Welcome to Episode #168 of NLP Around You.

 

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“Your mind answers every question you ask it. Ask a better one.”

For your daily dose of Thoughtful Thoughts, get your Thoughtful Calendar here.

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.” — Naguib Mahfouz

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – The Two Words That Lie to You

Listen to yourself the next time something goes wrong. “You never listen.” “This always happens to me.” “He never gives me credit.”

In NLP, we call always and never universal quantifiers. They are part of the Meta Model, the toolkit that catches the moments when our language quietly bends the truth.

Here is the trick they play. One frustrating moment gets stretched until it covers every moment. A single instance becomes a lifelong verdict. And because the word feels true, the brain stops looking for evidence to the contrary.

But the contrary is almost always there.

Catch yourself the next time you say always or never. Then ask one question: “Always? Has there been even one time when it wasn’t so?” Watch how fast the exception arrives. One exception is all it takes to crack a generalisation open.

Always is rarely true. Never almost never is.

Want the full Meta Model and the language patterns that change conversations? It sits at the heart of our NLP Practitioner programme.

 

🔮 Meta Magic – Coaching Chronicles

The Manager Who Asked the Wrong Question

He sat across from me with the look of a man who had already tried everything.

A regional head. Sharp. Fifteen years of building teams. The kind of leader who reads two management books a month and underlines them.

He came with one question. He had been carrying it for months.

“Why is my team so disengaged?”

He said it the way you say something you have decided is final. Not a question really. A verdict wearing the costume of a question.

I did not answer it.

Instead, I asked him to say it again, slowly.

“Why… is my team… so disengaged.”

“Good,” I said. “Now notice what your brain does with that question. You have asked it to go and find proof that your team is disengaged. And your brain, being a faithful servant, will find it. Every late reply. Every quiet meeting. Every blank face. It will bring you a full file.”

He nodded slowly.

“So let me ask you a different one. Who on your team was engaged last week? Even once. Even briefly.”

He paused.

The pause was long.

Then, almost reluctantly, two names. A junior who had stayed back to fix a deck nobody asked her to fix. A quiet engineer who had spotted an error that saved them a client call.

“What were they doing differently?” I asked.

And now he was not slumped any more. He was leaning in. Talking faster. Three minutes ago he had a disengaged team. Now he had two engaged people and a pattern worth studying.

Nothing about the team had changed in those three minutes.

Only the question had.

This is the quiet secret of the Meta Model in NLP. Our minds are not neutral. They answer the exact question we feed them, and they answer it obediently. Ask a vague, hopeless, all-or-nothing question, and you get a vague, hopeless answer that feels like the truth.

“Why is my team so disengaged” deletes the people who care, generalises a few moments into a permanent state, and hands you despair dressed as insight.

The fix is not a better attitude. It is a better question.

He left with one piece of homework. Replace every “why is everyone” question with a “who, specifically, and when” question. For one week.

He messaged me eight days later. Two lines.

“Same team. Different manager. Turns out I was the one who was disengaged, from the right question.”

So let me ask you.

What is the one question you keep asking yourself that has only ever handed you the same tired answer?

And what would change if you altered just one word in it?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Kitne aadmi the?” (How many men were there?)

This line from the movie Sholay reminds us that the right question forces the missing detail into the open. That is exactly what the Meta Model does in NLP: it recovers the specifics our minds quietly delete.

 

🏆 Winning Post of the Week

Honoured and deeply grateful to receive the 𝗥𝗼𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 recognition for W3 Success Academy. This acknowledgement is not just about a business. It is a reminder that values, integrity, trust, and ethical leadership still matter deeply in the world of work and entrepreneurship.

W3 Success Academy Recognised by Rotary

Missed the past issues of NLP Around You? Find them all here:

https://w3coach.com/nlparoundyou/

 

Thoughtfully Yours,

Mehernosh Randeria

Your W3 Coach

Welcome to Episode #167 of NLP Around You.

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“The breakthrough was never missing. The listening was.” — Dr Mehernosh J Randeria

For your daily dose of Thoughtful Thoughts, get your Thoughtful Calendar here.

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” — Stephen R. Covey

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – Stepping Out of Your Own Expertise

Here is a strange truth. The more you know, the harder you find it to listen.

Not because you are arrogant. Because your brain is efficient. The moment someone starts speaking, your expertise has already finished their sentence, sorted their idea into a box, and decided whether it is worth your time. You are not hearing them. You are matching them against what you already know.

In NLP, we call the cure second position, or meta-position. It is the deliberate act of stepping out of your own map and standing, for a moment, inside someone else’s. Not to agree. Just to receive.

