You know exactly what to do. So why are you still not doing it?

That is the question behind my free webinar, Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck. Tuesday, 30th June, 8:00 to 9:30 PM IST, live on Zoom. Ninety minutes to see why the old patterns keep running, and how to start changing them from the inside. There is no recording, so this one happens live or not at all.

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

Welcome to Episode #170 of NLP Around You.

 

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“Saying yes to everyone is a quiet no to yourself.”

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

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” — Annie Dillard

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – The Words That Build the Walls

Notice how often the phrase “I have to” runs through an ordinary day. I have to reply. I have to attend. I have to fix this.

In NLP, language does not simply describe your experience. It shapes it. The words you repeat to yourself quietly set the walls of the room you then have to live in.

“I have to” puts you in a cell. It tells your nervous system that someone else is holding the key. Say it enough times and even your own choices begin to feel like sentences passed on you.

Now swap one word. “I have to attend” becomes “I choose to attend.” Same meeting. Same diary. Different person walking in. One arrives as a prisoner of the calendar. The other arrives as its author.

Try this today. Catch yourself once, mid-sentence, saying “I have to.” Pause. Ask whether it is truly a have-to, or a choose-to wearing a disguise. Then say the honest version out loud.

You will be surprised how many walls were never load-bearing.

Change the sentence, and you change the state.

 

🔮 Meta Magic – The Dependable One

She walked in three minutes early. Laptop bag set down with care. Phone placed face up on the table, because face down would have meant missing something.

“I don’t have a problem with work,” she said. “I have a problem with time. There just isn’t enough of it.”

Ritika ran a large team. She was the one who said yes. Yes to the extra project. Yes to the late call. Yes to covering for the colleague who never quite recovered. People described her with the same word, again and again. Dependable.

She wore it like a medal. She was beginning to wear it like a weight.

“Tell me about your last yes,” I said. “Not a big one. The most recent small one.”

She thought. A junior had asked her to review a deck. End of day. She had said yes, of course, and stayed back an hour to do it well.

“And what did that yes cost you?”

She started to answer, then stopped.

She paused.

Not defensive.

Just thinking.

“I missed dinner with my daughter,” she said slowly. “Again. I told myself it was just an hour.”

Here is the thing we rarely notice. Every yes is also a no. When you say yes to the deck, you are saying no to the dinner. When you say yes to the late call, you say no to the early night your body has been quietly asking for. The no does not announce itself. It just disappears somewhere you were not looking.

In NLP we run something called an ecology check. Before a choice, you ask what it costs the whole system, not just the part in front of you. Not “can I do this?” but “what does doing this take from everywhere else?”

Ritika had never been overcommitted. She had been under-decided. She let each yes happen to her, then paid for it in a currency she never agreed to spend.

“So you are not short of time,” I said. “You are short of decisions.”

She was quiet for a while.

Then she smiled, the tired smile of someone who has just seen the trick behind the magic.

The next week she said no to a meeting for the first time in years. The world did not end. The deck still got reviewed, by the person whose job it was. And she made it home for dinner.

So let me ask you.

The next time you say yes without thinking… what exactly are you saying no to?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds.” — Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Discussion nahi, demonstration.” (Demonstration, not discussion.)

This line from Xerxes Desai in the new series Made in India: A Titan Story reminds us that change is never proven in talk, only in action. In NLP, behaviour is the evidence: you can discuss a new idea for years, but it becomes real the moment you demonstrate it once. A recommended watch this week, in every sense of the word.

 

🏆 Popular Post of the Week

NLP Influence Cheat Sheet: The Top 5 Techniques for Persuasion & Rapport

📢 Announcement of the Week

If Ritika’s story felt a little too familiar, you will want to be in this room.

Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck is my free live webinar for people who have achieved plenty and still feel held back. You do not have a discipline problem. You have a pattern problem. In 90 minutes, we look at the patterns running underneath, and how to begin shifting them.

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

👉 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,

Mehernosh Randeria

Your W3 Coach

Before we begin, a quick word.

Looks great on the outside. Feels stuck on the inside. Sound familiar?

That is what my free webinar, Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck, is about. 90 minutes, and we find what is really holding you back. If you have been meaning to join, this is your nudge.

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

 

Welcome to Episode #169 of NLP Around You.

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“Meaning never lives in the thing. It lives in what surrounds it.” 

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 Frame Around the Fact

Two people get the same news. One is crushed. The other shrugs and carries on. The news did not change. The frame around it did.

In NLP, we call this a reframe. And one of its quietest, most useful forms is the context reframe.

A content reframe changes what a thing means. A context reframe leaves the thing exactly as it is, and changes the setting where it belongs. The behaviour you scold yourself for in one room is the very thing that saves you in another.

Stubbornness becomes persistence on the day everyone else gives up. Bluntness becomes clarity in a crisis. Nothing about you changed. Only the room did.

Pick one trait you have judged in yourself this week. Now ask: where would this exact quality be a gift, not a flaw? Name the room where it wins.

The fact stays put. The frame is yours to move.

 

🔮 Meta Magic – Some Lines Don’t Need Rubbing

It is said that one morning, in Akbar’s court, the emperor was in a playful mood.

He walked to the centre of the hall, bent down, and drew a single line in the dust on the floor.

A long, straight, confident line.

Then he stood, and looked at his ministers.

“I want one of you to make this line shorter,” he said. “But you may not touch it. You may not rub out even a grain of it. The line must stay exactly as it is, and yet become shorter.”

The hall went quiet.

These were the sharpest minds in the kingdom. Scholars. Strategists. Men who had won arguments with kings.

One by one, they studied the line. They walked around it. They frowned at it. A few crouched close, as if the answer were hidden somewhere in the dust.

How do you shrink a line you are forbidden to touch?

Nobody moved.

Then Birbal stepped forward.

He did not kneel beside the emperor’s line. He did not reach for it at all.

He simply bent down a little to one side, and drew a second line. Longer. Bolder. Running well past the first.

Then he straightened up, and said nothing.

Everyone looked.

The emperor’s line had not changed. Not by a hair. It was exactly as long as it had always been.

And yet, beside Birbal’s line, it was now, plainly and undeniably, the shorter one.

Akbar smiled.

Birbal had not solved the problem the court was staring at. He had changed the problem they were staring with.

He left the line untouched, and changed what stood beside it.

That is a context reframe. The fact does not shrink. The comparison does the work.

So much of what keeps capable people stuck is a line they are trying to rub out. A failure. A delay. A version of themselves they wish were shorter.

They scrub and scrub, and the line will not go.

So let me ask you.

The next time something in your life feels too long, too big, too heavy to erase… do you need to keep rubbing at the line?

Or could you draw a longer one beside it?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” — Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Aal izz well.” (All is well.)

This dialogue from the movie 3 Idiots reminds us that when we cannot change a situation in the moment, we can change the frame we place beside it, and the heart often follows.

 

🏆 Popular Post of the Week

Reprogram Your Response to Emotional Triggers

📢 Announcement of the Week

If today’s story connected with you, my free webinar takes it further.

Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck? 90 minutes on why you can do so well and still feel stuck, and what finally shifts it.

👉 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,

Mehernosh Randeria

Your W3 Coach

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