I, for one, find these (MLP) Money Lingusitic Programming adverts:

“I got rich using NLP and here is my flash car and my huge house” quite tiresome.

Are we all so materialistic that success is only about the expensive car?

Warren Buffet , one of the richest men alive, drives a car that is very ordinary I am told!

These adverts tell of using NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) to get rich, which makes me shudder to the core, I do  not think Dr Bandler  would be ‘over the moon’ to know that his wonderful  techniques that he worked on for years to help people overcome a whole range of negative emotions and habits and to have better lives, is now used by people who don’t really have a decent product that can stand alone and be of enough value it needs no sales or slimy NLP  mind games.

I also read recently that there is a Cat (yes a feline) called George with an NLP degree:

In 2009, George, a cat owned by Chris Jackson (presenter of the BBC show Inside Out North East & Cumbria), was registered with three professional organizations, the British Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming, the United Fellowship of Hypnotherapists, and the Professional Hypnotherapy Practitioner Association, securing George’s accreditation as a hypnotherapist.

So beware of people with lots of accreditations you may be paying in cat food!

It has also been proven over time that money on its own is not a motivating factor in anything. Readers of Freakonomics will remember the school nursery in one of the Scandinavian countries where they had problems with parents turning up late at home time for their children, they came up with an idea to charge parents who were tardy with a financial penalty, and this just made it ten times worse, because it took away the guilt and turned into a choice. They then reverted to a much different and much more successful approach of having a chart on the wall, next to the kids academic charts, for late parents and giving Gold stars to parents who came every day at the right time to collect their offspring, they cured all tardiness in one week!

Recently there was a wonderful story about a trainer who took his business students to a child’s indoor play area, inside was an enclosure filled with balloons he had written each student’s name on a balloon, the balloons were hidden amongst all the other same coloured balloons, he then gave his students a few minutes to go and collect the balloons with their names on it, nobody could complete the task within the time given. He then instructed them to go back in this time, just grab any balloon, and if it’s not yours keep hold of it and find the person to whom it belongs too; sure enough everyone had their balloon in their hand within the time frame. Food for thought indeed.

I do not believe success comes from one person and one thought, you have to interact and share great ideas within a team, nature has given each one of us a different set of skills and different mind sets that make us all different and we all enjoy different things and excel naturally at certain disciplines. The secret of success comes within finding that team of people and they are all diverse enough, yet all striving towards the same goal which is to make each other successful. Success does not come from thinking about money!

For me personally; success is about time, and choices to go where I want when I want, so to me the idea of the flash car and manor home does not appeal because I just want to travel, take taxis and public transport, emerge myself in different cultures and stay in a lot of different countries to experience the world, I can’t really do that in a flash car and if all my money is spent on a ten million dollar home!

Yet I understand that some people may have already travelled the world three times over and want a house for grandkids and a car to travel a short distance to see them an take them out or just sit by the sea side in a nice motor.

My gripe with the ad is that it’s always the same theme! If I could offer constructive advice, I would suggest dispersing the money aspect with things like: Seeing a nurse using NLP to overcome exam nerves and passing her finals, or a Fund raiser getting over stage fright and speaking at a huge convention with many people in the audience and raising thousands of dollars for a great cause!  Or a person who was frightened of heights standing on top of a mountain and taking in the magnificent breath taking view. I would like these advertisers to try to remember we are all different strokes.

 Success and wealth is whatever it means to you

“I felt bad because I had no shoes, then I met a man with no feet” Ancient Greek proverb

To your success Alan