Ace Brains Consultancy

Nothing succeeds like success.

One success often leads to another or, as they also say, “Success breeds success”. And it’s little wonder because once we learn habits of success, it is easier to replicate them and keep doing them, particularly if those success habits boost our good reputation.

For instance, the author of a best-selling book is likely to sell plenty of copies of a follow-up publication, and possibly sell even more copies than the first, even though it may not actually be as good as the first one. Even if the second book was superior to the first, clearly, the author would not succeed quite so readily with its sales without his/her name already been well known and associated with success and quality. 

But we can’t all be the best or in pole position all the time, and if things aren’t going so well in our lives, how can we turn it around? Well, the rule that “nothing succeeds like success” still applies. We just need to start small and build our way up. Seek out whatever things you can do today that will be little successes because this will make you feel better and more confident, and you will more naturally want to repeat the process. Then think, “Right, I’ve tackled that, now I can tackle this!” and keep up the momentum and build the pressure to tackle bigger tasks and challenges as you go. Action and momentum is all important, so don’t stop for too long to pat yourself on the back or celebrate prematurely … keep it going! Tiny successes … little successes … minor successes … medium successes … large successes … big successes … massive successes! 

Not every success has to lead to a bigger one, but if you make successful behaviours a regular aspect of your daily life you will reap dividends, because ‘little and often’ is usually more effective than ‘trying to eat the elephant whole’. So keep going and never give up because you will eventually win the day if you are determined and persevere. You still have to be smart, though, and channel your energies where they are going to do most good; you don’t want to waste your precious energies ’flogging a dead horse’.

So ask yourself, “What little successes could I chalk up today?”

If you live in the Midlands region of the UK and are interested in learning more about my my coaching services for confidence, business, sales, higher education, sports performance and performing arts, or indeed my clinical hypnotherapy and counselling services, then please take a few moments to visit www.acebrains.com.

Until next time …

Best wishes and kind regards, Neil.

© Neil Arthur Williams 2010

No man is indispensable.

These days, this old proverb might be hijacked as an ironic feminist slogan of the kind typified by the women’s liberation slogan “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”. However, its true and original meaning, in a ‘mankind’ sense, is more along the lines the another old saying, “The graveyard is full of indispensable men”. In these frantically manic and busy times, I have observed many a person who behaves as if they were indispensable, particularly in relation to their all-consuming career. This is usually based in self-misperception and an over-bloated sense of self-importance rather than being founded in reality. 

However right and proper it may be to be very focused and energetic towards one’s career goals and ambitions, we should all occasionally stop and ask ourselves, “At what price?” You may be striving towards financial riches, but these are not the only riches in life. We are all guaranteed to die at some point, but few of us know precisely when. So ask yourself this: “If today was the first day of my last month on Earth, what would I do right now?” All of a sudden, you get a different set of priorities and get an inkling of life’s true riches. Maybe you gave yourself what you thought was a flippant remark by concluding, “Well, I would take myself off on a superb holiday!” Really? Well, maybe that’s precisely what you need right now. Remember the saying, “No matter how wealthy you become, you can’t take it with you”. Likewise, have you been putting off ringing that old friend or relative? Do it NOW before it’s too late. After all, “There is no time like the present”.  

If we get the work/life balance wrong our personal and family relationships can suffer, which can end up costing us both wealth riches and life riches (although if not enough work is being done, the same could also be true). However, there is a happy medium. The simple advice of “Work hard - play hard” is perhaps something we should all strive for. Remember too the old saying, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. No one likes a work bore.

If you live in the Midlands region of the UK and are interested in learning more about my clinical hypnotherapy and counselling practice, as well as my coaching services for higher education, business, sports and performance arts, then please take a few moments to visit www.acebrains.com.

Until next time …

Best wishes and kind regards, Neil.

© Neil Arthur Williams 2010

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Nature hates an empty space and usually endeavours to fill it with something or other. Likewise, empty spaces and places on our planet do not stay empty for too long as they fill up with people and industry from more crowded areas.

However, it can also be useful to think of our brains and minds as having similar vacuum-like properties. As young children, our minds are like empty sponges just waiting to soak up whatever is put in front of them. And this learning process, for better or for worse, tends to happen so fast that it is no wonder that the Jesuits used to say, “Give me a child of seven and I will show you the man of seventy“. In similar but far more sinister vein, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, one of Pol Pot’s willing helpers in the murderous regime of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, famously referred to uneducated teenage boys as “blank pieces of paper” for the manner in which their minds could be so easily indoctrinated.  

