Connect To Your Potential The Path to Emotionally Intelligent Relationships

Results for category "The Enneagram"

Why Accelerated Personalised Development?

Andrew

Why the term ‘Accelerated Personalised Development’? As you may have seen from the brief discussion our home page, answering the question “What do you do?” doesn’t seem quite so straight forward for us.

So if you have time, here’s a 33 minute video recorded at The Best You Expo 2017, where Andy describes how and why we arrived at this powerful methodology and why it is different to other personal development offerings. If you don’t have time to watch the video now, then read on.

Marketeers say that we need to keep descriptions really short, tight, clear, snappy, attractive etc. etc. That’s marketing for you!  Life really isn’t that simple. We say beware of people offering you very simple yet powerful generic personal development solutions – they usually don’t have a lasting effect once the hype has worn off…

We are in the business of human behaviour, people and relationship dynamics – these appear to be anything but simple! Indeed they are largely unfathomable to the vast majority of us.

This isn’t at all surprising as:

  • We all have very different character/personality/temperaments, much of which is hidden in our sub-conscious.
  • This isn’t taught to us in school.

The good news is that we have greatly simplified and systematised the understanding of people, relationships and human potential.

  • The system starts by focusing on you and the most important relationship – the one that you have with yourself.
  • We take our clients through a unique discovery process – developing much greater self-awareness, self-mastery, awareness of others and mastery in relationships.
  • We have systemised and condensed 24 years of combined experience and the study of many different human potential disciplines into a cohesive and structured process and framework.

Read More →

Our two workshops at The Best You Expo March 2017 London

Andrew

Come an join us at the UK’s biggest and best Personal Development event – The Best You Expo, ExCel London, 4-5 March 2017.

The Best You ExpoWe are exhibiting and giving two workshops:

Workshop One –  4th March 13:00
Accelerated Personalised Development – Workshop Room 2

Personal Development has much to offer. Success, happiness, resilience, personal mastery, being at peace, wealth, the list goes on.

However, the pathway is far from clear.

Where to start, what direction to take, which philosophies to study, which teachers to engage? Read More →

The Best You

Andrew

Do you want to become The Best You?

  • Do you want to achieve permanent, positive change?
  • Are you still searching to find the real you?
  • Are loving relationships and lasting happiness passing you by?
  • Do you lack purpose and direction?

Perhaps you’ve read the self-help books, watched the videos and attended the events, but you still can’t find your path to self-fulfilment and happiness?

The Best You ExpoWe’ve found the solution you’ve been searching for, and we want to share it with you.

We are husband and wife team Andrew and Diane Nicholson from Connect To Your Potential. We’d like to invite you to come and meet us, plus here our two talks at the UK’s biggest personal development event – The Best You Expo, which takes place on Sat-Sun 4-5th March 2017 at ExCel London. We are on Stand 26b.

Here’s the link to our speaker biography page, plus some of our credentials: Read More →

Have you stopped growing up?

Andrew
growing up

I’ve just started watching a fascinating programme on Channel 4 about the developmental psychology of 4, 5 and 6 year olds.

Here’s the thing. I watched it after watching an episode of the Apprentice on BBC iPlayer. The patterns of behaviour were remarkably similar! Defensiveness, entitlement, boys vs. girls, bravado….

It begs the question – how grown up are you? When did we stop growing up? How much more growing up is possible/desirable?

Adolescent Minds

It is my contention that most of us are adolescent minds and souls – struggling in an adult body and world Read More →

A reflection on Coaching vs Mentoring + Awareness

Andrew
coach vs mentor

Having always had an interest in ‘what makes us tick’, over the past 30 years I have formally and informally studied many aspects of human behaviour and performance. As I write this, I have just turned 50 years young. Upon reaching the age of 39, I came to the realisation that life wasn’t going how I wanted it to, not that I had much of a plan. I experienced a year of intense frustration – post-divorce, post-redundancy, and at a time when it became apparent that I needed to change what I was doing in order to get different results – certainly from a relationship and a career perspective. I didn’t know what I wanted to do – just that I don’t want more of the same…

During this time, I re-connected with an old friend – I shall call him Ali. He had been through similarly challenging times. After listening to my tale of woe, he suggested getting into personal development, in order to develop some new perspectives on life. I went along to monthly personal development groups in Birmingham and listened to a different speaker reach month on a wide variety of subjects including: health, wealth, positive thinking and relationships. This gradually helped me to reflect on my state of ‘woe’ and upon my potential for much greater things.

reflection ~

  • The throwing back by a body or surface of light, heat, or sound without absorbing it.
  • Serious thought or consideration.

These ‘PD’ meetings gave me the lift and the kick I needed. They opened up my thinking, got me focused on new possibilities and motivated to change. Read More →

When positive thinking is simply papering over the cracks…

Andrew
Shadow Side

By Diane Nicholson (originally posted on Di’s Blog December 2013)

A few years ago I discovered that I am an Enneagram type Two. The Enneagram is an ancient wisdom which teaches about the 9 ways of ‘being’ and perceiving life. It was created mainly for the egoic traits that arise through each type. Each of the 9 types are different, but have pretty much default and predictable behavioural patterns, and between them they make up humanity. When you understand this, you tend to understand why so many people feel so easily offended or can be judgemental in today’s society… it’s because we are all so different whilst telling each other ‘Be like me, be like me!’ rather than ‘Be like you, be like you!’

These days, the Enneagram has become so sugar-coated to make it socially acceptable so that it doesn’t offend the fragile egos of those who would have to face the truth about how they show up at times, the patterns they play on themselves and others, and how they hold themselves back. With this sugar-coating, the wisdom and potential the Enneagram contains becomes hugely diluted. You see, you cannot hold back from seeing the complete truth about how your ego shows up, then also expect to recognise and break through the patterns of that same ego. Because you cannot break through what you cannot see.

One of the things I discovered about being a Two… Read More →

The most empowering question you can ask yourself – Who am I?

Andrew
self-empowerment

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could understand yourself in a brand new light?

By this I mean be able to understand the different triggers that cause you to respond to life in the way you do, to know and be able to recognise what takes your energy up, what takes you down, what motivates you, and to be able to instantly recognise when your ego is responding to life rather than the real you? And wouldn’t it be wonderful to really connect with your inherent talents and to not only believe you have those talents, but to truly, deeply know? You see, there’s a world of difference between believing something and actually knowing it. This brings true self-empowerment.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to understand others, especially those closest to you, in the same light too?

Well… did you know that there are 9 different perceptions of life, 9 different drives and models of the world, and that each of us experiences life through one of them? Here are just some examples of how they all differ from one another: Read More →

Uncovering The Ego

Andrew
Uncovering The Ego

We have always specialised in working with people and their egos, be it fears, limiting beliefs, attention seeking….. Seven years ago, we started to investigate the Enneagram a model and transformational system based on nine egotypes. Whilst fascinating, we found that the online tests that were available we inconclusive and contradictory; indeed many practitioners did not use or rely on them and fully expected it to take many months and many sessions to try to workout someone’s ego type.  The benefits from understanding and overcoming the ego are immense. This is at the heart of emotional intelligence, which in turn is at the heart of great leadership, relationships, emotional wellbeing, resilience to mental health challenges, the list goes on.

Over the last five years, we have studied the Enneagram in-depth. After being mis-typed so many times, we finally learned our true Enneatypes, which had a massive positive impact on our relationship. In truth, despite years of personal development and starting to feel ‘sorted’, learning the truth of the Enneagram enabled us to finally understand and accept ourselves and each other. Read More →