The Training Secrets of NLP 1

The Training Secrets Of NLP Dr Richard Bolstad 2003

The Training Secrets Of NLP Dr Richard Bolstad Contents The Training Secrets of NLP _________________________________________________ii 1. Teaching to the Right Sense ________________________________________________ 2 2. On Becoming a Trainer ____________________________________________________ 8 3. Where Are All The Students? ______________________________________________ 15 4. Chaos and Order in Teaching ______________________________________________ 30 5. Making It Happen _______________________________________________________ 39 6. Preframing _____________________________________________________________ 42 7. The First Hour: The Power of Beginnings in Training__________________________ 47 8. Mind Your Language ____________________________________________________ 55 9. Educated Commitment ___________________________________________________ 59 10. Training Questions _____________________________________________________ 67 11. Revealing State Secrets to Teachers ________________________________________ 74 12. Providing Heroic Challenges On Trainings _________________________________ 85 13. Learning Games _______________________________________________________ 91 14. Transforming Conflict in Training _________________________________________ 97 15. Metaprogram Flexibility ________________________________________________ 106 16. Evaluating The Evaluator ______________________________________________ 110 17. Producing Excellence __________________________________________________ 117 About The Author ________________________________________________________ 125 Bibliography ____________________________________________________________ 126 Index __________________________________________________________________ 130

Published in 2003 and Copyright: TRANSFORMATIONS International Consulting & Training 26 Southampton Street, Christchurch 8002, New Zealand Phone/Fax: +64-3-337-1852 E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://www.transformations.net.nz

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Here They Are! In This Book! The Training Secrets Of NLP… 1. Teaching To The Right Sense 9 Understand what NLP will deliver in learning and teaching. 9 Discover why older models of training and teaching don’t fully access the incredible resources of the brain; and start doing just that now. 9 This very first chapter will give you the content of many books on NLP and training…. The rest of the book gives you the secrets of the training megastars. 2. On Becoming A Trainer 9 Put all the pieces of the training puzzle together in one model. 9 Integrate training with your life mission and have it inspire you totally. 9 Ensure everything in you totally supports you being the confident, resourceful trainer you want to be. 3. Where Are All The Students 9 Market your training business with the same passion you bring to teaching. 9 Find the new students you need to begin training, and build lifelong relationships with clients who want to study with you again and again. 9 Use marketing and advertising secrets that draw in the precise clients you’ve been looking for 4. Chaos And Order In Teaching 9 Ride the chaos of group development knowing you have set in motion the perfect training. 9 Ensure that every section of your training builds the results you want overall. 9 Use the new science of chaos to design seamless training plans. 5. Making It Happen 9 Plan for every possibility, building in processes so you can ensure your success. 9 Know you have every last detail of your training working for you. 6. Preframing 9 Solve disagreements before they happen. 9 Ensure students agree with all the core concepts you want to teach. 7. The First Hour: The Power Of Beginnings In Training 9 Build incredible group rapport so your training group co-operates as a team from the very start. 9 Use the first hour of training to set up the entire course structure in students’ minds. 9 Create powerful agreements and a sense of absolute contract with your participants. 8. Mind Your Language 9 Use powerful hypnotic language patterns so your every sentence inspires learning and enthusiasm. 9 Explain each concept with absolute clarity. 9 Make positive suggestions that your students accept at a deep unconscious level. 9. Educated Commitment

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9 Create absolute commitment and test it at each step of your training. 9 Ensure students memorise several times what they thought they could, using advanced accelerated learning processes. 9 Make sure that what your students learn actually transforms their daily lives. 10. Training Questions 9 Invite exactly the questions you need to make sure your students learn enthusiastically. 9 Identify what type of question needs what type of answer, and know when it is best not to answer directly at all. 9 Use student questions as opportunities to create personal breakthroughs in learning. 11. Revealing State Secrets To Teachers 9 Get students quickly into the state of mind where learning happens automatically. 9 Use the powerful storytelling techniques of stand-up comedians and stage hypnotists to totally entrance your audience. 12. Providing Heroic Challenges On Trainings 9 Take participants through powerful, life changing experiences that prove beyond doubt that your training is working for them. 9 Learn the secrets of firewalking and breaking a board with your bare hand, and guide participants through such events confidently. 13. Learning Games 9 Dissolve the illusory boundary between learning and fun. 9 Develop activities that ensure core concepts are learned while you play. 9 Make the most fun times in your students’ lives the times when they learned most. 14. Transforming Conflict In Training 9 Identify the precise communication skills which will be most effective in each exact situation. 9 Learn how to ensure that most conflicts simply don’t occur, by building co-operation from first contact, before the course starts. 9 Resolve any remaining conflicts so that you get what you need and your students are delighted. 9 Turn disagreements into learning events that your students thank you for. 15. Metaprogram Flexibility 9 Motivate students however extreme their personality seemed. 9 Help students use their own way of doing things to learn easily and to be convinced that they have indeed learned. 9 Discover your own learning and teaching style and develop flexibility with it. 16. Evaluating The Evaluator 9 Become 100% clear about how to check that your training is getting the results that you and your clients want to get. 9 Design evaluations so they increase learning and simultaneously solve any learning problems they uncover. 17. Producing Excellence

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9 Know the crucial difference between teaching beginners and teaching experts, and design training that works for each group. 9 Know what to teach and what not to teach, depending on the skill level of your participants. 9 Take students beyond information collection to expertise.

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Teaching To The Right Sense NLP in Training Welcome to this book on the contribution of NLP to the art and science of training. If you are involved in training, you have almost certainly heard of NLP. Perhaps you have dismissed the amazing techniques of NLP-trained teachers like Tony Robbins as being beyond your current career goals. This book will show you how you can deliver that magic yourself. I’ve been an NLP trainer for over a decade, and I know that the magic of NLP training is too good to be kept secret for the few. Unless you are already very familiar with NLP, this chapter is an important introduction to the concepts that underlie the rest of the book. If you have extensive knowledge of NLP and plan to use it in training, or to become a certified NLP Trainer, this book is also planned for you. In that case you may choose to begin at the next chapter. If you are already an NLP trainer, my hope is that this book will offer some new and interesting perspectives on what you already do so well. Read on and enjoy. Becoming an NLP trainer was once just my dream. From the time when I did my NLP Practitioner Training, I wanted to do this as my life work. Over the time of my NLP Practitioner, Master Practitioner and Trainer Trainings, I met some wonderful models of excellence whom I grew to love and respect as colleagues. For over a decade now, I have been living my dream. The reality has actually exceeded all my initial expectations. I am profoundly grateful to the universe for providing me this extraordinary adventure. I’ve had the opportunity to reach deep into the lives of thousands of people. I travel across the globe, teaching and learning at prestigious conferences, sharing life transforming processes in vastly different cultures, and seeing new hope arising in a war-ravaged world. Over the last five years, I have had the privilege of assisting others to step into this dream and become Internationally Certified NLP Trainers. This book is my invitation to you to join us. Help us create a world worth living in. What Is NLP? It’s the first question you asked when you heard the words. NLP is about modelling, about finding what works well, what makes high achievers successful. An NLP trainer is someone who shares in that adventure. Why? Because, says NLP trainer Robert

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!

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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 couldn’t 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 Satir’s 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 Satir’s 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. Satir’s 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. NLP’s precise understanding of the way the

brain works can be compared to a computer “User’s 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 you’ll 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 student’s 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 it’s 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

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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 you’re 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)

Some students do a lot of thinking in words (auditory digital). They want to know the “information” you’re telling them. But for other students, being able to “picture” what you’re 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 don’t 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 (you’ve 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

of the main senses (if you don’t 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 polyglot’s 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 it’s possible in one person’s neurology, it’s possible in anyone’s. 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 person’s 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).

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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% .

One of the key ways NLP uses to get your students into a learning state of mind is anchoring. Here’s an example of what I mean by anchoring. Sometimes when you’re listening to the radio, you hear a song you haven’t 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

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).

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-

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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.

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 (O’Connor 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 didn’t make a light go. Mistakes are the secret of genius! (That last sentence is a “reframe”. It changes the meaning of “mistakes”). Metaprograms

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 don’t follow their suggestions were “resistant” or “disobedient”. It makes more sense to realise that when students don’t follow your leading, it just means they aren’t enough in rapport with you yet. That’s 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. Here’s an example. If I say to you “Don’t 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 don’t taste the tang of that lemon now!” your mouth may begin to water -even though I told you not to. When teachers say “Don’t 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 “Don’t forget ...”, it’s “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 wouldn’t 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.

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 we’ve 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, they’ll be frustrated because they don’t 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 can’t 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”

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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 “…can’t…” refers to the level of Beliefs and Values. It would be the same if the student said “I don’t want to learn the writing methods they teach us at school.” “…don’t 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.

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; I’d 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 don’t 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”. That’s 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 that’s 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).

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 person’s body, and listen through their ears, and look through their eyes. This Second

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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 life’s 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 life’s 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, I’d 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 life’s 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

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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. It’s 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 don’t

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understand their meaning. In NLP we remind ourselves that it’s 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, you’d 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 can’t 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 didn’t fully match the person’s 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 doesn’t begin when you stand up in front of the group; it began when you made the decision to be a trainer. For this reason, I’d 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 O’Connor 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 (O’Connor 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 audience’s 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

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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 you’d 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 it’s higher intention so that you can have a completely integrated commitment to excellence as a trainer. For example, let’s 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 you’d 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”, you’d 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. Let’s contrast useful and less useful representations for a moment here. Seeing

yourself critically, as if from the audience’s 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. It’s 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, you’ll find that each sentence you say prompts the next, and you don’t 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

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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, it’s 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 you’d 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 trainer’s 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 doesn’t 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 you’ve 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

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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 you’ve 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, you’re 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

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(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 “What’s 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 person’s 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 person’s 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

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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.

Where Are All The Students? En-role-ment Most trainers are trainers because they love training; not because they love marketing. For those of you who are experienced both in training and in business skills, this chapter may simply confirm what you already know and use. But for many trainers, making the business of training work is an unexpected challenge. And the truth is that the best trainer in the world doesn’t get to do any training if they don’t enrol anyone in their seminars. When I ran my first two NLP Practitioner trainings and NLP weekends, I was employed teaching in a state tertiary institution. I had a stable income guaranteed, and was “transitioning” to private work, by running NLP seminars on my holidays and weekends. The first trainings worked like clockwork. Many of my friends and colleagues from round New Zealand enrolled, and my very first course was actually booked out. Then I ran a weekend that didn’t attract so many people. In fact, I got about eight enrolments, so I cancelled it in disgust. That was a bit puzzling. I had another weekend coming up though, and this one was to be videotaped by a professional video company. It was costing me a few thousand dollars, but I figured that all the best trainers had videos out, and it might be a great way to get well known. On the Thursday evening before that weekend, it finally dawned on me that we had six people enrolled, that the course had to go ahead because I’d paid for the video, and that essentially I was in trouble. For the first time, I really needed a training to work! That night I didn’t sleep at all - not because I was worrying; but because I was working. I thought again about who might be interested in attending this particular weekend. I listed all the possible ways to get people onto a weekend training one day away. I worked out what advertising would be needed, and who could help distribute it. I produced the adverts by hand. I left home with the adverts and began distributing them at 5.00 am on Friday. Twenty eight hours later the training began, and it was full. That was the first time I actually took my business seriously. I stopped “transitioning”, stopped rehearsing, and treated it as real. Which role are you in?

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Of the 500 NLP Practitioners I’ve trained since then, many dream of going into business using their NLP skills. But most are still “transitioning”. I’m 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 I’ve 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, it’s up to you to stop transitioning and use every resource you’ve 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. It’s not because the people running them don’t work! It’s 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 we’re 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 Gerber’s 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, that’s not the point. The new “office help” doesn’t 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! What’s missing is the manager in you. The decision, Gerber suggests, is whether you want to be primarily a Technician (in which case you’re 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. You’re 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 Earle’s 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 you’ll want to make such as: • •

•

•

Are you working alone or in a group? If you’re 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 you’ll 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, you’ll 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 you’ll 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 you’re using your home phone as a business phone, so if you’re at home that means another decision about getting one phone line or two. Next, you need some decisions about insurance, because your home insurance doesn’t cover all that new equipment. And

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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, there’s 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. You’ll 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.

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, it’s that (for example) the Inland Revenue might charge you very serious penalties if you don’t get money to them on time!

M ission A uthenticity R esearch K indling Interest E stablishing Seminars T hrough Care Mission: What Makes It All Worth While? As the Entrepreneur in you knows, though, there are some very good reasons for going into business. Getting clear about what those are in your specific case is important before we consider this mysterious field of Marketing. This involves asking yourself some fairly central NLP questions about what your mission in life is, what your vision of your business future is, what your values for lifestyle and career are, and what your evidence procedure for “success” is (see the last chapter). NLP training itself is great preparation for being in business. Being in business means you can focus your entire life on your mission, and directly create your vision of ideal lifestyle and work. Getting clear about the reasons for going into business also involves understanding some

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 employer’s “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. There’s a cliché 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, you’ll find they didn’t just buy it, they got converted to it. The now much copied Body Shop is another example, Kawasaki says, of evangelism. The Body Shop doesn’t 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 don’t buy Bibles because they’re a good textbook. They buy products because of the state that they hope the product will deliver. Founding NLP institute NLP Comprehensive’s 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 it’s 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, Landmark’s Director of Marketing and Communications emphasises “We are in the business of selling a product of Transformation.” (Wruck and Eastley, 1997, p 8). That’s 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.

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The One And Only You Whether Evangelism works depends, says Kawasaki, on three types of people. First and foremost, there is the Leader (that’s 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, it’s more to the centre. But guess what –nobody wants a grey keyboard! And now, her old customers, who trusted her black keyboards, can’t find her in the Yellow pages. Worse, when they see her grey keyboards, they’re 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 hasn’t 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 it’s true that you need a certain percentage of people willing to try out a black keyboard, for it to work. But it’s also true that if what you teach looked and sounded like every other training in the business, it simply wouldn’t exist. Who hasn’t been tempted to change their logo, their corporate name, and their trainings, to suit the latest trend they’ve heard of. It’s not that this is “wrong”. It’s 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. It’s 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. What’s the biggest selling book ever published, they ask (1986, p 21). Sure; it’s the Bible. But what’s the second biggest selling book ever published? –Who knows? New York is America’s biggest port. Sure, but what is America’s second biggest port? It’s actually Hampton Roads, Virginia! In these cases, as in all marketing, not many people remember anything after the “first”. That’s 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 can’t 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 won’t 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. It’s named after Amerigo Vespucci, who reached it in 1497, five years after Christopher. So why isn’t 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 Grinder’s 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

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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 doesn’t mean fighting the current number one; it means clarifying your position separate from them. Avis rental cars was the world’s 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 you’re committed to being true to it. What is marketing? Most people assume it’s 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 weren’t 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, they’d 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 you’ve 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

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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 can’t 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 didn’t 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 don’t 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, I’d 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 you’d 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?