What can we learn from this? Well, for starters, indoctrination can be harmful as it is not always done for good purposes. Perhaps we should all be very careful about what we allow children and teenagers to see and learn, particularly owing to the fact that negative and harmful influences can so easily become hard-wired into our neural pathways requiring significant positive programming and even therapy to overcome the worst of negative and harmful mental programming. Granted, it is virtually impossible to guard against the worst elements of the Internet, these days. Freedom of publication certainly comes with a societal price tag. Nevertheless, it is therefore all the more incumbent upon parents, teachers and all members of society to set a good example, wherever possible, and to provide attractive alternatives to bad influences whether they come in the form of music lyrics, music videos, movies, TV programmes, magazines, websites or computer games. Because, as the old saying goes, “the Devil makes work for idle fingers” [not that I believe that there is any such thing or person as the Devil].

Yes, owing to the fact that nature does indeed abhor a vacuum, including the vacuum of our minds, we have to guard against our brains sucking in a lot of filth and rubbish that will ultimately rot the mind and the person and even those around them. Sure, we can all handle a certain volume of trash; a limited amount can be a relief and a pleasure, and not many of us can stand being highbrow all the time. But there is a happy medium. And this applies just as much to adults as it does to children in many respects.

So question yourself and encourage your children to ask: am I watching too much junk TV? Am I spending too long playing computer games? Am I failing to read good, mind-expanding books? Am I failing to broaden my horizons by doing new activities outside the house? Am I failing to interact positively with real people on a face-to-face basis? Am I failing to create anything new? Am I a doer or just a viewer?

Your brain will certainly fill up with something. What it fills up with and the quality, consistency and variety of that filling is entirely up to you. Just bear in mind that the filling will ultimately affect your life, your relationships, your health and even your wealth. It’s your call.

If you live in the Midlands region of the UK and are interested in learning more about my hypnotherapy and counselling practice and my coaching services for higher education, business, sports and performance arts, then please take a few moments to visit www.acebrains.com.

Until next time …

Best wishes and kind regards, Neil.

© Neil Arthur Williams 2010

God helps those who help themselves.

I want to use this old proverb to explain the important difference between ‘free luck’ and ‘earned luck’. Firstly, though, there is another old saying that goes “Man proposes; God disposes“, which puts forward the idea that although it is people that make plans, it is God who really decides what happens, and people are powerless against God’s wishes. Now whether you believe in God or not, I am not so sure that this fatalistic kind of thinking does anyone much good. Indeed we might even be guilty of putting words into God’s mouth for suggesting such things. Too much giving in to the seemingly great powers of fate ironically leads us full circle towards the more modern, atheistic, and crude colloquialism of ”S##t happens!“, which, of course, it does.

I find far more heart-warming comfort in the old saying that “God helps those who help themselves“. In other words, you kind of have to try to make your own luck in life, be that by working hard, studying hard, training hard, loving lots, sharing lots, helping people, or any other actions that might improve your life or achievements or the lives of others connected with you. In essence, God will help you if you try yourself; don’t expect to just be able to just sit there and let God do all the hard work – He already did the hard bit by creating you and the universe in which you exist. If you don’t believe in God and attribute everything to random chance, then you have even less reason to sit around waiting for something good to happen. 

Sure, mathematical probability will dictate that among any given population, some people will just be luckier than others. That has to happen. However, it is important to realise that there are two types of luck: ‘free luck’, where you might get lucky in being in the right place at the right time, or being born to wealthy and good parents, etc. or ‘earned luck’ where you focus your efforts upon increasing your own chances of being ‘lucky’ by the sweat of your own brow, and in doing so, you expose yourself to the greater possibilities that are out there, if you do the right things.

Of course, all the ‘earned luck’ in the world won’t guarantee that you won’t fall victim to a lack of ‘free luck’ through ill health, accidents, random attacks, free market forces, and so forth. Nevertheless, regardless of whatever ‘free luck’ we may or may not receive, we can certainly improve our own chances of a good life with the acquisition of ’earned luck’. If there is a God who gives us free will, He is only in charge of the ‘free’ varieties of good and bad luck; the other ‘earned’ variety is of our own making, which is sort of where the “God helps those who help themselves” saying comes in.

