About Us

Welcome to the Mindskills website.

Mindskills is a personal and professional development based in the UK and here on our site you will be able to read more about who we are,  what we do and  find a range of information about the services and products that we offer designed to help you achieve you personal and professional goals.

Mindskills was origninally founded in 1997 by Chris O’Brien to provide a range of personal development services focusing largely on areas such as motivation, goal setting in addition to one of Chris’ main passions; brainwave entrainment. Having experimented with a variet of brainwave entrainmnent products in the areas of overcoming sleep problems, anxiety disorders and meditation, which were increasingly appearing in the personal development market at the time, particularly in the United States, Chris was frustrated and disappointed with many of their bold claims decided to dedicate a portion of his time to research and develop his own range of effective BWE products under the Mindskills brand.

This proved to be a success move and though not a main focus of the business, Mindskills continues to develop and sell a range of BWE to customers from around the world. These can now be found on the website, audio-therapies.co.uk

Mindskills Coaching

As the demand for personal and professional development products and services increased, Mindskills also continued to grow and having qualified as a practitioner of NLP in 2006, and later as a performance coach in 2007, Chris younger brother, Tom, joined the business on a part time basis and together they created Mindskills Coaching.

This provided a greater focus on providing personal and professional development services for both individuals and organisations. In order to keep up with the increasing demand for coaching and personal development services and as this part of the business continues to grow, in 2009,  Tom made the decision to leave his career as a social researcher and pursue his passion for coaching  full time coach, both with Mindskills and other Coaching companies.

Tom has a passion for helping others overcome their perceived limitations and set challenging goals designed to inspire and bring about fast, effective change and balance to others lives and having been able to help many clients create successful changes in their lives and with a focus on continuing professional development, Tom successfully completed his NLP Master Practitioner training in 2010, allowing him to increase his effectiveness and apply his increased skills in a range of ways.

The Mindskills Method

Combining elements from their experience of a wide range of  related disciplines such as energy/meridian therapy, hypnosis and NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), together, Chris and Tom went on to create  “The Mindskills Method”,   an offline course delivered in person to small groups which focuses on helping people understand and then apply techniques to overcome their limiting beliefs and procastination and move forward in their lives by learning how to get and motivated, set and achieve goals, clear negative emotions and anxiety and increase self belief in order to achieve real balance in their lives. Chris and Tom are currently in the process of putting together an online version of  “The Mindkills Method” with training delivered through webinars and video tutorials.

Mindskills Coaching

Professional

As Director of Mindskills Coaching, Tom retains a private practice splitting his time between helping both companies and organisations overcome issues relating which are preventing them from achieving excellent results. Often this will involve helping directors and managers identify challenges and onstacle in the area of staff performance and working with them to remove low levels of motivation and existing barriers to change in order to achieve outstanding results. As an experienced Master Practitioner of NLP who has trained a range of sales and customer service professionals, Tom also helps organisations create highly influencial, effective staff, capable of building high levels of rapport and quickly resolving conflict through the undewrstanding and application of both verbal and non verbal advanced language skills.

Sales and Customer Service Results

Over the past few years Tom has increasingly been asked to apply his skills in one of his main areas of passion;  NLP Language Skills. During these tough economic times many organisations have realised that their greatest assets are their workforce and this is particularly true for those who have a large number of staff working in the areas of sales and customer service. Organisations are now seeking greater results from fewer numbers of staff and with this comes greater demands to achieve better results with directors and managers often finding themselves in a position where they are expected to help their teams hit increasingly higher targets from generating new from sales as well maintaining ongoing relationships with existing customers.

More now than ever the focus is providing an excellent and oustanding customer experiences and relationships and organsations are having to increasingly seek out new ways of ensuring their staff have both the technical and interpersonal skills required to provide excellent levels of customer satistafaction.

Tom’s own past sales working for blue chip companies such as Coca Cola means that he understands just what both customers and company directors expect and what is required in order to consistently hit targets expectations and it is for this reason that Mindskills developed a range of sales and customer service group training courses and one to one coaching packages.  Helping companies to hit targets and see improved results from their sales and customer service teams is achieved by helping staff understand the importance of what is really important to customers, followed by group training in ‘ethical influence’, a range of  NLP and psychological tools and techniques which provide staff with the ability create consistently create win/win situations by understanding and applying psychological tools of influence.

Developing Effecitve  Relationships and Communicating Change

Tom’s work with sales and customer service teams led to organisations requesting further help in other areas to the extent that this has now become something Mindskills routinely offers as a separate service and this is where the focus is on internal challenges and the need to build better relationships between teams within an organisation as opposed to external relationships with customers.

Perception really is everything! That’s a fact and yet surprisingly, this is something that many organisations just don’t realise or don’t care about when it comes to keeping their own house in order. Many organisations put aside a huge budget in order to manage their customer facing public image because they understand that their is a direct link between how they are pereceived and their results.

