Read it now at http://www.philcallaghan.co.uk

But first, let’s tackle the “high performance” issue. Forget “high performance”.

To me, the Master prac is about two things – mastery and excellence.

Don’t get me wrong though. I think we can all agree that high performance is good. It’s just that I believe high performance is far from the pinnacle of excellence. I’d better explain what I mean.

High performance is what you get when you refine a process to near maximum efficiency or greatest effect. I agree that’s a worthy goal. So far so good.

However, the top limit on that, the highest performance, is defined by the nature of the process itself.

For example, you can build and fine-tune the best manual typewriter ever so it performs at its highest efficiency. Yet an average word-processor will out-perform even the best typewriter. This is why I’m asking you to focus beyond high performance. It only makes sense.

And high performance is generally about doing the best you can within the existing system. That’s why I focus on mastery. The journey from basic learning to mastery is about moving from learning the rules, to knowing how to bend and break the rules and far beyond – knowing when the rules simply don’t exist.

The most apparent evidence for this is in entrepreneurial behaviour. Top entrepreneurs are rule breakers and rule re-definers. They don’t just break their toys – they create something radically better from the pieces. Something revolutionary.

To me, that is mastery.

The Master Prac is also about excellence – and excellence is a personal quality. so you must get the learning that you personally need. How?

I’m going to let you in on a secret about our NLP Master Prac that few people are aware of.

The Master Prac syllabus allows us greater flexibility to focus the course on the areas of application that are most important to each of you. Naturally, we do this within the scope of the skills, techniques and awareness-enhancing exercises that make our NLP Master Prac such a high-level training. So participants bring their wish-lists – and finish the course feeling completely satisfied.

We ask participants to bring their NLP wish-lists. What would be on yours?

Would you like to be able to say this afterwards?

“Absolutely awesome! My ‘wish list’ goals were attained within the first 3 days. As the fundamentals of NLP were covered we moved into the mastery of NLP and the group started to create new patterns. I really felt as if I was in a pioneering development group. All of the trainers and assistants are friendly, good-humoured, down-to-earth and highly skilled. This course went way beyond what I expected. Superb value.” – Colin G Smith, NLP Master Practitioner

Go here if you want more proof.

What would you prefer now : high performance or mastery?

There is a further step beyond that level of mastery too. Let me know what you think that is in your comments on this blog.

Why?

Well, the book is all about offering the best in customer service. It’s a great book – a business classic which offers great advice. It’s highly practical and presents plenty of examples and case studies for innovative thinking about delivering a great customer experience.

So why am I left feeling angry?

This is largely because of my recent experiences with customer service representatives. Not merely poor customer service, but a thoroughly uncaring and rule-bound experience.

When did you last hear a customer services rep for a large company say “I shouldn’t really do this, but you’re a valued customer of ours, so…“  I’ll bet it’s been a while. And, sadly, many smaller companies are following suit.

You’re much more likely to hear “our policy is…” or to be referred to the fine-print these days.

“Customer Services” has become a swear word and it’s easy to see why.

To insist on having staff follow rules to the letter and still be effective requires you to have a detailed policy for everything.

Instead of endless rules, it’s much easier to empower your staff – give them permission to actually help the customer.

And there are few excuses for treating customers so poorly. The tips in POS are so straightforward and easy to implement, yet so few businesses take the time to help you to feel understood, let alone actually solve your problem.

I suppose that many businesses think that they don’t have to focus on being pleasant or helpful – they either have you under contract, or think they can keep getting more new customers.

It can be much easier to deliver a positive experience and everyone can win as a result. Think about the last product or service you recommended to a friend. I’ll bet it was light-years ahead of the ‘usual’ customer experience.

POS gives some great advice. Some highlights:

• give your customer services people the ability to make the customer happy
• have someone at a high level (i.e. accountable) involved in (or at least aware of) any complaints
• empower your staff to make good decisions

If you’re still wondering what all the fuss is about, just wait until you have an ‘issue’ with your broadband or mobile phone, or have some questions about your electricity bill.

I thoroughly recommend you read POS. It may leave you feeling angry too – and it might just help to change things for the better for all of us.