The expert’s reflex is first position only: my view, my frame, my answer. The skill most leaders never build is the pause before the answer arrives.

Do this today. The next time someone brings you an idea you are tempted to dismiss, hold your response for three full seconds. In that gap, ask yourself one question: What if they are right and I am simply too practised to see it?

Expertise speaks first. Wisdom listens longer.

Want to train this muscle properly? Our NLP Practitioner programme builds it from the ground up.

 

🔮 Meta Magic

The Day Edison Listened Instead of Spoke

In 1879, Thomas Edison’s lab in Menlo Park was on the edge of a breakthrough. The incandescent bulb was almost his. The problem was the filament. It kept burning out in minutes.

He had tested platinum. Carbonised paper. Bamboo. Cork. Coconut hair. Fishing line. Material after material. Thousands of them. Each one a small failure. Each one logged, filed, and moved past.

His investors were restless. His team was exhausted. And Edison, the man who supposedly never tired, was running out of road.

In the lab worked a young assistant named Francis Jehl.

Junior. Quiet. Easy to overlook.

For weeks, Jehl had been mentioning the same humble idea. Ordinary carbonised cotton thread. Not exotic. Not expensive. Just thread, the kind you would find in any tailor’s drawer.

Edison kept brushing it aside. Not out of cruelty. Out of certainty. It sounded too plain to matter. When you have tested thousands of materials, the obvious one is the easiest to dismiss.

Then came a bad evening. Another round of dead filaments. Edison, packing up to leave, stopped at Jehl’s desk.

He looked at the young man.

Not impatient.

Just, for once, willing.

And he said two words.

“Show me.”

That night, the carbonised cotton thread glowed for over thirteen hours. The longest any filament had lasted. The bulb that would light up the world had finally found its heart.

And it began, not with a flash of genius, but with a senior man finally hearing a junior man he had been too busy to hear.

The meta-magic moment. Edison did not lack brilliance. He did not lack effort. Thousands of attempts is not a man who gives up easily. What he lacked, for those few weeks, was the one capacity that no expertise can replace.

The willingness to listen below his own rank.

Most rooms have a Jehl. A quieter voice, lower in the hierarchy, holding the plain idea that everyone senior has already filed under too obvious to work.

So let me ask you.

Whose quiet voice in your room have you been too busy to hear?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” — Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Magar jis kalai ko tune lula kaha hai, wohi hamri sabse badi taakat banegi, dekh lena.” (But the very arm you have called crippled, that will become our greatest strength, you will see.)

This dialogue from the movie Lagaan reminds us that the resource everyone else dismisses as too ordinary, or too weak, is often the very one holding the breakthrough, if only someone is willing to truly see it.

 

🏆 Popular Post of the Week

What people expect about Conflict Resolution v/s What actually works

 

📢 Announcement of the Week

A Houseful Room, and a Door Still Open

Last week, 300 of you filled the Zoom room for Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck. A houseful session. The kind where the chat moves faster than you can read it and nobody leaves early.

Thank you for showing up so fully. The journey continues and our new NLP Foundation Weekend has already begun today.

Missed the webinar? The next session runs free on Tuesday, 30th June. Reply with the comment SUCCESS, and I will send you the link.

 

Missed the past issues of NLP Around You? Find them all here:

https://w3coach.com/nlparoundyou/

 

Thoughtfully Yours,

---

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Welcome to Episode #166 of NLP Around You.

 

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“Most signals arrive before the sentence does.” — Dr Mehernosh J Randeria

For your daily dose of Thoughtful Thoughts, get your Thoughtful Calendar here.

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” — Marcel Proust

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – Sensory Acuity

Pay attention to how often you hear the phrase, “But you never told me.”

In families. In teams. In marriages. Someone is upset. Someone else is defending. The defence usually sounds like, “How was I supposed to know? You never said anything.”

Maybe. But the body said something. The pause said something. The shorter reply on Wednesday morning said something. The phone, placed face down a little too firmly, said something.

In NLP, this is called sensory acuity. The trained ability to read state from observable cues, without waiting for the words to arrive.

Most of us calibrate only after a mistake. The trained eye calibrates before.

Practice this today. Pick one person you will meet, in person or on a call. Before they speak, give yourself five seconds to read three things. Their posture. The pace of their first breath. The quality of their first smile. Then notice how often the next ten minutes confirm what those three things were telling you.

Words are slow. The body is honest.

Most people listen to find their turn to speak. The skilled listener reads, long before listening is even required.

 

🔮 Meta Magic – Can You Catch The SIgnal Before The Words?

Bashir bhai has been pouring tea at Platform Six of Andheri station for 27 years.

