Facebook – Security – Prison Doors….and A Piece Of String.

Over the past few months the topic of online security and personal privacy has been somewhat at the forefront of a lot of peoples thinking. Especially with the recent concerns and discussions over Facebooks privacy policy and how they plan to protect our personal data from the beady eyes of the stalking community at large.

I quite like the idea that we’re begging this corporation to take away our personal responsibility for our own privacy and protection. If you’d told me 10 years ago that one day we’ll be begging a company to take away one of our human rights because we’re paranoid and unwilling to take responsibility for ourselves…I’d have called you a madman!

This seems to be where we’re at right now in this Facebook privacy debate.

I’ve spoken to quite a lot of people about this topic and almost every person has based their position on the idea that we need our privacy. Looking back over history, it seems that right now all we HAVE is privacy. We live in our houses with our locked windows and doors, many of us barely even know our next door neighbour let alone the wider community at large, we travel to work in silence refusing to speak to other human beings just centimeters from us, and our daily interactions with other people are almost exclusively limited to people we already know or are forced to interact with due to our jobs.

So what is this online debate about privacy really all about?

What is it that we want to be protected from and how come we’re begging for someone else to take responsibility for this?

The internet has become a medium of communication and information that many of us have become extremely accustomed to. This medium we’re using is known for it’s public exposure, it’s logging and tracking of user activity and it’s transparent communication. We’ve got blogs, logs, diaries, corporations, knowledge and logins. We know this medium well, we’ve been using it for years. So what’s suddenly changed?

I remember a time when people were quite afraid to make payments online. They’d say things like “ooh I can’t put my credit card details into that website, who knows what might happen to all my money”. The same people would then sit in a busy office shouting out their credit card number to an anonymous teenager on the other end of a sales line. Kinda ironic?

To me, the topic of privacy seems like an overreaction to the fear-mongering that’s been presented in much of the media of late. What happened to each person taking responsibility for their actions both online and offline? I know we live in a society that says “where there’s blame, there’s a claim” but is that really how we envisioned our species evolving?

There are certain truths that are ever more prominent these days and because of those truths, it makes sense to take a greater sense of personal responsibility for the things we do, and the things our friends do that directly impact upon our self chosen level of privacy.

If we post things onto the Internet, expect them to be seen. If we put up pictures on the world wide web, expect the world to be able to see them. If our friends take pictures of us at 4:30am on a Saturday morning jumping around and throwing up into public bins before swinging around a lamp post in a 1950’s movie-esq scene, we know they’re going to end up on Facebook or some other photo-sharing site.

Sure, there are always things that happen that we’d rather keep to ourselves and that’s precisely the point. If we want those things we should make them happen.

Taking responsibility for ourselves is about asking those friends not to put pictures of us up on the internet that we wouldn’t want people to see. It’s about saying what we want and not saying what we don’t want the world to know. Most importantly, it’s about asking ourselves…What is it that i’m doing that’s so bad I don’t want other people to find out?

Alternatively we can give up our responsibility to a corporation such as Facebook and then complain when neither them nor us do what we really wanted.

A good friend of mine recently called me and asked about the privacy available on Twitter. The question was regarding setting up a Twitter account for my friends father and he expressed the wish to only allow certain people to follow him such as friends and family and to forcefully block other followers.

In one way I really respect this. It’s quite a good example of someone taking some initiative to find out what security features are built into the system they’re about to become part of and yet, and the same time, I can’t help but wonder what makes people assume that they’re so interesting that other people will care.

That sounds a little cruel but I mean it in the best possible way. Our talk of privacy, protection, security and data protect, all seem to assume some entity or entities out there in the world that care enough about who we are and what we’re doing to go around gathering up our data and using it for their evil deeds. This may well be a truth, after all, this data could be extremely useful to certain corporations or governments. However, if we were really doing things worth tracking and watching, the people wanting to track us or watch us would. They’d find a way of doing that regardless of how much we protect our opinions that we’ve chosen to share with the world.

Wandering around the Tate modern recently reminded me how silly some of our ideas can be about protection and privacy. We spend millions every year securing our homes, protecting our land, buying locks for this and that, setting up alarms to catch bad people and warding off anyone who comes near the things we hold precious. The Tate modern has some of the most expensive art in the country. They have some of the most fragile artworks I’ve seen and how do they protect them against the hordes of people that pass through every single day? A little piece of white string. That’s all it takes to stop people getting too close and potentially destroying something very precious. A little piece of white string.

So what are we really protecting ourselves from? What are we so willing to give up our rights of personal responsibility? What comes next?

What do you think?

Human Rights For All

Yesterday was a proud day for all those who seek out and aim to right the injustices of this world.

I’d like to say that I’m normally one of those people, seeking out and fighting against oppression, starvation, inhumanity, brutality and unfairness in our world. The truth is I’m just a pretty average guy with a pretty standard life.