I’ve written about the ‘value of free’ before, though a recent experience has brought this back to the forefront of my awareness. A complete stranger contacted me several months ago about one of my training programs. They had decided they would “quite like to be a life coach”, so could they please attend my NLP Practitioner and Coach certification course (a £1697 value) for free!

Besides having a hell of a nerve, I think that people in that ‘free’ mindset somehow don’t understand that this business is my livelihood as well as my passion. Try pulling that sort of manoeuvre with your landlord or your bank manager and I guarantee you won’t get very far.

As I see it, there are several things wrong with the ‘free stuff’ mindset:

1) ‘Free stuff’ is less valued

In my experience, those who come to a paying seminar have invested something in themselves and are fully engaged in the process. They’re more motivated, tend to get better results and – most importantly – are inclined to practice. Those who have booked on free events I’ve run in the past are less likely to take the material seriously or even to turn up.

2) Investment constitutes a firm commitment

For example, those who invest in themselves take a therapeutic process more seriously. Statistics show that subsidised ‘free’ treatment has more no-shows than paid treatment.

3) Those who invest in themselves tend to be more involved and have specific outcomes

For example, training people within a business shows a great contrast with those who choose to attend our public courses. And the greatest contrast can be experienced when talking about outcomes. Many people treat a business training course as a ‘day away from their desk’ and that often translates into either a day off work or wasted time – neither of which is a positive way of engaging with the material. Needless to say, it’s good to get this out of the way beforehand.

4) ‘Free’ is a game that everyone has to play for the system to work

The ‘free’ mindset can be a tad selfish – “what can I get for nothing?” – but it’s important to look at the whole system to check the ecology. I would be perfectly happy to work for free if I can get free rent, free food, free clothes, transport, heating, electricity, water etc. and can live tax-free. I somehow can’t see that happening any day soon

5) There’s no such thing as a free lunch

Free material can sometimes have value, but it’s not motivated by altruism. It’s there to promote, to pitch, to up-sell, to build brand awareness or to educate, so your mileage may vary. In short, there is a lot of dross out there. Personally, I follow a principle I learned from marketing expert Mark Joyner – Don’t give something away that you couldn’t otherwise sell. It’s not a ‘free lunch’ but it does have substance – and is therefore a win/win.

Value, substance and standards

I think it’s vitally important to have standards. I feel great after delivering a training because I know that my trainees all measure up to a high standard of ability. Most of them don’t quite realise how high those standards are, because the training experience is so relaxed and fun. However, they consistently stand out from the crowd and I’m proud we could accomplish that together.

Naturally, I’m keen to promote more of that, so I’m done with ‘free for the sake of it’ and when it comes to my values, compromise is inappropriate.

As I said in Part 1 of this article, Life can be something of a teacher. However, it’s up to us which lesson we learn from life.

Look at this:

►

What does it mean to you?

You probably had an idea or maybe even several ideas ready. When I ask my students this question, I get a variety of responses. There are many meanings it could have – it’s ambiguous.

There are several things to consider about ambiguity.

I’ve heard a lot of people within the NLP community dogmatically repeat the statement “the unconscious mind processes every interpretation of an ambiguity.”

This is clearly nonsense. Let’s look at an everyday example to clarify this claim. You’ve all seen a sign like this at some point in your life:

I ask you: Have you ever thought this was an instruction to wet the paint? Probably not. However, this is one of the ‘ambiguous interpretations’ I’m told that we’re supposed to process unconsciously.

Since the supposition that we process every interpretation of an ambiguous statement is patently false, I would suggest a modification:

We process every statement for the meaning it has within the context or contexts provided.

No statement or sentence exists in isolation. It’s an over-simplification to suggest an individual word must be processed in every possible way. We derive meaning from the context, the meaning presented by the surrounding language.

The true artistry in NLP-based language is to create contexts and sub-contexts for interpretation. This is how we can train people with different needs at different levels of experience within one highly structured piece of communication.

Each person will interpret the suggestions in the context they have been led to or the context most appropriate to their current frame of reference and needs.

How do you set a context? There are many ways to do this. From a purely linguistic perspective, the surrounding information creates a congruent environment or context. The sub-context can be delivered simultaneously in the form of several complementary embedded suggestions.

