Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Published in 2003 and Copyright: TRANSFORMATIONS International Consulting & Training 26 Southampton Street, Christchurch 8002, New Zealand Phone/Fax: +64-3-337-1852 E-mail: learn@transformations.net.nz Website: http://www.transformations.net.nz
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003
ii
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 iii
Create absolute commitment and test it at each step of your training. Ensure students memorise several times what they thought they could, using advanced accelerated learning processes. Make sure that what your students learn actually transforms their daily lives. 10. Training Questions Invite exactly the questions you need to make sure your students learn enthusiastically. Identify what type of question needs what type of answer, and know when it is best not to answer directly at all. Use student questions as opportunities to create personal breakthroughs in learning. 11. Revealing State Secrets To Teachers Get students quickly into the state of mind where learning happens automatically. Use the powerful storytelling techniques of stand-up comedians and stage hypnotists to totally entrance your audience. 12. Providing Heroic Challenges On Trainings Take participants through powerful, life changing experiences that prove beyond doubt that your training is working for them. Learn the secrets of firewalking and breaking a board with your bare hand, and guide participants through such events confidently. 13. Learning Games Dissolve the illusory boundary between learning and fun. Develop activities that ensure core concepts are learned while you play. Make the most fun times in your students lives the times when they learned most. 14. Transforming Conflict In Training Identify the precise communication skills which will be most effective in each exact situation. Learn how to ensure that most conflicts simply dont occur, by building co-operation from first contact, before the course starts. Resolve any remaining conflicts so that you get what you need and your students are delighted. Turn disagreements into learning events that your students thank you for. 15. Metaprogram Flexibility Motivate students however extreme their personality seemed. Help students use their own way of doing things to learn easily and to be convinced that they have indeed learned. Discover your own learning and teaching style and develop flexibility with it. 16. Evaluating The Evaluator Become 100% clear about how to check that your training is getting the results that you and your clients want to get. Design evaluations so they increase learning and simultaneously solve any learning problems they uncover. 17. Producing Excellence
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003
iv
Know the crucial difference between teaching beginners and teaching experts, and design training that works for each group. Know what to teach and what not to teach, depending on the skill level of your participants. Take students beyond information collection to expertise.
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003
Dilts, we are in the business of creating a world that people want to live in. If you love this world, if you love humanity, if you love that which holds the world in the palm of its hand, then using these NLP skills will give you a voice to sing with, and the fuel to ignite an eternal flame. Go out to the end of your life, look back to now, and you will see what vast forces you summoned by making this choice. And before I tell you the details, the how of what NLP trainers do, I want to talk about the decision itself. Just as there may be few decisions that could deliver such a sense of destiny in your life, so too, there are few decisions that will ask as much of you. To me, being a trainer is not a step on your path. It is a path in itself. Perhaps you have heard what the Yaqui Indian teacher Don Juan said to Carlos Castaneda about paths. Anything is one of a million paths [un carnino entre cantidades de carninos]. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor's question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you. (Castaneda, 1990, p 106). Is using NLP in training a path with a heart? Only you can answer; only you can walk it. First of all, let me begin by telling you what NLP actually is. Where did it come from, and what does it offer you as a teacher. Teachers need more than knowledge of their subject!
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003
From the 1950s to the 1980s, psychologist Virginia Satir was one of the most influential developers in the new field of Human Relationships. Often called the grandmother of Family Therapy, Satir assisted thousands of married couples and families to resolve old conflicts and create a more enjoyable life together. In her field, she was an expert, but Satir had one problem - she couldnt teach what she did to others. Hundreds of people trained with her, but when they left her seminars, they were usually unable to copy what she had done. One day Satir was demonstrating in front of a group of student psychotherapists. She stopped talking to the couple she was working with, and asked if any of her students could carry on, using her methods. On by one, students tried to help the couple, but none of them seemed to know how Virginia chose what to say. At the back of the room, a young man was tape recording the training session. He was Richard Bandler, a computer programmer and a graduate student of linguistics at the University of California, and he had no training in psychology. Finally, after Satirs students had failed, Bandler came to the front of the room and offered to talk to the couple. Amazingly, he seemed to know exactly how Virginia was constructing her questions and suggestions to the couple. Listening to him was like listening to her. The psychotherapists were puzzled. Who was this young man, and how had he learned Satirs method so precisely? In 1976 Richard Bandler and Professor of Linguistics John Grinder wrote the first of several books explaining their discoveries about communication, human change, and teaching. Their first book, called The Structure of Magic (Bandler and Grinder, 1975) explained that by understanding the inner languages of the brain (neuro-linguistics) anyone could learn to achieve the excellent results of the most expert communicators, teachers and therapists. Before publication, Bandler and Grinder showed the transcripts of their books to the experts whose skills they had modelled, people like medical doctor/hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and of course Virginia Satir. Satirs comments, which I will quote from later, convey the excitement which teachers around the world have been reporting ever since, as they learn the structure of the magic of Neuro Linguistic Programming. What NLP Offers Teachers For teachers, NLP offers three important benefits. Firstly, it provides a new model of how people learn. NLPs precise understanding of the way the
brain works can be compared to a computer Users Manual. Without the manual, you know that the computer has a vast memory and can do amazing things. If you play around with it eventually youll manage to stumble on some of those things. But with the manual, you can choose exactly what you want to do, and have the computer do it perfectly every time. In NLP, we know the programs (or strategies to use the NLP term) which naturally excellent learners have accidentally stumbled on: the strategy perfect spellers use to memorise words; the strategy enthusiastic readers use to speed read their books in a fraction of the time, and so on. Secondly, though, human beings are more than computers. Learning and creativity work best when the students mind is free from distraction, when it has an almost meditative calmness and alertness. Research shows that having students relax at the start of each teaching session will increase their learning by 25%. (Jenson, 1994, p. 178). NLP delivers us some remarkable new ways to get students quickly into that state. If NLP only provided these powerful new ways for students to learn, it would already deserve its place at the centre of the learning revolution. But NLP also provides a whole new model of what teaching is, of how the most effective teachers are able to create a sense of rapport with their students, motivate them, and inspire them to achieve their best. In a world where the teacher competes for students attention with television, video games and popular culture, that is no small achievement. NLP shows you how to utilise your every move, and your every word so that they support you in getting your students to believe in and be hungry for learning. NLP is not one technique; it is a field generating hundreds of techniques, and the framework that makes sense of them. This chapter gives just an introductory sample of the ideas you can take advantage of in teaching. With these basic concepts, the rest of the book, on NLP training techniques, will be accessible. I strongly recommend getting reputable NLP training experience to support you in actually using these techniques successfully. Making Sense of Learning Here is a simple experiment which explains the NLP model of how your neurology (or to use less formal language, your brain) works ... Think of a fresh lemon. Imagine one in front of you now, and feel what it feels like
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003
as you pick it up. Take a knife and cut a slice off the lemon, and hear the slight sound as the juice squirts out. Smell the lemon as you lift the slice to your mouth and take a bite of the slice. Taste the sharp taste of the fruit. If you actually imagined doing that, you mouth is now salivating. Why? Because your brain followed your instructions and thought about, saw, heard, felt, smelled and tasted the lemon. Your brain treated the imaginary lemon as if it was real, and prepared saliva to digest it. Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting are the natural languages of your neurology. When you use these languages, your neurology treats what youre thinking about as real. In the past, some teachers thought that learning was just a matter of thinking about the subject, of using words. But when students learn, they are using the five basic senses, as well as the sixth language of the brain - words. In NLP the six languages of the brain are called: Visual Auditory Olfactory Gustatory Kinesthetic Auditory digital (seeing pictures or images) (feeling body sensations) (smelling fragrances) (tasting flavours) (feeling body sensations) (thinking in words or concepts)
of the main senses (if you dont see the point of this, you may not have been picking up a key way to get on the same wavelength as your more challenging students). When you use all these main three senses in your classroom teaching, your students brains will be far more fully activated. They will thirst for your teaching just as your mouth watered for that lemon. The Right Sense For The Job How do polyglots (people who speak a number of different languages fluently) remember which of a dozen languages each word comes from? Is it magic? In the past many people have assumed that there might be something different in the polyglots neurology; something that made them naturally more able to keep each language separate. Actually, NLP studies (Dilts and Epstein, 1995, p. 222) show that polyglots are paying special attention to their auditory and kinesthetic sensory systems. They use a different tone of voice and different set of body postures for each language. Someone who only uses their visual system (and tries to picture each word they say, as if it is written down) will not find it as easy to become fluent in multiple languages. Just as the Windows software can be installed in any compatible computer, so the strategy that polyglots use can actually be installed in any other person. If its possible in one persons neurology, its possible in anyones. All we need to know is exactly which sensory distinctions the first person uses, and in which sequence. To install a new strategy, NLP uses a series of groundbreaking discoveries about what happens when a person uses each sensory system. For example, we use the fact that a persons eyes move differently depending on which sense they are getting information from. Just how easily a new learning strategy can be installed is shown by a piece of research done at the University of Moncton in Canada. (Dilts and Epstein, 1995, p. 409). Here four groups of pretested average spellers were given the same spelling test (using made up nonsense words they had not seen before). Each group had different instructions. Group A was simply told to learn the words. Group B was told to visualise the words as a method of learning them.The two other groups were told to look in a certain direction while they visualised. Group C was told to look up to the left (an eye position which NLP claims will help visual memory).
Some students do a lot of thinking in words (auditory digital). They want to know the information youre telling them. But for other students, being able to picture what youre showing them (visual) is more important. Others will want to tune in to the main themes behind your words (auditory) or come to grips with the lesson and work through some examples (kinesthetic). If you listen to the words students use, they will actually tell you which is their favourite sensory system for representing their learning in (called in NLP their preferred Representational System). Effective teachers learn to speak in each of the representational systems. (Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998, p 124-125). NLP gives you a number of ways to reach the learners you have in your classroom. If there are some of your students who just dont seem to learn, you may not be teaching to the sense they think in most. For example, to reach visual learners, you may want to write words up on the board, and draw more diagrams. To reach auditory learners, you may choose more discussions and use music. Kinesthetic learners like to move around (youve probably noticed them in the class already), and they will appreciate your use of activities like role plays. You can adjust your language to match each
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003
Group D were told to look down to the right (an eye position which NLP claims will help feeling kinesthetically, but may hinder visualising). Group A scored the same as their pretest. Group B scored 10% better. Group C scored 20-25% better. Group D scored 15% worse! This study supports two NLP claims: a) the eye position a learner uses decides which sensory system they can effectively process information in; and b) Visual recall is the best sensory system for learning spelling in English. Even more exciting, it demonstrates that students can be successfully taught (in 5 minutes) to use the most effective sensory strategy. For a kinesthetic learner who had been a poor speller, this would result in an instant improvement of 3540%. Interestingly, in a final test some time later (testing retention), the scores of Group C remained constant, while the scores of the control group, Group A, plummeted a further 15%, a drop which was consistent with standard learning studies. The final difference in memory of the words for these two groups was 61% . In the same way, any learning strategy can be modelled from expert learners and taught to others in a minimum of time. The State Where Learning Naturally Occurs Research bears out the belief of accelerated learning experts that students ability to memorise new information is increased by over 25% simply by having them enter a relaxed state (e.g. Jensen, 1994, p. 178). Learning new information is not so much a result of studious concentration by the conscious mind, as it is a result of relaxed almost unconscious attention. Children learn nursery rhymes and television commercial songs, not by studying them consciously, but by just relaxing while they are sung. You ride a bike, not by thinking about your balance at each moment, but by trusting your unconscious responses. What NLP offers the teacher is the skill to quickly and unobtrusively invite students into this relaxed state. The NLP skills which achieve this were modelled from Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. They are similar to the techniques developed in Suggestopaedia from Hypnotherapist Georgi Lozanov. An NLP practitioner learns to talk in such a way that students relax, without having to use formal relaxation techniques (You are getting more and more relaxed; your toes are relaxed, your feet are relaxed ... etc). The result is like switching your students memories into top gear within minutes of them walking into the room (see Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998, p 27-28 for an example of this relaxation process).
