The Blog

If you’ve followed my work for a while, you know that sustainable peak productivity isn’t just about working harder or even working smarter. At its core it’s about learning to master your ‘self’. And one of the core skills of self-mastery is learning when to press forward with focused flow, […]

Have you ever been in the zone, riding a wave of flow so strong that you burn the midnight oil telling yourself “I better keep going because who knows when I’ll catch this inspiration again”? This is a common mistake I run into when exploring people’s relationship with inspiration, productivity, […]

One of the common habits I see among coaches, trainers, and NLP practitioners is this: when they are eliciting a state, they have their clients close their eyes first (and they do the same with themselves). At first glance, this sounds harmless and even helpful. Closing the eyes seems like […]

“Whose thoughts are in your head?” This was the question I asked my client upon hearing him state a clearly limiting belief.  This is when I got an answer that caught me off guard.   “My father’s,” he replied. I was perplexed.  “If your father’s thoughts are in your head, whose […]

How frequently do you update the apps on your phone and computer? I would hope quite frequently.  Apps on my phone are running updates nearly every single day to remain “up-to-date”.   Imagine how outdated your phone or computer would be if you didn’t run updates. Of course you would […]

Why I Learned to Love Deadlines (And Why You Might Too) Have you ever had a product, service, or skill that you invested in developing and yet you never seem to be ready to release it to the world? Lately, I’ve been receiving this question over and over again. “How […]

Started Writing for Myself… Here’s What Happened If you want to be a successful coach, creator, or leader, it helps to get into the habit of creating consistently. Yes, over time, creating and sharing content will help you build a name for yourself, generate business, and earn respect, recognition, and […]

What’s that one habit you know would move your life, work, or business forward but for some reason, you can’t get yourself to start? Maybe it’s going to the gym regularly, reading daily, posting consistently, launching that business, or finally doing that “daily practice” you know would take your performance to the […]

Do you ever block off time to prepare for a social media post, client session, presentation, or important conversation and find yourself spending way too long running potential “what ifs” in your mind, reviewing your notes, and overthinking your strategy? Oftentimes you show up more-than-prepared for whatever the situation will […]

If you’re an early-stage coach (or aspiring coach) who is wanting to put yourself out there, there’s a good chance you’ve felt it: That knot of fear around being visible in your not-yet-fully-stable identity as a coach, and risking judgment by posting publicly. Maybe you’ve thought about posting invitations to […]

Have you ever spent hours on a task, tweaking every tiny detail, only to miss your deadline or feel frustrated with the result? That’s the perfectionism trap. While perfectionism is driven by the desire to perform at our best, it often has the opposite effect. Paradoxically, it can lower our […]

Struggling with habits that hold you back? You’re not alone. What if I told you there’s a new, simple method that can help you shift those limiting habits into empowering ones—in real-time, and in just five steps? This strategy is designed to help you easily coach yourself to transform your […]

I was recently working with a coaching client who had a recurring concern: a situation that consistently threw them off balance, making them feel like they couldn’t control their emotions. They said, “That situation is ‘too much’ for me to ever learn how to manage my emotions.” This kind of […]

Do your coaching/consulting clients ever come into their sessions not knowing what they want to work on?  It can be a frustrating experience for you as the coach because without your client’s agenda, what will we talk about?  The more your clients are investing into the sessions the worse it […]

How do you prepare for your client sessions? I was in a session with a client last week and she mentioned she had been feeling unprepared going into her coaching sessions. As a solution she had started blocking off a few hours on Monday to prepare for all of her […]

A former client reached out to me a couple of weeks ago asking for advice on what to do when his coaching sessions don’t work out as well as he’d hoped. He wasn’t sure why some were more effective than others and he was even questioning if he was doing […]

Would you like to dramatically increase the probability that you’ll achieve your desired outcomes? If yes, one of the most important determiners lays in how much you want to do the things you need to do. When you think about the things you need to do to accomplish your goals […]

If you want to accelerate your development as a coach/leader one of the best things you can do is ask for feedback… But what about when the other person is hesitant or even anxious about providing feedback to you? This situation is fairly common and it makes a lot of […]

Would you like to learn a skill to take your day-to-day conversations deeper? When our conversations get deeper we can more deeply connect with others, understand what drives them to do the things they do, and if you are a coach (formally or informally) it will greatly increase the probability […]

When people are first beginning their journey with NLP, Neuro-Semantics and coaching skills one of the first questions I get asked is, “What are the best NLP books for beginners”. Of course there are a lot of books across these fields so what I decided to do is share a […]

