OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

For the past seven years I have worked for an organisation in Castlemilk, Glasgow called CEDA (Castlemilk Economic Development Agency). I started there on a youth enterprise project; I had to encourage more young people to think of self-employment, to provide advice and training to young people aiming to start up in business and to provide aftercare support to those already in business.

Over the intervening years I have moved on to other roles with CEDA, many of them involving training, until my most recent project of providing motivation and confidence-building techniques to people to enable them to look at self-employment as an option. This morning I gave notice to CEDA that I had decided to move on to something new. This evening I attended a networking event for half an hour. In that time I was offered work helping with training young business people, which will replace my work with CEDA. What do they say about "when one door opens..."?

Last week I was involved with a colleague from Glasgow's Business Gateway provider in delivering training in presentation skills and report writing to a group of about sixty Young Achievers, that is senior school pupils taking part in Young Enterprise. Anyone who spends any time with these young people cannot help but be inspired. They give me great hope for the future.

John Grinder and Richard Bandler, the creators of NLP, published some interesting books in their early days before they fell out. I recently picked up a copy of Trance-formations, their long out of print book about hypnosis and NLP. Essentially it is a transcript of a three day training event which they ran, with most of the references to the content of previous publications excluded. What a fantastic book.

Because I trained with Bandler and attended follow-up training in hypnotherapy I have found it quite easy to get into. Some people who know NLP only from books seem to have found it a bit dense and hard to get into. I just find it inspirational and I have already started to introduce some of the techniques to both my training practice and to work I am doing with individual clients.

I recently completed a sales and negotiation skills course and I have used an exercise almost straight from Trance-formations to demonstrate the importance of really looking at people. As demonstrated in the book, if you want to know whether or not you are succeeding in inducing trance you have to watch for every nuance in your subjects posture, skin tone, breathing, etc. One of the trainees described it as the best sales training he has ever experienced, so something seems to be working.

I also attended what was described as an audience with Richard Mehmed, who set up the Brighton wood recycling project almost ten years ago. Richard quit his job selling insurance with nothing else to go to. A very brave act on his part and brave of his wife to support him. His talk and the follow-up interview, which was organised by Forth Sector in Edinburgh, were educational, entertaining and inspiring. If you get the chance to meet Richard or to hear him speak take it. You will not regret it.