It has taken me 43 years to figure out what it really means to live extraordinary.
I have finally come to terms with what ordinary is. Ordinary is accepting what you have, the way it is. You easily allow choices to disappear and accept where you are at now. If where you are at now, is good enough for you, than that is great and if it’s not, then clearly time to change the pattern that you created for yourself and the strategies that you continually and consistently adhere to in your life choices, change is what’s needed.
However, what if your thinking is like mine. Where can imagine more than you can have and be and do? Where you can imagine what your results would look like if you had your ideal world mapped out for you? Where you are able to imagine a different world that matches your reality? A world that is worth living because you have created it in your mind. A world that makes sense to you. A world that you can be and do and have what you want when you clearly know what that is. Where you truly began living in faith and hope and walking the path of a greater source, a powerful source and one that offers love, harmony and peace. Yes, folks I am referring to GOD.
I want to state that when we trust in something that is bigger than us humans and choose to walk the path of GOD’s glory, like he wants us to, I believe you are truly faced with a new magical experience that is unexplainable and tricky for others to comprehend, unless they to choose to walk the same pathway.
I now choose to believe that I have a greater purpose in life, compared to what I have been actively doing the past 8 years. I believe, I have been hearing what church refers to as a “Kyros” moment(s). It’s the opportunity for me to let GOD in to my world. Let him have a place in my head when I am meditating and allow him to reach out to me with feelings, emotions and thoughts, that make sense to me and me alone. It’s a beautiful feeling and completely non-judgemental.
People ask, are you a born again Christian? I answer no. I found faith, hope, belief, love, that I understand and I am surrounded by people who are like minded, offering greatness in people’s lives. Volunteering time and giving back to members of the community. That is where I see my masterful and purposeful self-heading, today. I feel my purpose in life now, is to give back more than I ever have before. There are calculated risk involved in doing so. I am okay with that. Family and friends being the first to reject my wishes. That is okay. There world map does not have to emulate my world map. We are all on different journeys on this planet and that is the beauty of living.
I came across a coaching statement referred to as “Your MAP is NOT your TERRITORY”. What that refers to, is that each of us have our own life journey, experiences, understandings and evaluative meanings. Some being very complicated experiences in our life paths and others experiencing no hardship at all. However, if we take the majority of people’s living and stories shared, there are somethings, that are complex about their lives and we have the choices to turn them around. These experiences are unique and different for everyone, not one experience is the same as the other.
I can guarantee and believe that you would agree, that the meaning and outcome of the experiences, would clearly be different for each and every one of us on this planet.
Allow me a moment to share an example of the idea that ‘the map is not the territory’. This could be when a new estate is being developed. It started off with cows and sheep on the paddocks then they were moved for excavators to come in and dig up the earth, followed by landscape developers and so on. The idea of what was starting off with an evergreen, healthy paddock, with thriving live stock on it, then being moved away (to wherever) for new establishments on the rise are when the changes occur.
It can also be explained in the idea of food that we eat and at the restaurant we eat it at. For example, we may order a meal that we have never had before. Immediately, your experience, meaning and thoughts you give this meal by observations is one conceptualised expressed idea, then when you share the idea with someone else, they may choose to agree or disagree with you, on your thoughts about the meals presentation based on their observations. Then you taste the food. Your description of what you started out with about the initial presentation, how it looked, smelt, the colour etc.. Now has changed as you point out what it taste like. At this very moment, the thoughts you had about the food and what you started out with on the onset has now changed. You are either going to enjoy the meal you are eating or you are not. The meal will either remind you of something you had eaten before or it may not. It may melt in your mouth with great flavours and textures and it may not. Once again, it’s all about the changes and meanings given after the original thoughts and ideas on the product in this example, food.
We humans are the same. What we first have available to us, is likely to change over time. Nothing stays the same, unless you choose to stay the same. It is only when you have the choices available for you to make that you can create change. External forces cannot be overcome as per the example I gave about property developments and building infrastructure in areas that may be local to you.
