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A large part of our work at VIA Frontiers is committed to education. We are passionate about helping individuals attain self-management tools, to improve efficiencies and ultimately lead a happy life. The blogs I have written below are testimony to this.
Every blog will add value to the reader and give insights for free. How does an individual shift their focus for a different posture in life that will bring them grace, satisfaction and a life they love. Happy reading! Annabelle was learning fast. Sandy her NLP coach had helped her transform out of a bad relationship and she was ready to learn self management skills so she could be independent.
The more reliance on self, the faster she would achieve what she wanted. The more she depended on others, the less control she would have on her outcomes. The concept of achieving work-life balance is very personal and subjective as it is determined by so many variables;
· changes in family status · age · family commitments · state of health · personal events Factor in the busy and uncertain world we live in. Are we yearning for too much? Is this achievable or just pie in the sky stuff? Definitely a tough call but one we need to make a choice about. Over the years of observing people straddle a job and home, I observed that the ones who “perfected” work-life balance were good time managers. Hence my first focus in this series is time management.
So which bucket are you in? Do you manage time or does time manage you? Do you often feel that there are not enough hours in a day? Or are you someone who marches through the day like clock-work? “Make my people happy at home and they will come to work happy. Don’t worry about company performance as that will happen automatically” said one of my CEO clients.
He very much believed in the power of people. I was hired to mobilise the workforce towards the organisation’s vision. Why me? Because I had the tools to work through any emotional or mental issue that blocked individuals from reaching their full potential. Petra walked down the street and came to a crossroad. She had to choose – left or right? Having already been through hell in her life, she knew the wrong road would only make her suffer more.
Her heart said right and her thinking mind said left. She decided to go right. After all she had been training her soul intelligence to find its way towards self-management and was beginning to see some success through the otherwise closed blinds of her life. So the question remains “how do I find myself, my identity?” NLP was the saviour for me. It was many years ago when I went through a life transition, reinventing myself from a corporate job in banking, to running my own business.
It took 5 years of tumbling through jobs, upskilling myself through personal development courses and eventually stopping because I had found my passion. Many calamities came our way, from a pandemic to repercussions from global warming. All of these caused pain and discomfort which had people squirming in their circumstances. Some lost jobs and others were forced to reinvent themselves.
It is situations like these that pushed people into a corner, forcing them to make change. Choice was limited. Opportunities abound but they had to turn around. This rise in consciousness was the ultimate goal that opened doorways in minds. This method was the old way. No pain no gain as the old adage goes. The recent pandemic came swiftly like a swipe of the hand to either help or debilitate different segments of society. If you happened to be on the wrong side of the swipe, many suffered from it.
I for one was hit like other training providers, by the shutdown of face-to-face interaction. Speedily, many of us in the field garnered resources to reinvent ourselves into the online space. Globally, more than 264 million people of all ages suffer from depression. An astonishing statistic! A leading cause of disability worldwide and a major contributor to the overall global burden of disease, depression and other mental health conditions are on the rise.
From experience as an NLP Master Coach, I feel we could do more to stem out this disease. The scary thing is that many people who are depressed don’t even know it. It seems to attack under the radar. It is at the end of the day, our responsibility to help ourselves, improving emotional wellness to inadvertently close the door on depression. I taught NLP to many groups of people from corporate, to individuals throughout the Asia Pacific Region. Those seeking to better their lives came to learn NLP as they wanted to work on discovering their internal selves. It was a good start. That is how NLP worked best - applied to self first, then others.
This was how individuals who were convinced that NLP processes worked possessed conviction to work with others. It was a good way to learn, applying new knowledge to a context and seeing results from it. For Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) Practitioners such as myself, the Covid-19 Pandemic did us a humongous favour. It shone the spotlight on mental health, a subject seen as “nice to have” rather than a necessity. Escalated in importance overnight, as the Pandemic swept through the world with its witch’s broom, we realised globally that it wasn’t only our physical health that was under threat.
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) was discovered and coded into a structure for all to use in the late 70’s. Applied mostly to hypnosis sales training and psychotherapy, it evolved over the years to efficiency coaching. Corporates focused on NLP’s cutting edge impact to make fast and good decisions from accessing intuition.
