Living the Dream

The subject of this month’s Sushi evening is ‘living the dream’. When I first thought of the topic for the evening, I was thinking how NLP epitomises the notion of living the dream. After all, with NLP all you have to do is create an outcome, fully represent that outcome in your mind, operate from a state of excellence in relation to what you want and the dream is yours. What could be easier? The various aspects of life you equate with happiness such as health, good relationships, personal development and so on are all within your grasp using NLP processes. Or so the NLP guru might tell you.

Since writing the topic for the Sushi evening just one month ago, two people close to me, a school friend and a cousin have passed away from the same aggressive cancer. Both were relatively young and leave behind children and young adults who are now without father. Both are survived by parents. I am in the unusual position of attending two funerals in as many weeks and one of them falls on Tuesday 20th, when I am scheduled to deliver the Sushi presentation ‘living the dream.’ So I will not be in London living the dream next Tuesday, I will be in Hastings at the funeral of a dear friend. David Hamilton, my excellent colleague at the Academy will deliver ‘Living the Dream’ presentation at UKAI Sushi next Tuesday.

These bereavements have really got me thinking. Both men were relatively healthy up to diagnosis of their disease, then their health deteriorated rapidly and in no time they were gone. I offered help to my friend in the form of NLP and hypnosis but he was just not open to it, sadly in my cousins’ case I didn’t know how ill he was until it was too late. I couldn’t help but wonder, how do the people who are very close to people who pass away continue with their dream.  In the cases I am talking about in this blog, there are young people at university, teenagers in the last years of school parents who were enjoying retirement, all who have had their world rocked in such a way, that you couldn’t blame them for thinking how ‘unfair’ life can be. My Aunt was telling me how she wakes up every day thinking she has had a bad nightmare but how slowly she realises that this is no nightmare, it’s her reality. These people have a time of grieving ahead before they can even contemplate their dream again.

The thing that stood out for me at my cousin’s funeral was, in the eulogy his brother made an honest statement, how he wished he had known his late brother better. He emphasised that we should all get to know our families again and get to know them better.  It takes something poignant like that to really get you thinking, and to be honest many of us confuse our dream with life’s trimmings such as wealth, careers and personal achievement!  But without health and without a real connection of love to those people close to us and a love for ourselves, our dream is stilted and thus can only materialise with partial fulfilment. When there is a real connection to those we love, we obviously feel a deep sadness when we lose them, but that’s better than feeling guilty that we didn’t do enough in the relationship. So a major part of living the dream has to be really looking at the relationships in your life and how you currently are valuing them or not.

In this session on Tuesday, David will take you through some cool NLP processes to help you take stock of what and who is really important to you in your life, so you can connect with what is really important and enjoy each day and each person in your life to the full.

Click here for Dave’s Sushi session called ‘Living the Dream’