So don’t feel that it is ever only a matter of God’s plans or the hand of fate controlling your life, as there are always two ways for you to land lucky. In fact, the old sayings that ”Man proposes; God disposes” and that “Everything is in the lap of the gods” might be seen as anti-planning and anti-progressive, and this surely can’t be a good thing. I would agree that there is a valid point made by these sayings in that you cannot plan ahead and live your life as if you are not subject to outside forces, random occurences and the laws of probability – although a saying that sums this point up far more accurately is: “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans!” (I love that saying). All religion aside, this is really just a common sense acknowledgement that even with “the best laid plans of mice and men” you cannot account for the unexpected, and therefore such plans ”go oft awry” (as Robert Burns once wrote).  

But these sayings are not meant to suggest therefore that we should give up on making plans, but merely that we should be wary of believing our plans to be totally solid or permanent or guaranteed in any way. What these sayings do suggest, perhaps somewhat obliquely, is that we should heed the good advice of “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched“. Indeed, the great power of free luck (or the lack of it) means that there is always a high probability of things going wrong, and this is the very reason why it is very wise to plan and to have contingencies, and to revise such plans in a flexible manner as we progress. Indeed, when things do go wrong we should ideally let these events become our teachers so that we can plan all the better the next time around and further increase our chances of gaining earned good luck.  

 So let God have His plans and You have Yours.

If you live in the Midlands region of the UK and are interested in learning more about my coaching services for higher education, business, sports and performance arts, then please take a few moments to visit www.acebrains.com/nlp.html.

Until next time …

Best wishes and kind regards, Neil.

© Neil Arthur Williams 2010

Truth will conquer.

In a world of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science, it can be all too easy to feel that, as the old saying goes, “Truth lies at the bottom of a well“. Certainly, another saying that “Truth is stranger than fiction” can often be true. However, it can be really important to develop the academic and life skills of being discerning with our sources of information and how we analyse and interpret the information that they provide. Wikipedia, though noble in its intentions, is not governed by the quality control of the kind exercised by accredited universities, for instance. It is therefore a somewhat unreliable source of information. Likewise, we often rely on a lot of secondary and tertiary sources of information for our news. Rarely are we afforded the opportunity to question the validity of this somewhat highly filtered and possibly misrepresented or misinterpreted information, let alone to receive our news and information directly from unedited primary sources.

However, much as it is vital for us to not be blinded to the real truths of situations, we must also be careful not to seek our own bogus truths by viewing everything as a conspiracy or, even worse, a paranoid or even paranormal linking of what are just random facts.

To illustrate this, I will now give you my own example of how such ’bogus truths’ and seemingly ‘amazing coincidences’ can be constructed from REAL FACTS (coincidental key words and dates are highlighted in bold). In it I will create some bizarre but true links between two US Presidents of the 20th Century and four English composer-organists of the 17th Century, which I will execute in the manner of latter day interpreters of the so-called predictions of Nostradamus. 

Okay, prepare to be amazed …

FACT: Thomas Mudd was a seventeenth-century Church of England clergyman, organist and composer. He not only played the organ at Lincoln Cathedral in England from 1660 until 1663, but also caused scandal for being an unruly drunk.  

Now, take 1663 and put the second ‘6’ in a mirrored-inversion and it becomes a ‘9’ giving the date 1693,

FACT:Thomas Mudd’s equally troublesome successor, Andrew Hecht, who also played the organ at Lincoln Cathedral, died in 1693. He was also unruly and caused scandal when he was sued for assault.

Now, change the date 1693 around and you get 1963.

QUESTION: Which famous person died in 1963?

ANSWER: US President John F Kennedy died in 1963, assassinated while riding in the back of a Lincoln Convertible with a bullet to the brain … his most vital bodily organ.

FACT: JFK‘s killer was thought to be Lee Harvey Oswald, who also died from a bullet in 1963, and who is also known to have been an unruly drunk, much like the aforementioned Thomas Mudd.

But it gets even stranger …

FACT: The key centre for studies of the JFK assassination in the UK is ‘The Centre for Conspiracy Culture’ at the University of Winchester, England.

FACT: Winchester is also an American make of rifle that had to be ruled out of the forensic investigations of the JFK assassination.

QUESTION: But who played the organ at Winchester Cathedral in England from the year 1598?

