One minute the PC was working fine and the next minute it was as if an alien force had taken it over.

Place the cursor over an e-mail in the Outlook Inbox and suddenly it would speedily scroll down through every header in the inbox! My immediate thought was that some malware had slipped through the defences – so I closed Outlook and tried to run Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware – but as fast as I loaded the programme it shut itself down.

‘This is serious,’ I thought ‘It’s even taken over my defence programmes!’

Tried rebooting. PC wouldn’t reboot – or would reboot and shut itself down in a continuous loop.  Tried Safe Mode.  No luck there. Eventually I got Windows to load – until I got to the ‘login with password,’ screen. The moment I entered the first character of the password it filled the box by itself!

Panic was now setting in – wondering if I’d be able to persuade Andy , our local PC saviour/guru, to drop everything and rush to the rescue – unlikely as he’s usually very busy. Fortunately Debbie (of Pegasus NLP fame) had called in to visit us so I asked her to look at what was happening, thinking her IT background would provide some valuable technical insight. Yet, even before I could explain the details of my dire situation she said ‘How can you work with a keyboard like that! When did you last clean it?’ I ignored such irrelevant comments and eventually got both Spybot and the anti-malware programme to run. Both found nothing.

Then I thought… I know it can’t be that simple but, just to satisfy her, I’ll change keyboards – which will prove just how complex the problem really is.

Which I did.

And the PC’s been working normally ever since.

When I commented on this on Twitter today Jonny remarked today ‘sometimes the simplest of things resolve problems which we think are far greater than they actually are!’  Now that’s a deep one – and it sparked this blog post.

Take for example last week’s final module of the NLP Master Practitioner. Pegasus NLP certifies Practitioners and Master Practitioners on merit rather than merely on attendance and, as part of this quite thorough certification process, each participant demonstrates the results of their individual modelling project to a small group of peers plus one of the team of NLP Trainers.

Teresa was in the group I was overseeing. She decided to model what enabled successful fitness runners to stick to their regime and, specifically, what was involved in what they termed ‘the countdown’ to going for a run. In building her model, she elicited lots of fascinating insights about their routine, physiology, mental skills, beliefs and values, meta programmes, sense of self, and so on. A very thorough model, in fact. But, interestingly, it was one of the little gems which she uncovered that I’ve since found most valuable and immediately applicable.

She identified that each of the runners became extremely focused in the countdown to actually going for their run to the point where, in the last 10 minutes, absolutely nothing was allowed to interfere with their objective of leaving their desk, going to the changing room, changing and beginning their run.

This seemingly small point, when applied in my own life, has made a big difference in my own fitness regime in the nine days since.

Such small points can be what we in Pegasus NLP call ‘the un-obvious obvious’. Until you know about it it’s a mystery. But when you do know about it ‘well, it’s obvious, isn’t it!’  So my thanks to Teresa – and to Debbie.

(PS: while writing this I got so frustrated with the layout of the new keyboard that I got the vacuum cleaner to the old one – and it’s now working fine.)