NLP for Time, Money, Energy

Filed Under (NLP life coaching) on 01-02-2011

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Do you often feel that you don’t have time, money, or energy? Or perhaps two or all of them at once? What does it say about how you vote with these three precious resources? How can NLP help you always have enough time, money, and energy?

We vote with time every minute.

Hence we say yes to one activity and inevitably no to another.  We vote. Time is a limited commodity for all of us.  We have 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, 8,760 hours in a year.  If you lived to a 100, you’d live 876,000 hours from the moment of birth to the moment of death.  That is well under a million hours in a lifetime.  You’d have to live to 114 years of age to clock up a million hours on this planet.

Many of us would like to be able to squeeze more hours out of a day. Hence we study strategies of managing time and creative scheduling techniques.  We try to figure out how to do several things at once.

So how do you want to spend your time?  How do you spend time now?  A useful exercise is to track how you spend time for one week.  One coaching client often spent hours running around supermarkets for bargains.  This time cut the time he spent with his family!  So he used the information to change the habit.

By reading this article you have voted for personal [and professional] growth, learning, improving the quality and enjoyment of life.  There’re a million ways in which you could spend these moments.  But here you are.  Hence what values are you voting for by reading these words?

NLP ways to explore how you vote with time:

  • How do you use time in any context of life?
  • How could you reduce or eliminate the pressure of time that you feel?
  • Similarly, how do your choices about how you spend time reflect your highest values?
  • What have you learnt about yourself and spending time?
  • Do you often find yourself rushing?  What’s the cost of that?
  • How do you want to spend the time you have left on this planet?

You also vote with every amount of money that you spend.

Spending money is a political act as much as or even more than voting on election day.  Every time you buy a product or service you help an individual or a corporation to stay in business.  Your vote says that you want the product or service to exist in the world.

Yet there are people who complain that there’re too many chain eateries in town and the family ones seem to be disappearing.  These people wish that they could enjoy more of the atmospheric family owned establishments.  Yet when they go out to eat, convenience often takes over and they end up at a chain restaurant. Their vote for family owned eateries skips the essential step of financially supporting them.

Most of us are directly responsible for deciding how we vote with money.  How do your expenditures reflect your values?  How do you choose to contribute to causes that are important to you?  Do you buy products that are well designed or function well for longer even if they’re more expensive than products of lower quality?  Do you spend money to insure your safety or to establish your social status?

As a family member, friend, colleague, businessperson, or self coach you can help yourself or others be aware of how they spend money.  Firstly it will be important to estimate what you are like with money.  How much is enough?  How much time and energy are you willing to trade for money?  And how can you spend money in a way aligned with your values?  Money is a topic that people in many cultures are not willing to talk about in social situations.  So no matter how well you mean to help someone, ask the person’s permission before you explore financial issues with them.  And also do it with yourself.

NLP ways to explore how you vote with money:

  • How do you want to vote with your money?
  • How do you decide whether a product or service is worth what you are to spend on it?
  • What are your criteria for selecting that product or service?
  • How much money is enough?
  • How do you choose how you spend money?

Finally, how do you vote with your energy?  

What do you want in life?  What are your highest values?  Is peace of mind important to you?  How often do you do what it takes to cultivate peace of mind?  Or is connection your high value?  How often do you choose to connect with people? Think of spending thoughts/actions/energy in the same way as spending money.  If you spend your thoughts/actions on something, you’re voting for having more of that in life.  What mental environments do you create with your thoughts?  Do you focus on success, gratefulness, peace, or love?  Or do you spend thoughts on stress, frustration, anger, or hatred?  That is a costly expenditure of energy.

You live with your thoughts all the time.  Notice what you most often say to yourself.  Do you sort for worst case scenarios?  Creativity can be a drawback if that is your inclination.  You can live much of your life in a horror movie complete with special effects!  Or you can spend energy on creating more productive states of mind. Whenever you consider doing something, ask “does it lead to happiness?”.  When you’re happy, you are more likely to be generous and loving to others.  So by cultivating your thoughts and creating your happiness you serve the greater good as well.

As a person, family member, colleague, businessperson, or self coach you can be an anchor for or exemplar of creating more productive states of mind, and help people to create them for themselves and their environments.

  • What thoughts will serve them well as they invest in a task or relationship?
  • How may they be limiting their choices by holding [onto] certain thoughts?
  • What would/could be available if they changed their thoughts about a certain topic?

Similarly…

  • How are you thinking about this or the other problem?
  • What other perspectives could you take?
  • How do you make yourself suffer with this train of thought?
  • What different story could you create about this situation?
  • How could you think of this as fun or easy?
  • How could your thoughts serve you better in this situation?
  • Also, how could you inject some humour into the situation?

Other ways to use NLP for time, money, energy?

If this article inspired you to vote for NLP coaching to find ways to use time, money, and energy better, I’m always here to talk about it.

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