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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, you’ll discover that they have their own objectives for the training, quite separate from yours. You’ll 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 didn’t know and didn’t care about the content of the training. I then checked how she’d 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 (that’s 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 you’ll set a 5 year goal in terms of both trainings and participants. Then you’ll 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 you’ll take. Which actions? That’s 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 they’re showing? Whatever you do know, it’s the result of the movie companies investing millions of dollars. You probably don’t have quite that much to start marketing your business. You’ll need to use your resources carefully. Jay Conrad Levinson calls this “Guerrilla Marketing”. It’s 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 it’s 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 don’t 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 don’t buy shampoo, they buy great looking hair that people compliment them

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about. People don’t 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 don’t use words like “strategies” expecting that people know what you mean, and they certainly don’t use words like “submodalities”, an NLP jargon term. Ask “What’s 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….” It’s 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 they’re familiar with, looking for news (that’s 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”. There’s no way I’d 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 you’ve 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 someone’s 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 doesn’t 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,

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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 you’ve 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 I’d like to give you about how to utilise these and other methods of telling people about your training. I’ll 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 don’t 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 isn’t 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 don’t 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 ¼ 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

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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. Don’t 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 they’re 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 – don’t assume that the organisation knows what image you want to present. Write the article as you’d write a press release (see above). While we’re 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 they’ve been to, what they liked and didn’t 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, don’t 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 they’ll get. It can list detailed benefits, and contain testimonials from people who are as near as possible to the same as the reader (don’t 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.

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It’s 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 you’ll 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). There’s a difference in the graphic design. Subtle isn’t it?

A picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why we put these example pictures in; and that’s what the example emphasises. What’s 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 you’ll do what you say, especially if you’ve 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. Don’t trust them to do all the promotion though! Print a flyer as if it was your own

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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 they’d 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. Don’t 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. Don’t panic. It’s fine. By the time you talk to them, they’re probably friendly! I recommend Joseph O’Connor and Robin Prior’s 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 customer’s hopes, fears, needs and preferred style of buying. This may sound obvious –after all, if you teach communication skills, it’s 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 doesn’t mean that you have to do half hour counselling sessions on the phone with people who “may someday” do your training. It doesn’t 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, you’ll 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 you’ll 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 don’t 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

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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 (we’ve 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 they’re 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 doesn’t 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 don’t 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, you’re 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 they’ve learned, you’ll 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. It’s obviously vastly easier to support them doing further training with you than it is convincing strangers to join your trainings. What’s 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 they’re 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).

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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. I’ve 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, you’ll remember are you as the Leader, and the Angels who can help you from powerful positions). There’s 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. They’ll 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 you’re doing.

True believers, evangelists, or champions are the ultimate achievement of your marketing. At this point, it’s 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. That’s the person-to-person story of marketing. In a way, it’s 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 Let’s summarise. You’re 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 client’s 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 people’s 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

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“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 wouldn’t just turn up and hope you’ll think of some useful subject on the day. It’s the same with marketing. Successful marketing is the building of relationships with past, current and future course participants. It’s 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 you’re 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, I’ve learned a lot about this. Twelve years on, I am still learning… and I am still in business. If you’re 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?

• • • • • • •

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

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?

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Chaos And Order In Teaching Teaching is Chaos (As Teachers Know!) This is a chapter about creating order in teaching. There are many theories about teaching. And new teachers often hope that if they find the right theory, it will all suddenly make sense. This is comparable to the hope that weather forecasters had earlier this century. They thought that if they had good enough satellites and monitors, they could one day predict the weather perfectly. The work of Edward Lorenz, in 1961 (Gleick, 1987, p 11 to 31) finally proved that this dream would never be fulfilled. The weather is so complex, that to monitor it well enough would require us to monitor every square inch of air every second of the day, not to mention knowing what every person on the planet was about to do! Just measuring it could change the whole pattern. Weather forecasters are up the creek without a paddle! The weather, it turns out, is a “chaotic” system. That

(A)

(B)

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 doesn’t 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.

doesn’t mean it’s 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 you’ve seen in books.

(C)

(D)

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 earth’s 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).

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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 other’s 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 Legge’s 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 field’s 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

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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 McCarthy’s 4MAT system. Bernice McCarthy developed this system based on her study of a number of other models of teaching, including NLP and David Kolb’s 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:

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; there’s 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.

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. Kolb’s 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:

Bernice McCarthy’s 4MAT System

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. Ò 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 they’re 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.

Ô

Ñ Ó

2. What? Assimilators These learners want to know the information, and formulate concepts about it. The teacher can give information and lecture. To check their understanding ask “What more do you need to know? 27.5% of women and 37.5% of men.

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Using The 4MAT In Training How does a trainer apply the 4MAT? In simple terms, they could apply it by: 1. Explaining why the subject is worth learning. They can check that the “Why” question is answered for Divergers by then asking “So would this be of use to you?”. If not, it makes sense to continue explaining or demonstrating “Why” until students are motivated. 2. Teaching the facts of the subject, and the design of the process if there is one. They can check that the information is conveyed adequately for the Assimilators with questions such as “What more do you need to know?” 3. Demonstrating the use of this information (eg demonstrating the process), which gives the trainees vicarious experience (“How”). Then giving them an exercise to practise using the information. To check that they are Convergers are ready to do the exercise, ask “What else do you need to know to do the exercise?” and screen out questions about things which “might happen” or speculative “What if...” questions (which will make more sense after the exercise). 4. Inviting questions and comments after the exercise. At this stage questions about applications outside the training room can be answered, including questions about what might go differently to the expected and demonstrated process. This particularly answers the needs of the Accommodators. It’s also important to realise that people committed to one of the learning styles would be quite happy to spend the entire training answering their question alone. Divergers want a motivational speaker; they can always find out the facts and try it out later, if only you’ll inspire them now! Assimilators would rather you just gave them ten times the facts; they figure they can always practise later. The Assimilator’s ideal teacher is a lecturer. Convergers don’t want to chat about it; they want to get on and do it; right from the start, before they actually find out what the exercise is. Their ideal learning situation is a group skills “laboratory” where people just try things out in action, rather than theorising about them. Accommodators want to hypothesise about what might happen in obscure situations, before they even know what the basic process is. They just want you as a colleague to speculate with. The role of the trainer involves ensuring that all four questions are answered, and coordinating the sequence with the natural cycle of learning (why-what-how-what if). The 4MAT is almost the larger scale strategy of teaching. In NLP terms any process can be thought of as a strategy having four steps:

Trigger (something that lets you know it’s time to begin, and defines what outcome you want) Operation (the active collecting of information stage) Test (comparing the results of what you got in the Operation with the results you intended from the Trigger stage) Exit (the results of the comparison; the indication that you’re complete, or that you need to start the strategy again) Answering the “Why” question is the Trigger for doing the Operation of teaching (the “What”). When you then give students an exercise (the “How”), you as a teacher can compare the results to the intended results, and the results of this Test are confirmed in the final review, in the “What if” stage, which is the Exit. Demonstrations: The Set-up We frequently answer the “Why?” question with a metaphor (like the snowflake story above). This may include us telling the story of our previous successful use of the process we are teaching. We then explain the process, answering the “What” question. At this stage, some participants will expect (at least unconsciously) that the process is generally useful but may not work for them. Sending them into a practical exercise at this point is not the most successful move. Instead, we use a demonstration, by the trainer, in front of the group. The demonstration of the process becomes the prototype of the exercise as done by the participants. To restate this; the way the demonstration goes shapes the way all the other exercises go. It is itself a fractal of the exercises. Or, mixing our chaotic analogies turbulently; the metaphor we tell at the “Why?” stage is the butterfly flapping its wings, the explanation of the process at the “What?” stage is the swirl building in the air, the demonstration is the wind current, and the whole group exercise is the resulting storm. What we do in the demonstration will more reliably predict what participants do in the exercise than will our wall-charts, our manual instructions or what we say to do! If the trainer does the demonstration standing up, that’s the way participants tend to do it, even when we tell them “Sit down during this exercise”. Furthermore, the behaviour of the subject in the demonstration will tend to be replicated by the behaviour of participants when they are the subjects. If the demonstration subject sheds tears, then about a third of the other participants will shed tears too; and they will believe that the process intrinsically

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generates tears. Consequently, if the demonstration goes markedly differently to normal, repeat it! The demonstration, then, is a model of the exercise. That is its purpose. Its purpose is not to demonstrate how skilfully the trainer can do the process being taught. I take it for granted that the trainer can do the process better than most participants (after all; the trainer has done it before). The role of the trainer involves reducing what they do to the simplicity of the exercise (see Chapter one). What the trainer does in the exercise is what they explained before it. It is a simplified version of what is possible. Building Belief With Demonstrations Some participants assume that the demonstration is a “test” of the process. They are eager to “see if this can really work with my (challenging) case”. I believe it is appropriate, on the contrary, to select subjects who can provide the simplest demonstration of the process possible. A trainer can prove how smart they are in private. Demonstrations are not about that; they are part of the “How [do you do this basic process]?” stage, not the “What if [you have a resistant client]?” stage. As Bandler and Grinder (1981, p 54) say “To demonstrate teaching points, you should always be able to pick out exquisite demonstration subjects. If there’s a particular response you want to demonstrate, you can talk about what you are going to do, instruct people in what responses are appropriate, and notice who develops those responses most rapidly. That person will be the subject to select.” As an example, someone who is heavily auditory digital (talks to themselves and analyses a lot) is probably not the best subject for an anchoring demonstration. Someone who goes into trance easily when you do group relaxation may be a better choice. You can also ask people to tell you what issue they want to use, and select the person who seems most congruently to expect success. Interestingly, once you get a good subject, demonstrations themselves are powerful processes. The fact that you are willing to risk your credibility in front of the group conveys conviction. You can claim you trust a chair, and that chairs are safe to sit on; but nothing is as persuasive as actually sitting on one in front of people. Luckily, the subject is also in an unusual situation. They are also on show, and the pressure to “perform” is increased by their awareness that any “resistances” will be obvious to those watching. Ernest Rossi says (Rossi, 1996, p 202) “The late Carl Rogers in personal communication with me agreed that the activation patients experienced in

what he called “Demonstration Therapy” where he illustrated his “client centred” approach in front of large groups of professionals in training was at least in part responsible for the effectiveness of single session psychotherapy. Other therapists have wondered why single session therapy, particularly when demonstrated in front of a large group, is so effective that we may ask whether such therapy illustrates the dynamics of “Miracle Cures” (Barber, 1990)” Joseph Barber, cited by Rossi here, suggests that modelling demonstration conditions could give us important clues about how to do effective one-one therapy. Whatever the cause of this heightened success potential, it makes demonstrations a potent step on the way to successful group learning. The Fractal Nature of Exercises After the exercise, the group discusses the “What if?” issues which extend their understanding of the process being taught. These final learnings are the beginning points (the “Why?”) of other potential exercises. In this way, every exercise has several goals. It has the overt goal of learning the process being taught, and less obvious goals for prelearning other content and creating group-based results. For example, in my NLP Practitioner course, I teach the NLP concept of sensory acuity (how to notice subtle changes in a person as they respond internally in different ways). At the “Why?” stage I may tell a story about the incredible advantage of having Milton Erickson’s sensory acuity. In the “What?” stage I may explain the different types of sensory acuity (say visual, auditory and kinesthetic), the process of observing, and the specific cues we attend to. At the “How?” stage, I may then demonstrate and do as exercises a collection of sensory acuity-based processes. Finally, in the “What if?” stage I discuss what people learned and what questions they have. The issues that come up generate possibilities for the next learnings. They may include: -Why are some people are better at visual acuity, some at auditory acuity, some at kinesthetic? (leads into learning about sensory systems) -What do you do when you find that the person you watch has a way of behaving that is very different to your own? (leads into rapport skills) Other learnings which will be shared at this time arise from the fact that in doing the sensory acuity exercises, participants actually meet each other more fully. This is also an intended extension of the overt goal. Diagramatically, the structure is as shown on the previous page. Understandably, then, a teacher will think carefully about the many “covert” (in the sense of fractal, rather than in the sense of purposefully hidden)

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goals for each exercise. Exercises are not separate

chunks. They build into a vast system.

“Why?” (Erickson Story) “What if?”

“What if?”

Sensory Systems

Rapport

Sensory Acuity

Sensory Acuity “What?” “How?” (Types/Cues etc) (Demos/Exercises)

“What if?” Meet People More Fully

Topic Being Taught

New Topics Emerge Fractally

“Why?” (Rapport story) Pace+Lead

Use in Group Rapport

When This Process Is Repeated, The Result = Fractal Course Design

“What?” (Teach Rapport)

“

“How?” (Rapport Exercises)

Verbal Rapport skills

Next Topic Being Taught; New Topics Emerge

Stabilising the Group Attractor So far, I have talked about designing small shifts which generate massive changes (butterfly effects). The other side of working in a chaotic system, though, is that other small shifts are constantly occurring. A group participant may come with strongly held beliefs which oppose the trainer’s model. Others may then start to consider this other belief system as just as plausible. Or a participant may have a traumatic memory accidentally evoked in the middle of a process, and others may begin to get frightened about this possibility. The change,

again, builds up from such small beginnings that the group members will be convinced that “this is the way it had to be”. Such small changes are bound to occur. How do I stop them having disastrous effects? The answer lies in understanding the notion of attractors. Attractors, remember, are the “limits” that a system keeps itself within. A clock pendulum, when swinging, can be in several different states, but they always fit within a set of points. Even if the pendulum is bumped, it tends to settle back into that tidy set of points. This set of points is a periodic attractor. Your heartbeat, on the

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other hand, does not swing so regularly at all. And yet it stays within certain limits. Being chaotic, it’s attractor has more apparent randomness; it is called a “strange attractor”. Actually, if someone’s heart does become unchaotic and periodically “ordered” they are in danger! “What appears to be chaotic behaviour within the heart or brain is characteristic of health, whereas simple, regular heartbeats, for example, presage a heart attack.” (Peat, 1991, p. 105). Ernest Rossi (1996, p 68-69) suggests that mental life too is intrinsically chaotic, and the conscious mind is a “bubble” of order in the chaotic dynamic of the unconscious. The conscious mind’s job is to give you the illusion of order in the midst of what must remain basically an incomprehensible turbulence. The unconscious mind does not have order (check out your dreams if you don’t believe me yet), but it does follow a strange attractor (sanity). Overcontrol by the conscious mind can disrupt this attractor, just as overcontrol by an electrical pulse can disrupt the heart’s attractor, and overcontrol by human culture can disrupt the attractor of the Earth’s weather. Hypnosis, according to Rossi, is the re-entrainment of the mind in the strange attractor of sanity. Once it is thus entrained, challenges will be more easily handled because the attractor will take care of them. Many of Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson’s interventions result from the deliberate shift from the order of the conscious mind to the chaos of the unconscious.

In terms of the content of the training, presuppositions are examples of linguistic “attractors”. When I say “Is breathing in time with someone a more powerful way of achieving rapport, or is adjusting voice tonality and body position?”, the presuppositions in the sentence include the notion that “matching breathing, voice tonality and body position are powerful ways to create rapport.” This presupposition acts as an attractor for our subsequent conversation. The creation of such linguistic attractors is more fully discussed in Preframing (Chapter Five). When you are teaching, it can be useful to go through each of the key concepts or skills you want to teach and ask yourself, “What presuppositions are needed to support someone using that information or those skills?”. You can then design a statement that simply presents this preframe, or a statement which itself presupposes the desired preframe. Another way to preframe is to present an experience which gets the person to access the set of internal representations that create the preframe. The metaphor of the snowflake preframes this article in that fashion. Summary: Teaching In A Chaotic World There are an infinite number of ways to summarise what this chapter has been about. Here is one possible fractal design for this chapter:

Creating Group Attractors I believe the most useful strange attractor for a group is what NLP calls Rapport. What sanity is for the individual, rapport is for a group. When rapport has been successfully established in a group, the chaotic deviations from the expected pattern are “balanced out” by peoples’ trust in and caring for the trainer and the group. As the cliché goes, people don’t care how much you know unless they know how much you care. Like all results in chaotic systems, the creation of rapport begins with certain tiny events in the first moments of the training. This is more fully discussed in The First Hour (Chapter Seven), where I describe setting the attractor of rapport as a process of group “warmup”. Warming up to the group process answers two questions that participants have when they come to your class. “Who is here?” is answered by processes which enable students to introduce themselves to each other. “How will we act?” is answered by the explicit negotiation of a set of guidelines for behaviour in the group. The Win-Win approach to conflict resolution provides the skills to maintain this attractor (see Transforming Conflict, Chapter Twelve).

