(This blog was originally posted on
November 16, 2016)
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| Photo by Rick Hustead |
Queen Victoria is
known for many things. Until very recently, her reign was the longest of any
British monarch. During that time there were considerable industrial and
scientific advances, including growth of the railroad and building the London
Underground, and development of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolutionary
development. Her strong work ethic and public persona of prim behavior and
proper etiquette became legendary. But when I think about this queen, what
comes first to my mind is the Red Box.
The
queen reportedly kept a red box on her desk in which urgent documents and
communications were supposed to be placed until she could deal with the issue. As
it turned out, less important papers such as generic requests for an audience
(appointment) with the queen also found their way into that box. Of course,
over time the box got very full. The monarch became frustrated and more than a
little stressed out about all those things she had to “do.” Finally, her
husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, looked inside the box and pointed
out that a lot of the material inside didn’t belong there at all. Queen
Victoria could lighten her work load by addressing only the most urgent matters
and postponing or even delegating the rest to him and/or her ministers, secretaries,
etc. to handle. Long story short, the queen took his advice and adopted a new
and more efficient strategy for managing her monarchy.
Whether
she vocally resisted (argued) adopting the new system or immediately accepted
her husband’s suggestion to reorganize the contents of that box is probably
unknown. However, it is likely that the queen initially found this task
daunting and even annoying. Suddenly, she had to change a familiar, relatively
simple behavior of putting documents in one place and take more time separating
and classifying each item based on specific criteria. Once she got the hang of
it this process would prove simpler and more efficient, but she would have to
get used to it, first.
Call
it what you will, but Queen Victoria’s new and even the intention of her
original organizational system sounds an awful lot like the Neurolinguistic Programming
technique of “chunking it down.”
If
aspects of this tale sounds familiar in your own life that is the point I am
trying to make. From time to time, a lot of us—including monarchs!—need help
prioritizing assignments, jobs, projects and even relationships to be more
efficient and productive in other areas of our lives. We are used to doing
things a particular way, and every time we repeat that behavior (“way”) we
reinforce it. However, it becomes easier to adopt a new process as we practice
doing it for a while—i.e., incorporating these new actions (“knowns”) into the
behavioral repertoire to create your new subconscious
mental script. It is also easier to make a change when someone
we respect or admire (hypno-modality)
encourages/helps/teaches us what we need to do to implement the behavior/belief
system, as Prince Albert did for his wife in this instance.
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Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified
hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors
from the Hypnosis Motivation
Institute in 2005. For more
information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an
appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.
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