Rs. 3 a cup when he started. Rs. 12 now. The stove is the same. The kettle has been replaced twice. The smile has not changed.

I noticed something on my third visit.

He does not ask you what size you want.

He does not point to a menu.

He does not say, “Bada ya chhota?” (Big cup or small cup?)

He just looks at you. Decides. And pours.

Big cup for the harried commuter clutching a laptop bag and checking the platform display every six seconds. Small cup for the elderly gentleman who has placed his walking stick against the stall and is in no hurry. Half cup for the office boy collecting a takeaway order in a hurry, balancing five other things in a plastic carrier.

No questions. No menu. No “what would you like, sir”.

I asked him once. “Bashir bhai, kaise pata chalta hai kis ko kitni chai chahiye?” (How do you know who needs how much tea?)

He smiled the smile of a man who has been asked the same question many times.

“Bees saal pehle main poochhta tha,” he said. (Twenty years ago, I used to ask.) “Phir maine dekhna shuru kiya.” (Then I started watching.)

Watching, not asking.

That is the whole sentence – beyond the words.

Most of us call ourselves good listeners. What we mean is, we wait for the other person to finish their sentence before we begin ours. Bashir bhai does something different. He reads the customer before the customer has decided what they want.

This is what NLP calls calibration. Reading state from observable cues. Posture, breath, voice quality, micro-expression, the angle at which someone is standing.

Most professionals only calibrate when something has gone wrong. A meeting blows up. A spouse goes quiet for two days. A team member resigns out of nowhere. Then comes the audit. “What did I miss?”

Bashir bhai audits before. Not after.

And here is the quiet thing about his stall. 27 years of pouring different cups for different people has built him a kind of regulars list that no CRM software in the world could match. The elderly gentleman comes back not because the tea is the best on the platform. He comes back because someone, in the middle of a city of 20 million strangers, gave him a small cup without making him explain why.

Being seen, before being heard, is one of the rarest gifts one human can offer another.

So let me ask you.

In the room you will walk into next…

Are you waiting for the words…

or are you already reading the signal?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“Look for what you notice but no one else sees.” — Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Jo dikhta hai humko lagta hai, hai… aur jo nahi dikhta humko lagta hai, nahi hai… lekin kabhi kabhi jo dikhta hai, woh nahi hota… aur jo nahi dikhta, woh hota hai.” (What we see, we believe is there. What we do not see, we believe is not there. But sometimes what we see is not really there. And what we do not see is what is actually there.)

This dialogue from the film Taare Zameen Par reminds us that calibration is not about looking harder. It is about looking past the obvious, to the signal that was always sitting quietly underneath.

 

🏆 Popular Post of the Week

The Most Expensive Lie Smart People Are Telling Themselves

 

📢 Announcement of the Week

If you are someone the world calls successful, but something inside you is whispering that the picture is not complete, this one is for you.

Join me for the live webinar:

Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck

A 90-minute conversation about why high performers plateau, what your inner signals have been trying to tell you, and the First Shift that changes everything.

👉 Register here: https://www.w3successacademy.com/f/outwardly-successful-inwardly-stuck

 

Missed the past issues of NLP Around You? Find them all here:

https://w3coach.com/nlparoundyou/

Thoughtfully Yours,

---

Welcome to Episode #164 of NLP Around You

 

📢 FREE LIVE WEBINAR

Outwardly Successful. Inwardly Stuck.

For the high performer who has the title, the income, and the résumé… and still feels something is missing.

👉 Save your seat here

 

Welcome to Episode #165 of NLP Around You.

 

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“You are not lacking a resource. You are probably using it on the wrong field.” — Dr Mehernosh J Randeria

For your daily dose of Thoughtful Thoughts, get your Thoughtful Calendar here.

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” — Carl Jung

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – The Presupposition of Resources

Most of us have been quietly trained to believe that the missing piece lives outside us.

A better job. A bigger title. One more certification. The right mentor. The right city. The right partner. The right book.

NLP starts from a different premise.

One of its core presuppositions is this. Every person already has all the resources they need to make the change they want. The resources are not absent. They are sitting in a different room.

Calm is in there. Courage is in there. Patience is in there. Discipline is in there. You have been all of these things at some point in your life. Maybe at work, but not at home. Maybe with a parent, but not with your child. Maybe at thirty, but not at fifty.

The work of change is not installation. It is redirection.

Explore this. Pick one thing you say you do not have. “I do not have the patience for this.” Now ask yourself, where in my life do I already have this in abundance? Who do I treat with that patience? In what setting does it show up effortlessly? That is the room it is sitting in. Your job is not to manufacture it. Your job is to bring it across the corridor.