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Teaching Uses Use of Demonstration

Rapport

Power of First Steps

Teaching Attractors

Fractal Goals for Exercises

Presuppositions

Butterfly Effect

Attractors

Chaos Theory in Teaching

Weather

Snowflakes

Fractals According to this design, I began by considering the nature of “chaotic systems” using the examples of the weather and the formation of a snowflake (the one being a fractal of the other, of course). I identified that chaotic systems are fractal (parts have similar structure to the whole), are held within certain limits by strange attractors, and are sensitive to the butterfly effect. I then applied these notions in teaching. I said that my design of a course utilises the butterfly effect by taking great care of the beginnings of learning processes. My teaching sessions often begin with metaphors (answering the “Why?” question) which expand into explanations (“What?”), which expand into demonstrations, which expand into exercises (“How?”). Demonstrations are potentially vulnerable to butterfly effects, and yet are also able to form powerful positive butterfly effects of their own. I noted that course design can be thought of as fractal, so that each section contains (within its “What if?” stage) the seed of the next sections. While no “right way” of teaching can ensure predictability, a teacher can set the attractor within

which variability occurs. Rapport is a useful group attractor. Linguistic attractors are known as presuppositions. All of NLP can be re-written using the frame of chaos theory, just as Ernest Rossi has attempted to reframe Hypnosis with chaos theory (Rossi, 1996). This article, for example, contains several other fractal implications, which could start you thinking already about new and useful applications. One thing is for sure. There’s no conclusion to the exploration of chaos. (or is there?). Exercise 4.1: Fractal design For A Weekend Course 1) Choose a demographic group (type of person) you’d like to run a weekend training with. 2) Select an overall topic for the weekend aligned with that group’s values. 3) Brainstorm and choose three or four key outcomes for this weekend. 4) Identify possible learning experiences (presentations, exercises in the group,

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exercises in pairs, written exercises etc) to meet these outcomes. 5) From these learning experiences, create a fractal design (Mind map) like the one in the Summary section of this chapter. 6) Consider useful sequences for these learning experiences. For example, in the design of this chapter we wanted to present the topics a) Chaos Theory in Training, b) The Use of Demonstrations, c) The 4MAT as a fractal design, and d) Creating The Group Attractor of Rapport. The summary diagram is a fractal model for this collection of four topics. From this fractal model, it is clear that a deductive training (from the general to the specific) would be best to start by explaining a) Chaos Theory. We could then shift either to d) Attractors or to the power of first steps. Once we shift to first steps, we could then start with b) Demonstrations or with c) the 4MAT and fractal goals emerging from exercises in the “What if?” section.

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Making It Happen The Devil Is In The Details The largest training organisation in the United States today (the organisation that has the most students) is also the largest employer of high school students. They began in 1952, when Ray Kroc, a milkshake machine salesman, walked into a hamburger stand in San Bernadino, and saw the most amazing system of hamburger production. Mac and Jim MacDonald owned the stand, and the high school students they had working for them dealt with the long line of customers with a precision that Ray Kroc had never seen before. The success of that first McDonalds hamburger stand was not in the hamburger recipe; it was in the logistics which made it run so smoothly. Ray Kroc’s genius was his ability to model this efficiency and train others to do likewise, setting up 15,000 similar restaurants around the world (Gerber, 1995, p 80-82). Running a successful training is not just about the recipe for training. It’s also about dealing with the queue of customers; with the details. As the saying goes, the devil may be in the details that weren’t attended to, but a heavenly training requires that someone take care of making sure that there are enough seats, enough cups of tea or coffee, and enough manuals. There is an angel in the details too. When the “logistics” of your training is fully planned, it becomes seem-less. When it’s not, it can take time away from your design, create resentment amongst your participants and alter the impact of your training itself. Our own metaprograms incline us towards “the big picture” and we’ve found it invaluable to ensure we have checklists to ensure we keep track of the small points. We’ve learned what Ray Kroc learned; a large part of what a training (or any other business) provides is the process by which it provides its product. Each of our trainings runs reliably because it is modelled, like a MacDonalds franchise, on an original, systematic success. Some of our checklists (such as the Assistants’ Agreement, and the Participants’ Agreement) are shared with others. Some (such as the Criteria for Training Venues) are internal business planning systems. This is an important consideration. In designing checklists for someone else, you are engaged in a teaching process, and need to consider the instructions from their point of view. Michael Gerber suggests, in his book on running a small business (Gerber, 1995, p97-113), that you design your checklists as if they were the instruction manuals for a franchised business.

Checklists Amongst the checklists we use are: • A contract for people who are assisting on our trainings. These assistants are students who have attended the training before and are volunteers to help with teaching and logistics. Our contract with them covers areas such as advantages to the assistant, time commitment, meetings expected, logistics needs, how to give feedback, behaviour in the main group, keeping rapport, frames for assisting people in distress, and preserving the integrity of the material. • A list of course agreements, which we add to at the start of each course. These include timing, attendance, using the processes as described for safety reasons, confidentiality, knowing that the training is not therapy, and copyright issues. • A set of recommendations for dealing with conflict on the training. These include the protocol for approaching the person concerned individually or with support, raising concerns in the group, getting trainer assistance, and dealing with situations where any party is not happy with the outcome. • A checklist of criteria for selecting a training venue. Criteria cover space, quiet, heating & ventilation, tea/coffee/lunch facilities, car parking, equipment, padded chairs, cost and appearance. • A checklist of things we need to prepare for the training. This runs into several pages. It includes subsections such as: Booking and arranging the venue, Invoicing and enrolling participants, Stocking up on wallchart paper, pens, writing paper etc Stocking materials for refreshments, Arrangements with the assistants, Stocking our products (audiotapes, books etc), Arrangements with visiting trainers and speakers, Redesigning the manuals and handouts Printing all manuals and handouts, contact lists, etc Purchasing all extra equipment such as the boards for the boardbreak Training Venue Checklist Following is an example checklist for selecting a training venue. This checklist was developed in the simplest way. In a decade of running trainings, we’ve had pretty much everything that could go wrong, do so at some point. Even with the best checklist, using a venue that is familiar to you is a lot easier than using a new one. We strongly recommend that you arrive a day earlier than you

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need to, at any new venue. Some problems are simply not predictable (such as discovering that the building next door began major, noisy renovations the day before your training), but arriving early means you have time to work out how to adjust to cope with any challenges. Price is not a guarantee of suitability in the world of training venues. You need to decide what kind of venue you want. The role of the person who hires out a venue is to hire it out. They do not know your specific needs. For example, most business training centres are set up for trainings where people stay seated in rows all day, sometimes at large desks which are fixed in place. Most NLP trainings, on the other hand, require people to interacts in pairs, triads and small groups, and engage in discussion around the large group. We’ve been to expensive business venues which, by our standards, were poorly ventilated, dark, and badly positioned in relation to the rest of the amenities. Also, we do our own catering and bring our own sound system, so some of the “advantages” of more expensive venues are disadvantages to us. Use this list, not as “your” list, but as a guide to creating your list, based on your unique needs. Training Room

♦ Quiet. Free from traffic noise and work noise. ♦ Uninterrupted use of the space over the time of

the training. Able to leave the room set up overnight throughout the training (setting up a room each day after evening classes is enormously more work). ♦ Being able to put the flip charts up on the walls is a big advantage, especially if they can be left up there for the whole training period. ♦ Well heated, ventilated and cooled. Don’t assume that the time of year means that only one of these is needed. Often we need heating and cooling on the same training. ♦ Good lighting. Windows are ideal. ♦ Space: Minimum of approximately 10 metres by 10 metres for a group of around 20. We like to seat people in a semicircle, not rows, so this needs more space. An additional space, in adjacent separate room, for breakout space. (Work in pairs or small groups). ♦ Adequate number of toilets (four for a group of 30) ♦ Comfortable padded chairs with straight backs. ♦ Tea/Coffee etc for morning and afternoon breaks: it is often ideal if we can have an urn or some other hot water system, and organise a self service set-up for drinks. If morning and afternoon tea is provided by the venue, the cost of

this needs to be looked at carefully to check it will come within the budget. Per person charges for tea, coffee, cookies, can add up to much more than the cost of hiring the rooms. ♦ Lunch: somewhere at the venue or nearby where people can buy their lunch at reasonable prices. ♦ Car parking available. ♦ Maximum room hire cost: [Decide what you can budget for]. For a lengthy training there should be a dramatic reduction in their usual rate. Equipment (May be provided with the venue, or may need to arrange it separately):

♦ 2 Chart stands. Flip chart paper. ♦ Sound system with lapel microphone; one is

OK, two is even better. ♦ Separate sound system to play cassette tapes and CDs. (A good portable cassette player is fine) ♦ Table for front of room. Size not important, approx 1 metre in length., minimum. Accommodation for Trainers:

♦ Decide maximum price. (There should be a

significant discount off the usual rate for a long stay) ♦ Quiet. ♦ Access to meals, gym equipment, convenience store ♦ Near the venue, preferably walking distance, or easy access by transport. Accommodation for Course Participants:

♦ It is likely that people coming from outside the

area will ask you about places to stay. You could give everyone one option for a budget accommodation, and one middle range. There should be a discount available for staying several days, and for referring people attending a seminar. ♦ Within walking distance, or easy access to transport to the venue. Meta-detailing L. Michael Hall and Bob Bodenhamer (1999, p 278) suggest that a key to genius is the ability to pay attention to incredible detail, and to do so from the perspective of the big picture. The details that the genius pays attention to are not a sea of random details. They are details which have been selected and organised, according to the values of the higher concept which the genius is developing. Hall and Bodenhamer call this meta-detailing. What we are encouraging you to do with training logistics is

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similar. These checklists are not a side-issue that a trainer “has to put up with”. They are a precision way of expressing the values that are important to you as a trainer. In looking for a training venue, I am not just looking for a room to sit in. I am looking for a space in which people will transform their lives. I remember the rooms in which I did my basic NLP training; they have become powerful anchors for the feeling of inspiration I got there. I remember the comments that assistants made when sitting with us in the group. They were an important part of the learning process. If you want details like this to align with your training, you will plan them carefully. After the first five years of operation, 75% of franchised small businesses are still successful, compared to only 20% of small businesses in general. The difference is that the franchise provides a tested checklist, providing a reliable sequence of actions, a reliable service, and a reliable image for clients to identify with. Provide that for yourself today. Exercise 5.1: Checklist For Preparation Write a checklist for preparation for your next training. Ensure you cover: Booking and arranging the venue, Invoicing and enrolling participants, Stocking up on wallchart paper, pens, writing paper etc Stocking materials for refreshments, Arrangements with the assistants, Stocking products (audiotapes, books etc), Arrangements with any visiting trainers and speakers, Redesigning manuals and handouts Printing all manuals and handouts, contact lists, etc Purchasing all extra equipment

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Preframing Preframing This Chapter Ever watched a kid learning to walk? Watching my son, it looked so difficult. He would try to stand, waver a few seconds, and then sit down. A moment later he would be up trying again. It was as if he knew that walking would be fun, knew that all the things he wanted would be within easy reach. But it took many tries before he had the process. And no wonder. It’s an amazing thing. Walking involves deliberately throwing yourself off balance, by lifting one foot up and moving it forward. Then you catch your balance again just enough to throw yourself off once more. The thing is, it’s a controlled throwing off balance. The trick is to know how to choose where to be off balance. Once you can do that, the whole process is fun. You can run, you can skip, you can dance. That’s how we find teaching. It’s incredible fun, because we know how to choose where we’re going, how to choose where we’re off balance in order to reach our goal. So, the question is, “Where is it appropriate to be off balance in teaching?” and then, “How do you make it fun?”. In this chapter I’ll discuss a new model of teaching, and contrast it with the most common mis-taken belief about teaching. I’ll then introduce reframing as a key teaching activity, and explain how preframing is the most elegant way to deliver a reframe. I’ll show you how to shift the focus of students’ disagreement to areas that are guaranteed safe, so that even disagreement installs the basic beliefs and attitudes you need students to adopt for their success. What Teaching Is About Teaching is the process that makes us human. Alfred Korzybski, who first coined the term Neurolinguistics in 1933 (Korzybski, 1994, p xiii), said that human beings are distinguished by their ability to “time-bind”; to convey the maps of their experience from generation to generation. This ability is the basis of what we call “culture”, or when we get ethnocentric about it, what we call “science”. Teaching is the specific process by which time-binding occurs. To convey something of our experience to another is more than just conveying information. Information can be stored in books, on the Internet, and so on, but when a person accesses this information it becomes more than just data. So far, the part of teaching that remains uniquely human is the ability to create and convey the context in

which information makes sense; the state of mind/body. Teachers are people who experience and can convey to others the state in which those others will be able to take in, process and act on information. They convey the intense curiosity and eagerness which motivates learners to begin (the “Why...?”); they convey to learners the state of relaxed attention, enthusiasm and fascination in which people can take in new information (the “What...?”); they convey the sense of confidence and focused carefulness in which their application of the information will be successful (the “How...?”); they convey the openness and inspirational creativity in which students can extend the possibilities with this new learning (the “What if...?”). Using a computer program metaphor, the teacher’s task is not merely to transfer text from a book to a student; it is to deliver the application (program) which turns that text into a document, and the entire operating system (like Windows XP) which creates an environment in which the program works. In a human being, this operating system involves beliefs (presuppositions), values, personality styles (called metaprograms in NLP), and the person’s fundamental sense of identity and mission. For example, in much of Asia, the meditation teacher, or guru, would traditionally be able to guide a student into a deeply relaxed, meditative state of mind (which the guru already experienced at will). The guru would then associate this state with certain other stimuli, such as a special word (mantra), visual symbol (mandala), or hand position (mudra). By using these stimuli, the student could re-enter the state whenever desired, just by sitting in the same posture, making the same hand gesture, repeating the same secret word, and visualising the same symbol. In that state the student would learn certain truths, but they would be learned far more fully than if the student had read them in, say, the Bhagavad Gita or the Dhammapada (Govinda, 1972). The Most Common Mis-taken Belief About Teaching The student, on the other hand, quite often believes that teaching is simply a conscious process of transmitting information. They may assume that if this information could be given more quickly, they would have learned more. For example, nowadays all the sacred writings of the east are available for the beginning student to read. Does this mean more people experience the teachings of yoga or meditation? Occasionally, it does, but mostly it means that lots of people have “premature closure” about these subjects. They think they know them

