The Self Consciousness ‘Habit’(*)

Last week’s newsletter and blog article on Self Consciousness produced quite a few e-mails, including one from Bob (not his real name) who is in his mid-30’s, has had the self consciousness habit all of his life and finds that it’s getting in the way of his finding a life partner. He said he found the simplicity of last week’s explanation of self-consciousness enlightening and is now actively putting the tips into practice – and wondered what else he could do.

The answer?

The answer, in a nutshell, is: relax, stop trying, be yourself and others will find you more interesting and attractive.

See, that was simple, wasn’t it.

Not only that but as a strategy it works for many people. And yet… as always with advice, there are important missing pieces; pieces which distinguish between platitudes and useful directions!

For example:

1. The advice isn’t tailored to Bob’s personal circumstances (although there’s nothing we can do about this short of moving onto personal coaching mode)
2. There is no rationale for why this advice might be useful (that’s addressed to some extent below)
3. The advice lacks specific and practical ‘how to’ steps which Bob could choose to follow (that’s also addressed below).

This was to illustrate how so much advice, and so many positive thinking books, fail their audience i.e. they don’t deal with points 2 and 3. On the other hand the precision of NLP enables us to define step-by-step methods for doing things such as ‘be yourself’.

This week’s newsletter aims to provide some clear reasons for the advice – and some practical steps on how to do this.