Do you value being productive?  Personally I highly value productivity and I ran into a conundrum this Sunday while thinking about planning my day. As I laid in bed thinking about the day ahead the voice in my head posed a question:  “I could be productive today or I could […]

When I first started developing my coaching skills I learned the belief that “people have the resources they need already within them to overcome their problems and achieve their desired outcomes”… but is that really true? If that was true then why would someone need to seek out training? Why […]

Have you ever heard the expression “the mastery is in the details”? One of the things that sets a master apart from people earlier in their development is the master’s ability to notice the finer details and distinctions that others brush over and miss altogether. Not only are masters able […]

Do you have any overwhelming tasks you’ve been procrastinating on and you’d like to get them done? In today’s article I will be sharing two strategies you can use for overcoming overwhelm and properly ‘whelm’ yourself to free yourself from the unnecessary vitality draining state of overwhelm and take action. […]

Would you like to become a more transformational coach? If yes, there is a paradox: If you want to be more transformational with your clients, it is crucial to apply your tools and skills to yourself. It’s an interesting paradox, isn’t it?  It would seem that the best way to […]

One of my clients recently had a breakthrough in his NLP practice. He had experienced several NLP techniques for personal growth, but he thought something was wrong with him because he kept needing to revisit the processes. His expectation? That he should master them in one go. The result? Frustration. […]

Would you like to know how to help yourself (and your clients) consistently outperform expectations and build a track record of success? If so, mastering the distinction between intentions and commitments is essential. This distinction often comes up at the end of my coaching sessions, when it’s time for the […]

If you’d like to live a happier and more fulfilled life, one of the things you’re going to want to learn is to do is intentionally update your belief systems. Ultimately you’re going to want to get good at updating your beliefs quickly and in real time, but one of […]

When something is ‘semantically loaded’ it means that, for a particular individual, it is loaded with ‘meaning’. It is something that is emotionally charged for them. For them it is psychologically significant. Understanding what is ‘semantically loaded’ for someone allows us to get to know them more deeply, learn about […]

If you’re reading this article you are probably wondering what the heck a ‘semantic reaction’ is. In this article I will share a simple and practical definition of a semantic reaction, the technical definition, as well as share some examples of semantic reactions so that you can recognize them in […]

How long does it take to change a belief? While there might be a phase of preparation and reinforcement, the actual moment of belief change typically occurs in a fraction of a second. Did you believe it took longer? Perhaps you just quickly changed that belief. For me the question […]

Language is powerful, and the language pattern I will be talking about today is something that I hear being used counter-productively on nearly a daily basis. My typical response is “Thank God you’re not my hypnotist!” but it’s even worse when the person I am speaking with actually IS a […]

I was recently working with a coaching client and they had a concern regarding a recurring situation that gets them out of control of their emotions.   They were worried that they would never be able to manage their state in that context. “That situation is ‘too much’ for me […]

What is the quickest way that you have found to stop unwanted mental-movies from playing when something triggers me? My answer? When that happens to me the first thing I do is I ‘step out’ of the mental-movie. I shift from being IN the movie as an actor to being […]

I had a couple of conversations recently that led me to want to make a video on the distinctions between NLP and psychotherapy. There are a lot of reasons why the two get overlapped, and in this video I wanted to share what the distinctions are. These distinctions are extremely important for three […]

As human beings we have a phenomenal power to create identifications: The power to identify ourselves with people, groups and things.  Choosing who and what we identify with is an important skill to develop as we are growing up, however there is also a big danger in identifying with things […]

As human beings we are all born ‘externally referenced’.  What that means is that we look outside of ourselves for the authority to let us know what things are, how to respond to the world, what to believe, etc. This makes perfect sense because when we’re born we don’t really […]

Do you ever suffer from burnout or feel like you’re on the edge of burning out? If yes you’re probably going to benefit from the following four methods that I use to prevent myself from burning out and to maintain an optimal level of productivity. To be totally honest, I […]

One of my NLP training clients recently lost his mother and he asked me about how I have used Neuro-Linguistic Programming to cope with grief, loss, and death. A few years ago I had to cope with the loss of my youngest brother which put my inner resources to the […]

Did you know that in the english language there are many more words for unresourceful emotions than for resourceful ones? How rich is your emotional vocabulary? The more words you know for positive emotional states the more likely you’ll be able to put words to how you are feeling when […]

Would you like the ability to bounce back from any upset, loss, or setback that life brings you?  If yes, you could probably benefit from developing resilience skills. An interesting thing about resilience is that many people believe that they must go through hardship in order to become resilient but […]

In this clip I was interviewed by Shailaja Vishwanath asking one thing I teach my clients that helps them from where they are to where they think they should be… and my answer may seem a bit paradoxical. If we think about the basic landscape of personal change and transformation […]

