I feel therefore I am

My beautiful little newborn son has arrived and just as I have been shamelessly crowbarring his arrival into all my conversations, (with family, friends, the woman behind the counter in the off licence, the nice man in India who rang to sell me a new mobile phone plan etc), I am now going to shamelessly crowbar him into this blog.

So how do I connect the birth of Huxley James Wainwright with 'personal and professional effectiveness and the freedom of the mind'?

You know what? I'm not even going to try. He's been successfully crowbarred - job done.

Although something did genuinely occur to me at the hospital. People often ask me if I really practice what I preach in the programs that I run. In other words, all the techniques and approaches I teach and promote, do I actually use them myself, or is it a case of do as I say, not as I do?

It's a fair point, and the honest answer is no I don’t, because any given 'technique' won’t work for everyone. It's like shopping for a pair of jeans; you keep trying on different pairs until you find one that fits, feels comfortable, and doesn't make you look stupid.

During the 36 or so hours I spent with my incredibly brave, amazingly strong fianceé in the labour ward, waiting for Huxley to manoeuvre himself out and into the world, I sat on a chair next to her bed wondering: Is there a NLP technique or a reframing approach or perhaps a relaxation exercise that I can use to make this experience less tiring and stressful?

The answer came to me very quickly:

Probably, but I'm not going to use it.

I'm not waiting to 'present to the board', I'm not pitching to a potential new client or preparing for a team performance review. This is the birth of my child, and I want to feel everything I should be feeling for exactly that reason - I should be feeling it.

The stress, fear, fatigue and helplessness I felt in that delivery room as I watched the woman I love more than anything endure suffering upon suffering was almost unbearable. But it was also an incredible, unsullied, and dazzling fragment of life - something stripped of the now seemingly unimportant and faintly ridiculous minutiae of modern existence. Huxley Wainwright's very first act (with a little help from his Mummy of course) was to immediately sweep thirty-four years of triviality deep into the shadowy corners of my mind, so that now, I can barely see any of it. And, in doing so, he has left room for a lifetime of memories of us – our new family.

Sometimes you have to stop thinking and just be. Look around, listen, breathe and feel alive in the truest sense of the word, and, ultimately, glory in the privilege of being alive, and being with people you love, and who love you.