I recently finished reading The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku. It was my second experience of Eddie's story. The first time, I listened to the audiobook. At the same time, we travelled around Australia in our caravan. This time, though, I held the book in my hands, saw the photographs, and looked at the faces of the people he was talking about.

There seems to be a feeling in the air at the moment. I hear it in conversations with friends and family. I see it on LinkedIn and across social media. I hear it from business owners and people in workplaces. Life feels hard.

There is always a particular kind of energy at the beginning of an NLP Practitioner Certification. No two people enter the room for exactly the same reason. One may be there to become a more skilled coach. Another wants to communicate differently in business. Someone else may be looking for personal clarity, stronger relationships or practical ways to understand patterns they have noticed but have never quite been able to explain.

So much of what we teach isn't actually about changing the person in front of you. It is about looking at how you are perceiving what is happening, how you are creating meaning around it, and then asking yourself one simple question: Could there be another alternative?

When life is good, the team is performing, the business is growing, and things feel stable, the mere suggestion of change can trigger genuine anxiety. Yet when things are difficult, performance is declining, culture is suffering, and the team feels stuck, change is the very thing everyone is quietly craving.

We often focus so much on either the future or the past. The past of what was and the future of what if… When we focus too much on the future, we can become overwhelmed and anxious. Now, I love the big picture. I love being able to see what we want to achieve and where we are heading, but what I was forgetting was all the amazing steps we are already taking towards that big goal.