a million wishes

photo: who has lost a magic wand by Pσrcelαΐηgΐrl°


Having lunch with Chris West, and discussing an NLP book I wanted to a way to get across the optimism, and humanity that I find in NLP. I offered Chris the following thought experiment.

Think of all those stories where someone receives three wishes - and is either filled with contradictory urges about what to wish for, or wishes for something that ends up messing up their lives.

Now imagine that somehow a million wishes had been offered to you (and if you think that a million is not enough, you can always use one of that million to wish for a billion more...). Now what would you do with those wishes?

I can summarize what the people who I've offered this experiment to say as

'Well I'd wish for certain things for myself, then I'd start thinking about what I could do for other people.'

I have not met anyone who genuinely put themselves in this imaginary position, and who would use their wishes to wreak havoc in the lives of others.

Perhaps I should ask this of some of our society's demons - murderers, fundamentalists, terrorists. I have not done that yet.

I can imagine that certain people would go through a period or wrath and revenge with their wishing. I can also imagine them coming out of it into something more generous.

One of life's questions is how do we navigate those situations where the fearful and angry have the power to wound and kill. Soldiers, politicians, therapists, scientists, and philosophers all have different ways of answering that.

Of course we live in a world where we do not have the power to simply wish anything into, or out of existence, even though we may have more power in changing aspects of our lives than we think.

For me NLP, or any other form of genuine personal development, is about moving in a direction where we have more choice. That choice leads to greater compassion and greater generosity.

We may live in a way where we have three or fewer wishes at our disposal. But we can still aim for the expansiveness of a million wishes.

NLP and coaching can help us in this journey by developing increasingly effective methods that to navigate and transform the dangers of our current reality.

So what would you first ten wishes, your hundredth, and your thousandth wish be?