Mental Falconry

A friend of mine once said - if he were rich, he’d be bored. He has very little money. He has a lot of financial struggles, but is generally happy.

His wife told him - then, imagine being rich and doing all the things you like to do!

Don’t leave the and out. Don’t prematurely decide that there isn’t a way to have your cake and eat it, too.

A technical sales engineer at a semiconductor firm approached me asking for help on how to manage stress. During the client interview, it was clear that many things recently weren’t turning out as he had supposed them to, and this was causing him to do more work, and potentially miss his revenue quota.

I led him into relaxed state of alertness and suggested to him a new way of reacting when things didn’t go as expected. When he emerged from trance, he said he felt refreshed, free of the stress that he’d had before, and filled with confidence in his ability to act.

The key to the session was instilling the right attitude to have about mistakes. The right attitude to have when things don’t go as expected is to smile to yourself, say “Oops, that’s not it.” and try something different. Attaching too much importance to failure is paralyzing. In fact, failure is good in that it’s a sign that you’re experimenting with new things to improve the way you work. So - go out, interact with the world, and when things don’t go as planned, say “oops, that’s not it”, and adapt

In front of the train station there ran and played two boys - brothers, I figured. The older was about seven, and the younger about five. The older boy ran faster and was surer on his feet than the younger one. They began to race. Trailing a little distance behind, there was the mother, who anxiously called out to the younger boy “be careful! you’ll fall! you’ll fall!”

And the younger boy fell, and started to cry.

She berated him “see, I told you you’d fall.”

Bad suggestion. Bad hypnosis. Not only did she suggest that he fall, but she was also psychologically kicking him while he was down.

Kids are born enthusiastically testing the limits of their world. Better to have just let the boy run, and then if he’d fallen, say “That’s okay, you’re just getting faster and faster every day. Keep running, and your balance will get better and better, too. Now take a deep breath, and let’s walk for awhile.”

Ask yourself: do you set the people around you up for success or failure with your words?