However, you have the choice to stay and watch it all happen, hoping to develop and grow into a new community, forming new connections and thriving as an environment that you would like to settle in, live, grow and contribute towards your future days or you have the choice to move towards a different goal, a different passion, a different belief, a different place and as you become aware of the clear choices, you make available to you, you can comfortably go ahead and create and make changes to suit your needs.
Having said this, when family members are involved, children for example, your choices are factored into all the possibilities and outcomes, towards the benefits of the changes, that you can make and the implications these changes will have for the family, ensuring that the new territory explored, will provide options, that will serve and support the family better, therefore, changing the lifestyle experienced previously.
I am going to share the idea of strategies that we have to live by, our current reality (whatever your reality is) as this is different for everyone. For example, the way we dress, the clothes we choose to wear and how we choose to wear it, the way eat, the utensils we use, how we hold how spoons and grip them to eat with, the people we connect with in our lives, the people we speak to and choose to avoid, the work we do, the career paths we take, the relationships we develop with loved ones, family and ourselves. All of these concepts, are part of our living and become living factors and contributions into our world. We create its forms of strategies that we use to survive and embrace happiness in all areas that we experience.
We do this by making choices. Choices that lead us to things we like, choices that lead us to things we don’t like and choices we feel we have to continue with the because for whatever stigmatic reason, that you made the choice in the first place, is what is keeping you stuck, in a particular situation. For example, if you are unhappy with the hair style you currently have, you would actively do something about it. You would cut it, colour it or style it in such a way where you felt and looked like that it was right and a new look for you. That becomes the conscious and unconscious choice you have made to create change and create something different about you. Great choice!
This is the same in every area in your life be that in career, relationships, friendships, spirituality, financially. We make choices that we can control and create for better living and for living extraordinarily.
I recently had the opportunity to visit a couple of Secondary College’s. In the inner North of Melbourne and the other, further North of Melbourne about 105 km out of the CBD in travel distance, from where I am currently at.
At both premises students seemed to be at a loss. Students weren’t clear about what they wanted. One thing that all had and clearly lacked, in my opinion, was the lack of interest in self and not clearly understanding the importance of education and learnings that they have available to them and how the resources that are available to them, teachers, computers, friendship connections, electronic and social media connections, all rich resources for their learning and yet, students are not willing to embrace all that they have and is available for their benefit and future learning outcomes.
My experiences of hearing the student’s outcomes, disheartened me a little. I have been teaching for over 8 years, knowing that teachers work hard to provide the best learning intentions and opportunities for students and yet they simply don’t want to know. It’s seems there is a majority of students who don’t care, lack interest, lazy, not motivated, perhaps feeling like they’re not enough, not loved, missing something deeper therefore, created blocks for the learning paths and manifested these beliefs into their internal representations of their world.
As a professional school teacher, counsellor and NLP practitioner, I wasn’t willing to sit back and accept the student’s negativity towards their life. The life that they have ultimate control of and all based on the choices they can make to create what they want in the long term. I felt where they were lacking was the understandings of resourceful thinking and un-resourceful thinking. The language used were all negations. “I can’t, I don’t want to, school sucks, what’s the point”. The more and more classes I attended the more repetitive this language became and I was surrounded by the same feelings, emotions and thoughts.
Neuro Linguistic Programming is all about the study of excellence which describes how our thinking produces our behaviour, and allows us to model the excellence and to reproduce that behaviour. I believe, this process of changing beliefs, strategies, what is valued, the language that is regularly used within the NLP regime, desperately is needed to be implemented in the education and school systems in a form of Professional Development and Information Session for Professional Staff, Students, and Parents.
As an NLP coaching practitioner, life strategist, counsellor, mentor, coach, a parent, a teacher, I am on the mission to create change. I can only hope the education department supports my thinking to create changes and new territories that matter for the next generation of students for better value, beliefs and lifestyle choices. I fear that students in education today want to succeed and yet, some have lost the motivation in knowing how to do so. Something has to change otherwise workplaces options for these students are going to be limited as we may be facing with an epidemic of drop outs and welfare recipients.
Nikki Simos
Director of Mind Ahead
08/08/2015