The Malawi High Commissioners office in London yesterday saw a gathering in protest at the inhumane and oppressive sentencing of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, the two Malawian men imprisoned and sentenced to 14 years hard labour. What did they do? They told the world that they loved each other.

I only heard about this because my good friend Chris Morris wrote about this travesty in a moving and thought provoking  blog post.

I’d never been to any kind of protest before and I hadn’t heard anything about this case before either, and in any case, as a heterosexual man, what’s any of this got to do with me?

While I sat in my living room thinking about what might be going on for these two men over in Malawi and how it doesn’t really seem like a fair way to treat other human beings in our world, I started to wonder if there really was a place for me to make some kind of difference. I’d already signed Madonna’s petition in support of equal rights and freedom of love in Malawi but something inside me wasn’t quite adding up.

The more I thought about it, the more I started to realise that it really didn’t matter what I did, as long as I made the choice to do something.

I think there’s usually two main thoughts that an average guy like me has when hearing about something bad happening elsewhere in the world:

The first being “What on earth can I do about it” and the second being “It’ll be OK, someone else will do something about this”. This was where I decided to do something different this time. The fact was that these men could die and only by changing that would anything actually be different. I couldn’t fly over there and break them out of jail, but the simple act of turning up to a protest of which I knew nothing about just seemed like the right thing to do.

To be honest, I didn’t think that my role in this protest would actually make any impact on the world, after all, I’m just one person joining an already passionate crowd of people…but I was determined that I was going to be there even if in some moral way it made some difference to something or someone somewhere.

When I arrived I was pleasantly surprised. What I expected to find wasn’t what was really happening. My expectation of a hard-line crowd that knew everything about these two men and their case was delightfully challenged. About 200 people turned up and among them were some pretty experienced protesters who knew the chants, the rhymes and all about the cause but they weren’t the only people. There were other people like me! People who just wanted to make some kind of difference and make a choice to turn up and show their support in what ever capacity they could and for whatever difference it might make.

The irony is, the more of these people that turn up to these kinds of things and the more support and attention we all show towards the things we feel aren’t right in this world…the more of a difference it makes when we do turn up.

We might just be individual people. We might not know all the ins and outs of each case. We might not be used to creating change on a grand scale. But what we do have is ourselves and our own way of knowing when something is right and when something is just plainly wrong in our world.

We have the ability to make decisions that, on a single scale, make only the tiniest of dents in the bigger machine of injustice. But together, all of those dents, all of those decisions, all of our attention combined towards a common purpose…can create change on an unimaginable scale.

Less that two hours after the protest ended yesterday, Malawi’s president, Bingu wa Mutharika, officially pardoned the couple ‘on humanitarian grounds’ and called for their immediate and unconditional release.

I was just one person that day turning up to a protest I didn’t really know very much about for a case I didn’t really know much about in an area of London I didn’t know very much about.

What I did know was that I didn’t want these humans to suffer anymore. What I did know was that I needed to do something. And what I do know, is that every person that makes a choice to do something, changes the world forever.

On being a perfect person

Let me preface this post by saying that this isn’t actually about being a perfect person, in fact it’s quite the opposite.

It’s been quite some time since I blogged here and the main reason for that is that I haven’t felt that I’ve had anything new or interesting to talk about.

I’ve always had some value that tells me that if I’m not offering some kind of real value in what I say or write, I’d rather just not talk for the sake of talking. I once had someone tell me that when they first met me they thought I was a really shy person but as time went on, they realised that I mostly tend to say things when I’ve genuinely got something worth saying. Some might disagree with that statement but as a rule I’ve noticed it to be generally true.

The past year or so has been a real turning point for me. Not only in terms of my own development as a person but in my life, the friends I have, the people I live with, the places I’ve worked and the learning’s that I’ve been gathering.

This post then is in many ways, a letter to myself. I also hope by posting this here, other people can perhaps glean something of interest to them that either resonates or just gives a new perspective on how things might be.

Over the last 7 years I’ve put a lot of time and effort into learning as many new things as I’ve felt I can and as some of you who already know me will know, much of that time has been spent with the aim of figuring out what this whole life thing is all about. To give you the heads up on my conclusions, I’ve not got a scoobies!

In part, this conclusion has really opened my eyes to many of the real wonders of being here on this planet and what it means to have a good life. Having taken time to learn about how my own mind might work, studying NLP, Hypnosis, Magick and other types of personal development, I have a few things to say that I hope will be easily recognised by many people on a similar life mission.

The first and most poignant point is that no-one is perfect. For me this learning is something I have to continually remind myself of. Whatever I’ve done and however I’ve done it, I’ve always wanted to be the very best. The hardest part of that learning is that it’s just not always possible. Let me justify this slightly because I know many of you who have studied some form of linguistics will be asking “best according to who”, “best at what specifically”, “how would you even know if you were the best?”.

