Many years ago, I trained as an NLP Master Practitioner. One of the phrases that kept coming up was “operating at 100%”, but when I went back over all of my course notes I couldn’t find any written record of what what it meant officially. However, I can clearly recall what it involved, and now more than ever understand how critical it is to our personal and professional wellbeing.
Given my NLP qualification focussed on sports performance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that “operating at 100%” means giving your all, every session. This couldn’t be further from the truth. If we give our all to our work, or our interests, or our family, or our friends, or even to ourselves, then life starts to look and feel pretty unbalanced. We need a bit of everything to keep ourselves functioning well, and this in turn means that we perform better across each area of our lives.
If we find ourselves feeling stuck or dissatisfied, it is often as a result of ignoring something that is important to us, but which may understandably have been pushed to the side over time. The trouble is that by trying desperately to figure out what is wrong, we often can’t see the wood for the trees and so retreat back to what is familiar instead of making real, lasting, impactful change that could help us feel more fulfilled.
This is where SFH comes in. It can help us rebalance our timetables, by helping us understand how different activities fire up different hormones and create new neural pathways. Show me someone who wouldn’t want more feel-good chemicals coursing through their bodies and more capacity for learning and flexible thinking! This is exactly what we can achieve when we look outside the safety of our everyday routines and shake things up, one small manageable step at a time.
If the change that is needed feels more fundamental, by encouraging us to think about what is going well and planning micro-steps that we can take towards our goals, SFH helps we can uncover what lies in the way, or even identify new goals that are more aligned with the person we are now and want to be in the future.
Operating at 100%, one step at a time.