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because they’ve read the book; and they’ve closed their mind to further learning. As Paul Watzlawick says, this is like a student musician saying “Piano playing does not exist. I have tried it several times and nothing came of it.” (Quoted in Heller & Steele, 1992, p 1). The fact is that piano playing, meditation, and any other learned skills are not learned merely consciously. That would be like transferring the text from computer to computer, and expecting the text to run without a program to run it. Or it would be like transferring a text from the older DOS operating system and expecting it to run in Windows. All that “unconscious” backup (beliefs, values, metaprograms and types of awareness) is essential to learning. The Role Of Teachers In Creating Meaning When students try to pick up the information without getting the underlying state and the presuppositions that make the information work, they don’t achieve their outcome (learning). Effective teaching means ensuring the students receive these backups with the information. Whenever a student demonstrates that they have not taken on board part of this fundamental “operating system” the teacher’s task is to guide them through some series of internal representations (visualising or looking at something, listening to sounds, feeling feelings, doing something physically, or talking to themselves, for example) which installs the backup, the “frame” within which the information makes sense . This process is sometimes called “reframing”. For example, when I teach Hypnotherapy, I teach certain specific techniques for communicating with a client’s unconscious mind. A student in this course will occasionally ask me “What do you mean by the term “unconscious mind”? Unconscious means out to it, like in a coma. Either my mind is working, in which case I’m conscious, or it isn’t, in which case I’m unconscious. I don’t see how you can communicate with what is unconscious.” When I hear this question, I’m aware that something of the backup for learning hypnotherapy, the operating system, is missing. This backup includes certain beliefs about what is possible, and the opportunity to notice certain internal events. Amongst hundreds of choices, I might say “Until I mention it now, you weren’t conscious of the speed you were breathing, and the depth you were breathing to. But you can be conscious of that now, right? Infact, now that you’re conscious of it, you can change the speed

and breathe slower, or faster, shallower or deeper. Check it out now. You can run your breathing with your conscious mind. Of course, if you do, then it’s hard to get much else done. So being conscious of breathing may be useful for an athlete, but not necessary at some other times.... So how were you deciding which speed to breathe at when you weren’t conscious of it? That action of your brain that decided that is what I’m calling your unconscious mind. Now, when I play some classical music here, your breathing rate will tend to slow down, without you thinking about it consciously. That’s what I mean by communicating with your unconscious mind. The music communicates with the part of your neurology which is deciding how fast you’ll breathe. So, in the same way, would it be useful to you to be able to communicate with the part of your mind which chooses what to memorise, or chooses how quickly you heal?” This is a “reframe”. It changes the meaning of “conscious” and “unconscious”. The student said “”Unconscious” means non-functioning”. I said “To me “unconscious” just means not being consciously thought about as it happens.” The new meaning, as I note at the end, allows for lots of new learnings, new actions the person could develop skill with. To convey this new meaning fully, I took the person through a sequence of internal representations (noticing their breathing, varying it’s speed and depth, imagining how this was happening before they thought of it, etc). Preframing Is More Elegant Than Reframing Of course, the student may dispute my reframe. Because they already thought through their own conclusion (“”Unconscious” means nonfunctioning”) , they may find a way to fit my explanation into their map of the world. For example by saying “Well, when I’m not aware of my breathing, I’m not deciding how to breathe. It’s happening automatically just like water flows down hill. The water doesn’t have a “mind” that decides “now I’ll flow down here.” It just happens.” Once again, this student frame doesn’t support my hypnotherapy text very well. If I reply, we may well end up trading reframes for some time, and other students will begin to try on the alternatives. The group may then believe that the hypnotherapy model is “confusing”, and consequently doubt their ability to use it. Of course, these are students who have chosen to study hypnotherapy. Their goal is to be able to use it as I use it. How could I more effectively assist them to meet that goal? For me, one central solution is to anticipate the objection and say my

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reframe before anyone expresses a contrary model. In that case, it is my experience that the contrary model will never even occur to the students. Because my model is plausible (it “could be true”) they will accept it as an operating system, and move on from there. I will have preframed their understanding. Choosing The Focus For Mismatching There is a way I can maximise the acceptance of my preframe. After stating it, I can focus attention on a particular issue that occurs once a person accepts the preframe. For example, particular issues that occur once we have accepted the reframe that “There is an unconscious mind that can be communicated with.” include: ♦ What are we communicating to other people’s unconscious minds already? ♦ Is it ethical to go on randomly communicating with other people’s unconscious minds? Shouldn’t everyone learn hypnotherapy so they can keep their communication tidy? ♦ Why do some people’s unconscious minds respond so easily to communications such as music, while others take longer? ♦ Should salespeople learn how to communicate with the unconscious or not? Unless I’m teaching salespeople, all these issues are ones I’m quite happy for students to have different opinions about. As far as I can tell, their opinion about these issues will not affect their ability to learn and use hypnotherapy. In raising such an issue immediately after my preframe, I’m offering people who enjoy disagreeing, people who like challenging my model, something to disagree with. Some people (called in NLP terms, “mismatchers”) sort their experiences by identifying mainly what is different, what doesn’t fit, what they can disagree with. This is a perfectly useful skill, and essential to certain professional groups (such as lawyers and accountants, though they may disagree with me about that). Teachers often dread mismatchers, because they can take up group time by disputing essential points, rally others around them, and so on. I find that their energy is stimulating and valuable to the group. And I like to help them use that energy in a way that meets their own and the group’s goals. By discussing the issue I’ve chosen, the group is accepting the key preframe, because without that, what they’re saying wouldn’t make sense. You can’t discuss whether salespeople should learn how to communicate with the unconscious, without deepening the belief that communication with the unconscious is possible.... Or can you? Maybe it

doesn’t change the depth of your belief at all. You decide. From “Disaster” to Perfection When I’m running a new course, I aim first of all to identify the essential operating beliefs or attitudes behind the course content. In hypnotherapy, for example, this includes the notion that you have an unconscious mind, and we can communicate with it. Next, I plan a preframing experience or statement to install this essential frame. Thirdly, I identify a non-essential issue which comes up as a result of presupposing this essential frame. In the course, I introduce the preframing experience as soon as possible after introducing the topic, and immediately follow this by raising the nonessential issue and inviting group response. Of course, when it’s my first time running a course, I often don’t anticipate all the challenges that will occur to students. But every time a disagreement with the fundamentals of the course is raised, I note the student’s belief, and design a preframe to dissolve it in any future course. I ask myself: 1) “What could I have said or done before they spoke, that would presuppose the opposite of their objection, and that they would agree with?” 2) “What issues are raised once they accept my preframe, and that I can accept virtually any conclusion about?” By the third time I’ve run the course, it’s very rare for someone to challenge a fundamental frame of the course. In fact, by then, all challenges tend to confirm the fundamentals! What might seem like problem responses are actually the feedback I need to design a totally involving learning experience. Some Examples of Preframes Which preframes I need will vary depending on the group (i.e. depending on their particular frames at the start of the course). For example, if I was teaching a group of psychotherapists about NLP, I may like to alter their belief that NLP is not “real” psychotherapy. I might say “Of course, NLP was originally developed by studying the psychotherapy of Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson. That means that all the fundamental notions of NLP were already around in the work of those psychotherapists. Originally, NLP was thought of as being a “meta-model”, a model of a model, for the various kinds of psychotherapy. Some people would still say that NLP isn’t really a new form of psychotherapy at all; it’s just a dramatic application of Ericksonian therapy with Satir’s questioning

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style and some of Perls attitudes. But I think there are some really unique new models within NLP.“ At times, the preframe doesn’t need stating because it’s presupposed so well by the issue I’ve chosen. For example, I have so far always succeeded with this comment, which I deliver to people new to NLP: “In NLP we sometimes say that we have a ten minute phobia cure. But obviously that’s not true. It takes at least twenty minutes to build rapport and set the scene so that process will work. I think there’s a risk in us making that “ten Minute” claim, and it always pays to book in a full session.” The preframe that the phobia process takes one session is presupposed by the issue of whether we should claim it takes ten minutes or thirty. When I’m teaching win-win conflict resolution, I usually say something like: “Everyone knows that there’s a better way to sort out conflicts. Sayings such as “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” are based on this attitude I call win-win. But it’s all very well to have the theory. The question is “How do you do it? What are the steps?” How do you get your kids, or your boss, to do it with you? That’s what I want to discuss next.” Some preframes are so simple that you can apply them in a lot of situations. For example, whenever you’re teaching a powerful skill which you want people to believe in, you can say “When you’re using a powerful skill like ...X... there are ethical issues about where to use it. When would it not be appropriate to use this?” Another standard preframe is one I use for groups who already have “premature closure”, who already think they’ve learned the skill I’m about to teach, and who (like Paul Watzlawick’s piano player) are already convinced it won’t work. I say “I’m sure many of you have experienced people who’ve half-learned this skill and gone out misusing it in the world. You know what that’s like! Without some of the key points we’ll practise here, it’s downright dangerous! Used without full understanding, this skill can cause more problems than it’s worth. Who’s experienced that?” (If noone has “experienced that”, there’s no problem, by the way. If some people have, they’ve accepted by discussing it that “those people” needed to learn more precisely how to do it. What they tell me then gives me the key additional points to re-make when I’m teaching it, to allow for their concern). One common experience is to be in a group where people share a belief system that they think is incompatible with my topic. If I’m teaching a group of fundamentalist Christians NLP, for example, I preframe from their position. When we are about to learn rapport skills, I say “Building

rapport by matching the other person’s behaviour is a very old idea. The Apostle Paul told the Romans “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.” But some of modern psychology has tended to veer away from this for fear of “getting too involved”. So the question is, “Is it still okay to use this process?”” In this case I’m setting up an issue for discussion where I do care about the result, and the result is fairly predictable. Time To Play! So now may be a useful time to start experimenting with your preframes. Remember, the process goes: a) Identify all the crucial presuppositions and underlying attitudes you want installed to ensure your students can learn the skills or information you teach. b) For each one, design a statement or experience which demonstrates this fundamental frame. You may state this explicitly, or emphatically presuppose it. c) Identify an issue which only occurs once this frame is accepted, and which is nonessential (you don’t mind which opinion students develop about it). d) Near the beginning of introducing the topic, state your preframe and immediately follow it by raising the non-essential issue for consideration. e) In the course of teaching, as any other objections are raised, identify the preframe needed to counter them, so you can redesign your beginning next time, to incorporate the new preframe. You may like to collect your best preframes and share them around. You may also like to model them and use your own style of successful preframe repeatedly. Teaching is what being human is all about. And being human was meant to be fun, right? The only question is how do we make sure we get the fun we deserve every time. Exercise 6.1: Creating Preframes Identify a set of potential challenges for your training. For each of the potential challenges, construct preframes using the following steps: 1) Identify the fundamental frame you desire to install by preframe. 2) Design a statement or experience which demonstrates or presupposes this fundamental frame. 3) Identify a question or issue which arises once that presupposition is accepted, and which is non-essential. 4) Plan to incorporate the preframe into your teaching where appropriate.

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Example challenges for NLP: a) “There’s no such thing as an unconscious mind.” b) “If you use a fast NLP process to solve a phobia, what do you do with all the pain that hasn’t been dealt with?” c) “Isn’t it unethical to use these NLP techniques to trick someone into agreement?” d) “What happens if you have set lots of goals in the past, but have failed to reach them. How can you carry on believing in goals?”“If NLP is so good, why isn’t there more research proving it works?”

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The First Hour: The Power Of Beginnings In Training In a simple experiment showing the power of first impressions, Dr George Bach had College students briefly meet others they would be sharing their time at College with. The students were asked to write down their first impressions. Months later, once they knew those people well, the students were asked to write down their current impressions of those same people. Two thirds of the information in the final comments was also present in the first comments (1970, p173). The first contact shapes the rest of a relationship. Take this chapter as an example. Are you going to carry on reading and find out how the skilled use of

Process (Group Maintenance)

The First Hour with a group can maximise the effectiveness of your teaching skills? If you do, it probably has a lot to do with how you feel about what you’re reading now. I’ve written a chapter that I believe can save you time and make life easier; and deliver clear and practical benefits for the success of your trainings. But these first lines may count for as much as two thirds of the impression you have of the value of learning this. The same thing happens in your classes or seminars. Those groups that you really enjoy teaching were often a pleasure from the start. And occasionally you come across a group where you have the sense that you “got off on the wrong foot”. This is a chapter about how to design beginnings that create cohesive and co-operative groups, while focusing participants’ attention on the content you want them to learn. The specific techniques I’ll cover are summarised in the following chart:

Who Is Here? Creating Rapport Inclusion-ControlIntimacy How Will We Act? Creating Contract Win-Win Skills

The First Hour: Creating Beginnings In Teaching Content (Group Task)

Why Learn This? Preframing What Will We Learn? Seeding and Overviews

A. K. Fink (1962) notes that learning groups go through a process he calls Warmup, as they access states useful for learning. Warmup is a concept which evolved within the field of Psychodrama, but it has applications in most disciplines. Cars don’t start very well in fourth gear; seedlings grown inside do not thrive so well if they’re suddenly exposed to the outside world; and it’s hard to have a really enjoyable sexual experience in sixty seconds (though in each case people keep trying). An important point made by Fink is that in Education, a class that is well warmed up overall will warm up quicker within each session. Time invested on warmup in the first hour with a group

will be repaid with interest in every following session, and every time you want the group to begin a new task. Process and Content We can distinguish usefully between the content (the “what”) of a training group and the process (the “how”) of a training group. The process concerns the maintenance of relationships in the group, and the assisting of people to feel included, valued, and motivated. The content concerns the subject to be taught and the strategies for teaching it.

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In Trainer Training, a great deal of attention is usually given to warming participants up to the content, using preframes, metaphors, and preteaching. Surprisingly little attention is given to warming participants up to the process of the training; to the group, and to the “rules of behaviour”. And yet, conflicts about these are more common than conflicts about the content being taught. Furthermore, when people remember our own NLP trainings, our followup research shows that they report powerful experiences of bonding with other group members. In any group, there is a need for attention to both content and process. Leadership can be defined as the balanced delivery of Task (content) and Maintenance (process) functions in a group (see Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998, p 194-195). The task is the stuff that gets written down in a training plan or curriculum. Without it, your training would be merely a summer camp. People might have lots of fun, cooperate really well, and miss out on learning NLP. On the other hand, all the inspired teaching and skilled demonstrations you can design do not resolve maintenance problems such as participants being anxious about whether they belong in the course, or about what “tricks” might be played on them during the seminar. Attention to Task versus Attention to Maintenance has been described as a metaprogram. Successful leadership is the art of balancing that metaprogram. This article is about leading from the start. In the first hour, while you are warming up participants to your task by apparently framing and preteaching the material, you can also warm them up to the group, and to the kind of participation they’ll have in it.

Part One: Warmup To Process The Life Cycle Of A Training Group A group when a training ends is not the same group it was at the start. A number of researchers have generated parallel descriptions of the life cycle of a group. In the book Transforming Communication (Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998, p 192) I summarise the model used by William C. Schutz. Let’s take an NLP Practitioner course as an example, and review his Inclusion-Control-Intimacy model. Inclusion At the start of an NLP Practitioner course, people are motivated towards (or away from) being included in the group. They may make a lot of statements about what a good group is like, or even about how good this group is. But they don’t tend to refer specifically to any particular people they

like or dislike, or any particular issues they agree on or disagree on. This Inclusion phase of group life (called in some models “Norming”) generates matching behaviour, as people attempt to build rapport. To the untrained eye, this may sometimes make the group look cohesive (well connected). But activities that require high level risk taking (such as dramatic verbal or non-verbal self disclosure) are not likely to be well received. This means that some tasks the group attempts will go slower at this stage, because rapport isn’t deep enough. Opportunities to match behaviour, to meet people superficially, and to establish the groundrules of the group (see below) are likely to be appreciated. Control About a third of the way through the course (and it really doesn’t matter how long the course is; the group will time this change to suit) it will become clear that the Inclusion phase is over. Having assured themselves that they belong (or having left) many people are now paying more attention to how much influence they have, and whether they can get their needs respected in the group. In this Control phase (or as it is sometimes called, “Storming”), the trainer may find that participants are disagreeing with her/him, and that participants are disagreeing with each other (for example about who has more say). Matching has given way to mismatching. Some trainers are tempted to react to such conflicts with a fear that the group is “breaking up” (because they are still not sure about the level of inclusion). In fact, some groups do not effectively resolve control phase conflicts. But activities which increase people’s active participation, enabling feedback and renegotiation of ground rules, will usually be highly successful. Intimacy By two thirds of the way through the training, a successful group reaches the Intimacy phase (sometimes called “Performing” because it is the phase of group life when progress with the task is easiest). Trusting that their needs will be respected, group members are now more able to express their differing feelings, needs and objectives. In doing so they face the risks of both closeness and rejection. Group members may decide that they prefer to work with some people and not with others. They may decide that some parts of the course are “not for them” and other parts are awesome. They may become deeply bonded to specific individuals, whom they now meet without the carefully presented personal image they used in the Inclusion phase. Several Practitioners we have trained made links at this time which blossomed into lifelong friendships or marriages.

