🌱 100 Days | Season 2: RECODE Your Life
100 Days. 100 Tiny Experiments.
One short video a day, from 23 September to 31 December 2026. Not a course to finish. A small experiment to do, every single day.
Six phases: Recognise, Engage, Challenge, Open, Design, Embody. Because knowing changes nothing until you do something with it.
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Welcome to Episode #186 of NLP Around You.
🧠 Thoughtful Thought
“Knowledge fills the mind. Practice fills the gap.”
For your daily dose of Thoughtful Thoughts, get your Thoughtful Calendar here.
💬 NLP Quote Corner
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
⏳ One Minute NLP – The Four Stages of Learning
Remember learning to drive? First, you had no idea how hard it was. Then you sat behind the wheel in traffic and discovered exactly how much you could not do. Then you could drive, but only with every ounce of attention. And one day you reached office with no memory of the journey.
In NLP, we call this the competence ladder: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence.
Here is the catch. Reading, listening and watching take you up only the first rung. They move you from not knowing what you lack to knowing what you lack. Every rung after that is climbed one way: practice.
This is why so much of what we know never becomes what we do. We mistake the awareness for the ability.
Do this today: pick one idea from a book, a course or a talk that you have nodded along to. Practise it once before the day ends, even clumsily. Then once more tomorrow.
Awareness widens choices.
Practice makes them yours.
🔮 Meta Magic
The Scholar in the Boat
A learned scholar once needed to cross a wide, slow river. He hired a boatman and settled into the small wooden boat with a bundle of books on his lap. He had the quiet confidence of a man who had read more than most people ever would.
The boatman was a simple man. He had pushed that oar across that river since he was a boy, and he rowed the way most of us breathe, without thinking about it.
For a while, neither of them spoke. Then the scholar, perhaps a little bored, decided to make conversation.
“Tell me, boatman, have you ever studied grammar?”
“No, sir,” said the boatman.
“Philosophy, then? Astronomy? The movement of the stars?”
The boatman smiled and shook his head. “No, sir. I only know the river.”
The scholar sighed, the way learned men sometimes sigh at the unlearned. “Then I am sorry to tell you, half your life has been wasted.”
The boatman did not argue. He simply kept rowing.
Midway across, the weather turned. The wind picked up and the sky darkened. The gentle river began throwing up waves that a small boat was never built to handle. Water started spilling over the sides, and it was clear the boat would not last.
The boatman looked across at his passenger and asked, quite calmly, “Tell me, sir, can you swim?”
The scholar had gone pale. “No,” he said.
“Then I am sorry to tell you,” said the boatman, “all of your life is about to be wasted.”
It is an old story, told in more than one tradition. In most tellings the boatman pulls the scholar safely to the bank. The books, sadly, do not make it.
We smile at the scholar. And then, if we are honest, we look at our own bookshelves.
There are the courses we have completed, the podcasts we play at double speed and the certificates framed on the wall. Most of us know a great deal about health, about money, about difficult conversations, about managing our time. And yet the morning walk gets skipped, the conversation gets postponed, and the plan stays a plan.
Our problem is rarely knowledge. It is practice.
This is the gap between knowing and doing. In NLP terms, the scholar had become aware of a hundred subjects and then stopped at awareness. He knew a great deal about the river. He had just never been in it.
Knowledge sits comfortably on the bank. Skill only happens in the water.
The boatman had never read a single page about swimming, and he did not need to. His body had done it so often that it no longer needed instructions. When the storm came, it was not what he knew that kept them both alive. It was what he had practised.
So let me ask you…
What do you know so well that you have never actually done?
📖 Hook from the Book
“There is only one way to learn. It’s through action.” – Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
🎬 Movie Motivation
“There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”
This dialogue from the movie The Matrix reminds us that a skill does not live in what we can describe. It lives in what we can do when it counts.
🏆 Popular Post of the Week
Sach Lagna Zaroori Hai: 10 NLP Lessons from Drishyam: The Conclusion
📢 Announcement of the Week
Outwardly Successful. Inwardly Stuck?
You know what to do. So why does it not happen?
A free, live 90-minute session with me on the gap between knowing and doing. Why knowing what to do does not automatically change what you do. The hidden patterns behind delaying, overthinking and second-guessing. And how NLP helps you recognise them and choose differently.
You do not have a discipline problem. You may have a pattern problem.
Monday, 19 October 2026 | 8:00 to 9:30 PM IST | Live on Zoom | Free | No recording
👉 Reserve your seat: https://nlp.w3successacademy.com/outwardly-successful-inwardly-stuck
Missed the past issues of NLP Around You? Find them all here: https://w3coach.com/nlparoundyou/
Thoughtfully Yours,
Mehernosh Randeria
Your W3 Coach
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