discovered that the kittens, now grown cats, were incapable of seeing anything that wasn’t directly in front of them. They had lost all peripheral vision.

Whenever there is unfinished emotional business it’s as if you have a cardboard tube on your head. You are locked in a narrow capsule of your old unresolved issues. It’s all you know. You end up resigning yourself to the life you see through the tube. The constrained perspective blocks all your creativity, joy, natural intelligence and any sense of the possibility of freedom – which you don’t even realize you don’t have.

Unless the unresolved negative emotions – fear, resentment, shame, anger, disappointment – are addressed, that narrow field of vision becomes who you are. When it’s removed, or transformed, your field of awareness open, and you can now choose your focus. It is no longer predetermined by your negative emotions.

4. Personal Congruity. Congruity means that you are in agreement with yourself, that your conscious and unconscious mind are working together. When part of you wants to change other people’s lives for the better, but another part of you feels that you are a fraud, there is a problem, there is an incongruity.

When you are moved to work hard on a project, but when you are immersed in the project something always seems to come up to distract you, that’s also incongruity. Something inside you is fighting yourself.

When you are continually fighting against the very thing, or person, you love most, that’s another example of an incongruity. NLP is very good at identifying and resolving incongruities and invisible inner conflicts you are not fully conscious of yet.

5. Intention and results. Everything mentioned so far:

Mastering your emotions and mindset
Taking control of your direction
Learning to respond rather than just reacting
Growing your freedom of awareness
Developing personal congruity

are all the domain of NLP coaching. They are things that NLP is good at helping you with. Put together, they provide you with a vision for the scope of your life. Anything you choose or imagine, or envision for yourself becomes possible. One of the key lessons of NLP is that when you are emotionally, physically, and psychologically healthy you have immense resources of creative energy available to formulate and realize possibilities for your life and for your work in the world.

These are five ways that NLP coaching works for you personally. Stay tuned for how NLP works in the domain of team and community building, and of leadership development.