In the first episode of Season 1 of Love Life, Live Well, our host Emma Cartmell was joined by Nicola Cook the CEO and COO of Company Shortcuts and a qualified NLP Practitioner, Timeline Therapist and Hypnotherapist.
Nicola has previously published two business bestsellers and is scheduled to release six further business and personal development books in 2023 beginning with a fifteen-year anniversary edition of A New You: The small changes that make the biggest difference to your life (Link to Amazon)
Keep reading to find out the highlights and key takeaways from this podcast episode.
What do you love about your life or life itself?
I think it’s the variety of opportunities that you can create for yourself. I would say that I’m in the middle phase of my life at the moment. You know, I’ve reached that stage where I can be a bit more choosy about how I spend my time, which means I can spend more time on the things that I’m really passionate about. I’m really passionate about supporting businesses and enabling them to create sales acceleration.
I’m also massively passionate about individuals and helping them be the best versions of themselves that they can be and that is obviously grounded within my family and friends who are my absolute backbone and seeing them grow up and become great people and contributing to society in life. I just love every day. There’s these exercises that you tend to teach on personal development courses where you say, imagine your perfect day, and I’m living my perfect day every day, which is just such a gift, and that gets me excited and gets me going every single day.
Do you remember to look after yourself and how do you do that?
Well, one weakness is sometimes I forget that I have a physical body and I have such a strong mind and such a strong determination and a grit and a will to succeed and a desire to give back and serve and all those kind of great qualities but I know that I have the mental capacity to push through my own physical weaknesses if needs be. And I have been known to push too hard. I’ve had an interesting year this last year, because I actually collapsed at Heathrow Airport about 10 months ago, which was not my finest hour, but it was a typical burnout situation where just my legs went from underneath me and my muscles just would not work because I had nothing left in the tank.
So I’ve had a year of rebuilding myself starting physically, but then that’s led into spirituality and obviously changes in diet and, you know, I’ve made masses of changes. That’s led me into working with lots of other kinds of support areas for your overall well being. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and my advice is don’t let yourself get to that point and if you are pushing yourself beyond what your physical boundaries are capable of, then you need to look at the reasons why you’re doing that.
You have been writing the second edition of your book, what motivated you to write it, but also what’s making you do the second edition now?
I wrote the first one when I was in a transitional phase in my life. My first marriage had come to an end and it was the sort of two years following that. Obviously, if anyone has been in a relationship that has ended for whatever reason it’s a massive change. It’s often a change to your social life, your physical life, your work life, your financial situation, and obviously your emotions as well, and you’ve got a period of healing and transition to come out of.
I learned an awful lot about myself during that process, and not all of it was great, but I felt it was the catalyst that really cemented the transition of the person that I became and the person that I was always meant to be. I felt like I came out of that two-year period and became my true, authentic self as a result of that. It doesn’t mean that the old version of you is broken or isn’t worth anything, but it’s about how do you leave the bits of you behind that are not as helpful or are not supporting you or enabling you to be the person that you really want to become, and how do you transition into that new phase?
Can you talk us through the process of the book without giving it all away?
Well, the book itself is structured in two parts. The first part is all about developing the right mindset. And then the second part is all about developing the right skillset.
The first part is all about getting you to understand yourself, understanding what’s holding you back, understanding where you want to go. There’s a great chapter on goal setting because when we talk about goal setting, people tend to think about materialistic things and acquiring things where actually, you know, goals are much more about experiences you want to have in life. Yes, of course there will be a level of comfort from materialistic gain that you can aspire towards and there’s no limitation on that.
But, what kind of relationships do you want to have? What do you want to learn? What do you want to give back? What enables your creativity as well as just thinking about I wanna have that car or that house or that, that, this, that and the other. Then the second part of the book, every chapter is a different skill set. So there’s different skill sets on things like influencing skills, communication skills, networking skills, healthy skills.
What is a quick takeaway that people can take from the book?
The final chapter of the book is called Make It Stick, which is about how once you’ve made these changes, you’ve done the mental work, you’ve changed your behaviour, and you’re moving in a different direction, like how do you make it stick?
Ultimately the idea being it’s small changes over the long term that bring the greatest success, it’s down to three things. So the first one is an ongoing stimulus. Make time just as you would with your body to nourish your mind with the right kind of stimulus that is enabling you to continue to grow into the person that you ultimately want, how you want to live. The second point is powerful peers and having a really powerful peer group around you. Jim Ron is the man who says that you become like the five people that you spend the most time with, so choose them wisely is my advice. The third point is a supporting environment. So how can you set your environment up to make sure that it’s working for you.
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