Getting back to our initial example:

►

What does it mean?

Possibly a great many things.

How about this now?

It’s now easy to interpret the symbol as meaning “play” if you’re one of those who were led by the context.

It’s no longer ambiguous either. Context tends to help us resolve any ambiguity, so there is a definite skill in managing the context of your communication.

This may seem like a trivial thing to some of you, until you experience someone who presents multiple contexts masterfully within one piece of communication. At that point, ambiguity becomes useful because it is no longer a confusing barrier to understanding. It reveals multiple simultaneous messages instead.

When I train NLP, this is exactly how my communication is structured. Everyone gets the learning at different levels and in relevant contexts.

If you ever get the opportunity (as you could on our NLP Master Practitioner training) to study a well formed piece of deliberate multi-level communication, you will notice the difference between that communication and set of explicit or implicit instructions.

Bear in mind that there are more layers of complexity that permeate the communication used in NLP training and further distinctions that mark the style of training by Resourceful Change.

Experience will tell.

What I mean is that some people are demanding permission to cross a line I have set. I’m sure you know the sort of thing I mean. You set a deadline, a level of commitment or a standard of ability – and someone wants you to change it, just for them.

Take deadlines, for example. In my business, I run a series of public courses every year. In order to establish numbers and arrange or confirm a suitable venue, it’s helpful to me if people book a while in advance of the seminar. So I provide a discount as an incentive for delegates to book early enough to make this possible.

However, there’s always someone who has to push it. They want the discount, but don’t want to respect the deadline. You would probably be surprised to hear that it happens every single time. It does. Each time, there’s someone who calls or emails at (or even after) the last minute who wants to make a deal.

They don’t accept that the discount is not a right. It’s a reward for doing a specific action that I consider helpful – and therefore only a win/win outcome within the boundaries I have set. As for excuses, it’s been my experience that those who bargain hardest usually have the capital to spare.

If I was a large company with a call centre full of receptionists, such requests would be given short shrift. Since I’m a small business, I take my own calls and do not have the luxury of hiding behind ‘company policy’. In the past, I have occasionally flexed those deadlines. As the saying goes, it’s nice to be nice, but it sucks to be broke. And it’s worse still to have lost the respect of a customer before I ever met them.

Since respect is one of my top values, I have a new policy: No Exceptions.

That way, I will only attract customers who can respect my values, my time and the quality of my work. Naturally, I’m happy with that.

So is there any mileage in striking a deal? Maybe, but it has to be win/win. Everyone must benefit or you won’t get to make a second deal with that person. If you’re stuck in a win/lose mindset in this economy, business will be more like a constant battle.

I’m told frequently through the media that we’re living in financially straitened times, so if you’re buying a product from someone, then by all means negotiate. However, if you’re buying a service you need to be more careful, because too hard a deal can act as a powerful demotivator. In times such as these, many businesses are settling for far less than they should – they figure that they “need the business”. However, many other companies – those that demand respect – are actually putting their prices up!

Which do you think will still be in business in two years time? I guarantee it will be the latter.

Coming soon: In part 2, I’m going to discuss the true value of ‘free’.

That concept is ‘reverse engineering’. Normally when a person engineers something, they start with a purpose, a need or a problem and create something which embodies that purpose, satisfies that need or solves the problem.

Reverse engineering is essentially the opposite process. You start out with the finished product and go backwards, retracing the creative method to find out how it works.

This is what happens when a company like Sony produces a new gadget. A competitor buys one and takes a screwdriver to it, taking it apart in order to find out the principles behind how it works. Then they can produce their own version built on similar principles.

Suppose you were to apply this process to one of your current goals. Assume the goal is complete at some point in the future and reverse engineer the pathway to that successful accomplishment. Here are three ways of doing the ‘reverse engineering’ process.

1) The Magic Pill Scenario

I’m not sure where this method originates, though I often use it with coaching clients to get past a problem.

It involves a simple question and some imagination.

The question is this:

“If I were to give you a magic pill that meant you would wake up tomorrow with the problem completely solved, what would have changed?”

