Monkey Puzzle Blog

Time is a finite resource. We all have the same amount of time each day, each week and each month. How we use that time is dependent on what each of us believes is important and how we think about time.

Have you thought about what you want to achieve this year yet? New years resolutions rarely make it past the first few weeks but real goal setting each year leads to success and achievement. There is a key to great goal setting though, just visualising what you want won’t necessarily get you it.

Getting together with the family at Christmas should be full and fun and joy. In reality though the fun and joy rarely happens as spontaneously as it does on those Christmas TV ads. The secret to a successful Christmas with the family to think ahead and be prepared by considering who you’ve got coming with these three steps:

‘Difficult people’ come in all shapes and sizes. Their behaviours range from tears to gossip to outright temper tantrums. Sometimes those behaviours are short-lived. In these cases, challenging behaviour is probably sparked by a temporary stressor such as illness or work overload and can become exacerbated over the festive season. In other cases, difficult behaviour happens over and over again. How should you respond when someone else resorts to hard-to-handle behaviour? Here are our top tips from the experts:

Tis the season to be merry - and also stressed if you are organising Christmas this year. At such a special time, you want to get it right, but many people race up to the big day and are then too exhausted or stress to enjoy it. There’s a reason why Christmas Eve is a peak day for people getting colds. Here are our top tips for making Christmas a breeze:

On 31st October Wyatt Woodsmall ran an NLP Masterclass for over 30 of us in Bristol. The subject was Science and Spirituality and the path towards spirituality - and whether it’s a path we want to take. It was a packed day with many full heads at the end, but in it all were some practical life lessons that we could all take away and do something with. Here are some key ideas that help with day to day life and the path onwards:

We all know people who wind us up, make us feel small, angry or useless, even over small things. The impact can be a minor niggle, ruin our day or ruin a relationship! It might feel like these reactions are out of your control but the good news is there are ways to minimise the impact and deal with differently. Here are our top tips:

When people come on our certification courses in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) they are always blown away by the power of the interventions to change behaviours, how we feel and how we behave. It’s easy to love the big powerful stuff, but the small changes we make in our thinking are often the thing that ensures long term success because they create good habits which serve you for life. Here are our top tips to try:

Have you ever wondered how to end ‘blame game’ behaviour at work? Here are the top tips from the experts:

Eleanor Shakiba; author of Difficult People Made Easy

“Busy” has become a word so packed with meaning in social circumstances, it has become has common a response as ‘fine’ to the question ‘How are you?’. Habitual it might be but are you telling people what you really want to when you use this in conversation? Busy can be a positive thing, if you are busy doing the things you want to do with your life. If your business has been quiet and now it’s ‘busy’ that’s good. Be careful though of using it as a standard response because when you describe yourself as busy, you are potentially communicating to yourself and other people one or more of the following:

It’s a frustrating situation. You’re sharing advice or giving instructions and the other person just isn’t listening. Why does this happen? How can you engage others, so they really want to listen? Here are the top tips from our panel:

Your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. What is called multi-tasking is actually your brain flicking from one thing to another so that each task gets a bit of your attention and the processing power of your brain. You will divide your focus over a number of things and none of them will get your full attention. When someone thinks they are multi-tasking their brain is actually trying to track a number of different thoughts and activities in their mind at the same time. This drains your energy and reduces your thinking capacity. People multi task because it ‘feels’ productive, rather than an objective analysis of results and output.