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“Who Is Here?” Closure The final phase of group life is sometimes called “Transforming”. It is the time of closure. Schutz notes that groups rapidly wind their way back through the previous phases. Conflicts may suddenly re-emerge on the last day, and people may make incongruent and unrealistic plans to “meet again every week forever”, as they reexperience the need for inclusion. Inclusion = Rapport + Contract For this chapter, the point of knowing the life cycle of a group is to design Beginning experiences which meet the needs of the Inclusion phase, rather than Control or Intimacy. The tasks of the Inclusion phase are twofold: to create Rapport, and to create Contract. It’s as if the participants who walk into your course at the start are asking two core questions: 1) Who is Here? This question is about whether I’ll like people and whether they’ll like me. When this question is answered, participants have a feeling of connection to others in the group, of Rapport. 2) How will we Act? This question is about what behaviours are acceptable for me, and what behaviours I can expect from others. When this question is answered, participants have a feeling of commitment or Contract. If a trainer doesn’t provide an explicit method for answering these two questions early on in their training program, participants will take time and energy away from the task to cope. They will interrupt to ask what the rules are, introduce themselves to other group members while the trainer is talking, or give up and withdraw. The time the trainer “saves” by launching directly into the task will be like the time saved by starting a car in fourth gear. At its worst, the class may stall. If you allotted fifty minutes of your first hour to these two questions, there are some very simple processes you could use to help people find the answers they need. The above order (Who?, then How?) is normally the best order to work through these warmups, because people’s need for Rapport is more powerful than their need for Contract (See A. Maslow, 1962, on the prioritising of acceptance before esteem and self-actualisation). Following are specific examples of tasks to answer these questions (For more, see Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998, p 8-12):

1 Introducing a friend: People are asked to get into pairs (perhaps on the basis of finding someone of a similar height, or by turning to the person beside them), and take four minutes to learn each others' names and reasons for coming to the seminar. They then return to sitting in a circle, and (in no particular order) introduce their partners to the group. The partner may correct or add information as they are introduced. 2 Cushion toss: In this activity, someone begins by tossing a small cushion to someone else in the group, calling out that person's name as they do so (at first people will choose to toss to those whose names they recall. Later they can try for those they are less certain of. After everyone has had 2-3 turns, most of the names will be known). The person catching the cushion says, 'Thank you . . .', supplying the name of the person who threw it to them, and then calls out the name of the person they are throwing it to. 3 Map of The Country: People are invited to stand on an imaginary map of your country, placing themselves either where they come from, or somewhere in the country they feel most connected to. (This requires a large floor space. Distort geography as appropriate, eg. putting other countries nearby if needed.) Each person then talks about where they are standing and why. “How will we Act?” Creating A Written List of Guidelines: A) Explain the concept of guidelines about how a group is, rather than about what is learned. Point out that every group has such guidelines, but that if they are not discussed then people have to guess them, test them out etc. Suggest that the guidelines you are about to show are ones you’ve found to work successfully in this sort of seminar. Present and briefly explain the guidelines that are important to you. For example, we tend to list: 1. Start and finish at arranged times 2. Do the exercises as described and to the best of your ability 3. Keep personal information confidential 4. It’s okay to check when you’re not certain 5. Respect others’ model of the world 6. Fun B) Ask people to get into triads and check that they understand what you meant by these guidelines, and to check if anyone in their triad has any similar guidelines they’d like to add. Give them a few minutes, or until the conversation dies down (whichever is first). This invitation to generate new ideas gives you important information about the expectations of group members. Some trainers

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wonder if the process isn’t creating problems. We consider it to be testing that we have the agreement to proceed. C) Check briefly with each triad that they are Okay with the guidelines. If a triad has something to add, put it on a separate list. You’ll want to check that such new ideas are okay for you yourself to go with, and then ask all the triads to turn quickly to each other again and check that they have agreement about the new proposals too. If disagreement about a proposed guideline isn’t reached within the time you have allotted for this exercise, have that guideline left off the list for now, to be reviewed later. D) Either write the list of agreed-on-guidelines on a wall chart that stays up in the room, or have it typed and handed out to all participants. If conflicts arise later in the seminar, these can now be easily raised in the group by framing them with “I just want to check how we’re going with our agreed on guidelines.” Preframing Win-win Teaching An important comment about this Contract setting process is that it preframes the seminar as a winwin process. You are stating your needs, and inviting others to make sure their needs get heard. As this is the Inclusion phase of the course, you are less likely to get much mismatching response, but you have modelled the process of brainstorming and checking for agreement. The skills of maintaining this win-win process are taught in depth in our book Transforming Communication (Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998) and include: ♦ identifying when someone else has an unmet need or a concern, and pacing that verbally ♦ identifying when you have an unmet need or a concern and stating that in “I message” (metamodelled) form ♦ shifting between these two perspectives to clarify any conflict situation ♦ brainstorming, selecting and actioning solutions which meet both your needs and participants needs Creating Rapport Directly In using NLP one-to-one, I build rapport by matching behaviour. William Condon has meticulously studied videotapes of conversations, confirming that the matching or copying of behaviour is a natural part of successful relationships. He found that in a successful conversation, movements such as a smile or a head nod are involuntarily matched by the other person within 1/15 of a second. Within minutes of beginning the conversation, the volume, pitch and speech rate (number of sounds per minute) of the peoples voices match each other. This is correlated

with a synchronising of the type and rate of breathing. Even general body posture is adjusted over the conversation so that the people appear to match or mirror each other (Condon 1982, p 5376). As a person adjusts their facial expression and other nonverbal behaviour to match others’ they actually use the same pattern of brain activation that the other person is using. The same direct route to creating rapport can be applied in a group in three ways. ♦ Matching individual behaviours. For example, when we do one of the activities such as “Introducing a Friend” (above) one of us as trainers will match the body position of each person as they are introduced. In discussion after, it is clear that participants are totally unaware of this process, as their attention is taken up by the content of the exercise. ♦ Asking the group to do some activity together, and doing it with them. This creates a powerful group rapport-building experience. In many cultures (such as New Zealand Maori culture), any group activity begins with synchronised activity such as prayer and singing. In our longer trainings, we begin the day with a group visualisation process. However, any simple activity (such as opening the manual at a certain page) can be utilised as an opportunity to match behaviour. In Tony Robbins’ trainings, for example, the group members are repeatedly asked to stand in a similar position and shout affirmations with the group leader. ♦ Identifying people who already have rapport in this group, and matching them. If you are teaching in a group that has been together with another trainer, using that trainer’s mannerisms, voice tonality and stage anchors will tend to transfer their rapport (or lack of it) to you. Even when a group has not been together before, actions by some people will result in matching behaviour by others. Finding who is a “rapport leader” in a group is as simple as watching to see whose movements are followed by a ripple effect through the group. These people may not be the most co-operative students, and they may not be official “leaders”. However, unconsciously, others tend to match them and follow their suggestions. Teachers in the school system often notice such people when they are mismatching the teacher; their action is followed by several of the others in the class, making them seem like a “ringleader” for some semi-conscious “resistance”. Once you find a rapport leader, matching their behaviour, values and language will enable you to get rapport with the group of people who have been unconsciously following their lead.

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Part Two: Warmup To Content Preframing A preframe, remember from last chapter, is a statement by you which creates the presuppositions that are needed to understand what you are about to teach. For example, the first paragraph in this chapter provides evidence that “the first contact shapes the rest of the relationship”. This is a preframe. It is necessary to presuppose this idea in order to understand the rest of the chapter. If I started the chapter at the section headed “Process and Content”, it would still contain all the instructions to use this model. And if you already shared my presupposition about first contact being important, then starting there would be fine. If you didn’t share my presupposition though, I’d have to add further justifications of that frame later (reframes). Of course, the last chapter (on preframing) has already preframed this concept. “Why Learn This?” Many preframes, including the ones described in the last paragraph, not only present a belief necessary to understanding the content you are teaching, but also answer the motivational question “Why should I learn this?” Bernice McCarthy (see Chapter Three) suggests that this question is the central one to be answered at the start of a learning cycle. She points out that some learners who need the “Why?” question answered will refuse to continue until some preframe is given. Such learners are not being disruptive; they are simply asking for their learning disk to be formatted before they start. As a teacher you can check that students have had their “Why?” question answered by stating your preframe and then asking “So does this sound like something that you’d be interested in doing/learning about?” Overviews: “What will we Learn?” The idea of presenting an overview of the subject matter you are teaching has been contentious in NLP. Early in the history of NLP, trainers were captivated by the “Just do it!” approach of 1970s experiential learning. There is now more awareness of the research showing that for many learners, providing some overview at the start of a teaching session will give them crucial “pegs” to hang their new learnings on. Following up 135 research studies into this possibility, J. Luiten found that they strongly supported the value of what he called “Advance Organisers” in learning. These could be verbal explanations or visual mind-maps of the content to be covered. At the start of the Practitioner course, I tend to have a large mindmap of the course available on the wall.

Of course, the overview presented at the beginning of a seminar need not be the overview possible at the end of that seminar. As an example, at the beginning of teaching an NLP Practitioner course, I explain that the results of NLP modelling can be understood as details of the five “Keys to Success” (Know your outcome, Act, Have sensory acuity, Have Flexibility, and Use a physiology-state of excellence). By the end of the training, I am presenting much more complex overviews, such as the RESOLVE model (Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998, p 107-108). Seeding Overviews are not the only “Advance Organisers” however. A concept drawn from Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson’s work is the use of “Seeding”. In this notion, concepts to be taught later are “seeded” earlier on in the training. That is, they are mentioned in passing, and ready the participants’ unconscious minds for learning more. Even the notion of “seeding” has been seeded in this article (in the first section). But you may be wondering how much effect that has on your readiness to learn about the concept. Many simple experiments have demonstrated the power of seeding (Zeig, 1990). Here is one you can play with yourself. Ask an English speaking friend to, “Say the word “Poke” out loud ten times”. Then ask them “Now, what is the white part of an egg called?” Nine times out of ten, a person asked this will say the word “Yolk”. The white of an egg is not called the Yolk, but saying the word “Poke” has seeded certain associations in your friend’s mind. With skilful seeding, each concept you teach will feel “familiar” to your students. Just mentioning the key words from content to be taught later in a seminar will “seed” your students’ minds with the concept. They will then find it easier to access internal representations of that concept later on (much as the word “poke” made it easier to access the internal representation “yolk”). When Erickson was to deliver a lecture about sex education, for example, he began by telling an apparently unrelated story about his father sewing oats on the farm, and then mentioned that people sow their oats at different times. He returned to the topic of “Sowing wild oats” in its sexual-metaphorical sense, later. The days before teaching the metamodel language patterns on a Practitioner course, I find ways to mention all of the metamodel patterns we are teaching. Sometimes these are mentioned in passing, with no attention drawn to them. For example, in replying to a question, I might say “Well, when you ask that, that’s a bit of a mind read, and I’m tempted to ask you ‘How do

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you know I think that way?’. However, to answer your question…” Mind read is the name of a metamodel pattern and the appropriate question for responding to it, as I will teach in a day or so, is ‘How do you know I think that way?’ In the first hour of an NLP Practitioner course, I will have seeded all the key presuppositions of NLP and a several of the techniques we are soon to teach. This is so easy to do that it requires very little thinking. In the past you may actually have been preventing yourself mentioning things not taught yet. Seeding is so easy that it will happen by accident, once you understand its value. After all, if you’re planning to teach anchoring tomorrow, then of course anchoring is seeded in the back of your own mind already, so you’ll tend to notice places to mention it while you teach today’s subject. Part Three: Micro-Warmups More Applications of Warmup You’ll see from my “Advance Organiser” near the start of this chapter that I have now covered the four key skills for the First Hour of teaching or training. They are: -Using Introduction Activities to create the Process Goal of Rapport -Reaching Agreements for the Process Goal of a Group Contract -Preframing to Presuppose the Basis of the Content to be Taught -Providing Overviews of the Content and Seeding Concepts to be Taught Later Now that you are clear on the range of activities that could be called “Warmup”, it’s useful to mention again the fact that warmup happens at the start of each teaching session. Effectively warming up a group when they first meet means that the group will warm up quicker at the start of each session or each task. Clarifying how you create these micro-warmups is a bonus of your reading this chapter. Every time you begin a session, every time you ask course participants to begin a particular exercise (even a warmup exercise) the way you speak and act is a warmup to that content or task. This short term warmup is the most precise of all. It’s the fine tuning of your seminar. When a teacher’s suggestion to get into groups is met by a groan, or when a question to the group is answered by blank stares… that’s evidence that the group is insufficiently warmed up for the task set. In Psychodrama the saying is “Incomplete warmups leave incomplete expressions.” To paraphrase NLP, “There’s no resistance; only incomplete warmup.”

Following are some simple hints for microwarmups to the task (Content). Tips For Micro-Warmups 1. Access A Congruent State: Your ability to confidently and congruently describe a task is conveyed to your participants. 2. Suggest in small steps: If I want participants to perform some physical activity, I don’t give them instructions all at once. I first ask them to stand up. It’s a harmless enough task, and one that participants will do. Once they are up, I tell them the next step. If a teacher says “I’d like you to stand up and shake someone’s hand.” They may get some reluctance. But having stood up already, shaking a hand seems another small step. Research shows the power of this. Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser (Myers, 1983, p 47), for example, studied homeowners being asked to place a large “Drive Safely” signpost in their front yard. They found that if the person was asked to sign a petition in support of safe driving first, willingness to have the signpost placed there increased 300%. Another simple example in the seminar is that if you ask participants a question and no-one answers, tell them to talk to the person sitting next to them about it. That way, you give them an opportunity to rehearse their reply before answering. 3. Use Cause-Effect suggestions: Ellen Langer, Benzion Chanowitz and Arthur Blank did a study at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York (Langer, 1989, p 14). They approached people using a photocopier and asked if they could interrupt to make a copy immediately. When they said “Excuse me, may I use the Xerox machine because I want to make copies?”, they had dramatically higher success than when they said “Excuse me, may I use the Xerox machine?” Both these requests have the same information, but the first one is a Cause-Effect statement. When you ask participants to do something, give them a reason. 4. Use Students Own Highly Valued Criteria: NLP Trainer Dr Don Blackerby (1996, p 42-44) emphasises that the key to motivating students is to find out what’s important to them, and present your suggestion as something that will meet that criterion. To do this, you find out what activities they already enjoy, and then find out why those are important to them (what is the more general value that those things support). Then explain how your suggestion will meet that value. Use this as the “reason” in your cause-effect statements. Don Blackerby reminds us, “If you can’t do that, you’re teaching the wrong things!”