This enables them to start thinking about the problem as solvable. This also presupposes that there is a solution and that it’s possible for them to get past their current obstacle.

They are then free to discover for themselves what changes they need to make. All we have to do after that is agree on how to make those changes, set up resources and a timeframe.

Then they are completely free to move into action, knowing they are going in the right direction in an acceptable timeframe.

2) Timeline method

Imagine that your future is stretched out in front of you on a line, where days, weeks, months and years are arranged in order. One day follows another. This is a representation of your timeline – your inner sense of time. Your mind uses your timeline to plan and schedule. It’s a bit like a ‘mental diary’ or planner.

First, assume that at some point in time, you will reach your goal.

Then move forward along that timeline until you get to a point in your future where the goal is accomplished.

At this point, check that it happens in a way that you’re happy with. If it’s not okay, change it until you’re completely happy with it.

Now turn around and look back along the timeline, noticing all of the events that took place before your goal – those actions which allowed you to accomplish your goal.

Be aware of what you did each step of the way. Your mind will fill in the details as you go.

Now you know how you will get there and have a complete plan.

To make this even better, look at your new plan. Are there any distractions or unnecessary steps involved? Use your awareness of this to streamline the plan further until it is at its best.

Write down the plan and move in to action!

(For more about this method, refer to my NLP Primer on timelines)

3) The Chunkwise Method

Henry Ford once said: “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs”. He went on to prove his statement by working out all of the jobs involved in building a car and putting that knowledge to practical use. The result was the world’s first mass-produced car.

You can apply this process by breaking your goal down into a number of pieces, then subdividing those into smaller tasks. Then all you need to do to make that knowledge into a plan is to apply the three ‘power questions’.

I’ve detailed the full process below, using “creating a new ebook” as an example.

1 - Identify your goal
Example: creating a new ebook

2 - What are the major pieces needed or stages involved? (3-5 pieces)
Example: Research, Design, Writing the detailed text.

3 - what are the major pieces of each of those?
Example: Research – (Market research, Topic research)

4 - Apply three power questions to each piece :
Example: Topic research segment

A - How do you accomplish this piece?
Search internet, read relevant books, conduct studies in real world

B - How long will it take?
3 months

C - What order does this come in the bigger scheme?
After market research and before the design phase

Of course, you would go through all of the steps for each piece of every stage until you had a complete and comprehensive plan. Then you can decide if the time and effort involved are worth it. If not, you can work at ways of minimising the time taken in certain steps or do other steps in a more enjoyable or appealing way.

As a consequence of using the metaphor of reverse engineering, several strengths are revealed.

The process presupposes that the aim is possible and achievable, so we instantly bypass any doubts that could have stalled creative thoughts about a solution. If it’s really not possible, you’ll find out in the process.

You get to decide whether it’s worth it, which you can only assess fully if you know the full process involved in getting there. After all, it’s important to enjoy the journey as much as the final outcome.

You need to envision the outcome fully before you start, so you can adjust it and decide if you really want it that way. Needless to say, this saves a lot of time and effort.

Also bear in mind that none of these processes need to take very long – it’s all about finding a clear and acceptable path to your goal.

I hope these strategies are helpful in allowing you to decide on the great things you want in your future – and making them happen!

Basically, an affirmation is a carefully constructed statement that you repeat to yourself in order to create a positive change.

The idea of creating change through affirmations comes from the ‘positive thinking’ movement and is a fairly old idea.

However, few people can agree on how this seemingly magical phrase should be worded. The most commonly stated criteria are that it should be present tense, positive, personal and specific. So, in NLP terms, it must be a well-formed outcome.

However, there are certain difficulties with creating effective affirmations. The major problem is that in essence you’re supposed to tell yourself something that isn’t yet true.

Let me give you an example. Let’s talk about Mildred. Mildred weighs about 300 pounds and wants to lose weight. So she stands in front of her mirror and says “I weigh 200 pounds and look great”. That is the intended affirmation. However, she knows deep down that this isn’t true and her internal voice says something like “Oh no you don’t. You’re a big fat liar”. This is the actual affirmation.

