Making good choices | Learning Behaviour & Change

May 23, 2017

Doing the washing up and listening to Radio 4 this weekend I became aware of an unfolding story centering on a school in a refugee camp.
Education, the narrator maintained, was the key to transforming the lives of the children. But what do you teach them? That was simple, ‘I teach them to make good choices’.

In NLP we learn from the Presuppositions that having a choice is better than not having a choice and that everyone makes the best choice they can at the time. So why did the idea of making good choices resonate so strongly with me?

I mulled this over a cup of Earl Grey. How do we know we are making a good choice?

A quick Google (other search engines are available) later and I uncover some quirky facts about making choices including:
• An un-cited reference that we make 35,000 a day
• That leaning to the left helps us make better choices…
• …and so does having a full bladder!

It occurs to me that we can only know if a choice is ‘good’ if we are working towards an outcome e.g If I am going on holiday next week (which I am) and want to get into last year’s linen trousers (which I do) then eating a green salad instead of chips is a good choice.

Is it possible that we can only know if a choice is ‘good’ if it helps us towards our desired outcome?

So next time you are required to make a choice, notice how you know it’s a good one, and we’d love to know what you discover.

Thoughts

The clever Principal said “You are going to be fifty anyway”

On a holiday to the Philippines, I was lucky enough to see something both clever and stunning. I went to the north of the country to visit the one thing I really wanted to see there, the rice terraces. In the mountainous north, rice fields are just as required to grow the crop needed to feed the people as they are in the flatter lowlands. But with less flat land available, the population optimised what they had and created terraced fields to grow the rice. This is what clever, and in this case stunning, looks like. It embodies the mantra

Purpose – Start where you are; use what you have; do what you can.

If you could only have one of the following, which would you choose? £500k; or greater awareness to a cause close to your heart; or to inspire others to greatness? This week I read one of those ‘great-news-stories’ that pop up every once in a while. An 11-year-old boy slept in a tent in his back garden for 365 days, the purpose was to raise money for a hospice after fundraising events were cancelled due to covid. After he had done the entire year under canvas, he had raised £500k; he had raised awareness of the cause; and he has become

Commitment to your decision, yet flexible in your approach

Can I do commitment? Sure, I can. During lockdown, with gyms closed, I decided to do ‘Couch to 5K’, the running app. I loved it, I was really exhilarated by the continuing challenge and I completed the nine-week course by running three lots of 5K. I feel so much fitter for having done it – this is the value I gained by committing to the app. I run an internal strategy for pretty much most things that I do. I call it ‘the reward before the work’ strategy. Take my run for example, it is a ‘there-and-back circuit’. As I

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Thanks to Hayley Gelder and Dan Stevens.