🧠 MIND GAMES – 7 Fascinating Ways Your Mind Plays Tricks on You

You are invited to join me for a fun, engaging and highly interactive LIVE Wellness Seminar at the Radio Club, Colaba, Mumbai.

Come and experience 7 fascinating Mind Games as we explore:

🔹 How your mind makes assumptions without you realising it

🔹 How words, emotions and triggers influence your responses

🔹 How differently people can experience the same situation

🔹 Practical tools for greater mental and emotional wellbeing

📅 Saturday, 29th August 2026

⏰ 5.30 pm to 7.30 pm

📍 The Radio Room, Radio Club, Colaba, Mumbai

🎟️ FREE for Members & Guests

☕ Followed by light refreshments

If you’re in Mumbai, do join us. Feel free to invite friends, family or colleagues who would enjoy discovering some fascinating ways in which the mind actually works.

👉 Prior registration is required: https://mindgames.w3successacademy.com

Know Your Mind. Change Your Game.

 

Welcome to Episode #179 of NLP Around You.

 

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“Obligation is a choice that has forgotten it was ever made.”

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

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“We are our choices.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – The Word That Hides a Choice

Count how many times you said “I have to” yesterday. The 8:00 call. The reply that could not wait. The function you did not want to attend.

In NLP, these are called modal operators of necessity. They are the small words that describe what is compulsory and what is possible: have to, must, should, need to, cannot.

Here is what makes them worth noticing. Most of them are not true.

A modal operator of necessity always points at a consequence, and most of the time that consequence has never been said out loud. “I have to answer immediately” carries an unspoken “or else”. The moment you finish the sentence, you can look at it properly. Sometimes it is real. Very often it dissolves on contact.

Do this today. Pick three sentences where you said “I have to”. Ask each one: what would actually happen if I did not? Then rewrite the ones that survive as “I choose to”, and notice what changes in your shoulders.

Same diary. Different owner.

 

🔮 Meta Magic – Coaching Chronicles

Who Signed You Up for All of This?

He arrived with his diary already open, before he had even sat down.

Parag runs a mid-sized packaging business. 44, carefully spoken. The kind of man who apologises for taking up your time while handing you a list of everything he is carrying.

“I have no time,” he said. “None.”

I asked him to read me the week.

He read it out like a charge sheet. I have to be on the 8:00 call with the plant. I have to reply to every mail the same day. I have to sit on the building committee. I have to go to my cousin’s engagement in Pune. I have to be at the Rotary meeting on Thursday. I have to. I have to. I have to.

Eleven sentences. Every one of them opened with the same two words.

When he finished, I asked him only one thing.

“What happens if you don’t?”

He looked up.

“Sorry?”

“Take the mail one. You said you have to reply the same day. What happens if you reply the next morning?”

He opened his mouth. Then he closed it again.

Not defensive.

Just thinking.

“Nothing,” he said eventually. “Nothing happens.”

Then he said something far more interesting. “I started that in 2011. I was small then. Nobody knew my name. Same-day replies were how I built it.”

Fifteen years later, he was still keeping a promise he had made to a company that no longer exists.

We went down the rest of the list.

The building committee: “I have to, because nobody else will.” I invited him to say it differently. “I choose to, because I don’t like how the building runs when I’m not in the room.” He laughed at his own sentence. Same Tuesday evening. Entirely different owner.

The engagement in Pune: he wanted to go. He is fond of that cousin. But he had filed it under obligation along with everything else, and the filing had quietly taken the pleasure out of it.

The 8:00 call turned out to be a genuine necessity. So did one other.

Two out of eleven.

The remaining nine were decisions he had made once, some of them years ago, and never opened again. They had hardened into necessity the way a rule hardens into a habit. After long enough, nobody remembers who wrote the rule.

He did not leave with a lighter week. He left with exactly the same week, and one sentence.

“I have to” is a claim. Claims can be checked.

So let me ask you.

Open your own diary for the coming week. Read it out to yourself the way Parag read his.

How many of those are genuine necessities?