Think about it like this: If someone in the supermarket told Mildred that she weighed 200 pounds and looked great, she would probably smack them in the mouth. It’s just not believable to her.

So if you do affirmations that way, you may spend a lot of time beating yourself up.

We all have a ‘reality strategy’ – in essence, a way of knowing what is real and what is not. We can stretch this a bit (expand our comfort zones through a learning experience) but if something falls too far outside that statement of reality, we reject it as untrue.

And affirmations that just stretch your reality a little bit run the risk of being underwhelming.

Reality Sandwich

So how can we use affirmations for something useful? My take on it is this:

In one sense, an affirmation is a form of self hypnosis. It’s a suggestion you make to yourself that you want your unconscious mind to accept as a directive or as a new ‘truth’. That sounds like self-hypnosis to me.

If you disagree, that may be because I use a broad definition of hypnosis.

So how can you make a more useful affirmation that is acceptable to your unconscious mind?

There’s a three part structure in hypnosis that is often referred to as the ‘baloney sandwich’. It goes like this:

1. I am/have X
2. I don’t want (to be) X
3. I want (to be) Y

So Mildred would say “I weigh 300 pounds. I don’t want to weigh 300 pounds. I want to weigh 200 pounds and feel great.”

So how does this work? It’s like a form of hypnotic goal-getting.

You start by stating where you currently are. This is completely acceptable to your unconscious mind because it is verifiably true. This is what hypnotists call a pacing statement.
You finish by stating where you want to be instead. This is also verifiably true because you do want that. So you are pacing the outcome too and you’ve set up the change as a journey with reasonable starting and finishing conditions.

Next, the structure contains the basis for motivation. The middle statement “I don’t want X” is affirming that you want to change from the current state of affairs – engaging your natural motivation to move away from unpleasant things. The final part contains the positive component of your motivation – the thing you want to move towards – especially if it contains how you will feel when you get there. In Mildred’s case, the towards motivation was to ‘feel great’.

Will your mind accept this chain of suggestion as an affirmation? If it’s all completely true and you’re sincere, it certainly will work.

Redefine

Yet another way of looking at affirmations is to define them more broadly. I see them as a set of principles or assumptions we consciously choose to live by.

For example, I believe that things can be easy when you know how. Think about it. Any fool can make something seem complex and difficult – by adding needless jargon, creating new levels of complexity or requiring you to take the long way round.

It takes genius to reveal the simplicity in seemingly complex things. Look at chaos theory. The fundamental idea is that there are a small number of simple rules that underlie the complexity of nature.

Look at the most famous equation of all:

e=mc²

Simple, elegant, pure genius.

So the affirmation – the principle I chose to affirm this belief – is something I look at every day on my computer screen. It says:

“If it’s difficult, you don’t really know what
you’re doing. Find out.”

This is not a suggestion per se but a reminder of what to do if life fails to match my expectations. I’ve made a conscious decision about how I want to interact with the world and this statement affirms that choice.

My advice is to look beyond the surface. Go deeper into the idea of affirmations and you will find something more profoundly useful: well-structured self-hypnotic suggestions and ways you can choose the rules of the reality you want to live.

So choose your methods carefully – you could stand at the mirror and lie to yourself or you could instead affirm a deeper truth than you ever imagined.

You decide.

When you want to improve something or add to your skill-set, your success depends on a critical phase in the following process.

1. Unconscious Competence – you can currently do what you can do, near to the level you believe is possible for you.
2. Unconscious Incompetence – You realise you can do better, but do not know how to increase your performance.
3. Conscious Incompetence – You are aware exactly where you need to improve but have no strategy for doing that, so you engage in a “trial and error” process.
4. Conscious Competence – You know where to improve and how to do that, while needing to practice and fine-tune the new model.
5. Unconscious Competence – You have internalised the new skill, to the extent that you can just do it without much thought. You are at or near the level you now believe is possible for you.

That is what happens when all goes well in a process of self-directed learning.

Critical Point

However, there is a critical phase where this natural learning process can be disrupted, preventing completion.

During the ‘conscious incompetence” phase, there is a process of trial and error. Performance can actually drop at this point, due to self-consciousness and the experimental nature of the “trial and error” process.

