Why obstacles come up before your success

July was a busy month with a lot of coaching. I attended and assisted with John Overdurf’s Trainer’s Training in Scottsdale, Arizona and had an amazing time. I’m always working to improve my skills as a coach and trainer, and being able to work with John and the amazing people that attend his seminars is continuously the highlight of my career.

When I returned, I immediately jumped into coaching with a few of the people that took advantage of my summer coaching sale. One woman had an amazing shift, and she gave me permission to write about the work I did with her.

This woman is a high-powered entrepreneur with a business you’ve likely heard of. She’s had quite a few successes in her life, but she was finding it difficult to take her business to the next level. She had experienced a number of setbacks in the last few months, and she was at the end of her rope. She felt like maybe the universe was giving her signs that it was time to shift focus and give up. Old fears and doubts were beginning to present themselves. She was having issues with one of her children and with her employees. And her income was falling flat.

She could blame the economy. She could give up. Or, she could do what most successful people in this position do. She looked for help. As someone who wonders why people do the things they do, and what makes some people succeed while others fail, I asked her about this.

She basically said, “Giving up is not really an option. People depend on me. They need me to set a direction, to succeed. I knew I could succeed; everything is in place. I have a focus and a vision. Yet something was wrong. I couldn’t find it, so I knew it was probably something in me.”

What makes successful people succeed

She has what makes people succeed. She has vision, focus, drive, and desire to make something happen. She puts everything into her goals, and she’s very good at handling distractions and keeping focused. But even the best of us have bad days. We sometimes even have bad weeks. Sometimes our challenges can last a while.

The one thing I have learned throughout coaching thousands of people: when the going gets tough, it’s the biggest gift in the world. You are being shown something, something about yourself, something that’s in the way.

Your path hasn’t changed. You’ve just encountered a boulder on your path. Those boulders make the trip more interesting, more exciting.

When something difficult is in your way, it is actually a gift. You get to use that difficulty, that boulder, to leverage and catapult you to something even better.

As I worked with this woman, she did not exactly know what was causing such difficulty for her. She just knew she was getting it from all angles – home, work, relationships. It was popping up in synchronistic messages. “I know I have the support of spirit,” she said. “But I’d like to accelerate the process.”

She was open. She was ready to change.

I talked to her a little while, and listened for signs. Finally, something came up in a couple of different ways. And I asked her if I could work on clearing unconscious blocks she had from childhood. I took her through a highly effective NLP process to reconsolidate those memories. She began crying midway through the process as she realized this unconscious memory had been affecting her for years. “I think this is why I’m having issues with my child.”

I checked in with her two days later. “How are you feeling?”

She replied, “I feel great. I really don’t have that heavy overwhelming feeling of being out of control anymore. Some of the old triggers aren’t even bothering me. I’m getting along with my child and my employees better. I don’t feel like giving up. I think I am just enjoying where I am right now, and I feel optimism about the future instead of fear.”

I told her to just keep enjoying that feeling and the freedom she was feeling. We’ll check in again soon.

How NLP can change your life

All of the stress she had been feeling up to that point was her unconscious asking to be healed. These stresses come up for us when we desire to take things to the next level. When we want something more than what we have, when we want to grow, the things that are blocking us begin to become a little more urgent and a little more painful. Our unconscious is trying very hard to give us what we want — that growth and change — but in order to become more of who we really are, we have to let go of the past. So, some of those past hurts, limiting beliefs, the core impressions that drive us when we think we’re so in control, they come up and start causing problems so that we can heal them.

Remember this the next time you are going through a difficult time. If you’ve recently made a decision that you want something more, the difficulties that are cropping up are there to signal that you need something cleared in order to have it.

It may appear to you that the obstacles and difficulties are outside of you. However, those outside obstacles are a reflection of what needs to clear within you.

Clearing the negative beliefs, the limiting unconscious memories, and the emotional baggage from things that happened when we were young and impressionable is our work. We set up these goals, hopes, dreams so that we can trigger the things to come up. Our job is to grow into more of who we really are. Our job is to expand the things we desire. Our job is to become more love and less fear. That process requires cleaning up our past.

Is NLP coaching right for you?

If you’ve never been through an NLP coaching process before, you might not think it can help you. It sounds too simple, too good to be true, especially when we know of people who have been in therapy for years. Can a 30 minute process really change someone that quickly?

Yes, it can. It does. I’ve been helping people do this for two decades. People really can change in a matter of minutes.

It works by changing the way the brain processes memories, feelings, and beliefs. By reprocessing a memory in a different way, we not only see, but we can feel, a different perspective. That changes what we believe to be true in a fundamental way.

The new brain-based leadership science is verifying all of this. It’s not just anecdotal experiences. It’s been tested, tried, and proven. Corporations in Europe are insisting that their top level management are certified in NLP for a reason. It works.

If we have an experience that made us feel guilt, shame, anxiety, sadness, hurt, etc., we can revisit and reconsolidate those memories so that the emotion is no longer there. We work with that experience as a memory in the ever-present now and rewrite and reconsolidate the memory so that it is processed and interpreted differently. It ends up creating new beliefs about our life experience that are useful, instead of unconscious feelings and memories that hold us back from what we want.

This is, of course, just one way that NLP works. If you think you’re experiencing difficulties that need to be leveraged, contact me. My coaching process is simple, quick, but the results are powerful and will fundamentally change your life.