You are not empty. You are misallocated.

Installation is exhausting.

Redirection is elegant.

If you want to learn how to do this redirection at a structural level, the next cohort of NLP Practitioner is the place to begin.

 

🔮 Meta Magic – The Violet Lady of Milwaukee

The Violet That Was Waiting

Somewhere in the late 1950s, in Milwaukee, a young doctor received an unusual request. His name was Milton Erickson.

The request came from a worried nephew. “My aunt is deeply depressed,” he said.

She lived alone in a large house. Rarely stepped out. Rarely met people. Rarely attended church anymore, though she had been a deeply devout member of the congregation.

The house, in many ways, had become her world.

And perhaps, her world had become the house.

So the nephew asked Erickson if he would visit her.

Erickson agreed.

When he entered the house, he saw what most of us might have seen.

Dim rooms.
Heavy curtains.
A piano whose lid had not been opened in a long time.
A Bible on the side table, clearly used, but perhaps now more as memory than practice.

It was the kind of house where silence does not merely exist.

It sits with you.

It occupies the chair opposite you.

It becomes the third person in the room.

And then, while walking through the house, Erickson turned a corner.

And there it was.

Sunlight.

A glass conservatory at the back of the house.

Filled with African violets.

Rows and rows of them.

Purple. White. Lavender. Pink.

Each one carefully grown.
Each one lovingly tended.
Each one carrying the quiet fingerprints of a woman who still knew how to care.

Now, pause here for a moment.

Most people would have focused on the depression.

Erickson noticed the violets.

Most people would have asked, “What is wrong with you?”

Erickson silently seemed to ask, “What is still alive in you?”

He did not make her sit for a long therapeutic conversation.

He did not analyse her sadness.

He did not interpret the curtains.

He did not ask why the piano was closed.

He simply asked her one question.

“Do you have a list of every birth, illness, wedding, and funeral in your congregation?”

She did.

Of course she did.

She was connected to the church, even if she had disconnected from the people.

Then Erickson gave her one simple instruction.

From now on, whenever there is a birth, send an African violet.
Whenever someone is ill, send an African violet.
Whenever there is a wedding, send an African violet.
Whenever there is a funeral, send an African violet.

Not a lecture.
Not a long prayer.
Not a motivational quote.

A violet.

Grown by her.
Wrapped by her.
Sent in her name.

That was it.

That was the intervention.

No grand technique.
No complicated framework.
No dramatic breakthrough moment.

Just a gentle redirection of something she was already growing.

Years later, when she passed away at a ripe old age, the local newspaper carried a headline that stayed with people.

Milwaukee mourns the Violet Lady. Beloved by thousands.

Think about that.

She was not lacking love.
She was not lacking purpose.
She was not lacking community.

She was growing all three.

Quietly.

In pots.

In a sunlit glass room at the back of a silent house.

Waiting for someone to notice.

Waiting for someone to redirect it.

That, to me, is the beauty of Erickson’s work.

He did not give her a new life.

He helped her see the life that was still blooming inside her old one.

And perhaps that is where so many of us miss the point.

We keep looking for what needs to be fixed. What needs to be added. What needs to be installed. What new habit, new belief, new routine, new affirmation, new system, new identity must be brought in from outside.

As if we are empty rooms waiting to be furnished.

But often, transformation does not begin by adding something new.

Sometimes, it begins by noticing what is already alive.

NLP, at its best, does this.

It does not treat a person as broken.

It looks for the resource.

The pattern.
The strength.
The memory.
The value.
The forgotten ability.
The quiet violet growing somewhere in the background.

And then it asks a different question.

Not, “What is missing?”

But, “Where can this be used?”

Because sometimes your gift has not disappeared. It has only become inward-facing.

Sometimes your love has not died. It has only lost direction.

Sometimes your purpose is not absent. It is simply sitting in a glass room, waiting to be sent into the world.

So let me ask you this.

What is your violet?

What is that one thing you have been quietly growing, perhaps for years, without realising its value?

And who, somewhere in the world, is waiting to receive it?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” — Mary Oliver, Upstream

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Tumhare paas talent hai, par tum usse waste kar rahe ho.”

Translated: “You have the talent, you are just wasting it.”

This line from Wake Up Sid reminds us that the problem is rarely absence. The problem is usually the angle at which we are aiming what we already have.

 

🏆 Popular Post of the Week

The Psychology of Persuasion – in numbers

 

📢 Announcement of the Week

If something in this episode sat down inside you and refused to leave, that is the signal.

Join me live for the free webinar Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck. It is built for the high performer who has built the outer life beautifully and is now ready to name the inner thing nobody at work asks about.