A crisis point can come at the greatest difference between expectation and performance – when the person’s experience is most different from their perception of how it could be.

If that difference passes beyond a threshold value (too uncomfortable/painful) the person believes the goal is not achievable and stops the trial and error. They go back to square one.

The sad fact is that they may be incredibly close to success and they will never know it.

“Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not
realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

– Thomas Edison

Avoiding Crisis

Fortunately there are several ways to prevent the crisis threshold being crossed.

Persistence in the face of adversity is one solution – a dogged determination to succeed. This involves consciously raising the ‘discomfort’ threshold. Some people will just “tough it out”.

Approaching learning with a playful attitude is a great way of reducing the self-consciousness of the trial and error phase.

Emotionally letting go of the importance of the outcome without letting go of the desire for the outcome is another way to reduce the impact of trial and error.

A comfortable environment (which includes both people and setting) is another way to encourage this phase beyond the point where crisis was an option.

Our Solution

My preferred solution is to short-circuit the critical phase by removing the need for the “trial and error” stage.

How do you do that?

You train the person in methods, skills, techniques and strategies so they do not need the trial and error. In short, you teach them how to achieve the higher performance and provide convincers that the new approach is a valid one in achieving what they wish to accomplish. Then accelerate learning to the “unconscious competence” phase.

This is why we train people

• through experience
• in a light-hearted way
• in a comfortable, relaxed environment
• using accelerated learning techniques.

This approach totally bypasses the strain and discomfort of conventional learning. By contrast, learning becomes rapid, comfortable, straightforward and fun.

About trial and error

Sometimes trial and error is a completely redundant process – “reinventing the wheel” so to speak. And sometimes you can end up with a better wheel as a result.

If you want to maximise the effectiveness of the trial and error process, I recommend coaching. Effective coaching is a great way of managing and accelerating the natural process of exploration and discovery.

To summarise:

There are better ways of learning available to you than those you are most familiar with. There are ways to train and coach for success that greatly accelerate the process and are free from the drama and crisis of conventional learning.

Think about the things you want to achieve in your life. What can you now do to achieve those quickly and easily? The choices are yours.

I realise that this pattern has now become widespread, with many large companies investing in new customers to the extent that existing business is largely neglected. Customer support has gone from bad to worse to utterly intolerable in many cases. I’ve heard a lot of horror stories, yet that seems to be just a drop in the ocean.

Why do we put up with this? How can companies operate, or even prosper under such conditions? The answer may surprise you. Our basic drives are being exploited.

Which drives exactly? Famously, Virginia Satir (one of the original experts modelled with NLP) said that our strongest drive was for familiarity. It’s there in the language – “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” is just one example. Think of the idea of a ‘comfort zone’ too – it describes the range of behaviours and situations in which we are comfortable. Largely, we are most comfortable with the familiar and the known. Conversely we tend to be uncomfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown.

Changing from one company to another is often painful too. It requires effort, the exploration of new options and (most recently) substantial amounts of paperwork and time. Think about it. How much effort would it take for you to move to a new bank, mortgage or telephone provider, for example?

We often only move from the familiar when the situation reaches a breaking point. This is defined as the point when the pain of staying where you are becomes significantly greater than the pain of undergoing a change.

You may also have sunk costs – you may have spent time, invested money or developed systems that rely on staying exactly where you are. Many people focus on these costs and stay stuck. However, this is faulty thinking. If you focus on the full costs – how much more it could cost you to stay where you are in the long term and compare that to the full costs of change, the truth becomes apparent.

It’s best to notice the trends and have a way of creating the positive change before you reach the breaking point, though. The NLP-trained are well-equipped to apply their awareness and skills toward this purpose. How?

I set the boundaries for my decisions and contacted the web hosting provider with a simple request and achievable deadlines for fulfilment. This created the context for a clear and comfortable change. Their response was to merely close the support request.

So I changed my web hosting provider last week and moved nine sites to a new company. It wasn’t anywhere near as difficult as I’d been led to believe and I have a better, well-supported service for substantially less cost.

Many people would wonder at this point why they had left it so long to change. Yet you and I know the answer and that allows us to do things differently in future.

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