Possibility, Ability & Worthiness

Continuing on in the Limiting Beliefs to Empowering Beliefs 3-part series. The work of master NLP Practitioners, Joseph O’Connor and Andrea Lages was the key ingredient of my studies to add certification as an NLP Practitioner to my professional coaching toolkit in 2017. Joseph and Andrea shared what is known in NLP as the PAW Process.

In order to achieve your desired outcomes you need to believe three things:

            Possibility                     It is possible to achieve them.

            Ability                           You are capable of achieving them.

            Worthiness                   You deserve to achieve them.

Possibility, Ability and Worthiness are the three keys to achievement – the PAW Process.

Possibility

First, you have to believe that your desired outcomes are possible – for you. Otherwise, you will not even try to achieve them. We all have physical limits because we are humans, not superheroes.

However:

We do not know what these limits are.

We cannot know what they are until we reach them.

Often, we mistake possibility for competence. We think something is not possible when in fact we just do not know how to do it.

Ability

When you believe that your desired outcomes are possible, then at least you are in the game. The next block is that you believe you are incapable of getting your desired outcome. You have put a mental ceiling on your achievement.

As your coach I can give you one basic true belief that you have not yet reached the limit of what you are capable of.

Joseph O’Connor and Andrea Lages

The only way you can prove you are capable of achieving a goal is when you achieve it.

Until then you do not know, so it is better to believe that you can. It is just as realistic to believe you can as to believe you cannot. You can never prove you cannot achieve a goal because you cannot prove a negative. You can only say that you have not achieved it yet.

Once it was thought impossible for any human being to run a mile in less than four minutes, then Roger Bannister did it at Oxford on 6 May 1954. After that a strange thing happened – more and more athletes started running a mile in under four minutes and dozens have done it, since. This ‘impossible’ achievement is now commonplace. Bannister’s achievement changed a worldwide belief in what was possible.

Keep an open mind about your ability.

Sometimes we human beings will cheerfully announce that we do not have the ability to do something. We may even boast of our limitations, mistaking this for modesty.

Listen for a day or two and you will hear a string of admissions from people about what they cannot do:

            ‘I am no good with money.’

            ‘I can’t control my diet.’

            ‘I just can’t arrive on time for anything.’

When I hear this sort of thing in coaching, I will ask you to change your language:

            ‘I am not good with money at the moment.’

            ‘I do not believe I am good with money.’

            ‘I am not controlling my eating habits at the moment.’

            ‘In the past, I have not arrived on time for appointments.’

Changing the language is the first step to changing the thinking and hence the beliefs.

Ask me about a task we can explore in a coaching session about this.

Worthiness

Finally, you must believe you deserve to achieve your desired outcomes. Often there is a belief left over from childhood that we do not deserve anything that we have not worked hard for. Or the belief may be that we only get things because of others’ generosity, not for ourselves. Some people believe that others have to fail for them to succeed and this makes them incongruent about success.

Something you could choose to do in this situation would be to re-evaluate your childhood from the point of view that you do deserve things, but others do not think you do – the belief is in others. Sometimes you may even need to speak with your parents about this.

I’ve found that some of the most valuable coaching is getting a person to feel they deserve things – that they deserve to have the feelings they have, they deserve to get the desired outcomes they want.

This can lead to some deep conversations that may lead you to re-evaluate your life.

Cultural beliefs also play a part.

For example, in Northern Europe, it is a common belief that if you do not have to work hard for something, they you do not deserve it. This is a sophisticated version of the belief, “no pain, no gain.’ It is simply not true, because in other cultures, notably some Latin cultures, the opposite idea is prevalent, that is, if a goal takes a lot of effort, then you shouldn’t really have it.

You can start to shake these sorts of beliefs by asking yourself questions like:

            ‘What would have to happen for you to deserve it?’

            ‘Under what circumstances would you deserve it?’

            ‘Do you know anyone you think would deserve it?’

Within your personalised personal or business coaching package, you can ask me to run one session of your program focused on the Limiting Beliefs exercise mentioned in the previous article; followed by working on PAW together.

Just ask me to set this up for you for a coming session and together we can dig deeper with PAW!

Susan is a professional coach and certified NLP practitioner.

NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP studies three areas that give it its name:

Extract Reference: O’Connor J and Lages A, 2004, Coaching with NLP: How to be a Master Coach, Element, Hammersmith, London