👉 Save your seat here

 

Missed the past issues of NLP Around You? Find them all here: https://w3coach.com/nlparoundyou/

Thoughtfully Yours,

Mehernosh Randeria

Your W3 Coach

Welcome to Episode #164 of NLP Around You

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“Strip away your doing, and meet whoever is left. That person is the one running your life.”

— Dr Mehernosh J Randeria

For your daily dose of Thoughtful Thoughts, get your Thoughtful Calendar here.

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“Your behaviour does not define you. Your identity does. Change one, and the other follows.”

— Robert Dilts

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – Identity vs Behaviour

Most people try to change their lives at the level of behaviour.

Wake up earlier. Eat cleaner. Reply faster. Speak less in meetings. Spend more time with family. Read more books.

And almost all of it slips back within weeks.

Not because the behaviour was wrong. Because the identity underneath the behaviour did not change.

In NLP, we work with what Robert Dilts called the Logical Levels. Behaviour is a surface. Identity is the bedrock. If you try to install a new behaviour into an old identity, the old identity quietly dismantles it overnight, like a body rejecting a transplant.

A man who believes “I am a hustler” cannot rest, no matter how many wellness apps he downloads. A woman who believes “I am the strong one” cannot ask for help, no matter how exhausted she is. The behaviour they want is not the problem. The story they hold about themselves is.

Explore this today. Take one behaviour you keep failing to change. Then ask, gently, what kind of person would I have to become for this new behaviour to feel natural? That answer is the work.

Behaviour is what you do.

Identity is who you are when no one is watching.

 

🔮 Meta Magic – Coaching Chronicles

The CFO Who Couldn’t Sit Still

He walked into the session in a charcoal grey suit, sleeves crisp, watch heavy on his wrist.

Senior finance leader. Mid-fifties. Two grown children. A career résumé that takes a full minute to read out loud.

“I want more meaning in my role,” he said, settling into the chair. “The numbers are good. The team is good. But something is off.”

We talked for twenty minutes. He was articulate. Self-aware. Already half-coached, the way senior people often arrive these days.

Then I asked him to do something simple.

“Sit with me in silence for sixty seconds. No phone. Eyes open or closed, your choice. Just sit.”

He smiled. The kind of smile a senior leader gives when he assumes this is a warm-up to something more interesting.

Ten seconds in, his right hand started tapping his knee.

Twenty seconds in, his thumb went looking for his phone.

Thirty seconds in, he opened his eyes and laughed.

“Let’s just keep talking, doctor. I think better when I’m talking.”

I let the moment land. Not as an accusation. Just as information.

“You came in saying something is off,” I said. “I think we just met it.”

He frowned.

“For thirty years,” I said, “your nervous system has learned that stillness equals falling behind. Pausing means losing. Silence means something is wrong. Your body cannot tell the difference between rest and risk anymore.”

He went quiet.

A different kind of quiet this time.

Not performance. Recognition.

“So what do I do?”

“Nothing yet. First, notice. The man who walked in here wants more meaning. But the man who lives inside that suit cannot tolerate sixty seconds of meaninglessness. Those are two different men. Until they meet, no strategy will work.”

He nodded slowly. Then said something I will not forget.

“If I am not producing, I do not know who I am.”

That sentence, said out loud, is the entire problem and the entire doorway, both at once.

In NLP, we say identity drives behaviour. Strategy without identity-level work is decoration. You can teach a CFO mindfulness, journaling, breath work, every tool in the wellness catalogue. None of it sticks if his core identity is “I am what I produce”. Because the moment he stops producing, even for a minute, his body reads it as danger.

The work, then, is not to add a new habit.

It is to widen the definition of who he is.

Until “I am at rest” becomes a sentence he can say without flinching, every productivity hack will quietly fail him. And so will every promise of meaning.

So let me ask you…

When the doing stops, who do you become?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“It is not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”

— Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Kabhi kabhi lagta hai apun hi bhagwan hai.”

Translated: “Sometimes I feel I am God myself.”

This iconic line from Sacred Games captures the trap of identity built on doing. When everything you have ever achieved feels like you, you cannot afford to stop. Because the moment you do, the version of you on the throne starts to disappear.

 

🏆 Popular Post of the Week

Last week, the Dhurandhar Arc concluded on Lights! Camera! NLP!. Ten days, ten chapters, one spy thriller read through an NLP lens. The complete arc is now compiled as a free e-book, ten chapters in one PDF.

→Download the free e-book here.

 

Missed the past issues of NLP Around You? Find them all here: https://w3coach.com/nlparoundyou/

 

Thoughtfully Yours,

Mehernosh Randeria

Your W3 Coach