Day 7: Turning Setbacks into Success

These are tips that have helped me and continue to help me to turn setbacks into success.

1. Recognise the setback as feedback
1: What is the feedback here?
2: What is the lesson to learn?
3: What do you need to do differently?
4: What has changed?

2. Manage your state
Get enough sleep, exercise and rest. Many underestimate the power of making a physiology change. Create anchors or triggers to help manage your state: I press a certain exact place on the base of my thumb every time I need to feel energised or happy and that acts as an anchor by re-triggering many many positive experiences that I had when I pressed the anchor point at that time. This is an NLP technique and one of the keys to successful anchoring is to press the skin to the bone but to select a place that is easy to use in a normal gesture like clasping your hands so you can do it anytime and anywhere. Another key is to anchor just before or at the peak of the experience (a music concert, a birthday party, just feeling happy, etc) and hold the anchor for ten seconds then later reproduce it by the exact same touch.

3. Aim not to be comfortable but to be resourceful
Have a higher tolerance for ambiguity and create and use anchors for resourceful states of mind.

4. Be flexible
Be flexible a: mentally b: physically c: emotionally
Ask yourself what is needed for flexibility for each.

5. Change your perspective
In NLP this is often called second position: think what the other person feels, hears or sees.

6. Be active, keep going, don't give up

I am off to the country so may leave you with this for a few days unless I manage to track down a Wifi Hotspot. Thanks to those who gave me email feedback and feel free to leave comments here at any time.