One of the key ways NLP uses to get your students into a learning state of mind is anchoring. Heres an example of what I mean by anchoring. Sometimes when youre listening to the radio, you hear a song you havent heard for many years, a song that was a favourite of yours back then. When you hear it, all the feeling of what it was like back then may come back to you; even the sound of old voices and the image of those favourite places may re-emerge. The song has anchored you back into that state. In the same way, if you revisit your old school, it will anchor you back to the feeling of being at that school (not always as positive as the song!). Once you understand this process, you can design powerful anchors which instantly get your students feeling confident, curious and eager to learn. Even playing the same tune at the start of each of your classes will help to get your students quickly into the mind-set for your subject (Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998, p 24-25). Communicating Your Enthusiasm For Learning Earlier this century, successful salespeople were considered to have a sort of inexplicable charisma, a personal magnetism that made others buy from them. We now know that this charisma can be taught. When new executives learn the body language, and speech patterns of expert salespeople, their own sales begin to rise. In the past, these kind of skills have not been available to teachers. My belief as an NLP Trainer is that teachers have even more right to be skilled at motivating people than sales staff. Just as no modern company would leave its sales staff untrained in this area, no school can afford not to teach its teachers how to motivate students. In a sense, we are salespeople for the future. The life we and our children will enjoy, depends on our ability to inspire and enthuse them with a love of learning. NLP is continuously developing and expanding new teaching techniques such as metaphor, positional and music-based anchoring, and mind maps. But NLP is much more than The most important communications toolbox of the decade. (Jensen, 1994). It is a whole new way of thinking about teaching in particular, and communication in general. In this new way, teaching is a process of building rapport and then leading (Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998, p68-72). Rapport is the feeling of shared understanding that good friends and business colleagues sometimes build. It results in a genuine eagerness to co-
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003
operate and follow each others lead. If you remember a time when you really admired a teacher and had fun in her/his class, you know the feeling of rapport. You probably became interested in the things your teacher was interested in, and were highly motivated to follow their suggestions. Rapport is created by matching your students behaviour. That means doing activities together with them, using examples that are already interesting to them, using their preferred sensory system when you teach them, using similar gestures and body positions to them, adjusting your voice to a similar speed and tone, even breathing in time with them. If these things seem a little strange at first, notice that you do them naturally with your own close friends. Wherever people build rapport, they match each others behaviour. Leading is the process of inviting students to follow your suggestions. If you have rapport, students will do this easily. Once, teachers would have said that students who dont follow their suggestions were resistant or disobedient. It makes more sense to realise that when students dont follow your leading, it just means they arent enough in rapport with you yet. Thats something you can change, when you learn NLP rapport skills. Successful teachers are also good at using their language to elegantly invite students to learn and change. When we study skilled teachers, we find them using their language with care to create the kind of internal representations (pictures/sounds/feelings etc) they want their students to have. In order to understand what you say, your students make internal representations of your words. Heres an example. If I say to you Dont think of a juicy lemon!, in order to understand my sentence, you first make an internal representation of a juicy lemon. If I add ... and dont taste the tang of that lemon now! your mouth may begin to water -even though I told you not to. When teachers say Dont forget to do your homework!, students have to imagine forgetting it. Their brain is thus more likely to forget. If you want to suggest that your students do their homework, the thing to say is not Dont forget ..., its Remember your homework. Skilled teachers structure their every word so that it produces the representation they want their students to have. This art, called Suggestion in hypnosis, is very powerful. I wouldnt want to suggest that you want to learn about suggestion now though, because you can do that when you read the rest of this book.
Reframing (changing the meaning of an experience by describing it differently) and metaphor (telling stories to offer students new choices) are other examples of how skilled teachers use their language to have students create useful internal representations (OConnor and Seymour, 1994, p.; 182). For example, many students believe that the more mistakes they make, the worse their learning is. As a metaphor, I often tell them about Thomas Edison, who tried 10,000 different materials before finding the one that would make an electric light work. He said that this was the real key to his brilliant invention; that he was willing to find 9,999 things that didnt make a light go. Mistakes are the secret of genius! (That last sentence is a reframe. It changes the meaning of mistakes). Metaprograms In building rapport, as we mentioned, you match the behaviours and thinking styles of your students. Different styles of processing information are called metaprograms in NLP, because they are the programs that run other programs in the brain. One example weve discussed already is the metaprogram of sensory preference (whether a student prefers to think in visual, auditory or kinesthetic). This metaprogram decides which more specific learning programs (strategies) the person is likely to use. Another metaprogram which is essential to understand in terms of teaching is the preference for details and specific facts versus the preference for overviews and generalisations. Some students find it easier to think in more general terms (to chunk up in NLP jargon). Some find it easier to deal with specific facts and examples (to chunk down). If you start teaching details to a student who chunks up, theyll be frustrated because they dont know where this fits in the big picture. If you only teach in general concepts, the person who chunks down will have difficulty understanding what specifically they are supposed to do with all these general ideas. Successful teachers, of course, have the flexibility to shift from overview to detail, from concept to example, and back again. They can match each metaprogram, as needed. Multiple Perspectives One of the fundamental ideas of NLP is that it can be useful to consider any event from different perspectives. Different perspectives change the meaning of an event (reframe it). For example, when a student says I cant learn the writing methods they teach us at school. NLP trainer Robert Dilts points out that you could respond to this at a number of different neurological levels
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003
depending on which word or phrase in the sentence you attend to. 1) The final phrase they teach us at school. refers to the Environment where the problem happens. One way to create change is to change the environment (eg by finding a different teacher or a different school). Often this is the first level of change that students want to try. 2) The phrase the writing methods refers to the specific Behaviours which the student is unable to do. Change can be created at this level (eg by showing the student how to do those specific writing methods). Often this is the first level of change that teachers want to try. 3) The word learn refers to the Capabilities which the student would need in order to solve the problem. More profound change can be achieved at this level (eg by showing the student new learning strategies). 4) The word cant refers to the level of Beliefs and Values. It would be the same if the student said I dont want to learn the writing methods they teach us at school. dont want to is a Beliefs and Values level issue. Fundamental changes can occur for students when they resolve issues at this level (eg by changing their beliefs about what is possible). 5) The deepest level in the statement is the level of the word I, the level of Identity. At this level, change can occur by giving the student a new experience of who they are as a person (eg the experience of themselves as a good learner). Many of our attempts to get students to change do not work because change needs to occur at this much more profound level. Another NLP model for thinking about different perspectives is the model of Perceptual Positions. NLP co-developer John Grinder points out that in an interaction between myself as the teacher, and a student, I can consider the interaction in three ways. 1) I can stay in my own body, listening through my own ears and looking through my own eyes. This is called First Perceptual Position. It gives me useful information about my own opinions and choices. As a teacher, if I just go with my students ideas then I become unassertive, and I am unable to convey the understandings that I have. I need to be able to use First Position because often I have important information that my students do not. 2) I can, in my imagination, step into the other persons body, and listen through their ears, and look through their eyes. This Second
Perceptual Position gives me more information about the effects of my actions on the student. It also gives me a sense of where they are coming from. If I only used First Position, I would not notice whether they understood me; Id be preoccupied with my own fascination with the subject. As a teacher, Second Position helps me to know how to effectively explain things so that they make sense to this particular student, with their current level of knowledge. 3) I can, in my imagination, step out of my body to a neutral spot, separate from both the student and myself. This Third Perceptual Position gives me valuable information about the system of interaction between the student and myself. I dont get caught up in conflicts or misunderstandings so easily here. As a teacher, I can monitor our relationship, the class climate and the consequences of my actions more objectively from here. NLP: A New Field and A Tool For Our Profession As you read the above descriptions, you may have thought Well, I already do some of that. Thats part of why NLP is so powerful. NLP will help you to identify what you already do well, so you can repeat it even with the most difficult students, and the most challenging subject matter. And thats why Virginia Satir, one of the first teachers studied by NLP, said in her foreword to The Structure of Magic (Bandler and Grinder, 1975): It would be hard for me to write this Foreword without my own feeling of excitement, amazement and thrill coming through. I have been a teacher of family therapy for a long time .... I have a theory about how I make change occur. The knowledge of the process is now considerably advanced by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who can talk in a way that can be concretised and measured about the ingredients of the what that goes into making the how possible. (Satir, in Bandler and Grinder, 1975, p. Viii).
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003
On Becoming A Trainer
Mission In the 1990s I had the privilege of teaching core NLP processes to psychiatrists in BosniaHerzegovina. To be teaching a group of dedicated health professionals these skills in the main hospital of a national health system was itself a breakthrough for me as an NLP trainer. To be providing training which could help survivors of one of the great human tragedies of the twentieth century was more than that. It gave me a sense of connection to history. When they are asked a year later, 80% of my NLP Practitioner graduates rate their NLP training as one of their lifes most rewarding experiences. This rating, it should be noted, does not occur in the heat of excitement as they are certified. It comes after a year of testing out NLP in the real world. The same NLP that you are learning here. At that time, 95% say it has improved their ability to reach career goals, and 100% say it has had specific and practical value for many aspects of their life. I have trained over 1000 NLP Practitioners as of this date. Being an NLP trainer enabled me to provide perhaps 800 of those people with one of their lifes most rewarding experiences. Being an NLP trainer enables me to offer experiences which measurably change lives. Transforming Communication is a 26 hour seminar applying NLP to conflict resolution. I teach the basic seminar and also train instructors around the world. After doing this seminar people sometimes weep tears of joy as they tell me how their closest relationships have benefited from these profound skills. When I look at what has happened in Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in East Timor, in so many other places over the last decades, I strongly believe that I am teaching What The World Needs Now. In other words, being a trainer is just a qualification, but that qualification has facilitated me doing some of the most rewarding things I could ever imagine doing. As a trainer, Id recommend you think now about what your mission in life is. You might ask If I was at the end of this lifetime, and looking back, what would be the one thing which would make this life truly meaningful? This is one simple way to elicit information about your mission. Another way is to think back over your life, and notice what it is that, whatever external situation you are in, you find yourself contributing positively. What is it that you give to the world, wherever you are working, or whichever group you are with? A third way of
clarifying your mission is to think of three people that you admire, and ask yourself what it is that made their life meaningful (after all, if you admire them, probably you recognise something of your own mission in their life). If training is to work for you, I believe that the link from your training to your mission needs to be direct and undeniable. Then, everything you do as a trainer celebrates and is a tribute to your life mission. Perhaps you already have a metaphorical image that expresses the mission which you express through your work training. You may think of it as exploration on the final frontier; an ongoing mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no-one has gone before. You may think of teaching as a spiritual gift. The famous Prayer of Francis of Assisi says Lord, let me be an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury pardon, where there is discord unity. Where there is darkness light. (Cunningham, 1972, p 223). If you want to be truly happy with what life offers, it is hard to find a more precious gift to pray for, and training could be thought of as a way to answer that prayer. On the other hand, you may think of training as the ultimate team sport. Joining a team worth playing with enables you to tackle some of lifes biggest challenges, to develop a game plan for the new millennium, and to score some of the most extraordinary and exhilarating experiences available anywhere. Take the time to identify the metaphorical associations you have when you think of training, and to adjust them so that they support your mission. An Overview of The Training Process I use the word TRAINER as a mnemonic for the collection of skills and understandings which enable you to be a successful trainer. Tempting people: Before you begin teaching in the training room, there is another form of educating you need to do. That is educating people about your existence and the advantages of the trainings you offer. This includes clarifying your mission (see above), and marketing, which is the subject of Chapter 3 (Where Are All The students). Redesigning courses: Even if you know the basic structure of the courses you will run, each training has its own unique design process. The second step of your task as a trainer is to plan the particular training you want. Harnessing the chaos of a training to deliver the experiences you hoped for is
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003
the subject of Chapter 4 (Chaos and Order in Teaching NLP). Arranging Success: How you begin your training shapes the rest of the experience profoundly. The initial arrangements are worth thinking through in detail. In Chapter 5 (Making It Happen) I give some suggestions for checklists, to ensure the logistics of your training supports you. In Chapter 6 (Preframing) and Chapter 7 (The First Hour) I talk about how to begin a training in the way you intend to carry on. Instructing students: Explaining things so that students understand them is often considered the core of training. I think about how to do this in Chapter 8 (Mind Your Language) and Chapter 9 (Educated Commitment). Chapter 10 (Training Questions) particularly deals with the art of encouraging and responding to questions. Nourishing Changes: Training is about much more than transferring information though. Its about helping people access resourceful learning states, helping them install new strategies at the conscious and unconscious level, and ensuring the learning climate supports them fully. In Chapter 11 (Revealing State Secrets To Teachers), Chapter 14 (Transforming Conflict in Training) and Chapter 15 (Metaprogram Flexibility) I look much more at the climate in which training occurs. Chapter 12 (Providing Heroic Challenges On Trainings) and Chapter 13 (Learning Games) give you a range of dramatic choices for nourishing changes in inspiring and fun ways. Evaluating Learning: From the time you begin training, you are involved in the process of assessing participants success and change. This is the subject of Chapter 16 (Evaluating the Evaluator). Renewing Commitments: The official end of a training may not be the end of your input as a trainer. When you understand the learning process, you can function more fully as a facilitator of participants path towards expertise. While building ongoing commitment was discussed in Chapter 3, we will consider how to support students progress beyond training in Chapter 17 (Producing Excellence). Embodying the Presuppositions of NLP Living as an NLP trainer means living with the core presuppositions of NLP. NLP is based on certain assumptions about the world. This entire book could be thought of as a set of explorations of how to install the presuppositions of NLP into your training. The International NLP Association lists eight fundamental presuppositions which are made in NLP. 1. Outcome orientation with respect for others models of the world and the ecology of the
system. NLP is not a model where we just do something and hope for the best. As a trainer using NLP skills, you will set outcomes (goals) for your trainings and for each learning experience you invite people into. These outcomes will then be checked at the end of the process. This outcome orientation of NLP is expressed in the chapters The First Hour and Evaluating the Evaluator. The concept of respect for others models of the world, and respect for the ecology of their lives (the interrelationship between all aspects of their lives) is explored in Transforming Conflict in Training. 2. Distinction between map and territory. The model of the world that each of us forms in our head is not the same as the actual world we live in, and never can be. Any map is only an approximate model of the territory. The limitations that our students experience are not usually a result of absolute limitations in the territory of their life; they are a result of the limitations in their map of that life. Accepting that the map is not the territory (even this map of NLP) is what makes NLP such an open and constantly evolving discipline. This presupposition was first clearly stated by Alfred Korzybski (who coined the term neurolinguistics in 1933) and it is discussed more fully in the chapter Metaprogram Flexibility and the chapter Transforming Conflict in Training. 3. There is only feedback (cybernetic) - no failure. The developers of NLP were particularly interested in the creation of a systems model for human interaction. Systems theory was developed by theorists such as mathematician Norbert Wiener (Cybernetics, 1948), and biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (General Systems Theory, 1968), as a way of explaining the structure of communication and control in both machines and living animals. Systems explanations are now familiar in biology. For example, heat regulation in the body is systemic. The heat regulation centre in the brain monitors body temperature. When body temperature is too high, the heat regulation centre causes blood vessels in the skin to dilate. With more blood flow to the skin, heat radiates out from the body more, and perspiration increases. The body cools. Once it finds that the temperature is too low, the heat regulation centre causes the blood vessels in the skin to constrict. There is no temperature which represents failure; all results are simply feedback about what to do next. This presupposition is embodied in the notion of Preframing as well as in the types of assessment discussed in Evaluating the Evaluator. 4. The meaning of your communication is the response you get. People often complain that, while they communicate well, others dont
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003
understand their meaning. In NLP we remind ourselves that its more important to know what response (feedback) our communication gets, than to claim that we intended something else. We can then take responsibility for adjusting our communication to elicit a more useful response. The chapter Preframing: Giving Your Teaching The Perfect Setting discusses one important example of the presupposition that the meaning of communication is the response you get, and shows how to adjust your communication to ensure you get the desired response. 5. The adaptive intent of all behaviour. In a system, every behaviour is generated in an attempt to meet some useful goal for the system. Feedback may show later that the behaviour was not ideally designed to get the result desired. Nonetheless, every behaviour has, at some level, an adaptive intent (a goal of helping the system survive). The Transforming Conflict in Training model particularly emphasises the adaptive intent of all human behaviour. Rather than thinking that others behave in the way they do to annoy me or to be obstructive, it can be more useful for me to understand that their behaviour was an attempt to meet their own inner goals. 6. Everyone has the necessary resources. In NLP the metaphor of a TV set is sometimes used to explain this concept. Imagine that you brought a new TV set home and turned it on, and found that all you saw and heard was static. Rather than throw it away, youd probably first of all check if it was tuned in. The TV set may work perfectly, and not be tuned in to receive anything useful. Actually, you cant tell whether it is working or not. However, the assumption that it could work enables you to do the most useful things to get the results you want. The notion that people have all the resources they need is embodied in the subject of many of the chapters here, including Teaching NLP: How To Be Consciously Unconsciously Skilled and Educated Commitment. 7. Resistance is a signal of insufficient pacing. When I suggest something, and the person does not follow my lead, traditional change agents would describe this as a result of something in the person (they are resisting). We could more usefully think of it as a result of something in my approach to the person, which didnt fully match the persons experience. If I pace their experience better, I make it easier for them to follow my lead. Resistance is just feedback about my pacing. The presupposition that resistance is just a sign of insufficient rapport is actualised by the use of the skills described in the chapters The First Hour, Metaprogram Flexibility and Transforming Conflict in Training.
