Meeting With The Big Kahuna - part 2

08 August 2009

John drew my split attention away from the book. Because of timing, Carmen was not able to join us so John and I trotted through the winding side-streets of Brighton to find some lunch we could chat over.

First was the matter of filling John in on the immigration situation as it stands and how that plays its part in the situation as it currently is. The conversation then moved on to logistics and cash before we moved on to speak about matters directly related to the NLP Modelling aspect of the project.

You may remember blog posts from months ago about unconscious bodily sensations that can be of huge use to us if we can learn to read and utilise them with precision. Since long before I began this adventure, this has been an area in which I have had lots of room for improvement. It is also an area that is heavily influencial not just in the area of physical training but more importantly in the modelling process itself. My ability to differentiate between when my body is saying "yes" or "no" to something up and utilise that info until this point has slowed my progress down. The good news is that the amount of physical training that I have done in the last few months has provided me with a context in which I have learned to tune into these unconscious communications more succinctly. John suggested that if I can make even finer discriminations between these sets of signals that essentially form into two sets - GO and DON'T GO YET - I will be able to distinguish differences more easily in other contexts, including in my modelling activities.

Next on the agenda was a topic that I have just upon beginning this paragraph is very closely related to the subject of the previous paragraph - self-consciousness.

I can't remember if I told you about my kickabout with my good friend Patrick back around April time. Patrick is right footed, has always been right footed and has played semi-professional football. After a 90 minute casual kickaround in which I predominantly used my right foot (I am left footed by nature - ask anybody that went to school with me!), Patrick exclaimed that my right foot was now better than his.

How is this relevant to self-consciousness? It has been easy to hide behind the mini-successes, like the one above, that I have achieved so far. The truth of the matter is that my inability to get over my self-consciousness to this point has limited the results of my modelling. The transport of my modelled behaviours over into game situations has been minimal so far. Minimal compared to what, you might ask? Minimal compared to the carryover that I have experienced before at a time I was being far less self-conscious.

Any of you who know that I am a qualified trainer of NLP may be scratching your head thinking, "Shouldn't you be capable of dealing with a bit of self-consciousness?" My answer to this is yes but I haven't yet. Asafa Powell had ran a 9.74 second 100m in 2007. In 2008, admittedly after coming back from surgery, he placed 5th by running 9.95 in the Olympic finals. Just seven days later, Asafa ran the fastest electronically recorded relay anchor leg of all time. A few weeks later, he broke his PB for the 100m in a low key event. I'm my opinion, Asafa had the capability of easily running under 9.8 in the Olympic final but he bottled it (if that phrase isn't familiar to you, he choked means the same thing).

So to summarise, I have the skill to model, experiential evidence to back this and the capability to remove the obstacle of self-consciousness. It seems that self-consciousness has been stopping me accessing all of these!

Some of you might be thinking, "Suck it up, Arton. It's just a bit of stage fright! You are the guy that has dared to make this audacious huge goal of yours public knowledge!" This is pretty much what I'd been doing for a few months before the immigration-enforced break, so now it's time to solve this once and for all whilst everything is to all intents and purposes on hold.

Where did the dialogue with John go next?...