Was your answer: your partner, your parents, not enough money, not enough time, not enough love, bad luck or simply fate? All of these answers are basically saying that the reason you are not more successful or more fulfilled in one or many areas of yourself, is due to circumstances outside of your control.

What NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming teaches us is that in order to influence our external world we have to understand how our thinking affects our internal world, ie our unconscious. By understanding this we can then bring the circumstances within our control and change them.

Our conscious mind actually holds very little information at any one time, and research has shown that we can hold only 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of information in our conscious mind at any one time. Which, as you can appreciate, isn't a whole lot of data.

Meanwhile our unconscious can receive billions of pieces of external information at any one time and process them with no effort. The unconscious mind is awake even when we are asleep and continually processing information.

From this we can see that what we tell our unconscious is of vital importance, as whatever we tell it to do - it will do. But what are we telling our unconscious to do?

If you say to yourself - "I deserve to be rich", but the programs running in your unconscious mind, which have evolved as you have grown up respond with " you - you loser, like that's ever going to happen, you never succeed at anything" you aren't going to get very far along the road to riches. Therefore in order to progress these programs need to be changed.

It is never going to be enough to listen to something that tells you 'what' to do - you need something that tells you 'how' to do something. This is where NLP comes into its own, as it not only tells you, but it shows you how to achieve whatever you want from life and how you can achieve your goals. It is practical information that often marks the difference between what succeeds and what fails.

NLP stops you running the same old programs in your mind and getting caught in a loop of failure. Your conscious mind can tell you a million times that you need to shape up and achieve success but this just won't mean anything until your unconscious mind comes on board. Once the two are aligned, the world is your oyster and success in any area of your life - whether it be money, work, business, relationships, you name it - can be achieved. NLP is a fascinating subject and the more you learn the more you want to know, but more than this it offer a practical blueprint for change. Whatever you want, the only path to achieving it is to change, not the external circumstances, but yourself. The rest then falls into place.