8. The law of requisite variety. This is a key law of systems theory. It says that in responding to feedback, a system needs to have enough variety of responses to cope with the potential variety of situations it will cope with. The more uncertain the situation is, the more variety the system needs. The chapters Chaos and Order in Teaching NLP, Preframing and Metaprogram Flexibility are based around this recognition of the need to generate adequate variety of responses in the complex, even chaotic situation of training. Reading This Book Reading this book is not something you do in preparation for training. It is part of your training process. Training doesnt begin when you stand up in front of the group; it began when you made the decision to be a trainer. For this reason, Id encourage you to embody the presuppositions of NLP in your use of the book. Identify what you want to get out of reading the book; your outcome. Complete the exercises at the end of each chapter in order to actually install the strategies being described. Examine your maps and mine, in order to take advantage of the opportunity to build more useful models for what you are doing. Being a trainer is exciting. Allow yourself to feel that now! Managing Your Own State With NLP Joseph OConnor says that NLP co-developer John Grinder was once asked what were the most useful things for a trainer to pay attention to. Grinder replied (OConnor and Seymour, 1994, p 103) First pay attention to your own state. Second, pay attention to your own state. And third, pay attention to your audiences state. Maintaining a resourceful state is close to the heart of being an NLP trainer. From the last chapter, on NLP, you already know a great deal about maintaining a useful state. To take just three examples, you could use 1) resource anchors, 2) chaining anchors, and 3) parts reframing. 1) You know how to re-call powerful positive states from your past experience (from times when you have been utterly inspired, times you have been living your mission to the full, times when you have had an abundance of confidence, passion, vision, fluidity with words and sheer joy). You can easily create resource anchors for these states, and take them into training (as described in the last chapter). You could, for example, access one of those states, and then hold a whiteboard pen in your hand, as you feel how easy it will be to transfer that feeling to any situation where you have that kind of pen in your hand. You could take music or inspiring pictures that already help you
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 10
access one of those states, and bring them into your training room. 2) You can also understand how to design chains of anchored states to shift you from a sense of overwhelm to a sense of integration, from a sense of anxiety to a sense of confidence, from a sense of stuckness to a sense of clarity and passion. You might identify, for example, that anxiety is a state you have been cued into in training, and resourceful confidence is the state youd like to replace that with. Perhaps for you, the state of anxiety is close to the state of uncertainty, which is close to the state of curiosity, which is close to the state of exploration, which is close to the state of confident teaching. You could then anchor each of these states by pressing on one of the knuckles of your left hand as you experience it. Not only could you then chain these five states together so that each triggers the next in line, but you could also use what NLP calls a visual swish to take you from being associated into the first state to stepping into the next state and so on. Instructions for this combined Swish-Anchor chain follow this chapter. 3) You can also take any part of you that thought there was some reason to be less than totally supportive of your training, and chunk up (get more generalised) until you find its higher intention so that you can have a completely integrated commitment to excellence as a trainer. For example, lets imagine that a part of you was able to get you into a panic just before training. If you ask this part what its intention is in getting you into a panic, you might sense that it is trying to avoid embarrassment. So youd then ask it, And if I avoid embarrassment fully and completely, what even more important thing do I get through that? If it said Safety, youd ask it So if I have safety fully and completely what even more important thing do I get through having that? It might well then tell you Relaxation. You could then ask that part to fully consider that Anything less than completely letting go of that panic is not fully allowing you the relaxation that you actually intend for me. All this will only work when you use it, of course. One of the most useful preparations you could make for training is to arrange with someone to do an NLP breakthrough session and use NLP change processes to support you becoming all the things you want to be as a trainer. Useful Internal Representations, Useful Physiology When you are training, you want useful internal representations. Lets contrast useful and less useful representations for a moment here. Seeing
yourself critically, as if from the audiences position (second position), is a less useful representation for most of the time when you are training. Seeing the audience as an impersonal mass of eyes assessing you is a less useful representation. Useful representations include seeing the audience as individuals, who come to your training with their own uncertainties that you can alleviate for them, and their own dreams which you will help them fulfil. Useful representations include seeing the changes you are inspiring people to make in the future, and seeing the kind of things that have inspired you in your own life as a learner. Listen to your internal voice talking about how significant this teaching will be when people really experience it in their lives, and hear the passionate congruence with which you want to tell them that. When a skilled trainer is teaching, they are in what has been called in NLP an uptime trance. When I listen to audiotapes of my best teaching, I sometimes wonder how I will ever manage to remember to say all those great things next time. Actually, the best things just spill out, because in our best teaching we are un-self-conscious. We are enjoying what we are doing. Its like talking to a friend about something which we feel passionate about. There is no doubt that this happens more when you have taught the same content again and again. Getting a job teaching in a school or Community College type situation is a great way to build up your skill. Once you have taught something a few times, youll find that each sentence you say prompts the next, and you dont need to keep checking your notes to work out where you are. You then have so much more free attention to give to listening to the needs of specific trainees and to assessing the current group. In paying attention to your own state, it also helps to notice your physiology (how you use your body). Rocking from side to side, constantly using only one hand to gesture, remaining rigidly still in one place, and making grimaces unrelated to the teaching content are amongst the non-verbal leaking that happens when a person is not fully congruent or together (perhaps for as simple a reason as that they are wondering if they know what they know, at the same time as trying to teach it). The relaxed and congruent state has an associated balance in physical position, with the use of integrated left-right gestures. Simply changing your facial expression to a smile, as you teach, makes a dramatic difference to your state. When you look at your notes, if you choose to, you can do so with a facial expression of curiosity as if thinking What amazing thing will I tell them next. The anxious trainer has a kind of tunnel vision, and so does not see the waving hand of a questioner, slightly off centre in the room. The
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 11
relaxed speaker has their jaw slightly open and relaxed when at rest, and their eyes are in peripheral vision, the slightly defocused state where movements out of the corner of your eyes are easily noticed. Energy For Training Another way of thinking about being an NLP trainer is to use the metaphor of energy. A trainer is a channel for energy. In my visit to the Huaxia Zhineng hospital for Chi Kung, near Beijing, I observed Chinese instructors teaching thousands of people how to use body energy to heal themselves. Each session begins with the instructor gazing around the group, aiming to make eye-contact with every person. They imagine that they are connecting the entire group into a kind of unified energy field, creating what NLP would call group rapport. Successful training certainly feels like a unified field has been created. In a less successful session, or at the very start of a group, it can feel as if each person is holding in their energy protectively, and it takes work to move the group. In a successful teaching session, its as if the group is pooling its energy and that energy becomes available for you as a Trainer to direct to learning. The metaphor of energy can be used to facilitate getting you and your course participants into the state you want. Getting into state can be thought of as generating a strong personal energy field, drawing in energy from the universal field. Teaching involves the sending out of this energy to the group. Before teaching, I imagine love flowing into us from above my head, flowing down to the heart, and flowing out to fill the room, with every breath. I strongly recommend training in chi kung or other energy work for all trainers. As youd expect from a method with many researched benefits in terms of healing neurological problems, chi kung is good for your brain. Studies suggest it improves memory, attention span, response speed, emotional stability and thinking process (McGee with Chow, 1994, p 166-167). The need for energy in training has other implications. I believe that keeping physically healthy is a prerequisite of training. That involves doing the kind of aerobic exercise that enables fast, fluent movement, like a cat moving. It also means the kind of stretching, flowing movements of yoga and tai chi, which enable the elegance of movement a great trainer demonstrates. A trainer in a good state can seem to glide across the room, to bounce from place to place, to dance as they teach, and yet all in a way that becomes un-noticeable because of its gentle elegance. Over the prolonged training day, postures such as sitting with a bent back will
have an effect on the trainers energy and comfort. Sitting and standing sustainably is important. Food and water have an effect on the brain, not surprisingly. So another way to ensure you have the energy to last the distance is to eat and drink carefully (Jensen, 1995, p 72-74). Generally, research on the foods that assist learning, clarity of thought, alertness and energy supports the value of avoiding saturated fats and simple sugars; increasing intake of C and B vitamins, iron, zinc and (within limits) protein. It also supports the value of eating small amounts and drinking water regularly, rather than eating large, heavy meals. For further information about maintaining energy see my book on NLP and Chi Kung, Pro-fusion (1995). Managing Feedback Resourcefully Of course, I apply the notion of feedback to my trainees (as described in the chapter Evaluating the Evaluator). But we as trainers also can choose to remember that there is no failure, only feedback for trainers as well! Every time something doesnt go the way I intended in a training session, I follow up by rehearsing it through with the preframes which would have succeeded, creating positive representations of the way I want it to be next time. If need be, I run the NLP trauma cure (Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998, p 110-112, described at the end of this chapter) on distressing training experiences, before installing this new expectation of future success. This is crucial to your satisfaction as a trainer. In order to train well, trainers have a high level of the sort by other metaprogram. This means they spend a lot of time checking out how other people (especially their trainees) experience what they do. This needs balancing. Your trainees do not know (indeed they cannot know) the complex background to what you are doing. At times they will give you feedback which you will decide is based on their misunderstanding of your intention, or being unaware of the ecology of their proposal. At other times, they will give you feedback which results in you changing your training style. This is immensely valuable, and a successful trainer finds ways to enjoy learning from such helpful feedback. Enjoying training means knowing how to nurture your belief in yourself and recall the positive feedback youve received even as you adjust based on suggestions for change. Summary This chapter introduced you to the experience of being a trainer. I encouraged you to identify your mission in terms that give wider meaning to your
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 12
training. I pointed out that training involves much more than just presenting information. It involves Tempting people to attend Redesigning courses Arranging success from the start Instructing Nourishing changes with a learning climate Evaluating learning Renewing commitments with participants Being a trainer was also described as a lifestyle embodying the presuppositions of NLP itself, such as: 1. Outcome orientation, with respect for others models of the world and ecology. 2. Distinction between map and territory 3. There is only feedback (cybernetic) no failure 4. The meaning of your communication is the response you get. 5. The adaptive intent of all behaviour 6. Everyone has the necessary resources 7. Resistance is a sign of insufficient pacing 8. The law of requisite variety Managing your own state is a core expression of these presuppositions, and involves anchoring yourself into resourcefulness, using congruent physiology, creating positive internal representations of your training, and maintaining and projecting your personal energy. The following chapters explore training from a variety of perspectives, with a variety of maps NLP trainers have found useful. Most of all, they give you a clear sense of how one particular NLP trainer operates. Much of what I have published here has previously been available only inside NLP Trainer Trainings. But it will, I believe, also have much to say to anyone in the training or teaching field, and to anyone interested in studying NLP at an advanced level. Exercise 2.1: Aligning Neurological Levels 1. Choose a training problem youve had, and would like to change in a fundamental way. 2. Stand somewhere with plenty of space in front of you (enough to step forward six times). Think of the training environment where the problem occurs. Notice what you see, and listen to the sounds there. 3. Take a step forward. Consider what you actually do and say in the problem situation. Just run a movie of what happens. 4. Take another step forward. When you do those things, what capabilities, what skills are you using? And what skills are you not using? 5. Take another step forward. Consider what beliefs you are acting on in that situation. What is
important to you in that situation? What do you find yourself believing about your potential, and about the situation? 6. Take another step forward. Who are you in this situation? What kind of person are you in this situation? 7. Take another step forward, and remember that you are here for a reason. You only got yourself into that situation because, in a wider sense, youre here on earth for a reason. You may not know in words what that reason is, but notice it now. Realise that this reason connects you to something vast. You may think of it as God, the Goddess, the universe, beingness, or just humanity. But it is a vast source of energy, in front of you now. 8. Take another step forward, into that source of energy. Feel its power. 9. As you feel that power, take a step back and notice how that power gives renewed strength to your mission, your reason. Take another step back and feel how that power transforms your sense of who you are. Take another step back and feel how that power changes what you believe about that situation you were considering; changes what seems important there. Take another step back and notice how it changes what skills you can use there. Take another step back and be aware of how using those skills, with that vast power, changes what you will do and say there. Take another step back and be aware how those actions, done with that power, will change the training situation itself. 10. Thank that power. Exercise 2.2: Chaining Anchors and Swish To Create Resourceful Training Experiences 1. This process is designed to install a chain of anchors so that whenever the person experiences the state that has been a problem to them, they automatically feel themselves move into the state they would rather be in. You can design this for yourself, or you can have someone guide you through the process. In the latter case, of course, begin by establishing rapport by breathing in time and adjusting other communication to match each other more. 2. Design the chain. This is a list of five states gradually changing from the problem state to the desired state. For example: anxiety uncertainty curiosity exploration confidence
