Looking for the silver lining
I’ve been thinking about some of these old sayings recently and how they apply in business, and in life generally.
You know the sort of things – ‘A stitch in time saves nine’ ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ and ‘every cloud has a silver lining’.
I particularly like the last one.
At the core of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is a belief that your internal emotional and psychological state has a big effect on your performance.
There is also a belief that we are in controlof our minds, and therefore our results. Which makes sense really, because if we aren’t, who is?
With our Interaction Engineering approach to getting the best out of conversations, we use an NLP model called ‘reframing’ which proves that there is nothing new under the sun because it is basically about looking for the silver lining in the cloud. This will affect a state change which will have a knock on effect with our performance.
For example, when we first relocated Evolution to Cornwall in 2000, I was naturally anxious that we could develop a customer base here. I networked, phoned people up and eventually had my first Sales visit.
I was a little anxious about the meeting and was also concerned that I had a presentation to do the following day to a potential client but hadn’t prepared it yet – another late night was beckoning.
It was a long drive to my meeting and I’d just settled down to it when Fiona phoned and said “I’m really sorry, but he’s cancelled the meeting”.
It would be easy, at that point to fall in to a mind set of ‘typical, I knew we would never make a go of it in Cornwall, we might as well give up and go somewhere else, or get a job or something’
Instead, I heard myself say, “that’s great, now I can spend the afternoon on my presentation for tomorrow” and, pleased, I turned the car around and drove back to the office – thinking along the way how I could recover the lost meeting with the potential first client.
He never became a client, but the people I presented to did and we’ve been working successfully in Cornwall for the last 17 years. During this time there have been many times when I’ve had to look for the silver lining, but I always seem to have found it.
If you’d like to know how to reframe, or manage your State to improve your interaction, get in touch and let’s start a conversation. If you’d like to read more about our NLP Practitioner Course and see how we can help you find your silver linings, have a look here.