ANSWER: Thomas Weelkes, composer-organist who has previously been wrongly attributed as the composer of ‘Let Thy Merciful Ears’, a piece now attributed to Thomas Mudd, the aforementioned organist at Lincoln Cathedral.

FACT: Thomas Weelkes was also a notorious unruly drunk and caused scandals, much like the aforementioned Thomas Mudd and Lee Harvey Oswald. 

Now change the last mentioned date of 1598 around and you get 1985.

QUESTION: Who was US President in 1985?

ANSWER: Ronald Reagan.

FACT: In 2009, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California borrowed the Lincoln Cathedral copy of the original Magna Carta.

QUESTION: But where was the first Magna Carta signed?

ANSWER: Runnymede in Surrey, England.

FACT: The Magna Carta Memorial at Runnymede had a second commemorative stone placed there in 1985, at a time when the aforementioned Ronald Reagan was still US President.

QUESTION: But what do you also find at Runnymede?

ANSWER: the John F Kennedy Memorial, opened in 1965.

If you change the date 1965 around and you get 1695.

FACT:  1695 is the very year that the aforementioned Andrew Hecht’s son, Thomas Hecht (who had been organist at Lincoln from 1693), was appointed Organist of Magdalene College, Oxford.

FACT: Only a few years prior to this, in 1690, the aforementioned organist composer, Thomas Weelkes, caused scandal when he was charged with unauthorised absence by the Chichester Cathedral authorities.

Now change the date 1690 around and you get 1960.

FACT: 1960 is the very year that the aforementioned John F Kennedy started his Presidential Election campaign.

FACT: Following John F Kennedy’s key note speeches and successful election in 1961, and the various political scandal and sexual affairs that and surrounded him, JFK’s name was dragged through the mud by the Press.

FACT: The old saying about someone’s name being ‘mud’ is quite possibly a corruption of ‘Mudd’ originating from the notorious drunken scandals of the aforementioned Lincoln Cathedral organist Thomas Mudd in 1662-1663. In his time at Lincoln Cathedral, Mudd no doubt got to sound many a note and press many a key on the organ.  

Now take 1663 and put the first ‘6’ in a mirrored-inversion and it becomes a ‘9’ giving the date 1963, the year of JFK’s death by assassination.

FACT: JFK came to power as US President in 1961.

Now change the date 1961 around and you get 1691, the year of Thomas Mudd’s death.

… and so the strange circle of ‘amazing coincidences’ is complete.

I thang yo!

But what does this teach us?

Certainly, one can find interesting patterns and coincidences in all manner of places if you look hard enough for them. Nature itself is full of patterns that suggest design to some and evolution to others. However, it is perhaps most commonly unwise to interpret so-called ‘amazing coincidences’ as being anything more significant than completely unrelated or arbitrary events of every day life. Indeed, the world would be a very strange and uneventful place if it didn’t contain the ever-present mathematical probability of seemingly amazing coincidences that are, in fact, just random facts drawn from untold trillions on non-related facts. Genuine synchronicity and serendipity can and do exist, but sadly such providence can also be manufactured to beguile the naïve and dupe the gullible.

This is perhaps how Nostradamus interpreters got started … although it’s far easier, these days, to make up such garbage with the immense word-searching power of Google and Wikipedia. ‘Spurious’ might be the best description of these ‘truths’.

So choose your gurus with care and don’t be misled. Think. Analyse. Question. Go to original sources of information. Consider the bigger and the smaller picture. Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t make your case fit. Don’t decide the outcome of your enquiries before you have collected sufficient data to allow you to ask the right question in the first place. Keep an open mind but don’t make your brain a dumpster or skip for crackpot theories. Weigh the facts. Consider. Listen. Read. Discuss. Re-consider. Be flexible while arguing your own corner strongly but in a rational and balanced manner. Use your logic as well as your heart and passion. Be prepared to change your mind in the light of new evidence. These are all great ‘student of life’ skills for any human. 

As the old sayings go – ‘Truth certainly is stranger than fiction’, and ‘truth lies at the bottom of a well’, but in the end I feel that ‘truth will conquer’ and ‘truth will out’ if you give it a fair chance to do so.

If you live in the Midlands region of the UK and are interested in learning more about my coaching services for higher education, business, sports and performance arts, then please take a few moments to visit www.acebrains.com/nlp.html.

Until next time …

Best wishes and kind regards, Neil.

© Neil Arthur Williams 2010

It is the first step that is troublesome.