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 13
(a) Identify the first (problem) state by name (e.g., stuck, confusion, panic, overwhelm) (b) Identify the end state by name (e.g., go for it, learning, resourceful, excited) (c) Identify states which are or could be intermediate states. You could check a time the person got to the end state themselves, and ask what states they went through. Or you could ask Whats half way between (the first state) and (the end state) that leads to (the end state)? This is state 3. Find state 2 and 4 using the same process. In the chain - only the first two states are states that are unpleasant to be in. - the last two states have movement (eg excitement, rather than calm). - the last two states are more intense. (d) Explain to the person that their unconscious mind knows how to run this process so that it comes into action only where it is appropriate (for example, it may be that this change is desired only in the training context, and not in the persons private life). 3. For each state, find a memory of a time when the person experienced themselves in that state. Have them step back into their body in that memory now, see what they saw, and hear what they heard. As they do so, anchor the state by pressing on a knuckle (each state is anchored on a separate knuckle). To test that the anchor is set, have the person stretch and clear their mental screen, and then press the knuckle again. If the anchor is set, the person will return to the state they had while recalling the experience. Otherwise, repeat the anchor. 4. Once you have the five separate states each anchored on a separate knuckle in this way, press the first anchor and tell the person to step back into their body in the first experience. Then press the second anchor and tell the person that they can imagine the images from the first experience disappearing into the distance, as the image of themselves in the second experience zooms up towards them and they step into it. Repeat for each of the other states, in sequence from the first to the last state. Have the person stretch and take a deep breath, to clear the screen. Then run through this chain of states again. Repeat at least five times, or until the chain begins to run automatically. 5. Test: fire (press) first anchor and check persons awareness as well as their physiological shifts. If the chain is working, pressing the first anchor will cause the person to feel drawn through the sequence of states to the final state (possibly so quickly that they are immediately aware of the final state). Once you have seen that this is working, futurepace the changes: Have the person think of
a future time when, in the past they would have had problems with that old state, and notice how it feels when they think of that future time now. Exercise 2.3: Trauma Cure For Negative Training Experiences 1. The following exercise is itself completely safe. Unless you have professional NLP training, it would be appropriate to do this exercise only with yourself, and only on an issue which you know you can manage, although it is less than comfortable to think of. Examples might include: a "traumatic" exam which has left you anxious about further exams; a specific fear of teaching a certain subject. For the exercise, identify a particular time from your memory, when you had to cope with the thing that "makes you anxious. Once you have identified the time, put that memory totally away for now. 2. Begin by getting yourself into a relaxed and resourceful state. You may like to do the relaxation exercise from Section 2 on the body. Remember a time you felt incredibly resourceful and confident about a very enjoyable, satisfying experience, and step into your body at that time, feeling all those good feelings completely. 3. For this activity you need two chairs, one facing a blank wall; the other behind it, facing the back of the first chair. Sit in the first, front chair, and pretend for now that you are in a movie theatre. On the wall in front of you is a movie screen and on it, in black and white, imagine you see a still picture of yourself before the event which you got anxious in: a time before when you can see yourself looking safe and okay. 4. Next come out of the movie theatre, and go back to sit on the second chair, behind. This second chair is actually in the projection booth that they show the movie from. There's a thick glass screen between you and the theatre. If you look in front of you, you can see yourself sitting on the first chair, watching the movie screen. Imagine what the back of your head looks like, as that you looks up at the picture of the earlier you on the screen, looking safe and okay. 5. From inside the safety of the projection booth, you are now going to run a black and white movie. In the movie, that earlier you on the screen will go through the event you're changing, right from that time when he/she was safe before it happened, through to a time afterwards, when he/she was safe again, after that event, and maybe away from it As you run this movie, instead of watching the earlier you on the screen, I want you to watch that you in the movie theatre, who is watching the screen. That you watching the movie, may have some reaction to seeing the movie, but just run it
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 14
through to the safe end, and a still frame of yourself safe after the event. 6. Okay! Now, from inside the projection booth, I want you to imagine something. Stay seated on the second chair safe inside the projection booth, but imagine that you float out of there and into the earlier you on the screen, safe at the end of that event. In a minute I want you to be inside that earlier you, seeing through his/her eyes and hearing through her/his ears. You'll turn the picture back to colour and run the movie backwards, all the way to the start where you were safe before the event. Ever seen a video played backwards, with people walking backwards and so on? Well, that's almost how it will be. One difference is that you'll be in this movie. The other is that you're going to rewind the whole film in one second flat. Zzziiipp! Right back to the safe time before the event happened. Once you've done that ,you can float back into your body in the projection booth. Okay, go ahead and do that. Zzziiipp! 7. Now, from the projection booth, try and get back that black and white picture of the earlier you, safe before the event, on the screen. You're ready to repeat steps 5 and 6. Repeat these two steps until you absolutely cannot get back a picture on the screen. Some say it gradually whites out. For some people, at a certain point, it's as if the tape just snapped. Usually this takes 3-10 times, but do it till you know it's gone. Notice that the feeling goes too. You cannot have a feeling state without the representations that cause it. 8. After completing the process successfully, wait 5 minutes. Do something else - read a book, watch TV, go outside. Give your brain time to adjust. Then come back and think about the thing that used to scare you or upset you. Some people have an uncontrollable urge to laugh when you realise how different it is. Others just smile.
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 15
Of the 500 NLP Practitioners Ive trained since then, many dream of going into business using their NLP skills. But most are still transitioning. Im not an expert on business management, or on marketing. I can share with you some common sense discoveries and some useful sources of expertise that Ive discovered. This information is powerful. So powerful that it takes a lot of trust for me to give it out freely. I spent years learning most of this the hard way. I hope it will be easier for you. But finally, when it comes to Thursday night, its up to you to stop transitioning and use every resource youve got to succeed as if your business mattered to you. There is a very simple reason, as Michael Gerber says, why 80% of small businesses fail within the first five years. Its not because the people running them dont work! Its because they do too much of the wrong kind of work. They do the technical work they were educated to do (in my case training) as well as all the paperwork of running a business. Gerber says a self-employed trainer has three roles. They fit neatly with the creativity strategy Robert Dilts modelled from Walt Disney (Dilts, Epstein and Dilts, 1991). They are the Entrepreneur (what Dilts calls the dreamer), the Technician (in Dilts terms, the realist) and the Manager (Dilts critic). Most of us, Gerber points out, get into teaching as doers, as technicians. We get good at what were doing, and then we start to dream about being in business on our own. So we rush out into the world following our dream, and start teaching. The missing element, says Gerber, is the Manager. Most people think of a manager as a person in charge. But in Gerbers terms, the manager is the person who (like Dilts Critic) makes sure the plans of the entrepreneur and the work of the technician actually gets to succeed. He says, The Manager cleans up after the Entrepreneur. (Gerber, 1995, p 26). Aware that something is lacking, a newly selfemployed trainer looks around for help, and hires someone to do all the paperwork; to tidy up after them. Unfortunately, thats not the point. The new office help doesnt know your overall values, your vision as an Entrepreneur. In the end, Gerber, suggests, they just make the gap between your dreams and the day to day realities more obvious! Whats missing is the manager in you. The decision, Gerber suggests, is whether you want to be primarily a Technician (in which case youre better off working for someone else) or a Manager (in which case the teaching that you arrange to be done is more your product than your job). We would say that the important thing is to be clear, at any particular time, whether you are an Entrepreneur, a Technician or a Manager.
A Manager can think of their teaching as a product that is outside of and separable from them. They have the ability to step back from it and critique it, to plan it as a business, to market it, to model its success and even to package that success as a franchise. Most of this book is addressed to you as a Technician. This chapter is addressed to you as a Manager. Youre in Business! There are lots of great books on setting up small businesses, to guide you through the planning. One aimed at Therapists and Consultants is Joan Beigel and Ralph Earles book Successful Private Practice in the 1990s (1990). It has a lot to say about marketing, which is the main subject of this chapter, and a lot to say about this new millenium. It also discusses some of the simple setting-up decisions youll want to make such as: Are you working alone or in a group? If youre in a group, how will decisions be made? Are you going to be legally defined as a sole trader (sole proprietor), partnership, or company (corporation)? If you work, advertise and earn money in a group, you are legally either a partnership or a company (corporation). Companies have more legal protection, in return for more paperwork. Ask a lawyer for help with this decision. Which brings up the issue of outside professional help. You want a lawyer, a bank manager and an accountant from the start. Why do you want a bank manager? Read on. Where will your business be run from? The question is not whether youll have an office. You will. The question is whether it will be in your bedroom, in a separate room at home, or in an office building that you travel to each day. Getting it out of your bedroom is probably a high priority! Then you need to consider how to furnish it. To run a training business, youll want more than chairs. Probably, you want a computer with a word processor, accounting system and database, connected to a laser printer. Being connected to the outside world by phone, fax and email is almost essential. The question is how youll manage these connections. Will you use an answer-phone, will you try and answer the phone at any time, or will you pay someone to answer it for you (an office assistant or an answering company)? And yes, Telecom will check whether youre using your home phone as a business phone, so if youre at home that means another decision about getting one phone line or two. Next, you need some decisions about insurance, because your home insurance doesnt cover all that new equipment. And
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 16
how about indemnity insurance? (sometimes your national NLP Association can provide this or advise you where to get it.) Maybe you want health insurance, or other benefits that you might have taken for granted as an employed person. Finally, theres the issue of hiring help. You can do this in two ways; by employing people (full or part time), and by contracting help for specific tasks. Talk to someone about your responsibilities as an employer in either case; employing someone is not a decision you can randomly change your mind about next week. Youll also want to ensure staff operate in a way that aligns with your values. This means that you as an employer need to very clear about your values (your criteria) for each task you hand over to someone else.
distinctions between being in business and being employed by someone. In business, you are an independent agent, and this is an experience a bit like leaving home as a teenager. The independence is great, and the sense of personal achievement can be very affirming. With this independence comes a responsibility for things that in the past were done by your employers invisible hand. You will have great flexibility about how you plan your time, and this will be balanced by the realisation that how you plan your time directly affects what income you get. All in all, there is a feeling of growing up, and living in the real world that can be very refreshing. Being in business means having the courage to go for your dreams. Theres a clich in sales that the first and most important customer you need to sell to is yourself (LeBoeuf, 1987, p 34-37). Guy Kawasaki (1991) goes even further. Kawasaki worked for Apple Computer Inc. at the time they took on the computer giant IBM. His job title was Software Evangelist. Kawasaki says that the evangelical metaphor had him motivated not by making money, but by making history. And the goal was not to sell, but to convert. Even today, if you talk to someone who owns a Macintosh, youll find they didnt just buy it, they got converted to it. The now much copied Body Shop is another example, Kawasaki says, of evangelism. The Body Shop doesnt pay for advertising; they rely on their community projects and their political campaigns. One thing that the evangelism metaphor emphasises is that people do not buy your trainings because they are good trainings. Why? For the same reason that people dont buy Bibles because theyre a good textbook. They buy products because of the state that they hope the product will deliver. Founding NLP institute NLP Comprehensives 1996 advert for NLP Master Practitioner training makes it clear what they are selling - NLP Master Practitioner Certification Training: Prestige. Professional and personal development. Community. (NLP Comprehensive, 1996) Another way of saying this is that its important to identify which business you are in. You are not in the Training business. You are in something much more important. Landmark Education Inc. runs 3-5 day seminars of a similar type to NLP seminars (Landmark Forum). B.J. Holmes, Landmarks Director of Marketing and Communications emphasises We are in the business of selling a product of Transformation. (Wruck and Eastley, 1997, p 8). Thats where I place what I teach too. Marketing starts when you remember what states you are selling (prestige, community, transformation etc), and re-inspire yourself.