As I evolved and reinvented myself from a commercial banker to an NLP Trainer my company VIA Frontiers NLP program was steeped towards corporate applications. I conducted NLP sales training for a major client base that formed organically, focused on NLP insurance sales. Annabelle was learning fast. Sandy her NLP coach had helped her transform out of a bad relationship and she was ready to learn self management skills so she could be independent.
The more reliance on self, the faster she would achieve what she wanted. The more she depended on others, the less control she would have on her outcomes. Annabelle was learning fast. Sandy her NLP coach had helped her transform out of a bad relationship and she was ready to learn self management skills so she could be independent. Often, people do not see the natural link of an individual’s success and NLP. How this improves the performance of a business as a whole and how a simple NLP for business course is able to solve problems at the individual level, which translates to a stronger business as a whole.
Thank goodness for John and Trevor who were driving the Culture Alignment project. They had experienced NLP and been benefactors to how this amazing methodology worked. Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) was no longer a buzzword or trend in the business world. It had evolved and proven itself as an effective business tool. It is the very reason that savvy CEO’s bought in to hiring NLP Training as a corporate wide initiative. They saw it as a strategy to get ahead of the competition.
It was the very reason Janice, a forward thinking CEO decided to make that call to Sylvia Fernandes, CEO and Founder of VIA Frontiers. Wanting to impact and change employee thought patterns and behaviours to generate more consistent and predictable outcomes, she knew she needed the expertise of an NLP coach. “Does the thought of change make you feel fearful? Does it make you anxious? How did you ride the pandemic storm at work?” these were some questions that Bala, Culture Alignment consultant was posing to John, COO of the organisation.
John felt weathered by the storm, as if he had just stepped off a ship. Having to run with his intuition, he did his best. While he always thought of himself as adaptable, he felt the enormous stress at work. People were living in fear of losing their jobs. They had to adapt to new work from home regimes. Over years of working with leadership teams, the one common factor that lay ahead as a sticky point was how to get in bed with the new generations.
Most leadership teams comprised IQ driven leaders who were struggling with the newness of what was expected of them. Those who acknowledged their lack of fit for the future hired coaches. Others enforced authority even more, allowing ego to take center stage. Leadership development was a huge component of the Culture Alignment initiative that Sylvia was helping Janice with. As CEO, she needed an agile team, one who was ready for any challenge, armed with tools of resilience.
The team was made up of 13 members, each owning their own channel of business while ensuring they were focused on the one Vision and Mission of the organization. The Culture Alignment program began with a Town Hall facilitated by both Janice and Sylvia who were subject matter experts in their respective fields. Both C-suite and Sales teams were to kick off sessions first. They were closest to bumping up revenue immediately.
Module by module they were given bite-sized pieces of tools that would augur well for their respective fields. Sales people were exceptionally excited as they were promised strategies of how to deal with difficult clients. Turning this group of people around would matter a lot to their bottom-line results. As CEO of the organisation, Janice was aware lack of communication was a major factor that caused relationships to break down. These had massive implications on results at work and home. If people were happy at home, they would also come to work with the same disposition.
The writing was on the wall! She had to do something on this front, build a fundamental foundation of communication tools that would weather most storms. This was the reason she hired Sylvia and her team to do a Culture Alignment for the organisation. Having left the corporate world in a run down, burnt out state, he was adamant never to let that happen again. Family were neglected while his priority lay in building a career. Not unusual for many he re-invented himself over two years, fueled by a passion to help others see the light before they manifested disease.
He was not conscious of decisions he made. Neither did he realise the impact on family and friends. Consequences were grave. Relationships started to fall down, disintegrate. The party was going great guns. Music blaring, there were people on the dance floor. Others drinking, happier to be observer. Sarah was chatting with her ex-client who had completed coaching sessions with her. They were discussing how much she had progressed from when they first met.
Somehow music in the background suited them more. They loved getting into deep and meaningful conversations. It didn’t take them long to revert to the topic of their coaching interactions which had gone on for a year. As interviews with key decision makers ensued, Sylvia and Bala were sharpening their view of strategy they needed to employ. Gathering the team over a drink they liked to keep things informal. Hunkering down with flip charts and I-pads to discuss findings from their numerous interviews, this would pave the way for the entire Culture Alignment program.
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SYLVIA FERNANDES
Sylvia is a qualified Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) Master Trainer. She started her business in Sydney and is now based in Singapore. Archives
January 2025
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