🎙️ Last Call: Outwardly Successful. Inwardly Stuck?
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A free, live 90-minute session with me on the gap between knowing and doing. Why the plan in your head so rarely becomes the action in your day, and the quiet patterns that keep it that way.
Tuesday, 6 October 2026 | 8:00 to 9:30 PM IST | Live on Zoom | Free | No recording
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Welcome to Episode #185 of NLP Around You.
🧠 Thoughtful Thought
“Big journeys are made of small arrivals.”
For your daily dose of Thoughtful Thoughts, get your Thoughtful Calendar here.
💬 NLP Quote Corner
“Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.” – Henry Ford
⏳ One Minute NLP – Shrinking the Mountain
Ever stared at a to-do list for so long that you ended up doing nothing on it? Not because you are lazy. Because the list was simply too big to begin.
In NLP, we call the remedy chunking down: breaking a large, vague outcome into smaller, specific pieces until one of them is small enough to start right now.
The mind does not act on “grow the business”, “get fit” or “sort out the finances”. Those chunks are too big to hold. It acts on “call two clients before lunch”, “walk after dinner”, “open the bank statement”.
Every big outcome becomes doable at some level of detail. The work is to keep asking one question until you reach it: what, specifically, is the first step?
Do this today: take the goal that has been sitting heaviest on you this week. Chunk it down three times. Then do only the smallest piece, before the day ends.
The goal can stay big.
The step must stay small.
🔮 Meta Magic
The Dabbawala Who Never Carried the Whole City
Churchgate. A little before noon.
Rohan had stepped out of a meeting he did not want to be in, to make a call he did not want to make. Quarter-end was close. Three projects behind. One key client wobbling. A board review he had not even begun to think about.
He was not thinking about any one of them.
He was thinking about all of them. At once. All morning.
Which is why he did not notice the man until he almost walked into him.
A dabbawala (lunch-box carrier). White cap. A long wooden crate balanced on his head, packed with tiffins. He moved through the crowd like water. No hurry. No hesitation.
Rohan watched him set the crate down beside a handcart, where another man was already sorting the boxes by the marks painted on their lids. A letter. A number. A dab of colour.
Curiosity got the better of him.
“Itne saare dabbe, kaise yaad rakhte ho?” (How do you keep track of so many boxes?)
The dabbawala looked up, amused, as if the question itself was a little silly.
“Saare nahi, sahab. Bas agla stop.” (Not all of them, sir. Just the next stop.)
Not all of them.
Just the next one.
And that, it turns out, is the whole system. Every working day, a couple of hundred thousand home-cooked lunches travel across Mumbai, from kitchens in the suburbs to desks in the city, and back again. No single man carries a box from start to finish. One collects. One sorts at the station. One rides the train. One delivers to the desk. Each knows his leg, his marks, his next handover.
Nobody carries the whole city.
And yet the whole city gets fed.
Rohan looked down at his phone. He had been carrying the whole city. Every project, every deadline, every what-if, stacked on his head from the moment he woke up. No wonder he was tired before he had moved a single box.
In NLP, we call this chunking. Chunk up, and you find meaning: why this matters. Chunk down, and you find movement: what happens next. Overwhelm is what happens when we stay chunked up all day, staring at the size of the whole, and never come down to the next small, doable piece.
It is also one of the quieter reasons for the gap between knowing and doing. We know exactly what needs to be done. All of it. And the sheer weight of all of it keeps us from doing any of it.
Not less ambition.
Smaller handovers.
Rohan put the phone in his pocket and picked one thing. The client call. Just that.
The rest could wait at the next station.
So let me ask you…
What would change if you only carried the next station?
📖 Hook from the Book
“You must never think of the whole street at once, understand?” – Michael Ende, Momo
🎬 Movie Motivation
“Sattar minute. Sattar minute hai tumhare paas.” (Seventy minutes. You have seventy minutes.)
This dialogue from the movie Chak De! India reminds us that no one wins a whole season at once. We win the stretch of time in front of us, and then the next one.
🏆 Popular Post of the Week
What If the Person You Need to Forgive Is You? – Michhami Dukkadam?
📢 Announcement of the Week
Already an NLP Practitioner? The next step begins on Sunday.
The NLP Master Practitioner Certification starts on Sunday, 4 October 2026. 20 Sundays, 7:00 to 10:00 PM IST, live on Zoom. Internationally certified by ANLP and ABNLP.
This is where you move from using the tools to understanding how change actually works underneath them. Enrol now and you get immediate access to previous cohort recordings, so you begin before the first live session.
20 Sundays. One at a time.
Open to certified NLP Practitioners | ₹75,000
👉 Enrol here: https://www.w3successacademy.com/courses/nlp-master-practitioner
Missed the past issues of NLP Around You? Find them all here: https://w3coach.com/nlparoundyou/
Thoughtfully Yours,
Your W3 Coach
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