So how are you going? Being a Manager has a different feel about it. For one thing, the costs and risks involved are often much more concrete. The risk is not just that someone might not like your presentation, its that (for example) the Inland Revenue might charge you very serious penalties if you dont get money to them on time!
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 17
The One And Only You Whether Evangelism works depends, says Kawasaki, on three types of people. First and foremost, there is the Leader (thats you!). Your role is to believe in the vision and to embody it. If Body Shop founder Anita Roddick does not seem to be true to her own animal-testing-free, environmentally-friendly image, then the entire marketing structure of the Body Shop is at risk. Similarly, NLP trainers who seem to glorify their own addictions, to excuse their own phobias, or to insult and humiliate students similarly place their own marketing at risk. When people admire a trainer enough to keep coming back for more, they admire not just their training style but their lifestyle. Most of us became involved with training because it worked in our own lives. Evangelism keeps us true to our first intentions. The second step to successful marketing, then, is to be clear about your vision and willing to hold on to it. This could be called integrity. Imagine two companies, both selling computer keyboards. One, making white keyboards, has 80% of the market. The other, selling black keyboards, has 20% of the market. One day, the manager at Black Keyboards Ltd has a brilliant idea. Black keyboards are not mainstream enough, she decides. She changes the company name to Grey Keyboards Ltd, and changes all their products to grey. After all, its more to the centre. But guess what nobody wants a grey keyboard! And now, her old customers, who trusted her black keyboards, cant find her in the Yellow pages. Worse, when they see her grey keyboards, theyre not so sure they can trust them. They liked being different, and grey is a lot like white. And who knows what else has changed inside the new grey keyboards. Trainers are constantly tempted by the grey keyboard. Who hasnt had people tell them that if only what you teach was more mainstream, looked and sounded more like everyone else, it might work better. And its true that you need a certain percentage of people willing to try out a black keyboard, for it to work. But its also true that if what you teach looked and sounded like every other training in the business, it simply wouldnt exist. Who hasnt been tempted to change their logo, their corporate name, and their trainings, to suit the latest trend theyve heard of. Its not that this is wrong. Its simply that there are costs every time you do it. Each change causes you to disappear a little into the background of all those other people selling similar things. Success, say Al Ries and Jack Trout (1986) is not always about making a copy of the mainstream
product. Its about unique positioning, that makes your product stand out from the mass of information that your buyers are coping with. To demonstrate the power of a unique position, they demonstrate with the success generated by being first in a field. Whats the biggest selling book ever published, they ask (1986, p 21). Sure; its the Bible. But whats the second biggest selling book ever published? Who knows? New York is Americas biggest port. Sure, but what is Americas second biggest port? Its actually Hampton Roads, Virginia! In these cases, as in all marketing, not many people remember anything after the first. Thats why Edward de Bono (1992) says that companies which are successful do not do it by competing. They do it by being one of a kind; what he calls values monopolies. Instead of being part of the rat race, they have a product which is so unique that they are in a race of their own. And then they keep creating uniqueness. De Bono calls this Sur/Petition. An example: As far as we know, no-one in the world currently offers a creche for participants at NLP Practitioner courses. We get lots of enquiries from people who cant attend our trainings because they need to have their kids minded. Whoever offers the first NLP creche will be in a race of their own. Those parents wont be deciding between several competing providers of NLP training. The Creche-and-NLP-training will have a monopoly on meeting their values. Of course, you can always make yourself first. What was the continent that Christopher Columbus discovered? Why, America of course. Its named after Amerigo Vespucci, who reached it in 1497, five years after Christopher. So why isnt America called Christopheria? Because Amerigo recognised that he had reached a new continent, rather than just found another way to India. And he wrote extensively about his new discoveries, having his articles translated into 40 different languages over the next 25 years. He died a rich man, appointed to a prominent state post. Christopher Columbus died in jail (Ries and Trout, 1986, p 25). One reason is that Colombus failed to think of himself as first to a new continent. NLP itself is an example of the same process. Virginia Satir lists all the questions of the metamodel in her book Conjoint Family Therapy, published in 1964. Yet in her preface to Bandler and Grinders first book on their new metamodel, in 1975, she expresses her delight at their clarifying the patterns of her therapy. What Bandler and Grinder did was not to create yet another list of therapist statements; but to recognise that they had reached a whole new continent. It ended up being called the metamodel, not the Virginia model. Grinder and Bandler announced it as a whole new way of thinking about what therapy
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 18
did, and then as a whole new way of thinking, period! Another way of making yourself first is by identifying your unique position in contrast to the current number one. This doesnt mean fighting the current number one; it means clarifying your position separate from them. Avis rental cars was the worlds second biggest rental car firm when they began advertising Avis is only number two in rental cars, so why go with us? We Try Harder! Pepsi Cola was a new, untried competitor to the century-old, established Coca-Cola corporation when they ran their campaign Pepsi The Choice of a New Generation! Similarly, in 1996 Richard Bandler, Paul McKenna and Michael Breen took on the task of drawing people who had already experienced NLP to their range of new and shorter trainings called New NLP. They announced that they have extensively revised the technology, redesigned the practitioner standard, and updated NLP for the twenty first century. You can go to the innovators or you can wait for the copies. NLP as it will be is not what it was. (McKenna Breen Ltd, 1996) Research and Development Okay; lets assume you know your mission, and youre committed to being true to it. What is marketing? Most people assume its much the same as advertising, and boils down to getting out some brochures. Actually, advertising is a tiny subsection of marketing. Marketing involves the entire relationship between you and your market (your past, present and future participants and buyers). This includes finding out who those people are, developing trainings that are of interest to them (rather than only of interest to you), helping them find out about and get to your trainings, dealing with any situations where people werent happy with your training, and in other ways treating all these people as partners in your mission (Joseph, 1987, p 11-19). Making brochures and sending them out is a pretty small part of all that. Even within the area of advertising, marketing experts (eg see Kennedy and Courtnay, 1995, p 7579) give their three priorities the following rating: The audience to be targeted =10 points A compelling offer =5 points Irresistible creative execution =1 point They say that for every one hour (or $1) you spend on creative design of your advert, you would be advised to spend five hours (or $5) designing your offer (explained below), and a huge ten hours ($10) learning about your customers, and their needs and values.
This has been a problem within NLP, for example. The history of NLP has given NLP trainers a curious legacy. The NLP certification trainings developed in the 1970s and 1980s were designed to suit psychotherapists! But we often try to sell them in this form to businesspeople, teachers and people wanting personal change as well. Trying to be everything to everyone, we are in danger already of producing a grey keyboard. Consider a standard day on a traditional NLP Practitioner certification. The participants are learning anchoring, and doing exercises in triads where they use processes for collapsing and chaining anchors, based on pressing on the knuckles on the back of each others hands. Collapsing anchors would be immensely valuable in teaching, but there are few occasions when a teacher has time or permission to go round and press on the knuckles of each student like this. Collapsing anchors would be a very useful process to do individually to achieve some change, but the way these people are learning it, theyd have to have a friend who was also trained, in order to run the process at a future time. Given that they wanted personal change, the benefits could be achieved far quicker by the trainer taking the whole group through the change processes (as, for example, Tad James does using Time Line Therapy on his Secret of Creating Your Future weekends). The format most NLP Practitioner trainings use is great for psychotherapist trainings, but a nuisance for almost anything else. Our courses are very creatively designed, but often for the wrong people. This is why one of the first tasks of new NLP trainers has often been to redesign their seminars to suit their actual market. The jargon can be reassessed, and the sequencing considered. I want to ensure that the first things I cover make it clear why this training will be of benefit to the people I have directed it to. The timing of your training, and the structure of it can be changed to suit a specific group. Teachers may prefer to attend courses in their holidays or after school hours. Parents have the opposite needs. Most people think of Marketing Research as the field that produces those annoying questionnaires where they ask you if youve a) ever bought a white keyboard, b) ever bought a black keyboard, and c) would ever buy a black and white striped keyboard if it was half the price of a white one. Of course, market research is happening every time you interact with people. But the advantage of surveys is that they may give you more objective information than individual comments. I often have people tell me that I should run a course in their town, because they have at least 20 friends who would do it; or should run a training in late November, because lots of people they know are
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 19
available then. Early on, I actually made decisions based on such hearsay, and discovered that the number of friends someone has ready to do a course is approximately 10% of what they believe (once you allow for those friends who are unavailable at the time of the course, or cant afford it this year etc). Traditional style market research, done by you or someone you hire, can tell you such things as: what people like and want, what they have heard about your product (if anything), what they are willing to pay for it, who actually makes the decisions you need to influence (eg if school teachers are your market, you may find that their School Principals actually control what courses they are freed up to attend). The person who makes the decision is the person you want to market to most of all. Apart from simply asking people these questions, research also involves observing what other people are doing in your same market. For example, what are other similar training organisations doing that works, what are other personal development courses doing that works, or what are accelerated learning trainers doing that works. Do check that you are modelling actions that are successful, because not all advertising campaigns in the training field are working. I was impressed to see that one Hypnotherapy trainer I knew was placing half page adverts in a national magazine every month. I almost decided to emulate his investment, but when I asked him how successful the adverts were, I discovered that he had approximately three responses a year to his thousands of dollars in advertising. If the audience takes up 10/16ths of your advertising priority (see above) then selecting specific groups of people to advertise to is crucial. For example, as a counsellor, I originally assumed it would be easy for me to market NLP to counsellors. What I didnt think through was that most counsellors and psychotherapists have invested two to four years of their life training in a specific style of counselling. They dont want to reinvest in a contradictory style! The way I thought of NLP (as a whole new field), my real market in the counselling field would not be counsellors but new counsellors and would-be counsellors. To attract established counsellors, Id need to considerably modify my marketing approach, by advertising and offering training that linked in to what counsellors already do. In Finland, for example, Veli-Matti Toivonen and other Finnish NLP trainers have successfully marketed to large
numbers of Freudian Psychoanalysts, by presenting NLP as a set of skills that naturally blend in with analysis. I assumed they had the key to attracting all psychotherapists to NLP training until I asked about their success with Gestalt Therapists (after all, Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, was modelled by Bandler and Grinder). It seemed, though, that the Finnish success was mainly with Psychoanalysts and to Solution Focused Therapists. In the same way, business people is rather a large market segment. To plan advertising youd want to know which type of businessperson are you marketing to. The same is true in consulting. The more you specialise, the more precise your advertising can be. Consider the vast range of specialisation possible in business consulting. For example: Recruiting, Training, Industrial Relations, Compensation, Motivation, Production Planning, Quality Control, Advertising, Distribution, Real Estate, Computer Systems, Feasibility Studies, Financing, Expansion, Auditing, Systems Analysis, Product Design, Organisational Effectiveness, Human Resource Development, Financial Analysis, Market Research, Safety. Or consider the range of specialisation in counselling. For instance: Career Guidance, Displaced Workers & Relocation, Geriatric Counselling, Parenting Skills, Sex Therapy, Spirituality, Sports Psychology, Womens Issues, Grief, Chemical Dependency, Codependency, Eating Disorders, Post Traumatic Stress Disorders, Sexual Abuse Counselling, AIDS Support, Infertile Couples. You can identify a useful market segment both from your own end (What do you know most about?) and your customers end (Which customers are most likely to want your services?). To explore a market segment more fully, create in your mind an internal representation of your typical desired client. Create a picture of a person who represents exactly the kind of person you are interested in marketing to. For example What sex are they? What age are they? What cultural identity do they have? What kind of house or apartment do they live in? What do they do with their time? What do they earn? What difficulties do they have in their life? What is important to them? What metaprograms do they operate with? Once you have a representation of the person, you can do your own virtual market research. What would motivate this person to buy from you?
