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1 " Excellence is all around, sometimes so obvious that we miss it. "
― Joseph O'Connor
2 " If you go through the world looking for excellence, you will find excellence. If you go through the world looking for problems you will find problems. Or as the Arabic saying puts it, “What a piece of bread looks like depends on whether you are hungry or not”. "
― Joseph O'Connor , Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People
3 " The best way to find out what you are capable of is to pretend you can do it. Act “as if” you can. What you can't do, you won't. If it really is impossible, don't worry, you'll find that out. (And be sure to set up appropriate safety measures if necessary.) As long as you believe it is impossible, you will actually never find out if it is possible or not. "
4 " People who mind read usually feel they are right, but this does not guarantee they are. Why guess when you can ask? "
5 " Outcomes ‘come out’ when we achieve them, hence the name, and the first step towards achieving them is to think them through carefully. "
― Joseph O'Connor , NLP Workbook: A practical guide to achieving the results you want
6 " By setting an outcome we become aware of the difference between what we have and what we want. This difference is the ‘problem’. When you have set an outcome and are clear about your desired state, then you can plan to make the journey from one to the other. You become proactive, take ownership of the problem and start to move towards a solution. When you do not know what you want, there are many people who are only too delighted to set you to work getting their outcomes. "
7 " Emotions make excellent servants, but tyrannical masters. "
8 " To believe that someone else is responsible for your emotional state is to give them a sort of psychic power over you they do not have...we really do generate our own feelings. No one else can do it for us. We respond and are responsible. To think other people are responsible for our feelings is to inhabit a billiard ball, inanimate universe. "
9 " Once a response becomes a habit, you stop learning. Theoretically, you could act differently, but in practice you do not. Habits are extremely useful, they streamline the parts of our lives we do not want to think about...But there is an art to deciding what parts of your life you want to turn over to habit, and what parts of your life you want to continue to learn from and have choice about. This is a key question of balance. "
10 " Questions are also interventions. A good question can take a person's mind in a completely new direction and change his life. For example, ask yourself frequently, 'What is the most useful question to ask now? "
11 " When we believe something, we act as if it is true. "
12 " Why' questions have little value, at best they get justifications or long explanations which do nothing to change the situation. "
13 " As long as you believe it is impossible, you will actually never find out if it is possible or not. "
14 " No one can consistently get everything wrong. Such perfection does not exist. "
15 " Free your expectation of the future from the grip of past failure. "
16 " True learning involves learning other ways of doing what you can do already. "
17 " Any single person's viewpoint will have blind spots caused by their habitual ways of perceiving the world, their perceptual filters...How can we shift our perceptions to get outside our own limited world view? "
18 " What happens to our thoughts as we clothe them in language, and how faithfully are they preserved when our listeners undress them? "
19 " Words are anchors for sense experience, but the experience is not the reality, and the word is not the experience. Language is thus two removes from reality. To argue about the real meaning of a word is rather like arguing that one menu tastes better than another because you prefer the food that is printed on it...To come to believe that the external world is patterned by the way we talk about it is even worse than eating the menu - it is eating the printing ink on the menu. Words can be combined and manipulated in ways that have nothing to do with sensory experience. "
20 " We all have beliefs and expectations from our personal experience; it is impossible to live without them. Since we have to make some assumptions, they might as well be ones that allow us freedom, choice and fun in the world, rather than ones that limit us. You often get what you expect to get. "