And how many are old decisions that you have simply stopped reviewing?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“Work is love made visible.” — Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Zindagi badi honi chahiye, lambi nahi, Babumoshai.” (Life should be big, not long, dear friend.)

This dialogue from the movie Anand reminds us that a full calendar and a full life are not the same thing, and only one of the two is actually chosen.

 

📢 Announcement of the Week

If you are in Mumbai on Saturday 29th August, come and spend two hours finding out how your own mind actually works.

MIND GAMES is a live, interactive wellness seminar at the Radio Room, Radio Club, Colaba, from 5.30 pm to 7.30 pm. Seven mind games, a few surprises about your own thinking, and light refreshments afterwards. Free for members and guests.

Seats are limited and prior registration is required.

👉 https://mindgames.w3successacademy.com

 

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 #178 of NLP Around You.

 

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“Most opinions are not conclusions. They are first impressions that stopped moving.”

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

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – The Three Ways You Trim the World

Two people walk out of the same meeting. One says it went well. The other says it was tense. Neither of them is lying.

In NLP, we call the machinery behind this your perceptual filters. Three of them do most of the work: deletion, distortion and generalisation.

Deletion drops what does not seem relevant. You have walked past that shop for years and could not describe its signboard.

Distortion bends what remains so it fits what you already believe. A colleague is quiet in a meeting, and you hear disapproval rather than a difficult morning at home.

Generalisation turns one instance into a rule. He missed one deadline, so he is unreliable. She spoke well once, so she is a natural.

None of this is a defect. Without these filters, crossing a road would be impossible. The trouble is not that they operate. It is that they operate silently, and we mistake their output for the world.

Do this today. Pick one person you have already made up your mind about. Write down, in a single sentence, what you believe about them. Then go looking for three things from the past week that do not fit that sentence. Not to prove yourself wrong. Only to find out whether you have been reading them, or repeating them.

Perception is instant.

Accuracy takes longer.

 

🔮 Meta Magic

The Verdict That Arrived Before the Evidence

Ninth floor. A glass-walled room with the blinds half drawn. Two chairs on one side of the table, one on the other. Three printed copies of a CV, stapled, still warm from the machine.

Vikram had sat in that chair for eleven years. Four hundred interviews, perhaps more. He liked to say, with some pride, that he knew within ten seconds.

The candidate came in at 11:04. Slightly out of breath. He apologised for the traffic, shook hands, sat down, and placed his phone face down beside him.

Ten seconds.

Vikram had his answer.

Not confident enough for a client-facing role.

The interview ran another forty minutes.

Sameer described an account he had rescued after two missed deliveries. Vikram heard rehearsal. He was asked about a failure, and he paused before answering. Vikram heard hesitation. Near the end, Sameer asked a sharp question about where the team was heading over the next two years, and Vikram wrote “well prepared” in the margin.

Every answer was received.

Every answer was sorted.

Nothing was gathered.

Farida, the second interviewer, scored him at the top of the shortlist.

In the corridor afterwards, she asked what he had seen.

“He wasn’t confident,” Vikram said.

She thought about it. “He was nervous for about a minute,” she said. “After that he ran the conversation. Did you notice he brought us back to the roadmap twice?”

He had not.

Same room. Same man. Same forty minutes. They walked out with two different candidates.

Here is what was happening.

Every second, far more arrives than any of us can hold, so the mind trims. It drops most of what comes in, bends a little of what survives to fit what it already believes, and quietly turns one instance into a rule. Those three moves happen before you have consciously decided anything.

They also happen fastest at the beginning, when there is least to go on.

Vikram was not dishonest. He was efficient.

He had made his decision at 11:04, and then spent forty minutes being right.

That is the real cost. Not that we judge quickly, because we all do. But that once the judgement is made, the collecting stops, and we begin calling the little we have already collected evidence.

Sameer never had forty minutes.

He had ten seconds.

So let me ask you…

Think of one person you have already summed up. A colleague. A relative. A neighbour you decided about years ago and have not revisited since.