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 20
What kind of training do they like, and what do they want from it? How would they make the decision to attend, and what could get in the way of that decision? What could you do that would assist them to get to your training? What are the key benefits that your training could offer this person in their daily life?
Of course, your market research may reveal that even the structure of your training could best be changed to suit the people you imagine coming. You may decide that the best way to reach these people is not to run a public training at all, but to approach their employer and run the training inhouse. In that case, you will be able to do even better market research, by interviewing the specific people you want to design the training for. In doing so, youll discover that they have their own objectives for the training, quite separate from yours. Youll also find that they have their own way of knowing whether these objectives are met (their evidence procedure). Design your training to meet their evidence procedure, not their objectives as you would interpret them. For example, I recently ran a training for a group of teachers in a school. In talking with the Principal before (the person who was hiring me) I discovered that her aim was to have her teachers re-inspired with teaching as a career. She didnt know and didnt care about the content of the training. I then checked how shed know that they were reinspired. As a result, I was able to send her a copy of the feedback after the course, carefully drawing her attention to how the participants had been reinspired. The Principal in this example is a person who has the power to enable my course to go ahead. She may also be an example of a type of person that Guy Kawasaki describes as the second building block of evangelism, in his evangelical metaphor for marketing. Remember that the first of the three types of people who make evangelism work is the leader (thats you). The second is the Angel. An angel is someone in a position of power, who can assist you with expert advice, connections, and tangible support. An angel wants to see you thrive; believes in you, and has the ability to help. Perhaps they once had your dreams; perhaps you provide a way to further their mission. People in gatekeeping positions in organisations (eg Directors of Training and Development, Staff Education Officers) and people in the Community Action Foundations of large corporations are potential angels. Sometimes, these people will do your training, and then begin to assist you. When you approach them, you need to have a clearly thought out plan, and demonstrate a willingness to do the work required. The famous Italian nobleman
Lorenzo de Medici once saw an apprentice sculptor carving the face of a satyr, and commented to the sculptor that the mythical creature had an old body but smooth skin and a full set of teeth. The next time, de Medici passed the sculpture, the skin was wrinkled and a tooth was missing. He was so impressed, he invited the apprentice to live with his family. This was a great start for the young man, whose name was Michelangelo (Kawasaki, 1991, p 39). Kindling Initial Interest As you know in NLP, having an outcome is crucial. In marketing training too, you want outcomes. Probably youll set a 5 year goal in terms of both trainings and participants. Then youll work backwards and identify your goals for this year, and finally, for the next training you are running. Once you have goals, then you can get out your calendar and begin to timetable in the marketing actions youll take. Which actions? Thats our next section. In order for people to enrol in your training, they need to know that it exists. This is not as simple as it sounds. Probably you see a movie occasionally. Consider how much money a movie company spends getting you to know which movies are available. But how many of the movies that are on in your city right now do you know about? Do you know what time theyre showing? Whatever you do know, its the result of the movie companies investing millions of dollars. You probably dont have quite that much to start marketing your business. Youll need to use your resources carefully. Jay Conrad Levinson calls this Guerrilla Marketing. Its a rather unfortunate metaphor, but it conveys the sense of making do with what you have. A metaphor I like better is that of adventure tourism. The movie company has its advertising agency and MBAs (people with a Masters Degree in Business Administration). Think of that as being like the package tour approach to overseas travel. But an adventure trekker carries everything in their pack they dont have a tour bus to carry their bags, so they think carefully about what they take. Following is our Lonely Planet guide for your trip into marketing! Whichever specific techniques you use to get information across to people, there are four core concepts you will benefit from being clear about: benefits, attention, the offer, and measurement. 1) Benefits. Benefits are what people buy. They do not buy trainings, or audiotapes; they buy the benefits they will get from those things. People dont buy shampoo, they buy great looking hair that people compliment them
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 21
about. People dont buy breakfast cereals, they buy feeling great all day by eating something yummy at the start. To find benefits, you simply chunk up (get more generalised) about the training, asking the NLP question, For what purpose?. Benefits contain no jargon (eg they dont use words like strategies expecting that people know what you mean, and they certainly dont use words like submodalities, an NLP jargon term. Ask Whats the benefit of submodalities? Identify, for your chosen market, approximately seven benefits of your training. Write them down. Ideally, each benefit should be described in less than 10 words, using you as the focus (eg instead of, We will explain the nature of memory say, You will learn the nature of memory). Use a verb in the present injunctive form, as if telling them what to do now! (eg instead of, You will be learning more about memory say, Learn more about memory). Now choose the most powerful benefit you could offer. It may be one of the ones on your list, or it may be a chunk up on them. You need to choose this one key benefit because of the next core concept: 2) Attention. People pay attention to what interests them. They do not pay attention to advertising at all unless it happens to interest them. For example, most people, research shows, open their mail while standing by the rubbish bin / garbage can. They open each letter and throw the unwanted parts out. You have about three seconds to convince them to read on before they throw away your mail. If they already know and like you, just your name will be enough to catch their attention. Otherwise, you need to think carefully about what key benefit will grab their attention. Consider using phrases that grab attention such as Do your students deserve?, At last, a seminar that., Discover why., Take a giant step. Its the similar in a newspaper. People do not go through a newspaper reading each advert carefully in case it contains benefits to them. They skim the parts of the newspaper theyre familiar with, looking for news (thats what newspapers claim to contain). If you want to attract their attention, make your newspaper advert look like the news and good news! Unless I can get editorial copy in beside my advert, I tend to use newspaper advertising simply to get the attention of people who already know NLP. So the big word in my advert is NLP. If I can get an article in about
my work, I choose a benefit for the heading. Something like New discovery heals phobias in minutes! or Study shows time saved by remembering instantly. Theres no way Id waste that heading by saying The Advantages of NLP. NLP interests you and me. But the question in advertising is what interests your customers. When I write the word NLP as the heading of my advert, I am in a sense using a logo. As you set up in business, consider having a logo designed. Placing it in every advert you use will enable people to quickly and unconsciously find your advert. It also conveys non-verbally something of your intention. My first logo was a butterfly. It emphasises the notion of transformation. My current logo emphasises the international nature of what I do. Each has its place, because just as there are some groups where a butterfly is a little playschool-like, there are some places where a globe is rather multinational-conglomeratestyle. This brings up another important point about attention: conscious attention is the result of cumulative unconscious awareness. After youve seen the same advert twice unconsciously, seeing it a third time can be enough to bring it into awareness. Thus, three small adverts in the same newspaper are worth far more than one large one that cost the same money. 3) The Offer. Once you have someones attention, your advertising communication moves to one clear conclusion. It may be where the person fills in a coupon and mails it to you, or where they ring you up, or where they attend your free introductory talk, or where they enrol for your training. This conclusion is made more motivating by the use of an offer. Attending a free evening may be an offer. Getting free information leaflets may be an offer. Getting an audiotape at half price when you enrol in a training today may be an offer. Getting free advice about how this training could benefit you may be an offer. The offer doesnt have to be fancy. An example of a newspaper classified advert with a benefit, an offer, and a measurable response (see below) could be Increase memory by 60% in 30 minutes. For free brochure on the NLP visual memory process, phone Visual Memory Services, 03-337-1852 Offers can be tiered so that the first offer is for a brochure, and when the brochure arrives it comes with an offer for a weekend seminar with a free audiotape. If you choose to tier your offer,
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 22
remember that in your first advert you aim to sell the first offer, not the final product or course! Tell them benefits of the current offer. 4) Measurement. Advertising results can be measured, like any other outcomes. This requires keeping a record of what advertising youve done and what results you had. Lets imagine that each new person to your weekend training pays $200 and costs you $30 in extra materials. If you put a $1000 advertisement in the newspaper, you need to get six more people as a direct result of that advert, for it to have paid for itself. If you get seven, it earned you $200. But how will you know whether someone came as a result of that advertising? The answer is to use key words or even key addresses which mark out each advert. In your newspaper advert, you might say Call 03-3371852 and ask for the Weekend Success Seminar, while in your posters advertising the course you might say instead Phone 03337-1235 and ask about our Two Day NLP Training. By what someone says when they call, and even by which phone they call on, you can tell which advert delivered the call. Once you can measure the results of your advertising, you can even test out different versions of the same advert (eg with slightly different wording, or put on a different page of the newspaper), to see which version delivers best. Measuring advertising costs in this way reminds you that they are an investment. We invest at least 10% of the income we expect from a course into advertising. We also invest considerable time. So we choose carefully. Your marketing plan is a part of your total business plan, so it needs to relate realistically to that (in terms of money spent and time used, for example). Choices, Choices I filled my initial Practitioner course by writing an article for a local teaching magazine (and placing a cheap advert in with it), mailing brochures to all the contact addresses I had (about 100), and leaving brochures around in staff rooms where I taught. That was my total advertising investment. Your initial marketing plan for your ongoing training business might be as simple as 1) listing in the yellow pages, 2) telephoning any contacts you have who may be able to circulate brochures 3) photocopying a brochure, 4) mailing the brochure out to contacts taken from the local city council directory of community services, and to friends, and 5) putting the brochure up on some noticeboards. The brochure, of course will have
your list of benefits, with the main benefit as a heading, with your offer, and with the information about how to contact you. There are some useful hints Id like to give you about how to utilise these and other methods of telling people about your training. Ill list these methods under seven headings: Directories, Magazines, Newspapers, Community Bulletin Boards or Newsletters, Mail, Free Samples, the Internet and Sales Talk. Directories (eg The Yellow Pages): People who are looking for your services already will look in the yellow pages. You dont need to convince these people that training is a good idea they already are looking for it. What they want to know is where to contact you and, if you have a display ad (the kind with more than just a name and phone number) what range of training you do. Size isnt important in the yellow pages unless you can be the biggest on the page (a position probably held by some established business training organisation). Listings in other directories may or may not be useful. I paid extensively for a listing in a counselling directory, for five years, with no apparent results. On the other hand, listing in the back of NLP specific Anchor Point magazine has really worked for me. Magazines: People read magazines for specialist articles which give them in depth ideas. Adverts dont do that. Some magazines have their own yellow pages or diary dates, and those are worth using. The real point of magazines is the articles. Articles give people an opportunity to explore your ideas in depth. If you write an article for a magazine, then putting an advert beside it can deliver. Some magazines will offer a deal where they publish a small article and an ad, and you pay a reduced price for the ad. From my experience it can be even better to include your brochure as an insert, but this is very expensive. Do this only when aiming at a specific geographical area, and with a magazine that goes out to lots of people who are interested in training (a New Age magazine is an example for NLP training). Adverts that cover page or more are very expensive, and rarely deliver value, no matter what the magazine editors tell you. Newspapers: People read newspapers for news, so if you have space write a newspaper article-style advert, with a title, columns and newspaper style justified (neatly lined up left and right) typing. Remember that three small adverts costing $200 each are worth more than one larger advert costing $1000. Advertising may be cheaper in community newspapers, but think about who reads them before you use these. In newspapers, as in real estate, research shows there are three basic rules: location, location, location. The right side page is better than the left, the outer edge is better than the inner, the
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 23
weekend is better than a week day, and certain pages (near the start, or the TV page, or an education supplement, for example) are better than others (say the gardening page). On the other hand, newspapers do have remnant space which can sometimes be purchased cheaper (a bit like standby travel). Check it out. You can also write your own press releases. Remember that, to get published, they need to focus on news, not on ideas. Write the article in the style that reporters use, talking about yourself in the third person. Dont start with an introduction; start in the middle of your story with a key attention getting fact. Use short simple words, and include quotes from yourself (eg At the opening of the new crisis centre today, NLP trainer Richard Bolstad explained, 'We now have methods available to resolve most psychological trauma in one session.' The centre plans to assist approximately twenty people each week.). Type the article out double spaced, and phone the newspaper to find out who is the best reporter to send it to. Deliver it to them personally. Bulletin Boards and Newsletters: Free advertising opportunities are available at shops, community centres and in any organisation (such as a school) that has a newsletter. People looking at noticeboards are in a specific setting. A noticeboard at a university catches people when theyre thinking about learning. A noticeboard at a local shopping centre has a local community flavour, and people will feel better supporting something local there. A noticeboard at a bookshop attracts people who know what books are selling, so your advert can link into the latest books. A noticeboard at a health food shop attracts people thinking about their health. Similarly, if you put an advert/article in a newsletter, be aware of why people read the newsletter (to keep up on local affairs, for example). Also, offer to set out the advert on your own computer where possible dont assume that the organisation knows what image you want to present. Write the article as youd write a press release (see above). While were on the subject of free marketing, consider exchanging marketing for other services you can offer. Is there something you can do for an organisation in return for the opportunity to market to their contacts? Can you combine with another organisation to market together at lower cost? How could you deliver to someone else something so valuable that marketing for you in return would be a bargain? The obvious example would be to get someone to do marketing in return for attending your training.