Orgnisational NLP Coaching

Developing Effecitve  Relationships and Communicating Change

Tom’s work with sales and customer service teams led to organisations requesting further help in other areas to the extent that this has now become something Mindskills routinely offers as a separate service and this is where the focus is on internal challenges and the need to build better relationships between teams within an organisation as opposed to external relationships with customers.

Perception really is everything! That’s a fact and yet surprisingly, this is something that many organisations just don’t realise or don’t care about when it comes to keeping their own house in order. Many organisations put aside a huge budget in order to manage their customer facing public image because they understand that their is a direct link between how they are pereceived and their results.

You can read more about how Mindskills helps organisations to overcome these issues on the ‘Organisational Coaching’ page

It has become a fact of life these days that organisations are having to pay more attention and be more flexible in relation to their to their internal operations. In a battle to constantly re-structure their size and shape in order to bend to market forces, the flux of the global economy and changes in supply and demand increasing focus is given over to the best ways of keeping up. Regardless of whether this happens to involve upscaling or downscaling the key to any successful transitions, aside from strategy and planning, is within existing internal relationships and how the changes are communicated.

There exist in the world of business a plethera of models and approaches which are used by an increasing army of specialist consultancies to help companies effectively manage change and of course, there are an array of buzzwords and management speak that come with them. Measuring change has become a science in itself and with so many forms to be filled and boxes to be ticked and information to be collected and then disseminated it’s a statistician’s utopia.

However, crucially, there often tends to be one major factor that is overlooked before, during and after these extensive projects have been undertaken and the often unsuprising results analysed -  and really there is no getting away from this one crucial, practical fact – it’s about people and relationships.

As useful as they can be when done well, you don’t need a 360 degree performance  review to tell to know that fundamentally there is always going to be a human’ factor and at for the most part, humans have been conditioned to be incredibly wary and suspicious of change in all aspects of their lives. Small changes are of course a natural part of day to day life and most people are flexible enough to manage this, yet large, sudden, forced changes are things that most of us find hard to manage and it is for this reason that most organisations have tended to create changes gradually.

However, during times of economic upheaval and uncertainty this isn’t always an option readily available and it is a measure of an organisation as to how successful it is at leading and managing change in these conditions that is the focus here because all too often this is where organisations face their greatest challenges and experience the greatest levels of opposition and disruption. Too Often the problems which arise in the face of large scale change come about dut to a failure to understand the ‘human factor’ and the importance of relationships.

A board of directors is expected to possess the qualities which allow them to identify and harness the notion of change in ways which ordinary members of staff are not. often because the majority of their daily tasks will be centred around working to set standards and procedures designed for the most part to stay the same. It is impractical to have more chiefs than indians and for the most part it is in the interest of the chiefs to employ the indians to be flexible and only employ their creative reasoning witin contects and areas of responsibility that are clearly defined and deliberatly limited because they are not paid to come up with strategy and direction.

When an organisation begins a process of lare scale change their is often an unrealistic expectation that this will just be accepted and implemented and here within lie the failure; a failure to understand the human factor and to understand perception. Again, the majority of people tend to perceive large scale changes as bad and as a threa to their own stability and survival and all too often it seems that the strategies employed to communicate change fail to include an understanding of this perception. In many organisations there just isn’t the will to identify the most effective ways of communicating this change, between striking a balance between carrot and stick, preferring instead to just hope that it will eventually all work out for the best. Unfortunately, the end result tends to be a lack of accountability and a culture of blame.

It is a sad fact that many organisations fail to decide to identify and employ experts in language and influence who are able to assist by ensuring large scale changes are commincated to and neogitated with staff in ways that create win/win situations.

Many organisations continually fail to realise that relying solely on already over-stretched HR departments and team managers to design and create methods to communicate change and provide damage limitation is an ineffective strategy and all too often leads to important problems being swept under the carpet in the hope that with time they will just disappear. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case and what tends to increase are are a pattern of negative consequences requiring yet further attention from HR departments and team managers such as decreased performance from  demotivated employees with unresolved feelings of suspicion and distrust because they perceive the  top down communication as having come from an increasingly uncaring organisation that is disrepectful and distrustful because it has failed to provide them with ‘all the facts’.

states of consequently leading to demotivated, rather than address them in ways which sho and force through changes to culture and working conditionscreate minimal ofculture change and mediation. Whether this is providing assistance to organisations seeking to commincate change to their staff or providing advice on the importance of understanding and incorporating NLP learning/thinking styles into staff training and development or as part of a plan to increase the effectiveness of company literature, Tom helps organisations become more influential and understandand harness the power of the NLP language in both verbal and written forms.

If you are interested in getting help in overcoming barriers and challenges in your live, be it  personal or professional then take a look at our Services page to find out more.

On our Products page you will find a link to our sister company, audio-therapies.co.uk, also part of Mindskills.

including NLP Coaching.