Are you still gathering evidence about them…

or are you only collecting proof for a verdict you reached long ago?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” – Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“It’s always difficult to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this.” This line from the film 12 Angry Men reminds us that a conclusion reached early rarely feels like a bias from the inside. It feels like clarity.

 

📢 Announcement of the Week

Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck

This is the last issue before it runs.

Tuesday, 18 August 2026. 8:00 to 9:30 PM IST. Ninety minutes, live on Zoom.

There is no recording. If you are not in the room, you miss it.

It is for the person whose CV reads well and whose evenings do not. Who has done everything in the correct order, cleared every milestone, and still feels a quiet step behind something they cannot quite name.

Ninety minutes to look at what is actually holding the door shut.

👉 Register here: 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

The W3 Coach

Welcome to Episode #177 of NLP Around You.

 

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“A limit you have never tested is not a fact; it is a rumour.”

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

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.” — Marcus Aurelius

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – The Difference Between a Fact and a Ceiling

Ask someone why they have never applied for the bigger role, and you rarely get a reason. You get a certainty. “That is not for people like me.”

In NLP we call this a limiting belief.

Not a thought you are having.

A rule you are running.

Here is the quiet trouble with beliefs. A fact survives testing. A belief never asks to be tested, because somewhere along the way it was simply accepted. Most of ours were never our own conclusions. They arrived from a parent’s caution, a teacher’s careless remark, one painful experience generalised into a law.

And once a belief is in place, the mind becomes its lawyer. It notices every piece of evidence that agrees, and quietly files away everything that does not.

Do this. Take one sentence you say about yourself that begins with “I can’t” or “I’m not”. Then ask three questions of it. Who first told me this? What would count as proof that it is wrong? Has someone with fewer advantages than mine already done it?

A fact holds when you test it. A belief only holds while you don’t.

 

🔮 Meta Magic

The Fastest Mindset Shift in History

Iffley Road, Oxford. 6 May 1954.

The wind had been against the runners all afternoon. Gusts swept across the track at nearly 25 miles an hour, enough to make an already difficult challenge even harder.

Roger Bannister almost decided not to run.

At 25, he was a medical student at St Mary’s Hospital in London. He did not train full-time like many of his competitors. Most days he squeezed his training into short sessions between hospital duties, often during his lunch break.

Then, just before the race began, the wind eased. The flag on the nearby church steeple fell almost still.

He chose to run.

For years, the four-minute mile had become more than an athletic milestone. It had become a psychological boundary. World records edged closer, fraction by fraction, until progress appeared to stop. Gradually, the conversation changed. People stopped saying, “Nobody has done it yet.”

Instead, they began saying, “It can’t be done.”

There is an important difference between those two statements.

One describes history.

The other predicts the future.

Bannister ran the final lap alone, crossing the finish line exhausted and collapsing into the waiting officials.

The announcer paused before reading the time.

Three minutes. Fifty-nine point four seconds.

The four-minute mile had fallen.

Just 46 days later, John Landy ran even faster. Soon others did the same. Within a few years, what had once been considered impossible had become the benchmark for elite middle-distance runners.

Nothing had changed in human physiology during those 46 days.

No new muscles.

No larger lungs.

No revolutionary running shoes.

What changed was the collective mindset about what was possible.

One person’s achievement gave everyone else a new reference point. The boundary that had lived in people’s minds suddenly looked negotiable.

That is the fascinating thing about limiting beliefs. They do not have to be true to influence behaviour. They only have to remain unquestioned.

Which brings us to a more important question.

Where is the four-minute mile in your own life?

Perhaps it is an income level you have decided you will never reach.

A business you believe is beyond your capability.

A conversation you keep postponing.

An opportunity you assume belongs to people who are more qualified, more connected, or younger than you.

Pause for a moment and ask yourself.

Did you discover that limit through your own experience?

Or did you inherit it from someone else’s map of the world?

Because the moment you begin to question a limiting belief, you also begin to loosen its grip.

Sometimes the biggest barrier is not in your ability.