Mail: To use mail, you need a list of addresses. There are a couple of ways to keep this list. One is to buy some pages with sticky labels on from the stationery shop. You write each name and address on a label, and then take your list of addresses to a photocopier and copy off a version ready to do a mailout (leaving you with the original to photocopy again next time). The fancier way to keep a list is to get a computer and use a database such as Access. The computer will then do the printing of labels. The advantage of the computer is that you can also keep other information about each person on it their phone number, what other trainings theyve been to, what they liked and didnt like etc. Mail makes a more personal appeal to people -it arrives the way their personal letters do. Research shows that the letter is the most successful format for mail adverts, for this reason. It can best be written conversationally, like a letter to a friend. Write, Dear reader (singular) rather than Dear readers. Put a day of the week in the corner where the date usually goes. Use NLP language patterns gently (see the later chapter on language) and always speak to the positive intentions of your reader (eg In your search for excellence in teaching.). If you need to go over the page, dont finish a sentence; have the sentence carry on to the next page. The best combination of things to send by mail is (according to research) a cover letter, a brochure, and a post paid reply card (you get a postage paid number from the Post Office, and you only have to pay for each letter actually sent back to you). The brochure can show people with a picture what theyll get. It can list detailed benefits, and contain testimonials from people who are as near as possible to the same as the reader (dont include New Zealand counsellors testimonials in a brochure for American managers, for example). Remember that you yourself can write a testimonial about what the benefits of your training are. Always include your name and qualifications: people choose trainers more than they choose courses by title! The brochure can include a guarantee. It can also include the reply card or enrolment form. Brochures can be quite simple. Consider using your business card as a minibrochure. People often keep business cards (and catalogues). They often lose brochures. The crucial rule about all these pieces is that everything you send should include your address and phone number, and the key details. If the enrolment form is in your brochure, check what gets cut off and mailed with it. You want the person to still have enough details so they can recontact you, so they can re-read and think about the offer, and so they can put the dates in their diary.
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 24
Its also worth considering the appearance of your mailout. Most people expect computer designed brochures. Expensive business trainings are still advertised on cheap paper, but quality paper does add to your image. Research shows that even the colour of the paper does affect decisions. Black print on yellow paper is more likely to be read than any other colours. Dark blue, dark green and dove grey are the preferred colours in business. Many people feel more aligned with recycled paper, which we use for all our catalogues. When getting your brochure printed, shop around for cheap places. Remember that in printing there are three variables youll want to choose based on: Quality, Economy, and Speed of Delivery. You can have any two! Jay Conrad Levinson recommends you choose the first two, which means planning ahead. The other thing about appearance is layout. This is a whole field in itself (graphic design), but the following example makes the point. Here are two page size adverts for NLP trainers trainings, which appeared in the same edition of Anchor Point magazine (March 1999). Theres a difference in the graphic design. Subtle isnt it? A picture is worth a thousand words. Thats why we put these example pictures in; and thats what the example emphasises. Whats even more intriguing is that half the second advert is for a business training! PS. People read the PS on letters more than the main part of the letter! They want to see what you missed out. So always have a PS on a sales letter. Free Samples: The bigger the risk people take by buying a product, the more useful it can be to offer a free sample. It can be quite scary for people to spend large amounts of money simply on the trust that youll do what you say, especially if youve never done it before! But how do you give someone a free sample of your training? The answers include audio-tapes and videotapes of your trainings, and the free introductory talk. You can record live-sounding audiotapes at home with a microphone and a good stereo system, or contact a recording studio (community radio station or small music recording studio) and create a professionalsound-quality product. Videos and DVDs are a little more complex. The trick is to understand that VHS videos and DVDs (which are probably the end products you want) are produced from originals filmed in a clearer format such as Beta, Super-VHS, or a digital format. That may mean paying a professional firm to do the filming and editing. As a rule, for every hour of filming or audiotaping, allow for two hours of editing work. A free talk is a risky but enormously rewarding way to generate sampler experiences. At times another organisation will help advertise it for you. For example a school may permit you to run a free talk for their teachers, or a medical centre may permit you to give a (30 minute) free talk to their staff. Dont trust them to do all the promotion though! Print a flyer as if it was your own
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 25
promotion, and ask how you can help them advertise. Trade fairs are another place that sets up free talks. For example, there may be an annual alternative health or accelerated learning trade fair in your city. You can set up or share a stall advertising your courses, meet interested customers, and deliver a free talk to already motivated buyers. If you set up your own talk, you certainly need to advertise it, which means mailing out to your contact list, putting flyers up around town, and probably scoring at least some newspaper advertising. It could even mean advertising on radio (a medium that research shows will draw mainly young women). A few years ago, one of our graduates invested over $10,000 in setting up a free talk. It was very successful, and attracted about 200 people. Unfortunately, he never circulated a contact list, so the $10,000 worth of marketing all but went down the tube. Adding to the misfortune, in his talk he presented lots of information about the subject of the course and little about the benefits. There are a few simple principles that enable your free talk to generate more enrolments than any merely written advertising. 1) Have an assistant who can do the logistics work at the talk while you focus on teaching. 2) Have the assistant share their personal experience of learning NLP. 3) Encourage past participants to come to the talk and bring friends or family theyd like to introduce to NLP. 4) Have enrolment forms ready for a specific, dated training, and circulate a contact list. 5) Talk about the benefits of the course, rather than the features and contents. 6) Provide an experience of NLP at work (eg some exercise that shows how internal representations affect how you feel or your physiological responses). 7) Have people discuss, in pairs or small groups, what they are getting out of the talk. The Internet: If you have a computer, you probably have an internet connection. This gives people another way of contacting you quickly and immediately (by email). It also gives you the opportunity to advertise and market through the internet. Dont email adverts to everyone you know the address of. This is considered uncool in internet etiquette. The correct way to go about it is to set up a home page and get search engines like Yahoo (internet directories) to link to it. Talk to the people you have your internet connection from about it. Setting up an on-line catalogue is cheaper than printing one, and it is accessible from anywhere in the world.
Sales Talk: Ultimately, you probably will end up talking to most of the people before they enrol on your training. Dont panic. Its fine. By the time you talk to them, theyre probably friendly! I recommend Joseph OConnor and Robin Priors book Successful Selling with NLP as an introduction to this field. They present selling as the facilitation of buying. The skills they focus on include building rapport, asking useful questions, listening to the customer, and understanding the customers hopes, fears, needs and preferred style of buying. This may sound obvious after all, if you teach communication skills, its what you teach. Remembering to use it in talking to customers is important. The underlying attitude is one of fascination with the customer, and genuine interest in how to help them. This doesnt mean that you have to do half hour counselling sessions on the phone with people who may someday do your training. It doesnt mean you have to try and meet every desire of your customer. It simply means you are a consultant, clear about what you have to offer, and interested in checking whether what you offer could help them. Of course, you will check that. For example, youll acknowledge any objections and suggest win-win ways of resolving them (eg the expense objection may be met by time payment), and at an appropriate point youll ask if the customer is ready to buy now (called closing the sale in traditional selling). The Right Price Pricing deserves a bit of comment, if only to explain the notion of a pricing plateau. When people decide whether to buy one of our audiotapes, they have in mind that they would be willing to spend up to a certain amount. This amount varies, depending on the context (for example on an NLP Practitioner course, where the overall investment is thousands of dollars, many people dont blink at adding $200 worth of tapes to their account. On a weekend where the fee itself may only be $200, the same person is unlikely to buy more than $100 worth of extras. In either context, certain pricing ceilings operate. A person may decide that they would pay anything below $20 for an audiotape. In that setting, selling your tape for $17 rather than $19 does not increase your sales. From $15 to just under $20 is a sort of pricing plateau. This is why so many things are priced at $19.95. There are pricing plateaus for your training as well. There is one other important implication of pricing. Ever noticed how cheap and nasty the items in a Bargain Bin shop look, compared to the same items in an upmarket department store? Pricing well below other people in your field sends a clear message that your product is not as good. This
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 26
operates completely irrationally, and cannot be repaired by simple reassurances that our training is as good as ones that are twice the price. You may well attract some people to a cheaper training because they cannot afford other trainings. The risk is that if they know the alternative prices, they will consider themselves to be bargain-bin shopping. People do respond positively to specials (prices which are temporarily lowered), but permanent reductions need careful consideration. Training is expensive to run (weve just been discussing all the hidden costs for you). Ask for what your training is worth! Are you as good as a university lecturer, for example. Sit in on their classes, and find out. Then find out how much theyre paid for how much teaching. That gives you an idea what the fair rate of pay (after all your expenses are deducted) is for what you do! One effective way to use lower prices is to offer a lower price for early enrolment in trainings (eg for enrolling three weeks before the course starts). This doesnt just ensure that people enrol early enough for you to predict how many are coming. It also generates more enrolments. An important thing to understand about people buying your goods and courses is that people often only do a small portion of the things they actually intend to do. They may take away a brochure about your trainings with every intention to read it and enrol sometime. But the brochure gets lost, or by the time they read it the course has started, or they enrol in another course and then realise they dont have the money to do both. Helping people actually do your courses when they intend to means thinking about how to make it easier for them to act, and act now. Amazingly, even having an enrolment form on your brochure makes it easier. If people have to write out their own enrolment letter they are less likely to do so. Having an offer which makes it advantageous to act now, also gets them to put their intention into action. Another way to make purchasing easier is to expand the choices for people paying. You can offer cash payment, time payment, EFTPOS, and credit card payment. Ring up the credit card company. Their representative is only too happy to show you how, for a 4% fee, you can have people pay by credit card on mail order or by using a machine at the time. Establishing and Running Seminars Once you have generated interest in your training, youre going to want to run it! Marketing (relating to past, present and potential customers) continues throughout the training of course. The problem is that our focus as trainers shifts to delivering the training. Checklists and written guidelines are one
way to ensure that other elements of the customer relationship are not forgotten. These are discussed in Chapter five (Making it Happen). At the end of any training, participants are energised by the training, and committed to learning more. In a few hours, after they leave, they will re-enter the complex maze of their everyday tasks and multiple objectives. That means they will never be more receptive to considering enrolling in your other trainings. Recognising this, participants tend to ask Where do I go from here?. If you genuinely want to support their remaining committed to the skills theyve learned, youll have an answer. While providing a range of choices, ensure that you are clear what the next logical step is for them, and be willing to advise them. Tell them the benefits of that next step, and consider handing out the enrolment forms for it at this time. Through Care The most important marketing of all begins after a training! People who have been to your training have been through a significant emotional experience with you. In hypnotherapeutic terms, they are bonded to you. Its obviously vastly easier to support them doing further training with you than it is convincing strangers to join your trainings. Whats more, they are now going to do your marketing for you. Research suggests that ninety percent of your future clients will come as a result of contact with these people! Given that, you might want to treat them as ongoing friends rather than ex-clients. If they are in business, why not buy from them where you have the choice. If they are in the same business as you, think about how you can behave synergistically, rather than competing with them. If they are unhappy about something, pay attention to it. One of the most significant marketing exercises you will do is to respond to complaints. Bear in mind that each angry ex-client has been found to tell about 30 other people what theyre unhappy about. No-one is perfect, and your training cannot work for everyone, so if you keep training someone will be unhappy. Often, you will be able to immediately replace defective products or alter some action in a training. Sometimes, the best you can do is offer to give a gift as an apology. The question is not just how to minimise the chances, but how to respond. Decide now what you will give as free gifts to apologise. If they actually ask for something to compensate, give that and a little more. People who complain and have their problem solved tend to become loyal customers or Evangelists (see below).
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 27
Obviously, it makes sense to keep in contact with people who have trained with you, and to have them identified separately on your database. There is a balance here too. After my first two NLP Practitioner trainings, I treated graduates as personal friends. I searched for, photocopied and gave to them extensive documents whenever they asked for information. I spent hours on the phone giving free consultations to some of them. I loaned my personal books to them (and lost hundreds of dollars in books over the year). I even loaned my products to them! The thing is; this is all very well when you have 50 graduates, but now I have twenty times that. Ive learned both the value of remaining in contact with participants, and the value of preframing the relationship so they know what to expect. There are four ways in which I keep in contact with them. Firstly, I mail follow-up information to them, send a free newsletter, and offer a regular journal with our latest articles. Secondly, I phone people up and ask how they are going and what I can do to help them in learning more. Thirdly, I run special trainings (short trainings as well as longer certifications) directed at them specifically, and based on their requests for more learning. Fourthly, within the limits of my time, I respond to requests for information and help (often by directing them to sources rather than doing the research myself). Perhaps a quarter of the people who train with me become what Guy Kawasaki calls Evangelists. These are the third and final essential building block of his Evangelism system (the others, youll remember are you as the Leader, and the Angels who can help you from powerful positions). Theres no-one more worthy of spending your marketing money on than evangelists. Evangelists want to promote you. Tad James calls them True Believers, and Jerry Wilson calls them Champions in his book Word of Mouth Marketing. They will ask you what they can do. Theyll ask you what advertising you can give them to show others. They can inspire others because others know that they are not in it for the money. They share your mission. They are motivated by that mission, by the desire to befriend you, by the desire to share their own experience with their friends, colleagues and family, and by the simple desire to be part of something worthwhile. If you identify them on your contact list, you can identify ways to enlist their support. They could, in ways that benefited them as much as you: Provide phone references and written testimonials for you. Assist at your courses and free talks. Distribute advertising for you (which you could redesign to meet their market segments).
