Auto Mentor-expert coaching at your fingertips

By Phil Parker Do Dip E Hyp Psyc CMPNLP

More of the core skills for making your life and work even more productive, successful and enjoyable are available in Phil Parker's handbook for self coaching "The 10 Questions" available at www.philparker.org

Who do you know who could benefit from you being an even more effective coach?

Our subscription list is just growing and growing thanks to you; thanks for telling you friends and passing it around- they can join by mailing yes!@hyp.no.com.

If you've received this by mistake please email us, we've had some database problems recently, so please accept our apologies.

If you look at cultures throughout time you might be struck by their enormous diversity, a testament to man's ingenuity and complexity. Closer examination, however, will also reveal one special common thread- a lineage of stories, powerfully used to inform, to safeguard learnings and histories and create new perspectives.
Despite western culture often regarding stories as the province of children and writers, or even, fantasists and liars, leading thinkers in corporate change have long recognised that there is a very important place for the use of story in business culture. When you consider the last time you began to see something in a new light, what story had just been shared with you?
The following tale is a nice collision of this most ancient of tools and the modern world, and it's also been designed in a particular way. To get the maximum benefit from it whilst you read it, ask yourself the follow question:
"What I can learn from this that will help me resolve those issues which are bothering me right now?"

It's the 11th April, enough explosive material to make a very big hole in the ground has just been lit a few hundred feet underneath you, and you're the happiest and scaredest you've ever been in your life.
Just after 10 pm the 13th of April, two days later, the oxygen tanks are stirred as normal before you go off to sleep, but a faulty wire causes a electrical fire, and a hole is blown wide open in the sheet metal that separates you from the vast emptiness of space. Yes, it's 1970 and you're on that fateful space mission, Apollo 13.

If you were an astronaut, and you had a choice, would you go on rocket number 13, or take a rain check and wait for the next one? Why didn't they miss out on the number 13 and go straight from Apollo 12 to 14, like the floor and room numbers in most hotels and hospitals in the USA.
Of course, in Asia, this wouldn't have been an issue, they know it's a silly Western superstition and the facts speak for themselves, 13 clearly isn't unlucky at all.

In Asia, in fact, it's number 4 that is considered to be extremely unlucky, because the sound of the number four in Chinese and Japanese is very like the sound of the word "death". Cultures do see some things very differently, I remember flying into Hong Kong airport to be greeted with an enormous billboard advert for "Double Happiness" cigarettes.
And double happiness, or a lucky strike, was something the crew of Apollo 13 definitely needed now; they were losing heat and air at such a rate they couldn't make it back alive.

Back at Houston there was work to do; they had to find a solution to the crisis. One group was instructed to find a way to speed up the return journey. A second group had to find a way to conserve the heat and purify the air, just using components that could be safely stripped from inside the capsule.
After trying all sorts of unlikely combinations this second group finally created a solution. It wasn't the prettiest, or the best on the planet, but as the astronauts couldn't just pop down to their local hardware store and stock up on tools and materials, it was the best solution.
It's worth noting that NASA didn't start stripping out the existing life support systems of all their new capsules and replace them with the cannibalised life-support system which this crisis had generated, just because it had worked once; although they did learn many other important things from the demanding experience.

The other group at Houston who had been tasked to speed up the return journey finally worked out what to do. It involved the astronauts having to perform a very long and seriously complicated set of advanced mathematical calculations and an equally long list of procedures which involved hundreds of buttons and dials being pressed in a particular order.
At this point the mission nearly ended in disaster. Can you guess why?
Scroll down to see if you're right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The capsule didn't have enough clean sheets of paper to note down all the information. It was never considered that paper would ever really be needed in such a high tech environment as space travel!

Take a few moments to write down what the significance of this story is to you and your current life issues, you may be surprised at what you already know about creating the solutions.

Phil Parker's latest book is

Ten Questions

The handbook for self coaching

"In this concise and engaging manual Dr. Phil Parker manages to deliver the key elements for creating change and managing the challenges of business and personal life.

The genius idea of this book is that it transforms these change concepts into simple, understandable, practical, universal Questions.

I highly recommend this book to everyone interested in personal and professional development and success."

Steve Andreas, Author, trainer and NLP pioneer

For information on how to order the book '10 Questions' http://www.philparker.org/