It is in the mindset you have accepted without ever testing.

Change the mindset.

The possibilities often change with it.

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.” — Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Mhaari chhoriyan chhoron se kam hain ke?” (Are our girls any less than our boys?)

This dialogue from the movie Dangal reminds us that a limit everybody around you agrees on is still only a belief, and every belief can be put to the test.

 

📢 Announcement of the Week

Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck

A 90-minute live session on the gap between how your life looks from the outside and how it feels from the inside.

Tuesday, 18 August 2026. 8:00 to 9:30 PM IST. Live on Zoom, and there is no recording, so join us in the room.

👉 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

The W3 Coach

Welcome to Episode #176 of NLP Around You.

 

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“You are not indecisive. You are two loyalties, waiting to be heard.”

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

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” — Walt Whitman

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – The Meeting Inside Your Head

You have made the decision. Twice, actually. And you are still standing exactly where you were.

Most people call this indecision. In NLP, we call it a conflict of parts.

A part is simply a cluster of your own behaviour organised around something it is determined to protect. One part wants the bigger role, the visible work, the growth. Another part wants the evenings you already have, the team that already trusts you, the life that already works.

Neither part is being difficult. Every part carries a positive intention, including the one that keeps reaching for the brake.

The trouble begins when you take sides. You label one part ambition and the other one fear, and then you run a meeting in which only one of them is allowed to speak. The silenced part does what silenced people do. It waits. And it reopens the case at two in the morning.

Do this today. Take the decision you keep circling and write two headings on a page: what the yes is protecting, and what the no is protecting. Give each one four lines. Judge neither.

Most people find that the no was never against them.

A part that is heard settles. A part that is ignored takes the wheel.

 

🔮 Meta Magic – Coaching Chronicles

When Both Parts of You Are Right

He walked in carrying a printed sheet. Actual paper, neatly ruled into two columns. One headed Take it. The other headed Stay.

“I have made this decision four times this month,” Nikhil said. “Twice yes. Twice no. I am probably the most indecisive person you will ever coach.”

He had been offered the head of a new business vertical. Bigger mandate, bigger visibility, eighteen months of travel to build it from scratch. On paper, it was almost word-for-word the role he had described to me two years ago.

I asked him to tell me about the part of him that wanted it.

He sat forward. His voice picked up pace. He spoke about building something from nothing, about the people he would pull in, about finally being measured on what he delivered rather than on how well he managed upwards. Three minutes, no pauses, hands moving.

Then I asked him to tell me about the part that did not want it.

He waved a hand. “That is just fear. Comfort zone. Ignore it.”

“Curious to know,” I said. “What is that part protecting?”

He opened his mouth to answer quickly.

Then he stopped.

The silence ran on longer than either of us expected. He looked down at the two columns on his sheet, and something in his face loosened.

“Sundays,” he said finally. “My father is eighty-one. I drive down every Sunday. It is the only three hours in my week where nobody wants anything from me and I do not have to be impressive.”

He looked up.

“That is not a comfort zone, is it?”

Not fear.

Not weakness.

A loyalty.

Here is what we had both walked past for twenty minutes. He had been chairing a meeting inside his own head in which one part was invited to present and the other was shouted down before it could open its file. So every time he decided yes, the silenced part quietly filed an appeal by midnight.

We let it speak. Properly. We wrote down what the no was protecting, in its own words, without arguing with it once.

He did not decide that day. I did not want him to.

He called on Thursday. He had taken the role, and he had written one line into his conversation with the CEO: travel blocks planned around Sundays, in writing, not negotiable.

“The strange thing,” he said, “is that it took four minutes once I actually listened.”

The part that kept saying no had never wanted to stop him.

It wanted a seat at the table.

So let me ask you…

That decision you keep making and unmaking. Which part of you have you been overruling instead of hearing out?

And what has it been protecting all along?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Andar se kuch aur hai hum, aur bahar se majboor.” (Inside, we are something else altogether. Outside, we are bound.)