Since I did my first NLP practitioner course when I was 19 I’ve been trained by and seen a lot of people who also want to achieve very similar goals to myself. The problem I’ve found most pervasive is that many of these people, including myself at times, have jumped on the “fake it till you make it” bandwagon and spent way too much time and energy trying to convince one another that we ARE amazing at NLP or that we DO have all the answers. I know it’s the popular thing right now to bash NLP and I’m not going to jump on that bandwagon either so if you’re wondering where this is going….read on!

In the world of NLP Trainer Land, it’s seen by many as a prerequisite to helping other people learn…to be an authority figure and build a certain level of personal power as part of the overall plausibility of what’s being taught. I think at times this way of operating has some real benefits. We need only look at many of the people who are new to NLP and you can quite literally see how they shift and change through their first few courses and a lot of that changes comes from believing entirely in the trainer teaching them.

They do say that “the meaning of your communication is the response that you get” and so it’s seems quite apt to take people from point A to point B in whatever way necessary.

There is another way that I’ve seen some of the greatest trainers teach. It goes along the lines of “Here’s some ideas, lets see how they work for you”.

I really admire this way of teaching and if I do ever decide to teach some things to a few people will definitely be one of the core ideas that I’ll be working from. The real benefit and power I’ve learned from studying all of these things and a lot of ideas I’ve had shared with me from some of my great friends is that sometimes, some things, work for some people, and sometimes….they just don’t.

In some ways this king of goes against one of the core philosophies of the NLP world in that “If it’s possible for them, it’s possible for me”. It’s a nice place to live your life from and many of the things I’ve had the pleasure of doing in my own life have come from this kind of thinking. I also think it’s worth people knowing that it’s actually not really true.

It’s one thing to use beliefs as a basis for living and being a certain way, and it’s another to fall for the idea that any of these beliefs are real in some less-than-abstract sense.

It’s all to easy to get caught up in the idea that as people who have studied certain ways in which people think, organise their beliefs, values etc, that we should somehow be able to become a kind of super-human species with powerful techniques to change the world.

The truth is , everyone on the planet can already be the person who changes the world. They can already be someone who makes a difference in the lives of others..and…and the same time…we’re not perfect. People are people and no matter how much training they’ve had we all have our down periods, we all have things in our lives that aren’t “sorted” and we all have the ability to make our own and the lives of others that little bit nicer.

Learning NLP, learning Hypnosis, learning Magick…learning many things in life are only a part of being more of who you really are. I don’t want this to sound too philosophical but the point I want to put across is that all of these things are just ideas, just ways to move life in certain ways and just ways to expand everything you could potentially be.

Let’s not get caught up in what we all think is the truth. Instead, how about we look at these ideas and realise that when we need to work from them to get some result, that can be one way of getting there.

The real truth   is that no one person has all the answers to everything. No trainer, no guru, no shaman…no-one has everything sorted out. If they did they’d probably be the most boring person on the planet. The beauty and wonder that comes part and parcel of being a human being on this beautiful planet is that in some regard, we’re all slightly messed up. To me, that’s the real significance of being alive. If everything is perfect, you’re probably dead in some way or another.

I hope that this message really does offer up a new way of looking at things for some people. I’ve fallen into the trap myself of thinking I SHOULD be the best at everything and that my life SHOULD be sorted because of all the things I’ve studied and practiced. The richness of life is only equaled by our ability to recognise it in some way and to live our lives around the idea that there’s always room to improve, but sometimes, it’s nice just being who you are.

No-one is perfect and because of that, we’re all perfect in our own way. Let’s remember that and use it to aim our lives in the direction we want. We don’t all need to be gurus, we don’t all need to pretend like we have the ultimate answers in life, we don’t all need to “fake it till we make it”.

It’s just an idea : )

Jamie x

What does Attitude mean to you?

Today was my 400th Twitter Tweet and in celebration, I’ve published a short piece from a book I’m writing on NLP and how to become a great NLPer.

The article is about attitude and is followed up in the book by a chapter on how to go about building attitude and using it to become even better at whatever you do. I hope you enjoy this so please comment and let me know your thoughts.

Bite off more than you can chew, then chew it. – Ella Williams

John La Valle says that “It’s not about having AN attitude, it’s about having attitude” and when you’re from New Jersey that goes without saying. Attitude is one of the most important and fundamental aspects of being good at NLP and at the same time, it doesn’t really exist. This means that even though it exists inside our heads and is exhibited in our behaviours, it’s a concept and not an object that exists in the physical world. What we’re talking about when we use the word attitude is a collection of beliefs and values that when brought together, create actions and thoughts that go in a specific direction and get specific results.

