Monkey Puzzle Blog

People often tell us they find asking other people for their time, help and support difficult. This is particularly tough when asking a loved one to help out, it can feel like grovelling, being demanding or disrespectful depending on how you think.

Procrastination is a stress response. People procrastinate when they feel overwhelmed or anxious about moving forward pushing their brain into ‘freeze’ mode. It can happen to us all and putting pressure on someone who is procrastinating will only make things worse.

Remember that when you are communicating to other people about your time you are basically training them in how to treat you. We all have natural habits in how we respond to requests for our time. Let’s look at ways in which you can increase your choices of response to requests for your time adapted from our new book Time Management; Banish Time Management Forever.

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