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In doing this, I don’t say “This is what I want you to do, and this is why I think it’s important.” Because that means the participants hear about the activity before I have a chance to offer my reasons. Instead I say “This is something I believe is a useful outcome… [describing a value I know the participants have]… and this is one way I believe we can achieve it….” The sequence is Pace their value and Lead to my suggestion. At its most simplistic, this would mean saying “To pass the test comfortably and relax, it’s important to have a good grasp of this subject, and that’s what I plan to go over now. Interested?”

seeding comments about content to be taught later. Each small task or content session offered to participants can also be warmed up to by being suggested confidently and congruently, in small steps, using cause-effect linkages to participants’ own values, and using contrast frames.

5. Use A Contrast Frame: Put a suggestion which you suspect participants will find challenging in a frame next to something even more challenging. Simplistically, this means saying “In China, Chi Kung masters break up to twenty tiles with one blow of their hand. Today, we’re just going to break one board each.”

Exercise 7.1: The First Hour Of A Weekend Training

A Caveat: Everything in these suggestions for micro-warmups is to be complemented by the skills of cooperative win-win teaching, described in a later chapter (Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998). These micro-warmups are warmups to the task you want to do. If you want your teaching success to be maximised, achieving the task will always be balanced in your priorities with the maintenance of the group. Summary The success of teaching is founded on what happens in the first hour you are with a group; even in the first minutes or moments. Beginnings in teaching enable your course participants to warm up to both the group process and to the task. Warming up to the group process answers two questions that participants have when they come to your class. “Who is here?” is answered by processes which enable students to introduce themselves to each other. “How will we act?” is answered by the explicit negotiation of a set of guidelines for behaviour in the group. These two steps move the group more easily through the Inclusion phase of group life, and prepare for an easy transition through the Control phase, on to the Intimacy phase, where participants act with high levels of trust. Warming up to the task answers two more questions. The question “Why should we learn this?” is answered by preframing, a process of presenting the essential presuppositions that make sense of your content. The question “What will we learn?” is answered consciously by giving an overview of the course, and unconsciously by

All that remains is to make this chapter a beginning for you now, by reviewing the way you warm up participants and choosing which of the above suggestions can either be added to your repertoire, or used to further clarify skills you already have.

1) Select a weekend training which you have designed (eg in Exercise 4.1) or are familiar with. Choose a specific demographic group (type of person) to deliver it to. 2) Plan the first hour of your training:

♦ What process will you use to create rapport /

introduce people to others? ♦ What process will you use to create a sense of contract about the style of training (guidelines) and the content? ♦ What preframes are important to answer the “Why?” question for this group on this weekend? ♦ What overview will you give people? ♦ Which content areas could you seed during this first hour?

Exercise 7.2: Micro-warmup Choose a challenging group task (eg you want a group of managers to give each other a shoulder massage in pairs; you want a group of alternative healers to set sensory specific goals for their business success over the next 5 years). 1) What state do you want them to access, in order to make this successful? How could you associate them into that state? 2) Break the task of getting them to the start of the process into 3-5 smaller steps. 3) Which of the group’s own highly valued criteria could be appealed to, to preframe this? 4) Which even more challenging activities could you use as a contrast frame? 5) Write three cause and effect statements to lead from their criteria to the suggestion to do the task.

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Exercise 7.3: Rapport Leaders In your next teaching session, make a point of identifying unconscious rapport leaders. In your peripheral vision, notice whose movements are followed by movements of others around them. Also notice whose statements result in nodding by others in the room. Choose one of these rapport leaders, and match some of their behaviours for five minutes as you teach, and check for responses by those people who were following them.

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Mind Your Language NLP and Language Neuro Linguistic Programming was originally created as the art of using linguistic programs (patterns of verbal and non-verbal language) to affect the neural system (the brain). In this sense, the use of language to affect what happens in another person’s brain is the basis of what we call teaching. Essentially, NLP proposes that communications from the outside world are filtered through such internal checks as language, values, metaprograms (personality traits) and remembered experiences. Our brains filter the communications from others and then generate internal representations (internal visual images, auditory sounds, kinesthetic feelings, olfactory smells, gustatory tastes, and auditory digital words). These internal representations, and those generated by our own internal processing (our thinking), affect our general state of mind and our physiological (bodily) responses. When I say “I bit into a juicy, ripe lemon today.” a listener will tend to make an internal picture of me biting a lemon, or feel what it would feel like to bite a juicy lemon. Their mouth will then water (a physiological response). All this happens without the listener’s conscious intent, just as it happened to you right now, reading this. The Milton Model Negating statements such as, “Don’t think of a blue tree.” generate internal representations of their opposite. In order to understand the statement “Don’t think of a blue tree.” the listener must first generate an internal representation (a picture) of a blue tree, to know what not to think of. In this way, a teacher who says “Don’t worry about the test on Monday.” generates a representation of worrying in the minds of their students. The words set up a chain of internal reactions in the listener before they can process the sentence consciously. Being an NLP trainer means being scrupulously “clean” about using positive internal representations. That means being careful to say “Relax about the test on Monday.” If, on a rare occasion, you find that you have needed to deliver a negative representation in order to explain clearly what is to be avoided, a useful choice is to follow it with desired representations (eg “Don’t collapse the anchors before you get a positive test on the resource anchor. That is, always ensure you have a positive test first, and then collapse anchors.”) Effective teachers select carefully which things they presuppose in their comments. For example,

the statement “How difficult was that?” appears designed to get the same information as “How easy was that?”. In fact, “How easy was that?” presupposes that the task was easy, and elicits a totally different set of internal representations. Since you need to presuppose some things in order to be able to talk, you may as well use the opportunity to find useful presuppositions. In the Milton model of language patterns used by Dr Milton Erickson (see Bandler and Grinder, 1975), NLP provides us with a comprehensive analysis of the way words affect internal representations. This ability of what we say to affect the unconscious responses of others is what has traditionally been called “hypnosis”. Obviously, this is very different to the stage hypnosis you may have seen on television. A trainer would be well advised to keep becoming expert at the use of the “hypnotic” language patterns of the Milton model. Choosing to use positive language and carefully selecting the presuppositions you want are examples of the patterns that NLP has called the Milton Model. Cause-Effect and Complex Equivalents The Cause-Effect and Complex Equivalence patterns, are two more examples of the Milton model. These patterns are used repeatedly by all effective teachers to “pace” (walk alongside) some experience their students know is true, and then “lead” to an experience the teacher intends them to have. A teacher may say “We’re really moving through this stuff now; so we’ll probably finish it this afternoon.” as if the first thing was the “equivalent” of the second. In this case the teacher paces the students’ belief that they are “moving through this stuff” and leads them to the new idea that they will finish that afternoon. A teacher may say “Once you have this practice with these language patterns, you’ll find they come into your mind naturally” as if the practice was the “cause” of the “effect” of the patterns coming into the mind naturally. In this case they pace the students’ realisation that they are going to have practice with language patterns, and then lead them to the idea that they may find the patterns coming into their minds naturally. Even very young children already know how to use such complex equivalent and cause-effect patterns to “hypnotise” their parents: “You love me, so buy me this new toy”. “It’s a lovely sunny day; let’s go to the beach”. Even apparently opposite concepts can be linked in this way, e.g. “The fact that you have doubts about this article means you’re checking out how these ideas will really work”. “If you’re sceptical about hypnosis, you owe it to your scepticism to find out more about how it works.”

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No More Zits! An extension of these patterns is the Yes Set, in which a teacher stacks a set of agreeable propositions, and then adds a suggestion. For example: “You’ve completed learning about rapport, right? [trainees nod] And you found that got easier as you went, isn’t that right? [comments agreeing] And the same thing happened with learning about sensory systems? [agreement] So you can imagine how easy it will be to learn the Milton model.” Nonverbal Patterns The verbal patterns of the Milton model are augmented by its non-verbal patterns. One example is the Embedded Suggestion, where a section of the sentence is marked out by being said in a different way (perhaps in a lower tone of voice). An example would be “I wonder if you’ve noticed yet how you can begin to have fun using these patterns.”). The phrase begin to have fun will be heard by the person’s unconscious mind as a separate “suggestion”. You probably have already realised that, in the example just given, the possibility of the person beginning to have fun has been presupposed. This deepens the power of the suggestion. And of course you’re probably thinking by now that, by including this example here, I may be using the technique right now to remind you of your own ability to learn this pattern and use it easily. A second non-verbal pattern is even more challenging to diagram here in written form. It’s the “command tonal shift”. In English and many other languages, raising the tone of voice at or just before the end of a sentence suggests that the sentence is a question. I can say to you “Are you interested in learning this?”, and the sentence structure tells you it’s a question. But if I raise my voice at the end, I only need say “Interested in learning this?” and you will recognise that this is not a statement; it is a question. The opposite tonal shift, lowering the tone of voice near the end of the sentence, produces the effect of a command. Imagine that we are sitting in a cold room, and wind is blowing through the door. If I say “Could you shut the door?” with a rising tone, my comment will sound uncertain or questioning. But if I say it with a falling tone, “Could you shut the door?” will sound quite emphatic. As another example, consider: “I’m not sure if you’ll find these patterns easier now?” Many learning suggestions you’d like to make to your students can be made elegantly in this way (O’Connor and Seymour, 1994, p 91).

Another important part of the art of using language to generate internal representations is taking care, in teaching especially, to use language that does actually have sensory representations attached to it. Here’s an example. If I say to you, “Draw me a diagram of a plant and label the main parts”, you probably could oblige me, because you have a representation of what a plant is and what a diagram is. If I say to you, “Draw me a schematic illustration of an electron multiplier”, you may not be able to comply. NLP Trainer Don Blackerby (1996, p 30-32) emphasises that the teacher’s aim is for every word they say to elicit a visual image in their students. When a word does not, he says it’s as if the teacher has said “zit” at that point. So my previous sentence could be experienced by the listener as “Draw me a zit zit of a zit zit.” As a trainer, you have yourself created internal representations (internal pictures, sounds and sensations) giving examples of and explanations of a large amount of vocabulary which you use in your teaching. Remember that your listeners often have not. I have one videotape where an NLP teacher is explaining something to a school child, aged about 12 years old. The child asks her why, in a demonstration they have just done, the teacher pressed on the child’s knee. The teacher explains, “That is what we call in NLP an anchor.” Now, the word anchor sounds like something this child will have an internal representation for. Unfortunately, the internal representation generated by this word is so different to the intended meaning that the child looks very puzzled. The teacher quickly explains “Do you know what that is? It’s stimulus-response. Another example would be… ” As far as I could tell, from the child’s perspective, the teacher just said “That is what we call in NLP a zit. Do you know what that is? It’s zit-zit. Here’s another example of a zit….” On the video, at this point, the child nods politely. The fundamental difference between trainers who are described as “clear” and trainers who are described as “confusing” is that clear trainers are able to detect most words that their listeners register as a zit. As soon as they want to introduce that new word, the clear teachers create for their students a definition of it, and announce that they are doing so. The teacher on the videotape could have said “I pressed on your knee to connect that touch with the good feeling you had as you thought about that exciting event you were describing. Later, I could press on that knee again, and it would pull you back to that good feeling, just as an anchor pulls a boat back to where it’s connected. We call that kind of thing an Anchor in NLP. An

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anchor is where one thing, like that touch on your knee, brings back the whole feeling of an experience. Another example would be…” Clear teachers identify all the new words they will use in a session, and plan short definitions and examples for each. They emphasise these before beginning to use the terms in their teaching, because teaching, is, in large part, the art of creating new internal representations in the minds of learners. Clear Explanations Each explanation can be measured against two criteria for effectiveness. Firstly, an effective explanation will include only terms which are already understood by the listener. Defining an anchor as “stimulus-response” describes one new word using two other new words. This demonstrates a failure of the teacher to “go into second position” with her student; to see the world through her student’s eyes and ask what will make sense to the student. In order to explain one concept, you will frequently find it useful to go back and explain two or three more basic concepts first, so that your final explanation makes sense. It can be useful practice to create a list of your favourite jargon terms and write explanations for them, designed for a person who knows nothing about your field. Next, test out your explanations by giving them to someone who actually does know nothing about it. Have them explain back to you what each of your terms means. The second criterion for an explanation is that it includes at least one, and preferably two sensory specific examples. These examples will be taken from a context familiar to the listener. In talking to a child about anchors, I might say “You know some times when you just see the picture of one of your favourite TV characters in an advert; how you get back the feeling of excitement and fun that you have while watching the show? That picture is what we call an anchor. Just as a real anchor pulls a boat back to the place we want it to stay, that picture anchors you to the good feeling you got while watching the show. And sometimes when you smell the smell of popcorn, you get the feeling of excitement that you have at the movies. The first time you smelled the popcorn, you were excited, so now when you smell the popcorn, the feeling comes back. The popcorn is an anchor for the feeling of excitement.” Notice that these examples need to be described with enough sensory information so that the listener creates internal images, sensations and sounds. It is not enough to say “You know how sometimes something present at the time of an event reminds you of the feeling you had at that event? That’s an anchor.” In this case, the listener

would need to create their own sensory examples of “something present”, “an event” and “the feeling you had”. An effective example fills in the details; it’s like a story of the event. I could even say “I loved watching the Star Wars movies. They were so exciting! When I even hear the music from the start of one of those movies, my heart starts to pound. For me, that music is what we call an “anchor”. It connects me back to the feeling of excitement, just as an anchor on a boat connects the boat back to a particular place.” Notice also, that in our examples I have given a rationale for why the jargon word (anchor) has been chosen. I say that an “anchor” in NLP terms is similar in function to an “anchor” on a boat. This helps the person to build links from our new set of internal representations (anchors in the NLP sense) to familiar ones (anchors on boats). Here’s another example: The Milton model itself is a list of language patterns and the names of these patterns come from linguistics. Some of these jargon names make sense immediately, such as a the “mind read” pattern. If I say “I know you can understand this.” I’m using a mind read, and this terminology is used in everyday English. Some of the names of the Milton Model patterns, such as a “lost performative” do not immediately make sense though. I could explain that “A lost performative is a statement where a value judgement has been made, without it being clear who has made this judgement. Examples would be where I said ‘It’s good to study NLP language patterns’. In that sentence, I’ve claimed that study is ‘good’ without saying according to whom. The person making the value judgement is not mentioned in the sentence.” This explanation is passable. But notice how much clearer it becomes when I build links from the actual term “lost performative” to previous ways the person will have used those two words (“lost” and “perform”): “A lost performative is a statement where someone has performed a value judgement, and the person who performed the judgement is lost; which is to say, they aren’t mentioned. Examples would be where I said ‘It’s good to study NLP language patterns’. In that sentence, someone has performed a value judgement that study is ‘good’, but the person who performed the judgement is “lost”. You don’t know, from the sentence, who they are. They’re the lost performer of that value judgement.” Reversing The Milton Model To Get Specific In going beyond zits, and giving specific examples of new concepts, notice that I am doing the opposite of what I was doing by using the Milton model patterns above. The Milton model is a way of talking very vaguely. When I say “Once you

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have this practice with these language patterns, you’ll find they come into your mind naturally” I’m talking very vaguely. This generalised way of talking is useful when I want to encourage my students to just unconsciously accept the suggestion I am making. When I want them to have a clear conscious understanding of what I say, I will do the opposite. I will talk very specifically, and encourage them to think specifically. If a student says “I had trouble understanding grammar at school, so I’ll find learning language patterns hard”, the student is now using the same Milton model pattern (cause-effect) to hypnotise themselves into being unable to learn. In this case, I can challenge the student’s pattern, saying “So you think the trouble you had learning at school might mean it’s hard to learn here. How specifically would what happened at school cause you to have difficulty now? By challenging the Milton model pattern here, I encourage the student to get more specific about their fear and challenge it. This kind of challenge is called in NLP a “metamodel” challenge (Bandler and Grinder, 1975). In the same way, if a student creates unhelpful presuppositions, I can use a metamodel challenge to these. If a student says, “How hard will the test on Monday be?” they have presupposed that the test will be hard. The metamodel challenge would be to say “When you say that it sounds as if you are expecting the test to be hard. Can I check how you know it’s not going to be easy?” Summary Training involves the art of creating useful new internal representations in your listeners. I have discussed several ways to do that here, including ♦ taking care to describe the positive results you want, ♦ using cause-effect statements to connect pacing statements to suggestions, ♦ using voice tone changes to generate embedded suggestions and command tonality, ♦ explaining all new terms in words understood by the listener and with sensory specific examples. ♦ Challenge less useful language patterns that students make by asking metamodel questions that say “How specifically did you get to believe that?”