One evening when I was watching Richard Bandler teach an introductory seminar on NLP he said something along the following lines: “When I watched Virginia¹ working I started taking note of how she did what she was doing. When I asked her followers whether they could do what she did, they replied that ‘No, only Virginia can do what she does’”. This a fantastic comparison of attitude vs non-attitude. The fact is, if you look at what you want to be able to do and you do it in a way that inside you say to yourself:

How does this person do what they do and if i had to teach someone else to do it, what would be the key steps

then you start to create inside yourself an attitude and determination that allows you to do more things.

I remember talking to a friend of mine who’s one of the most motivated people I know. I asked him one day about how he does his motivation and determination and he told me the following: “When I decide what I want and it feels like something I want to do, something inside me rumbles and I know I’m going to achieve what I want”.

This was a key element in my own learning and as i found out more and more about how he did his determination and motivation, and I began to try out his strategy for myself, the more motivated and determined I became about the things I wanted to do.

When I think about my own attitude and what that means for me, I get the following answers:

• Attitude is about being curious.
• Attitude is exploration.
• Attitude is about being tenacious.
• Attitude is walking away when it’s right too.
• Attitude is loving every moment of doing what i do.
• Attitude is always knowing that deep down, whatever happens in the outside world, I get to be in charge of what goes on in my inside world.

To be great at NLP you have to be curious about what it is that makes things how they are. You have to be willing to explore and question the things you don’t already know about and often the things you do know about. You have to be tenacious about the way in which you go about doing what you do and at the same time, you have to do this in a way that makes you feel amazing from the inside out and creates a light inside you that motivates you even more to learn new things and discover what’s yet to be discovered.

This is what I call the NLP attitude and this is just the beginning!

How about you? What does attitude mean for you and how do you use it?

Footnotes:
¹ Virginia Satir was a family therapist who Richard met and studied whilst at university, the result of which formed a large part of Richards first book (co-authored with John Grinder) – The Structure of Magic.

The Healing Pool Magazine: Special NLP Edition

This month I’m pleased to announce that I have a new article published in The Healing Pool Magazine: Special NLP Edition.

It feels like quite an honour to have an article published in the same magazine as such great people as Eric Robbie, Kathleen LaValle, Phil Farber and Robert Dilts.

This edition of The Healing Pool Magazine also contains an interview with Richard Bandler as well as articles by other great names in the NLP world. You can order your copy of The Healing Pool Magazine here. Here’s what they’re saying about The Healing Pool Magazine:

NLP perspectives on Healing, Health and Well-being from top NLP Trainers in the field – including an exclusive interview with Richard Bandler. Review by Eric Robbie “Wow, what an assembly of talent you have here! It sure is one helluva magazine you’re publishing. And I say that as someone who has worked in magazines, and who guest-edited the 60th issue of the ANLP’s Rapport magazine. I think anyone who reads it will learn a lot – whether they already know nlp or whether they’re just interested in the subject of healing. And if the latter, they will also learn quite a bit about nlp. Nice work. ))”

Keeping the joy

Today I wanted to tell you about a question that I ask many of my clients who themselves are coaches or aiming to become coaches. This seems to be one of those questions that gets that “aha!” light bulb moment from everyone I’ve asked it too and I hope you have a similar experience too.

Tags: audio, joy, media, Podcasts, questions

Submodalities in copy

I recently replied to a video by Dr Harlen Kilstein over at nlpcopywriting.com in which he stated that if anyone had any ideas about how submodalities might be related to copywriting he’d be interested in learning more.

I wrote a reply to Dr Kilstein and I realised that it could be useful for more people to read what I wrote. After I commented on Dr Kilsteins video article, he later made my comments into a seperate article on his website at nlpcopywriting.com. Here are the comments I made on the topic for your reading pleasure: Read more…

Changes Ahoy!

Photo by: tomhauburn

It’s the New Year and just as I have, I’m sure many of you have decided on new changes you want for this New Year.

Whether that’s to stop smoking, to lose weight, to finally motivate yourself to do that one thing you’ve been putting off, whether it’s to find your life partner or make a million, most of us have set up something that we plan to achieve in this new year. Read more…

Christmas with the family – patterns again

Photo by: beebo wallace

There comes a time in most people’s lives where they feel the need to break free from the family nest and go off to do their own thing. In my case, I moved 200 miles away from my family to be in London, the place I know I’m meant to be right now. As much as I love my family and I look forward to a time when I’m back to living close by them and enjoying their company more regularly, I know for the moment that London is the place I need to be in for the things I want and need to do. Read more…

Breathing for life

Photo by Katarina

Since I started studying many different areas of both human and personal development including NLP, Hypnosis, parts of Hinduism, parts of Sikhism, Yoga, Western and Eastern energy systems and much more, there has been one area that consistently jumps out at me and seems to be the basis of so much of each of these things.

That area is breathing. Read more…