Book Review: 7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence

7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence is my favorite book on NLP so far. Given the dozens of books I have read on the topic, I consider this to be a real accomplishment!

What I like most about this book is that it is not simply a rehash of NLP techniques learned in the standard NLP Practitioner courses offered worldwide. While Merlebvede, Bridoux and Vandamme cover all of the basic principles and techniques of NLP in depth, they take a step further and apply them to developing Emotional Intelligence.

It did not take me long to realize that the authors of 7 Steps are not only well qualified as teachers and practitioners of NLP, but as helping professionals as well. Each has a background in therapy and cognitive science, which explains the depth of explanation of the concepts included in the book.

Despite the depth of knowledge each of these professionals has, they still manage to keep the writing simple and non-technical, relating the concepts of NLP and Emotional Intelligence in a way that the average reader can easily understand.

This is not only a book that I will reference again and again as a hypnotherapist and trainee therapist; it is also a book that I intend to make required reading for the core curriculum of my upcoming LifeSkills training series.

I cannot recommend 7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence highly enough. Get it today and read it cover to cover over the next couple of weeks. You will be glad you did.!

7 secrets of self-motivation

Written by Diane Lowther of Brilliant Minds
(http://www.brilliantminds.net)

1. All motivation is self-motivation. Nobody else can motivate you. What they can do, however, is either support or distract from your own motivational process. Notice whose style adds to your self-motivation and who gets in the way of it. Consider coaching some of the key people in your life in how to enhance your self-motivation or in how not to derail your motivation
2. Very few people can perform at their best all day. Keep track of the times of day when you are mentally most alert, when you are most communicative and when you are most creative. Wherever possible plan to spend time doing the kind of task that comes easily at that time. This avoids wasting energy to motivate yourself to go against your natural inclinations. Read more..

Well-formed outcomes

How can you get what you want unless you know what it is? Many of us think we know what we want. We know we want a nice house on the beach, or a new car, or more time to spend with friends and family.

However, while we may have an idea about what we want in life sometimes we haven’t really given thought to how to get what we want, what the real costs will be when we get it, or even if getting what we want is aligned with our values and life’s purpose.

Without thinking seriously about these aspects, getting what we want may be impossible, or in the end turn out to be not at all like what we thought it would be. Read more..

Self-hypnosis for positive change

Did you know that you can hypnotize yourself? That’s right; you don’t need anybody else’s help to go into a trance. Self hypnosis is relatively easy to do, and there are a lot of reasons why you would want to do it. Here are just a few. Read more..

Living in the present

There is a saying among therapists that depression is about the past, and anxiety is about the future. Think about that statement for a moment. When I first heard it in a seminar I was taking about Mindfulness Therapy I thought it was rather profound, and I still do.

Many of us spend a great deal of our time either reliving the past or trying to anticipate the future. Reliving the past often tends to create thoughts about how we could have done things differently, or better. Maybe we shouldn’t have done this or that, or if only we had done something else things would be better. While it is sometimes useful to review the past for the purpose of learning and improvement, undue dwelling on the “if I had only’s” or “should have’s” often leads to feelings of remorse, regret or dissatisfaction – and these are the roots of depression. Read more..

The value of being flexible

Behavioral flexibility allows you to adapt your behaviors to achieve your goals.

Life is a dynamic and complex system. Think about all of the choices you make every day, all of the situations you face, the problems you solve. Even a “simple” life is extremely complex.

Most of us go through life without fully realizing just how complex our lives really are. Sure, we all feel stressed out or stretched to the limit sometimes, but for the most part we do not really understand just how complex our day to day existence really is. And that is a good thing. If we really paid attention to all of the stressors in our daily lives we would go insane. Read more..