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Part I: Selecting the Mountain and Your Guides
CHAPTER 1
Creating a Vision of What You Want to Achieve
If you have only a few minutes to skim over this chapter, this is what you should focus on:
- Neuro-Linguistic Programming
It helps to have an idea of what you want to achieve, otherwise, “Any road will take you there.”1 If you want to climb Mount Everest, you will obviously need a high degree of skill and preparation on all types of challenging terrain. If you want to be a CEO of a major corporation, you will likewise need to have that vision early on and carefully map your career moves to ensure you are gaining the requisite skills. It is worth noting that becoming a CEO of a major corporation seldom happens by chance.
It is worth understanding the power of the subconscious. As I understand it, the subconscious does not know the difference between right and wrong; it does not know the difference between what is real and what is imagined in the future or the present; it does not know its limitations.
In the book, The Winning Zone,2 Al Smith states that “the more vivid the imagination, the more real the subconscious thinks the picture is; eventually, the subconscious will believe it is reality and allow the body to perform the task.”
Neuro-Linguistic Programming
Many readers will be aware of this term, even attended a course on it, and yet this concept has been left in the deep recesses of the brain, unused. At its basic level it is the most effective form of behavior alignment one can do. By using your five senses you create visions of achievement you have yet to attain. You smell, you see, you feel, you hear, you touch, all in your mind, the event you want to achieve. Your subconscious is now in a dilemma. It needs to close the gap between now and this future reality. Because it knows no bounds, it will lift your performance, the only limiting factor being your consciousness, which as always will interfere and will sabotage progress, if allowed to.
Al Smith, a sport psychologist, sat his son down to watch hours of videotape of the top-ten bowler, Marshall Holman. After a week and a half of focusing on Holman’s delivery and visualizing the same approach and motion when he bowled, his son’s average moved from the 120s to the 185s! There are many more sporting analogies highlighting the power of vision.
Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay are reputed to have visualized being the first person to climb Mount Everest. It is no surprise that they should meet each other in the best-organized attempt on Mount Everest. Upon meeting, they soon realized their compatibility and joined together as a two-man climbing team, performing feats of endurance designed to catch the eye of Lord Hunt, the Expedition leader. They naturally were then selected to be the second summiting team. The first team met a problem they could not surmount, whereas when Sir Edmund Hillary approached the final barrier, now known as the Hillary step, he developed a new climbing technique, at 27,000 feet, to get around the problem. One wonders how much Sir Edmund’s and Norgay’s shared vision was the differentiating factor between the two separate summiting attempts.
Influencing the Environment
There are people who believe that one’s thoughts can influence the environment around you. For those readers who think I have lost the plot, I ask you to do an exercise. Pick a busy shopping day where parking will be a nightmare. Now think precisely where you want to park—the most convenient busy road where parking is available. On the journey, think of an empty parking spot. Now that you are thinking the positive thoughts you will be amazed at the results you get. It is as if the universe has linked into another driver and stimulated him to move his car just as you are arriving; or looking at this another way you are more open to the opportunities that are always there. Many cars will be leaving their spots during peak times!
By creating visions of where you want to be, you are, according to this school of thought, creating the opportunities and being receptive to them as they arise. It is worth attending courses on neuro-linguistic programming, meditation, and visualization, which lock in practices better than any book on the subject.
Notes
1. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, (Tribeca Books).
2. Al Smith, The Winning Zone, Ist Books Library, 2002.
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CHAPTER 2
Find Out about Yourself
If you have only a few minutes to skim over this chapter, this is what you should focus on:
- The Enneagram
- The personal baggage checklist
Personal Baggage
We wi...