Have you ever given someone advice and it was met with resistance?  Or perhaps they were open to receive your advice but they didn’t act on it, even though it would have been in their best interest? If yes you’re really going to enjoy today’s article where I share with […]

If you’ve ever done some training or study into goal setting you know that your goals should be ‘realistic’… but how do I know if my goals are realistic or not?  And if you’re coaching someone else, how do you know if their goals are realistic? Over my coaching career […]

How do you respond when your coaching client says “I don’t know” to one of your questions? I was recently asked this question by one of my group coaching clients and in this article I want to share with you how I was originally trained to respond, how I respond […]

There are two categories of states that we flip between all day long, and this process occurs largely unconsciously: uptime & downtime states. In this article I am going to share with you what those two states are and the pros and cons of each. My hope for you is […]

Would you like to become a better decision maker?  If yes, you’re really going to enjoy this quick tip I learned to step out of any fear, fatigue or stress and gain a larger perspective. I learned this from Michael Hall, Ph.D. who took this from the book Decisive: How […]

Simply put, NLP allows people to become FREE. Free to shift your mindset, free to improve your relationships, free to expand your potential, free to evolve into the best version of yourself, and free to lead others with passion. But with so many powerful models, patterns, and skills in NLP […]

The skills of giving and receiving feedback are among the most important communication skills with yourself and in your personal and professional communications.  How good are you at giving feedback? For most of my life I was not very good at giving feedback.  When people would actively request feedback from […]

As coaches one of our highest goals is to facilitate our clients to self-actualize i.e. to be their best self while becoming their best self. The ironic thing about this is that our best clients are usually the ones who are already ‘self-actualizing’. In other words, the more we coach […]

How good are you at buying things?  When I say ‘good at buying things’ I do not mean being good at spending money easily and being loose with your money!  What I mean is, everybody has different strategies for how they buy things and I wonder what are the quality […]

Do you ever ‘should’ on yourself? For example ‘I should exercise”, ‘I shouldn’t be so hard on myself,” or “I should practice my NLP skills more.”  If yes, you are probably not motivating yourself in the most healthy way and there is a much better way to get yourself to […]

If you want to be richer, more skilled, have more clients you might need to beware! And this warning applies to pretty much any goal that ends in ‘-er’  e.g. I want to be richer, thinner, fitter, happier, etc. It also applies to any goal with the word ‘more’ e.g. […]

Have you ever felt attached to one of your outcomes before?  Ironically when we make goal setting about ‘goal getting’ it decreases the likelihood that we will achieve our desired outcomes and paradoxically when we let go it can increase the likelihood of actually achieving your outcomes. In this article […]

Do you ever feel overwhelmed with all of the things you could learn and all of the skills you could develop?  Paradoxically when this happens your desire to learn, practice & grow can actually push into a state of inaction.  What can be done about this? In this article I […]

What does COVID mean for you?  Since the meaning you give to the events in the world determine how you respond to them this is probably a much more important question than you might have originally thought. Try these frames of mind for just a moment:  “COVID is traumatic.” “COVID […]

Are you aware that day long you are having mental movies flashing on the screen of your mind?  These mental movies are driving your emotions, your capabilities, and your responses and so I am wondering how much mastery do you have over the movies in your mind?   One key thing […]

Do you have your emotions or do your emotions have you? One thing that I do almost every morning (and throughout the day as needed) is consciously practicing my desired emotions. Does this sound strange to you? We have a quote in the field of Neuro-Semantics “the quality of your […]

Do you have any habits that hold you back from your desired outcomes? I am assuming yes, but a more important question is… How do you feel about those habits? How much can you appreciate those habits? Many times when we have habits that ‘hold us back’ our automatic reaction […]

Are you aware that you speak hypnotically?  In fact everyone does on a regular basis whether they are trained and doing it consciously or they unconsciously picked it up from their friends and family growing up. And our hypnotic language patterns influence others for better or for worse.  In the […]

Would you like to achieve your goals with greater ease and efficiency? Whether you are a parent, manager, leader, coach, or simply someone striving for peak performance, there is a powerful secret to visualizing your outcomes that most people overlook. Understanding this secret can help you maintain consistency and follow […]

I was recently asked by one of my INSIDERS members the question: “How do I build the rapport, safety and vulnerability in my coaching so a client can feel safe to speak their truths?”. Beyond the basic NLP rapport techniques there are many coaching skills & states that support this […]

Did you know that there is a way of perceiving time that is shared by some of the most productive and self-actualized people? Would you like to know what that is? There is an interesting thing about time… Have you ever walked out of your home and tripped over a […]