This line from the movie Tamasha reminds us that the distance between who we are inside and how we behave outside is rarely a flaw of character, and is usually a part of us that has been given no room to speak.

 

📢 Announcement of the Week

Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck

A free live session for people who have built the career, the title and the life that reads well on paper, and still feel a quiet resistance underneath it all.

Tuesday, 18th August 2026

8:00 PM to 9:30 PM IST

Live on Zoom. No recording.

👉 Register here: 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

Welcome to Episode #175 of NLP Around You.

 

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“A map is a memory of the land, not the land itself.”

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 – The Map Is Not the Territory

Have you ever argued with the GPS? The road in front of you clearly bends left, and the calm voice keeps insisting on the right. For one strange second, you are not sure whom to believe.

In NLP, we say the map is not the territory. Your mind never deals with the world directly. It deals with a picture of the world, drawn from old experiences, borrowed opinions, and conclusions you reached years ago.

The picture is useful. Without it, you could not function. The trouble begins when the picture stops matching the ground, and you defend the picture anyway. The colleague you labelled difficult after one meeting in 2019. The skill you concluded was not for you in college. The market you swore had no room for you.

The territory changes on its own. The map changes only when you redraw it.

Do this today: pick one belief you have carried unchanged for more than five years, and ask yourself, “What is the ground showing me now?” Not what it showed you then. Now.

You do not see the world as it is. You see it as you last saved it.

 

🔮 Meta Magic – The Mapmaker’s Village

A young traveller once set out to cross the hills to a village his grandfather had often spoken of.

Before leaving, he was gifted a map. It was a beautiful thing. Hand-drawn, inked in four colours, every stream and shrine marked, every path measured. His grandfather had bought it decades ago from the finest mapmaker in the region.

“With this,” the old man said, “you cannot get lost.”

The traveller walked for two days, and everything matched. The banyan tree. The twin wells. The milestone with the broken corner. His faith in the map grew with every step.

On the third day, the map showed a wooden bridge across a river.

There was no bridge. There was no river. Only a dry bed of white stones, and far to the east, a glint of water where no water was supposed to be.

He checked the map again. He held it up against the horizon. He turned it around.

Then he did a strange thing.

He decided the land was wrong.

He walked up and down the dry bed for half a day, hunting for the bridge the map had promised, growing more irritated with every hour. When a shepherd boy asked him what he was looking for, the traveller thrust the map at him.

The boy looked at it for a long time.

Not confused.

Just curious.

“This is very beautiful,” he said finally. “But the river moved when I was small. The bridge fell the year after. The forest you crossed yesterday is twice this size now.”

The traveller stood in silence.

The map had not lied. It had simply stopped being true. It was a faithful record of a land that no longer existed, and he had spent half a day defending paper against ground.

He folded the map, put it away, and asked the boy the question he could have asked hours earlier: “Which way is the village from here?”

We smile gently at him. And then most of us do the same thing every week. We navigate a marriage using a map of who our partner was ten years ago. We manage a colleague using a map drawn from one bad meeting. We avoid a dream using a map of who we were at nineteen.

The maps were accurate once. That is exactly what makes them so hard to put down.

So let me ask you…

Where in your life are you still defending a beautiful old map… against the ground you are standing on today?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“It is not down in any map; true places never are.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Main nahin maanta ki hamara desh duniya ka sabse mahaan desh hai. Lekin yeh zaroor maanta hoon ki hum mein kaabiliyat hai, apne desh ko mahaan banane ki.” [I do not believe that our country is the greatest in the world. But I do believe that we have the ability to make it great.]

This dialogue from the movie Swades reminds us that clear seeing comes before real change; when we describe the territory honestly instead of defending a flattering picture of it, we finally find the power to act on it.

 

📢 Announcement of the Week

Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck – Live Webinar

You have the designation, the income, the respect. And still, somewhere quiet inside, a sense that you are running in place.

If that sentence landed, this webinar is for you. Join me live on Zoom on Tuesday, 18th August 2026, from 8:00 to 9:30 PM IST. It is a full 90 minutes, live only, with no recording. Come with your questions.

