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I’ve been reading Penny Power’s Book, Know Me, Like Me, Follow Me and what is clear to me is that those three states are outputs or outcomes; they are the consequence of action that the individual has taken.

This started me thinking about the causes that lead to that consequence and whilst there are many, one word kept coming back to me – commitment, and specifically to 2 questions:

a. How do you demonstrate that you are a committed networker
b. What is your evidence criteria for deciding that another networker is, or is not, committed?

Next week I’ll be posting some of my answers to those questions, and some tips – in the meantime, over to you – what areyour answers?

I signed an on-line petition asking:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to oppose the adoption of the Codex Alimentarius (WHO/UN) proposals for restriction of the presently freely available herb/vitamin/mineral food supplements.”

Details of Petition:

“The principle of self medication with herbal/vitamin/mineral food supplements would be restricted to ‘prescription only’ status, if the Codex Alimentarius is applied in this country. Since the NHS priorities are ill health diagnosis and treatment, the good health preservation that supplements provide will be inaccessible to the majority of our population and the cost to the NHS will increase, and the health of the population will decline.”

· Read the petition
· Petitions homepage

Read the Government’s response

There are no current or planned Codex Alimentarius proposals that require the UK to change the controls on vitamin and mineral or botanical food supplements.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 to develop food standards and guidelines.  One of the main purposes of Codex’s work is to protect the health of consumers.  Codex texts and guidelines are not enforceable in law and Codex member countries are not obliged to reflect their requirements in domestic legislation.

In the UK, food supplements are regulated under the European Food Supplements Directive 2002/46/EC which came into effect in the UK in 2003 and has applied since 2005.  The Directive is implemented into national UK law by the Food Supplements Regulations (England) 2003.  There are no plans to make vitamin and mineral or botanical food supplements available on prescription only.

Herbal remedies are subject to separate controls and are overseen by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority.  Herbal remedies do not fall within the scope of Codex guidelines.
An outline of Codex, its activities and the UK’s involvement is available at: www.food.gov.uk/foodindustry/regulation/Codexbranch/.

A successful coach-client relationship depends, amongst other things, on the coach having an appropriate mindset:

1. That they free their minds of any attachment to their own needs and agenda

2. That they accept everything that the client says as information, without making any judgement about it being good or bad, desirable or undesirable, right ot wrong.

3. All of the input comes from the client, not from the coach; the coach can offer feedback and ask questions to help the client gain insights, but should not lead or control the client.

The question then comes up about what to do if the client asks directly for advice or help.  At this point, the coach needs to have a conversation with the client and perhaps change the nature of the relationship.

We tend to dislike and resist in others what we suppress in ourselves.

It’s called projection and it’s one of the biggest causes of problems in relationships, and blockages to our self-development. We feel uncomfortable when we see others behaving in ways we dislike in ourselves, so we project our dislike and anger onto them. It’s frequently a good idea to put away the magnifying glass we use to examine the behaviour of others, and pick up a mirror instead.

… is there:-

A relationship you would want healed?

Someone you’d want to be with?

Someone to whom you would want to say ‘I’m sorry, please forgive me’?

Someone to whom you would want to say ‘Thank You’?

Someone to whom you would want to say ‘I Love You’?

Somebody with whom I used to work closely died recently; we had had an argument several years ago and had never resolved it, in spite of my trying several times. I now wish I had tried harder!

In considering a transpersonal perspective, we need to look at both material and spiritual dimensions of a person’s being.

In his hierarchy of needs, Maslow described level 5 – self-actualization, as the final level of psychological development, achieved when all basic and mental needs are fulfilled and the person can develop their full potential. Whilst many organisations and leaders quote Maslow when talking about motivation, they typically express the view that level 5 issues are not the concern of organisations.

I believe otherwise. I believe that the key players in organisations who want to take the lead into the next decade have to identify what really matters to them, where their passion lies and how they can best serve their organisation and humanity as a whole, all Level 5 transpersonal issues.

Organisations, their leaders and managers will have to become comfortable not just talking about these issues, but providing their employees with the opportunities to develop at this level, if the employee wants to.

The transpersonal perspective emphasises the importance of personal development in both physical and metaphysical areas, working as individuals on our own and when interacting with others. To quote Roberto Assagioli:

“At this time, it is the right course and our plain duty towards ourselves, towards others and towards God, not only freely to accept Spiritual Joy but intentionally to awaken it within ourselves and to preserve and increase that which we have obtained.”

.. give you good customer service. Let me explain

I travel overseas a lot for work, and have found that there is good and bad service in most countries, except one; I have never encountered bad customer service in Japan.

What I have found is that whatever the country, if I smile and engage the other person in eye contact, it does make a difference, even in supposedly hostile places. Last year, Mathilda and I went into a large supermarket on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The last time she had been there, the area was mixed race. She didn’t know that since then, it had become an area where white people are not known to be welcome.

As soon as we got in there, we realised that we were the only white people in the supermarket. It was too late to turn around so we just walked confidently, heads up, smiling and saying hgi to anyone whose eyes caught ours. Not only did we have no trouble, the checkout girl looked at what we were buying, asked if we were having a braii (BBQ), and asked if she could come.

When we got back to her folks house, they thought we had been crazy to shop where we had!

You can often create a good customer service experience by displaying the kind of behaviour you hope to receive in return!

I’ve just come back from spending 2 weeks in one of my favourite countries: Japan.

And I have to say that standards of service there are so much higher than in the UK – shop staff are more friendly and helpful, more prepared to take responsibility for the customer’s needs, the streets are cleaner, queues move quicker etc. And it got me to wondering: whatever happened to the concept of customer service in the UK and most of Europe?

Far from the customer being at the centre of things, the customer is often forced to conform to the supplier’s processes, processes that are more often than not managed by people who have forgotten how to smile,  forgotten what courtesy is and forgotten that the customer is king.

What do we need to do to match the Japanese for efficiency, courtesy and standards? What do we need to do to get staff at all levels to take ownership of what they do, to take pride in what they do and to place the customer back at the center of what they do?

Some NLP practitioners, in common with many in the human development field, claim that we only use 10% of our brains. They hint, or openly state, that their approach enables their clients to use more of the remaining 90%

What’s odd is that nobody really knows where this myth came from; various suggestions have been made, with no definitive answer. What is the case, however, is that it is only a myth. Barry Beyerstein has identified 7 different sets of evidence to debunk the myth.

Preferred Representational Systems or PRS was once one of the flag-ship elements of NLP; it states that  for practical purposes, information is (or can be treated as if it is) processed through the senses. It goes on to state that each person has a preferred representational system; that some people process information and access memories through pictures (the visuals), others through sound (the auditory people) and yet others through their feelings (the kinaesthetics).

Sharpley carried out a meta survey of PRS research and wrote in 1987 that there is no evidence to support PRS theory.  Ironically, this was a year after one of the NLP co-founders, Richard Bandler, at Santa Cruz, California, on July 9, 1986, when meeting with the [National Research Committee] influence subcommittee… stated that PRS was no longer considered an important component of NLP. Bandler openly stated that NLP had been revised. He then repeated this in an interview with the Enhancing Human Performance subcommittee. Ironically, this was 1 year before Sharpley’s studied was published!

Unfortunately, many NLP trainers and authors still teach and write about PRS.