1) Identify what is presupposed (what internal representations does the person need to make in order to understand what you have said?) 2) Write a second statement which deals with the same content and yet creates more useful internal representations ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Tell me when you find the work too hard. Who didn’t do their homework? I hope you don’t do as badly as my last class. Let me tell you the biggest mistake here. This session we study the really confusing parts of NLP. ♦ What did you find most confusing this session? ♦ What worries do you have about doing this? Exercise 8.2: No More Zits! Identify ten core terms for your field. For each of the terms, 1) Identify which other terms need to be known before this term can be understood fully. 2) Write a definition which assumes no previous knowledge. 3) Give a sensory specific example. Terms for practice for NLP Training: ♦ Accessing cues ♦ Anchor ♦ Being at cause ♦ Cybernetic epistemology ♦ Dissociation ♦ Internal representations ♦ NLP ♦ Parts ♦ Rapport ♦ Reframing ♦ Representational system ♦ Strategies ♦ Submodalities ♦ The map is not the territory ♦ The meaning of communication is the response you get ♦ The metamodel ♦ The Milton Model ♦ Trance

Exercise 8.1: Creating Useful Internal Representations For each of the following statements,

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claims and orators who distorted the truth to gain some effect.

Educated Commitment The Purposes Of Training

Demosthenes, on the other hand, was interested not so much in what was “true” at present, as in what could be “made true” by the actions he advocated. Accused at times of dishonest dealings behind the scenes, he was none-the-less admired for his ability to convince others to dream great dreams, and go out and act on them. Demosthenes’ speeches were dramatic, varied in style, and motivational. The story goes that when Isocrates spoke, people said “Great speech!”, but when Demosthenes spoke, they said “Let’s march!” (Saunders, 1970, p 1321).

Isocrates and Demosthenes In the fourth century BC, Isocrates and Demosthenes were considered the greatest political orators in Athens. Their styles could not have been more different. Isocrates was a publisher of pamphlets whose aim was to educate, to encourage people to learn and to make clearer judgements based on their learnings. As a speaker he had a smooth, regular style, but he despised extravagant

Mind maps

Multisensory material

Personal goals

Create learning state

Intend

Mnemonics

Storage systems

File

Inductive

Educated Commitment

Deductive

Call out agreement

Group discussions

Chunk material 7±2

Rehearse

Memory Learning Strategies

Peg systems

Review material

Structured & Goal-oriented

Self Actualisation

Commitment

Group stages

Small, public actions, at the training

Verbal contracts

Written plans

Roleplays

Real life acts (eg via phone)

The Educated Commitment Model

Do NLP Trainees Change? In your eagerness to share NLP with the world, are you with Isocrates or Demosthenes? Do you focus on education or commitment? I believe that both are equally important, and in this article I want to

consider how NLP training can be used to enhance each. I will explore the research on both learning and persuasion; how to get people to remember the metamodel or the four keys to effective anchoring… and how to get them to actually apply these in their lives outside of the training room. For me as an NLP Trainer, there is a very simple reason

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for clarifying these things: I want what I do to work! I’d like to think that, six months after an NLP Practitioner training, people still remember some of what I taught them, and actually use it in their lives. Does training actually result in change? Some degree of answer to this question is already available. In 1990, a study was made of 54 people attending a 21 day combined NLP Practitioner / Master Practitioner training run by Ed and Marianne Reese near Amsterdam (Duncan, Konefal and Spechler, 1990). The study involved a questionnaire called the Personal Orientation Inventory, which assesses a number of variables related to “self-actualisation”. This term was originally used by Kurt Goldstein and Abraham Maslow to refer to the way that healthy human beings continually search for ways to maintain and enhance the sense of “self”. The NLP researchers noted that “self actualisation” is a concept closely linked to the ability to 1) be aware of and 2) make connections between ones internal representations (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic etc), internal state, and physiology (ie Self actualisation is related to: 1. self-awareness and 2. self-control). Developed by Shostrom and Shostrom, the Personal Orientation Inventory had been administered to a number of other individuals before and after experiences such as encounter groups, Gestalt therapy groups and Assertiveness Training seminars. In other studies, groups which focus on interpersonal issues rather than intrapsychic issues actually have resulted in a lowering of “self-actualisation” on this scale, but most personal growth or training groups lead to an increase in the quality. The 18 NLP Master Practitioners already had high scores on the selfactualisation scale before starting Marianne and Ed Reese’s training. This is consistent with them having already completed a personal growth group experience, and having maintained the changes. Both Practitioner and Master Practitioner groups increased their scores over the time of the current training. Qualitative Evidence A great deal of qualitative evidence suggests that NLP Practitioner training delivers other, more concrete results. As NLP trainers we sustain ourselves with this kind of written feedback from our trainees: “Immediately after my training I established what has proven to be a successful vocational rehabilitation business with 12 colleagues working for me in 6 different locations. I could not have achieved this success without the outstanding NLP strategies.”

–Stu Macann, Manager, Wellington, New Zealand “NLP has had an impact on my life both professionally and personally. At school, I have had students go from achieving 0/10 in spelling tests to achieving 10/10 and moving up 2-3 levels in a week. Even more important is the effect this small success has on their overall confidence and attitude towards themselves and school in general. I’m now involved in sharing the skills in training sessions with other teaching staff.” –Julie McCracken, Secondary Teacher, Christchurch, New Zealand “As a psychotherapist, my obligation is to help clients change in the ways they request. Professionally, my work has just taken off. What a gift it is to be able to remove a person’s phobia, relieve a past trauma, halt an eating disorder, obliterate a sense of abandonment, enhance self esteem, instil a sense of purpose in someone’s life, and much more.” -Jeff Saunders, Psychotherapist, Christchurch, New Zealand However, in talking with NLP graduates, we have also come across people who have barely thought about NLP since their certification. These practitioners lacked one or both of the two essential training outcomes: either they didn’t learn the material, or they weren’t committed to using it. Related to these missing pieces, they also have not installed useful learning strategies, or usefully altered basic presuppositions about their life. Most of the things we want from NLP training could be considered under these four headings: Memory, Commitment, Learning Strategies, and Selfactualisation. Facilitating Memory If it’s memory we are after, then we know a great deal, from research, about how to get it. Firstly, memory is unrelated to intelligence test results. At the University of Texas, a study was done where slides were shown to viewers, and then re-shown with some new slides mixed in. Viewers were to press a lever when they recognised a slide from the first set. Human adults and five year old rhesus monkeys both got 86% correct! (Howard, 1996, p 242). When people don’t remember, it is not because they are too “dumb”. It’s because they don’t use their brains the way people who remember do. In every case of a person with exceptional memory, the person’s mental capacity has been shown to be within the normal range. In every instance, the exceptional memorisers have discovered and used some very simple memory techniques.

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Joan Minninger (1984) points out that the entire gamut of memory techniques can still be summarised in the 3 points made by the scientist Erasmus in 1512 AD: intend, file and rehearse. As a trainer, these principles translate into: 1) Have students identify what they will be learning and why it’s worth learning. 2) Teach students how to file memories in ways that they will be able to retrieve them. 3) Have students review information repeatedly after first exposure to it. Having students identify their intention for learning involves getting them to set individual learning goals at the start of any training. It also involves answering what we have termed “the why question” before each teaching segment (Bolstad, 1997). In an overview of 400 separate studies of goalsetting, E. Locke and G. Latham (quoted in Jensen, 1995, p 79) showed that setting specific and slightly challenging goals always led to better success in the task required. Mobilising students’ interest in the subject is not just an intellectual process. It floods their brain with chemicals such as adrenaline and enkephaline, which act as “memory fixatives” (Jensen, 1995, p 85). Even injecting these chemicals into rats before learning studies will increase their memory (though we recommend the motivational route as safer than the intravenous one). Techniques For Filing Throughout history, there has been some development in the techniques of filing, the second of the principles for memory. For example, we now know more fully that our mind’s files are linked to the particular psycho-physiological states we are in when we compile them. If you drink coffee while studying, it helps to drink coffee before sitting the test (Howard, 1996, p 250). In NLP terms, all learning is anchored. We also know from George Miller’s studies that there is a neurological reason why learning is best chunked in sets of seven plus or minus two (7±2) bits (Howard, 1996, p 230). Short term memory handles only one such set of five to nine information bits at a time. The production of long term memory involves the making of links between different sensory areas in the cerebral cortex, and links to the deeper areas of the brain (Howard, 1996, p 242). Memory techniques are ways to deliberately create such links. Ensuring that memories have significance in relation to other areas of ones life also creates such links. This is why “meaningful” phrases are easier to remember than nonsense ones, and facts about a place you want to go on holiday are easier to remember than general “geography facts” (this last fact also draws on the first memory principle – “intend”).

Mind maps are a recent addition to the field of memory techniques. Companies like Boeing say that the use of mind maps has enabled them to reduce training time to one tenth or less (Buzan, 1993, p 170). Memory peg systems and Mnemonics are far older methods, and account for the “super-memory” of people such as the Russian “S” (Buzan, 1991, p 15). “S”, studied by Dr Alexander Luria, could recall an entire speech, word for word, after a 30 year interval. Mnemonic and memory peg systems take advantage of the fact that a multi-sensory experience is easier to remember than a word or number. For example, if you wanted to recall the three keys to memory (intend, file, rehearse), using memory pegs, you might first notice that the number one (1) looks like a pen, the number two (2) looks like a swan, and the number three (3) looks like a woman’s breasts. You could then create the sounds and images of a pen writing intentions, a swan in a filing cabinet, and a woman rehearsing putting on her new bra repeatedly. Later, to recall the three points, simply see the three numbers (123) in your mind, and the pictures/sounds that go with them. If you wanted to use a mnemonic, you might remember memory as a FIR tree (File, Intend, Rehearse). This memory technology (now called “Accelerated Learning”) is based on the same awareness of sensory systems that is central to NLP. Amongst the things we could change are: ♦ Avoid giving students unchunked lists of 30 points. Chunk these into lists of 7±2. ♦ Avoid teaching by lecturing, with no visual aids and no movement for hours at a time. Keep wallcharts with key points up on the walls, design experiential demonstrations requiring physical movement for each key point, and provide kinesthetic break states every half an hour. ♦ Avoid expecting students to recall lists (such as, in NLP training, the metamodel) without teaching them memory peg systems, mind mapping or mnemonics. I believe that memory systems are a fundamental part of any training. Finally, repetition is the third of the three keys to memory (intend, file, rehearse). The most successful learning results occur when information is reviewed a short time after initially being presented, and again the next day, after sleep. Sleep itself is an important part of the process of “fixing” long term memory, and reducing students’ sleep by only two hours reduces recall significantly. Sleep loss has been the key factor in several famous human error accidents such as the 1979 Three Mile nuclear reactor accident and the 1987 Challenger Space Shuttle explosion (Jensen, 1995, p 51). NLP style trainings which promote sleep reduction may do well in increasing commitment; but they do not

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increase learning. A certain level of relaxation is essential to short and long term memory.

and thus discover new sensory accessing cues, never written up in the NLP literature before.

Facilitating New Learning Strategies

“Unfortunately” perhaps, new NLP students do not generally want to discover “new truths”. They want to learn the “rules” we’ve found out already. Experts in a field (and that includes NLP trainers) are deeply interested in inductive learning in that field; in expanding the frontiers of knowledge. They are tempted to try and make new students function in this way too. New students, according to the research by Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus (1980) do not have the sensory distinctions to identify new information in this way. In NLP training, this suggests that deductive learning is most effective early in Practitioner training, and inductive learning could become increasingly relevant at the Master Practitioner level. At that level, an exercise could be run with the instruction “Sit down with another person, and, over the course of a five minute conversation, identify what other non-verbal cues are related to visualisation in this person.” Such exercises not only invite students to create new knowledge; they also install the strategy of inductive reasoning. To maximise learning (without necessarily predicting what will be learned) the uncertainty generated by such inductive exercises is valuable. Research suggests that learner involvement will be at its best when the learner is “confused but not yet frustrated” (Jensen, 1995, p 167). For Practitioners, deductive tasks do that anyway. For Master Practitioners, inductive tasks may be more effective.

Of course, one of my aims in NLP training is not merely to teach facts, but to enable students to install whole new learning strategies. The most obvious example is the teaching of learning strategies such as the visual recall “spelling” strategy. The ability to remember and apply information involves quite a different strategy to the ability to question it or to discover new information. Remembering and applying information is what is known as a “deductive” process. Questioning and discovering new information requires an “inductive” process. This difference was at the heart of the renaissance of science in sixteenth century Europe. It may yet prove to be at the heart of a renaissance of education in our twenty first century. To understand the difference between inductive and deductive thought, Bertrand Russell (1996, p 209 and p 527-530) uses the example of human mortality. In Europe up until the 16th century, the fact that a particular person (let’s call him John) would die was very simply proved. In the Bible, God had decreed that humanity would return to the dust from which it came. John is an example of humanity, so John will die. This is deductive reasoning. From the general principle, the specific fact can be deduced. If I tell you that when people look up it assists their visualising, then you as an NLP student can deduce that if you look up, you will be more able to see pictures in your mind. Inductive Learning Strategies Sir Francis Bacon was the first European scientist to clearly state that this way of ascertaining facts was limited. He suggested another possible way to determine whether our friend John is mortal. We could check several people who were born 150 years ago. We might then find that they have all died. We could then, from these examples arrive at a general principle: namely that within 150 years of their birth, everyone dies. The resulting principle could be tested in a more deductive way, and applied to John. This process was called by Bacon “inductive reasoning”. Sadly, the result of inductive reasoning is never as certain as the result of deduction. After all, we might one day find a person who was 160 years old. And then we would have to alter our theory. But the big advantage of induction is that you can not only check old theories with it, but you can discover totally new truths. I can have students observe for nonverbal cues which occur when visualising is being done,

Facilitating “Self Actualisation” One day I was talking with a friend about the immense skill that NLP Practitioners have, and how great it would be to get a group of NLP Practitioners together for a kind of “group therapy”. A friend of ours, also NLP trained, said “Well; you already do that. It’s called a Master Practitioner course.” Actually, that’s what the study of Ed and Marianne Reese’ training demonstrates. There is a “hidden curriculum” of the NLP Certification trainings which installs the presuppositions of NLP in the actual lives of the trainees. The new vocabulary of NLP (phrases such as “at cause”, “intention”, “chunk up”) supports and validates this change. A number of comparable trainings achieve this same result. As an example, consider another fast growing, international, personal development technology; the “Forum”. Landmark Forum (which evolved in 1985 from Erhard Seminar Training or EST) delivers a series of seminars averaging 4 days in length. The content of the Forum training is a series of 150 reframes, which Landmark refers to as “distinctions”. Steve Zaffron, Vice President of