Organise study groups, a library or other support services Provide expertise. Give you important feedback about how to improve what youre doing.
True believers, evangelists, or champions are the ultimate achievement of your marketing. At this point, its useful to go back and review your marketing plan, to consider how you can assist more people to move through the sequence from first hearing or reading about you, to becoming a participant, to becoming an evangelist. Thats the person-to-person story of marketing. In a way, its actually another type of training that you are doing to achieve this result. In that sense, being in business is kind of a familiar process. Re-viewing Marketing Lets summarise. Youre in business, and so you have a role as an entrepreneur (dreamer), technician (realist) and manager (critic). As a manager, you think through the legal, organisational and logistic questions of running a business. The independence of business life gives you great opportunities to fully express your own personal mission. Creating a style of presentation that is authentic, congruent and unique gets you out of the rat race and into surpetition. You can then get very clear about who you are marketing to, creating an internal representation of your typical desired client, and of any gatekeepers or angels who may be able to assist you to teach that desired client group. To kindle interest in your trainings, remember to think in terms of benefits, and to assess your advertising to ensure it catches your clients attention, makes a clear offer, and delivers measurable results. The choices for advertising include using directories (especially the yellow pages), writing articles for magazines, writing press releases or repeated small adverts for newspapers, accessing bulletin boards and community newsletters, mailing letters, enrolment forms and brochures with clear benefits and contact information, providing tapes of your work and offering free talks where you demonstrate benefits and collect contacts, setting up an internet page, and listening to people to help them verbally clarify their needs and decide whether to enrol. Price your trainings so they fit with peoples expectations, pricing plateaux and ability to pay. When you run your training, a set of checklists can help you keep to your policies about such things as training contracts, assistants and staff, conflict resolution, selecting a training venue, preparing carefully. Marketing at the training helps people utilise the attention they have gathered to select a
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 28
next step. In many ways the most exciting work of marketing begins after your training, as you find ways to keep in contact with participants, respond to complaints, and support evangelists to promote you to their friends and colleagues. When you teach, you put a great deal of energy into getting it right. You wouldnt just turn up and hope youll think of some useful subject on the day. Its the same with marketing. Successful marketing is the building of relationships with past, current and future course participants. Its very much the kind of people related work that you wanted to do when you chose training as a career path. Getting it to work requires a commitment to building the best relationships you can, so that you can go on delivering the great teaching youre capable of to more and more participants. Since that Thursday night when I finally took marketing seriously and filled my weekend training in 24 hours, Ive learned a lot about this. Twelve years on, I am still learning and I am still in business. If youre a trainer, I want you to be the best teacher you could ever be. This chapter is aimed at giving you the best chance I know how to make it work. Exercise 3.1: Marketing Plan For your training business, identify: 1) What is your mission? 2) What makes you unique? 3) In what ways could you make your position more unique or first? 4) In terms of your marketing objectives, what geographical and demographic area do you wish to be teaching to? 5) What kinds of training do you plan to offer; and when do you plan to have these up and running? 6) What is the number of trainees you plan to reach in that time? 7) Think of the kind of person who would be your core client. Imagine one person. What sex are they? What age are they? What cultural identity do they have? What kind of house or apartment do they live in? What do they do with their time? What do they earn? What difficulties do they have in their life? What is important to them?
What metaprograms do they operate with? What would motivate this person to buy from you? What kind of training do they like, and what do they want from it? How would they make the decision to attend, and what could stop them deciding? What could you do that would assist them to get to your training? What price will they pay? What are the key benefits that your training could offer this person in their daily life?
8) In relation to this type of person, who are Angels who could help you to reach them? 9) Who do you already know, who would be an Evangelist for you? 10) Consider the following methods of reaching people. Write a plan for your use of each to reach the objectives you set above. Directories (eg the Yellow Pages) Magazines Newspapers Bulletin boards and newsletters Mail Introductory talks and free training sessions The internet Talking with people
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 29
doesnt mean its got no order; it just means that the order is so complex its result cannot, in the real world, be predicted. And teaching is exactly the same. This article is about how to take advantage of that. The Snowflake The new science of Chaos can be very simply understood if we use the example of a snowflake. Every snowflake is unique. Every single one. The process of making a snowflake, then, is not ordered in the way we normally use that word. It is Chaotic. And yet, there are similarities between snowflakes. Let me show you a simple way to make one of the millions of possible snowflake patterns (Gleick, 1987, p 99). You take a simple triangle (A below). Then, you add other simple triangles to the middle of each edge of the first one (B). Then you do that again, adding other triangles to the middle of the edge of those ones (C). Then you simply keep doing it again (D). By this time, your picture looks recognisably like those snowflake diagrams youve seen in books.
(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
The real snowflake does this itself. As a liquid crystallises, it forms growing tips (like the points of a triangle). The boundaries of these tips become weakened by the process and send tips off them (the next set of triangle points). This happens again and again, so that the result doesnt even look like a simple orderly set of growing tips. It looks chaotic. If you magnify one of these natural shapes, you find that small areas of it look similar to larger areas (in our example case, triangles with triangles on the sides). This kind of shape which is similar at different magnifications is called fractal (see Dilts, 1998), and it looks more natural somehow. Why? Because nature has very few orderly geometric shapes, and lots of fractals. Think of trees, fern leaves, or even the little blood capillaries in your body. They are all fractals. A small part of a fern leaf has the same shape as the whole fern leaf.
All snowflakes are different, but all of them have some similarities. For example, all of them have a six-sided-ness about them. Six-sided-ness is what is called an attractor for snowflakes. The shapes vary, but they never vary beyond the basic attractor. In the same way, every oak tree is unique, but if you learn what the attractor is like (the essence of an oak tree) you can recognise that they are all oaks. Another example is that, in terms of the earths climate, there are two known attractors. One is what we have now; a balance that supports life, even when we pour greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere for a century. The other is where the seas freeze, and the land is covered in ice. That too would be a stable attractor. Scientists do not know why the current climatic attractor is holding out; the other state, called the White Earth Equilibrium, is mathematically just as likely (Gleick, 1987, p 170).
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 30
The notion of attractors explains why all snowflakes are similar. So what makes a snowflake unique? The answer is in very minute differences in the air conditions at the time the snowflake begins to form. The same is true for the oak tree, and for all other natural, chaotic forms. The sensitivity is so dramatic, that Chaos theorists like to use the analogy that if a butterfly shifted in the air in Beijing, it might alter storm patterns in New York weather next month (called the butterfly effect; see Gleick, 1987, p8). Finally, if conditions change too much, the snowflake can break away from its attractor and be caught by another attractor. It can become a raindrop. Letting Go Of Order In Teaching For us as trainers, the fact that teaching is a chaotic system is both a challenge and a blessing. It is a blessing because it makes teaching an adventure that is constantly new and interesting. It is a challenge because teachers often seek grand unified theories to reassure them that if they act in a certain way, they will get a certain result. And in a chaotic system the only result that is predictable is unpredictability. The old idea of order in teaching included a belief that there will be one correct way to teach. In studying the application of chaos theory to business, John Legge (1990, p33-45) points out that salespeople often want to know what is the correct sales pitch for a particular market. In reality, the most successful sales pitch for a market often appeals to only 20% of customers (but 20% is better than 19%). This is because the market, like a seminar group or a school class, is a chaotic system. It is not tidily organised into a triangle with three key points to learn. It is more like a unique, complex snowflake. The point for salespeople is that if you are wanting to enter that market, copying the most successful current salesperson may be wasting your energy. It may be easier to find another sizeable group of customers (say 16%) who respond to a totally different pitch. By accepting that the market is more complex; that there is no one right way, you open up more possibilities for success. In this article, our aim is to do the same with teaching. First Moves Legge uses another analogy (1990, p 110-111). He says that interacting in an old style ordered system would be like playing a game of poker. Poker is a game of power. You can have a weak hand, a strong hand, or even an invincible hand. In any case, you win in one powerful move, by keeping your position secret, and pushing the other person until they cannot afford to respond.
This is the way that many of the teachers you had at school tried to play teaching. By contrast, interacting in a chaotic system is like playing the Japanese game of Go. In Go, each player places a stone at a time on a board. By encircling areas of the board with stones, each player can co-opt the others areas. No one stone placement can overwhelm the other player, and in fact, the game usually ends at an arbitrary time, when players agree to stop and check who has the most of the board encircled by their stones. Each play is open and obvious. Successful play involves precise (though apparently random) early placements of stones, which shape the entire game in almost mysterious ways. Both Go and poker are competitive games, at least to some extent. But something of Legges analogy applies to the chaotic world of teaching. Success in teaching involves great skill at initial moves; skill at creating the butterfly effect. Much of Ericksonian hypnotherapy, one of the fields studied by NLP trainers, is based on this butterfly effect. Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson tells the story of how he worked with Olympic shot put medalist Donald Lawrence. Lawrence believed that he could not throw the shot further than 58 feet. Erickson asked him if he could honestly tell the difference between a 58 feet, and 58 and 1/16 of an inch. Lawrence agreed that he could not (and he thus accepted the possibility of throwing the shot 58 feet and 1/16 of an inch. Nor could he tell between 58 and 58 and 1/8 of an inch, or even between 58 and 59. Erickson said I slowly enlarged the possibility. In real life, Lawrence finally placed it over 68 feet (Rosen, 1982, p 102). This is of course a widely recognised strategy in hypnotherapy. The hypnotist elicits a small hypnotic effect, such as an involuntary tremor in the hand, and builds on it to produce an arm catalepsy (floating arm). This in turn might be built on to produce a hypnotic analgesia, and so on. The person is following consciously each step, and yet is surprised at their analgesia. But how much more amazing it is to realise that the tiny tremor was its real cause. In the same way, the ultimate successes of teaching are carefully built on very small steps. In teaching an NLP Practitioner course, for example, I have people very early on perform a small and apparently simple visualisation exercise. An example might be asking them to think of a lemon, see the shiny yellow skin, and see the juice squirting in a fine spray into the air as they cut a thick slice off it. Smelling the sharp scent, I have them pick up the slightly wet slice and place it in their mouth just on top of their tongue. As they bite I have them notice that their mouth is now actually salivating (in the real world). And yet there
The Training Secrets of NLP Transformations International Consulting & Training Ltd, 2003 31
is no lemon,. We have triggered a hormonal response simply by imagination. This tiny exercise begins a butterfly effect. Step by step we build on it until the participants are breaking solid pine boards with their hand, producing arm catalepsy and other hypnotic effects, and actually changing major life issues using NLP processes. I do not allow people to start the Practitioner course on day two, though. I have found from experience that the later storm of transformation depends on the butterfly of the first visualisations. The participants do not usually believe this. They assume that the later processes worked because they are intrinsically powerful. In fact, the later processes have power because they seem expected based on the initial ones. Successfully delivering the lemon visualisation is more central to the art of our teaching than actually teaching fancy anchoring or submodality processes. The design of our courses is based on each step seeming plausible based on what people inevitably got from the last step. This means that the steps must be small enough so that success is almost guaranteed. I pay a great deal of attention to someone who cannot yet do the lemon visualisation. I risk nothing by doing this. After all, I hardly lose face if they fail such an obviously unimportant test; theres no problem in discussing it openly. But I do so knowing that many other moves in the game ride on their success with this small step. Bernice McCarthys 4MAT System
In the same way, as I teach each step, we have a design which supports success and belief. To use Chaos theory, my training design is fractal. The design at each level utilises Bernice McCarthys 4MAT system. Bernice McCarthy developed this system based on her study of a number of other models of teaching, including NLP and David Kolbs Learning Style theory. Kolb noticed that learners have different preferred learning styles. To simplify, learners are asking four different questions in relation to the learning process: 1. Why? These learners want to know the reason for learning. Kolb calls them Divergers. 2. What? These learners want to get the facts and concepts. Kolb calls them Assimilators. 3. How? These learners want to practise and do something. Kolb calls them Convergers. 4. What if? These learners want to try out variations. Kolb calls them Accommodators. Kolb pointed out that each of the four groups of students is focusing on one section of a learning cycle. This cycle begins with identifying a reason to learn, formulating concepts about the subject, actively using the concepts, speculating about the results of using the concepts and trying them out in life elsewhere, and identifying new reasons to learn more. Kolbs research verified that learners were spread across the four types. McCarthy pointed out that different teaching styles were required for each stage of this learning cycle, and that accelerated learning models such as NLP were providing the tools to meet the needs of all four groups. The information about the four quadrants is summarised in the following table:
4. What If? Accommodators These learners want to consider future applications of what they are learning. Teachers can be consultants as they explore questions about what might happen , teaching to themselves and others. Ask after an exercise What questions and what comments do you have? 32.7% of women and 19.6% of men. 3. How? Convergers These learners want practical experiences and exercises to do with the information given. Teachers can give them an exercise and coach them as they do it. To check theyre ready to do the exercise, ask What else do you need to know to do the exercise? 14.8% of women and 23.5% of men
1. Why? Divergers These learners want to know why they should learn this. Teachers can motivate them by giving reasons at the beginning of a training session. To check their readiness to learn, ask Would this be useful to you? 25% of women and 19.4% of men.