👉 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

Welcome to Episode #174 of NLP Around You.

 

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“Rapport is the bridge you build from their side of the river.”

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

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” — Harper Lee

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – Pacing Before Leading

You gave someone the right advice, in the right words, at the right moment. And it bounced. Sound familiar?

In NLP, we call the missing step pacing. Before you lead a person anywhere, you first match where they already are. Their pace. Their energy. Their rhythm.

Here is why it matters. Long before the mind weighs your words, the body has already answered one silent question: is this person with me, or ahead of me? When your pace says with me, the door opens. When it says ahead of me, even brilliant advice arrives at a closed door.

Pacing is not imitation. It is respect made visible. You slow your speech to their speed. You let your energy settle to somewhere near theirs. You spend the first minute earning the next ten.

Do this in your next difficult conversation. For one full minute, match the other person’s pace before making a single point. Speak at their speed. Pause when they pause. Then, gently, begin to lead. Notice what happens to the conversation.

People do not follow your words.

They follow your rhythm.

 

🔮 Meta Magic

The Nurse Who Sat the Way They Sat

The evening ward was quiet in the way hospital wards are quiet. Machines humming softly. A trolley rolling somewhere down the corridor. The faint smell of antiseptic and old flowers.

Dr Arjun stood at the foot of Bed 12 with a clipboard and a problem.

He was good. Top of his batch. Gentle voice. Thorough. He asked all the right questions, in the right order, with the right words.

And his anxious patients gave him one-word answers.

“Fine.”

“Nothing.”

“It’s okay, doctor.”

Then there was Sister D’Souza.

Twenty-six years on that ward. No clipboard. No rehearsed questions. And patients told her things they had not told their own families.

One evening, Arjun watched her work.

The old man in Bed 12 sat hunched forward, arms folded tight, breath shallow, eyes fixed on the floor. Surgery the next morning. He had not spoken properly in two days.

Sister D’Souza did not straighten him up. She did not tell him not to worry.

She pulled a chair beside the bed and sat. Slightly forward, the way he sat. Hands folded, the way his were. And for the first minute, she said almost nothing. She simply let her breathing slow down until it was somewhere near his.

Then something shifted.

The old man’s shoulders came down half an inch. His breath deepened. And then, unprompted, in a voice hardly above a whisper, he began to talk. About the surgery. About his late wife. About the fear he had been carrying since Monday.

Arjun found her later at the nursing station.

“What did you say to him?” he asked. “I have been at it for two days.”

She thought about it. Genuinely. As if nobody had ever asked her before.

“Nothing much,” she said. “I sat the way he sat. I breathed the way he breathed. When his body saw that mine was not in a hurry, he stopped being a patient for a minute. He became a person.”

“And persons talk.”

In NLP, this is rapport, built through matching and mirroring. Not mimicry. Matching. The nervous system reads posture, rhythm and breath long before the mind processes a single word. When your body says I am with you, the other person’s body signals back: safe. And safety is the soil in which honest words grow.

Arjun’s questions had been perfect. But they had arrived from a body that was standing, clipboard raised, already half-turned towards the next bed. His words said “Tell me.” His posture said “quickly.”

The skill was never in the words.

So let me ask you…

Before your next important conversation…

will you arrive with your point ready…

or will you first sit the way they sit?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.” — Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Ek jadoo ki jhappi de de.” (Give me one magic hug.)

This dialogue from the movie Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. reminds us that healing begins with connection, and connection begins with meeting people where they are, not where we want them to be.

 

📢 Announcement of the Week

You have read the books. You know what to do. And somewhere between the knowing and the doing, something keeps slipping.

Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck is my free live webinar for professionals who have achieved plenty on the outside and still feel held back on the inside. In ninety minutes, we look at the patterns running underneath the delay, the overthinking and the self-sabotage, and how change begins once you can finally see them.

Tuesday, 18th August 2026. 8:00 to 9:30 PM IST. Live on Zoom. No recording.

👉 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