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Development in the Landmark Education Corporation, defines a distinction as an idea which, “opens a new way of relating to reality because reality is experienced differently for the person realising the distinction.” (Wruck and Eastley, 1997, p 8). For example, just as in NLP a core “distinction” is between Map and Territory, a core distinction in Landmark is between “what happened” and “what it means”. A survey of Forum graduates 3-6 months after their initial training found that seven out of ten rated it “one of life’s most rewarding experiences”. Nine out of ten considered it “likely to have enduring value for me.” B.J. Holmes, Landmark’s Director of Marketing and Communications emphasises “We are in the business of selling a product of Transformation.” The NLP Practitioner Results We in NLP could say the same. To check the comparable impact of NLP training, our organisation followed up people who had completed Practitioner training with us 6-9 months previously and asked them the same questions, in the same format, as Landmark. In our graduates, 8 out of 10 rated the NLP Practitioner Training as one of their life’s most rewarding experiences. 95% said it had improved their ability to reach career goals. Nine out of ten said it had helped them clarify goals, values and strategies, and the same amount said it had helped them cope with a particular challenge or problem. 100% rated it as well worth the cost and 100% said it had specific practical value for many aspects of their life. Studies on groups in a variety of settings (W. Reddy and K. Lippert, “Studies of the Processes and Dynamics within Experiential Groups”, in Smith, 1980, p 56-84) reveal a number of factors which contribute to the development of selfactualisation in such trainings. We know that persons who have a high drive for goal achievement and greater energy tend to do better in such situations than those who are seeking support or “learning about themselves”. Regardless of the type of group, the skills of the person in charge also largely determine whether participants will have a positive outcome. In training that extends longer than a weekend, carefully directed and structured trainings deliver better results, and are described more favourably by participants than less structured trainings. Trainers who are able to make closer emotional contact with participants achieve more success near the end of longer trainings, but less near the beginning. This is related to the research supporting Schutz’ theory of group development (Bolstad and Hamblett, 1998 C), which holds that groups go through a life cycle where the appropriate focus shifts from creating a

sense of inclusion, to creating a sense of equal control, to creating a sense of intimacy. Summarising the implications for trainers, we could say that trainers enhance self actualisation by: 1. Encouraging people to focus on goals and achievement. 2. Structuring the training carefully. 3. Shifting from an initial focus on creating a sense of inclusion, to a focus on creating a sense of participation, and finally to a sense of closeness in the group. Facilitating Commitment A significant part of the achievement of enhanced self-actualisation in the training setting results from what has come to be termed in training “commitment”. Success Magazine’s Dan Greenberg (1998, p 71-2) describes his experience of a Tony Robbins seminar, and notes that Robbin’s demands for what he calls commitment are continuous. “Robbins often ends his statements with “If you agree with that, say “Aye!” and the crowd echoes back, “Aye!”…. Before the break we’re told to stand, face our partners, and make a pledge to keep one another’s energy at peak; we repeat this at peak volume like a command from a marine drill sergeant.” And again, “Robbins leads us in a repetitive, responsive group incantation: “Now I am the voice! I will lead, not follow! I will believe, not doubt! I will create, not destroy! I am a force for good! I am a leader! I will defy the odds! Step up!” Clearly, Robbins does not assume that he has gained commitment simply as a result of the person attending. He constantly asks the person to verbally state their commitment, and has people check up on each others’ actions to ensure they are consistent with this commitment. Robbin’s continuous rhetorical questions also require people (answering him in their minds as they listen) to affirm commitment. The final result, in terms at least of people continuing with his trainings, is convincing. It’s hard to find someone else in the training field who is as good at getting “commitment” in that sense (over a million people have attended his seminars, says Greenberg). For the Landmark Education Corporation, a related notion is “enrolment”. “Enrolment is generating a possibility in another’s listening such that they step into that possibility committedly and act.” (Wruck and Eastley, 1997, p 12). This is not the same as coercing or persuading someone –it is measured by the creation, by the person themselves, of internal representations of a new life possibility, and by their willingness to act until these internal representations are matched in reality. As an

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example of the Forum’s ability to “enrol”, consider their actual enrolment statistics. 20% of those attending an introductory evening (usually brought by a previous Forum trainee) will attend the Forum. By the second (“Advanced”) course, the rate of enrolment for the third (“Self expression and Leadership”) course is 80%. This result is built into the structure of both evening sessions and basic courses – fully a quarter of the time on the basic course is spent in enrolling participants in the next level of training. Of course, many of the 80% who do not enrol after a basic course evening may find the pressure on this introductory evening offensive. The end result for Landmark, however, includes a very high number of “enrolments” (in both senses of the word) from each evening. Landmark has another feature which supports “enrolment”. During the training sessions, there is time when participants can make phone calls to people in their family, friends or colleagues, and put their new learnings into action immediately. This creates an even stronger level of external involvement than Tony Robbins’ pledges to another training participant. Between training sessions, Forum participants are also set homework tasks which involve them in interacting with others using their new “distinctions” (Wruck and Eastley, 1997, p 9). Follow-up on their completion of these tasks is quite confrontational, comparing convincingly with weight reduction groups’ “Pig of the Month” awards. In each case, a considerable “away from” motivation (to use the NLP term) is applied. Commitment-focused trainings (and here I’m including both Forum and Tony Robbins’ seminars) are also heavy on modal operators of necessity. “Turn your shoulds to musts!” Robbins exhorts (Greenberg, 1998, p 70). There is a simple principle behind Robbins’ pledges and shouts of “Aye”, and the Forum’s phone calls and homework. The principle is that once people have engaged in some new behaviour, they tend to keep doing similar behaviours, in order to seem congruent (to themselves, and to others). In the field of social psychology there is considerable research on this phenomenon (Myers, 1983, p 4469). For example, usually, 46% of Toronto residents asked to contribute to the Cancer society fundraising drive actually do so. However, in one study residents were asked, on the day before the drive, to wear a lapel pin advertising the fundraising. All those approached agreed to do so, and the contribution rate from these people, the next day, was 90%. Having done one behaviour (wearing the pin) they were twice as likely to complete other similar behaviours later. Similarly, after agreeing to sign a simple “safe driving” petition, Californian residents were three times more likely to agree to have a large, ugly “Drive

Safely” sign put in their front yard. In sales, this is known as the “foot in the door” phenomenon. Verbal Commitments Interestingly, the first action need only be a verbal or written statement, in order to generate other related actions. Steven Sherman repeated the Cancer society research, but merely phoned people up the day before and asked them whether they thought they would be willing to donate time to the society (by working as a collector). Almost half said yes, presumably wanting to appear helpful. When the actual Cancer society organiser called a few days later, the result was a 700% increase in collectors (Cialdini, 1993, p 58). American prisoners of war in the Korean conflict provided perhaps the most dramatic instance of this phenomenon. Their captors asked them to copy written statements critical of America. These written statements were then posted up for other prisoners to read. After writing them, several hundred soldiers actually became critical of their own army, and twenty one refused to return to America after the war (This process led to the original coining of the term “brainwashing”). In sales, many companies utilise this principle by running competitions in which a person writes a “testimonial” beginning “I like the product because…”. Amway Corporation was one of the first large companies to take advantage of the idea with its own staff, by requiring sales personnel to write their own individual goals down and state them publicly (Cialdini, 1993, p 67). Statements creating commitment can be encouraged without the influencer even asking for them. When groups are allowed to talk about the decisions they face (as a group or in pairs) people are more likely to act on their positive intentions. In the Second World War, United States government Committee on Food Habits representatives travelled around the USA attempting to convince housewives to cook the less popular cuts of meat, in order to provide more food for the war effort. Only 3% of those attending their presentations, and receiving the glossy recipe books actually changed their behaviour. Next, they changed their strategy, and after a brief presentation had the groups discuss whether they would be willing to change to use more of these meats. This increased their response rate to 32% (Franzoi, 1996, p 239-240). Stephen Franzoi (p 546) explains “group discussion allows members to make explicit promises as to how they will behave, and these promises act as a binding “contract”.” Once useful new behaviour is established (for whatever reason) it tends to create its own justifications. A study in Iowa (Cialdini, 1993, p

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83-85) looked at attempts to influence residents to reduce natural gas consumption. Those in the study were first given information about how and why this important conservation process could be done. All agreed to “try” to save gas, but gas use remained the same that year. The next year, a section of residents were given the same information, and told that if they did save gas, their names would be published in the newspapers. They saved an average of 422 cubic feet of gas each over the next month. At that point, they were told that the newspaper advertising had been cancelled. Would they now stop saving? Not at all! In fact, over the next few months, their gas savings exceeded the original month! Though initially motivated by the publicity, they had now found other reasons why they felt good saving gas. Their new behaviour, once started, continued and was self-supporting. In summary, then, for a trainer to establish commitment involves having course participants take action (verbally, in writing, in roleplay or in real life situations) that: a) Is completed while they are at the training. b) While small, is consistent with the change they want to achieve. c) Is observed and even discussed by other course participants. The result of doing this repeatedly through a training is life-transforming change. Isocrates or Demosthenes? So far, I have presented commitment, self actualisation, learning strategies and memory as complementary goals. That’s the way I consider them to be used most effectively. For you as a trainer, it’s also important to know that some “presenters” have a strong focus on one goal and an avoidance of the others. This difference became obvious in ancient Athens, when Philip of Macedonia began to gather the northern Greek cities under his control. The response of Isocrates was to write to Philip in 346 BC, proposing that he consider becoming a sort of defender of unity and peace in Greece. Philip’s greatest success would then be the admiration of future generations, he said. Isocrates, in presenting this proposal, acknowledged “I hope you will go through and examine all I have written, and if you find any weakness or inadequacy in it, you will put the blame on my age, which may reasonably be excused.”(Saunders, 1970, p 166). In other words, he advocated a careful consideration of his proposal, rather than simply acceptance. Between 351 and 341 BC, Demosthenes, on the other hand, spoke forcefully to the Athenian senate about the need to wage war against Philip. He said,

“We have no choice. We are left with the one most just and unavoidable course, which speakers like this deliberately overlook. What is that? Resistance to aggression.”(Saunders, 1970, p 236). Demosthenes’ rhetorical questions, away-from motivation and modal operators of necessity are not designed to engage considered decision-making. They demand commitment. If the risk of Isocrates approach is that he never insists on action, the risk of Demosthenes’ approach is that he only insists on action. Dan Greenberg (1997) has trained with Landmark Forum, NLP trainers and others. Commenting on Tony Robbins, he complains, “Am I in a Tony Robbins seminar in New York in 1997, or have I stepped through a time warp into a Hitler Youth rally in Berlin in 1937…. In pure energy and charisma Tony Robbins ranks up there with the best of them. But although his seminar was dramatic and lively and energising, the following day I woke up to the recognition that little of what I learned there had stayed with me.” Robbins had motivated him, but not installed in his memory the tools to motivate himself. On the other hand, the Iowa gas conservation study (above, Cialdini, 1993, p 83-85) and the Committee on Food Habits study (above, Franzoi, 1996, p 239) show that giving people information, by itself, is not enough. In both those studies, lectures simply turned uneducated non-responders into educated nonresponders. And there are certainly trainers who focus on information in this way. I have attended NLP training (at the trainer level) where nine hour days were used to do an “information dump” without a single exercise or discussion to engage commitment. By contrast, here is another example of someone I’d consider to be both using and demonstrating the results of the Educated Commitment model. Here, one of my NLP graduates describes her own teaching of NLP skills. “The programme I run is called “Fresh Start” and was established at the beginning of 1996 because there was a big problem in the area about what to do with "at risk" teenagers…. We work to change the beliefs that they hold about themselves, particularly by looking at how they can go about improving their ability to learn. We do all of this through the outdoor skills and also learning to juggle, stuff like that from my NLP training. I teach them the memory-pegs and NLP Spelling Strategy too, so they can visualise to spell and read and do maths and suchlike. They like that, because no-one ever showed them specifically how to use their own brain properly before. They learn the NLP attitude that 'if it is possible for someone else to do something, then it is possible for me to learn to do it too'. Then I show them some of the NLP and

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accelerated learning tools to actually do it. In 1996 we got about 40% of students actually go back into the classroom and stay, which is a really, really good result. Most of the other approaches that have been tried with these kids counselling, police, getting heavy with them - none of that stuff has worked anything like that well.” -Karyn Chalk, High School Teacher, Christchurch, New Zealand Summing Up I have considered four ways in which participants change as a result of NLP Practitioner training. In each case, I suggested guidelines that can enhance the achievement of that outcome. Memory: • Have participants set personal learning goals. • Create a relaxed and curious learning state. • Chunk material (7±2). • Teach using visual aids, words and activity. • Use memory storage systems such as mnemonics, memory pegs and mind maps. Learning Strategies: • Teach deductive learning strategies such as the visual recall process. • As students become more expert, use and install inductive learning processes. Self Actualisation: • Encourage people focusing on goals and achievement. • Structure the training. • Utilise the group development through Inclusion, Control and Intimacy phases. Commitment: • Have participants repeatedly take small, positive action on the training. • Have these actions observed by and discussed with other participants.

3) Collect the key 5-9 points and number them 4) Create images using the following visual memory pegs, for each of the points 1 pen 2 swan 3 breasts 4 sailboat 5 hook 6 golf club 7 cliff 8 hourglass 9 pipe 10 bat and ball 5) Find three words which a) are related to the content you have chosen, and b) have 5-9 letters (eg “anchor”) 6) Experiment to find a way to create a mnemonic from one of the words selected in 5). Use a thesaurus and a dictionary to help you find plausible words starting with the letters in the word you are using. 7) Design three small actions, which a) people could take on the training, b) in front of other people, c) while learning this content area, d) which would be demonstrations of their commitment to using this area of content.

Memory by itself is of only academic importance. Commitment by itself is the stuff of which cults are made. But these four outcomes together create something extraordinary. For me, this “educated commitment” to transformation is the measure of training success. Exercise 9.1: Educated Commitment 1) Select an area of training content 2) Draw a mind map of the area of content

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Training Questions The field of NLP began with the development of a series of precision questions (the metamodel), so it’s understandable that NLP based trainers would be fascinated with questions isn’t it? Before we start, we’d like to invite you to experiment with a simple NLP demonstration which clarifies the nature of questions. Right now, I’d like you to spend a few seconds simply looking round the room and asking yourself “What’s red?” Notice what things you see, and come back to reading this. Actually take the time to do that now. “What’s red?” Now; for the next few seconds, it’s important that you keep your eyes either looking at this paper, or closed. First, I’d like you in a moment to close your

eyes and remember what things in the room are red. Just go ahead now and close your eyes and remember “What’s red?” How good was your recall for those things? Keep your eyes on the page though, because I’d like you in a moment to close your eyes again, and this time (without looking around the room again) try to remember what things in the room are blue. Just go ahead now and close your eyes and remember “What’s blue?” So, how does your recall for those things compare with your recall for red? Finally, I’d like you in a moment to close your eyes and remember what things in the room are brown. Just go ahead now and close your eyes and try to remember “What’s brown?”

A Model For Responding To Questions 1. Elicit the question 2. Clarify the question 3. Identify its place on the grid in terms of Timing/Depth. Most common areas for questions

Why?

What?

How?

What if?

Environment Behaviour Capability Beliefs Identity Spirit

4. Respond 5. Check result Again, notice what you recalled. The questions you ask yourself determine to a great extent what you see, hear and feel of the world. The questions we ask sort our experience in profound ways. What this means for you as a trainer is that when you hear a course participant ask you a question, they are telling you a lot about what they actually experience in their world. How you respond to such wonderful opportunities has a lot to do with the success of your training. Far from being an interruption to your teaching, questions give you information about what is working and what needs adjusting, and simultaneously give you an invitation to make direct interventions to alter your trainees’ maps of reality. In this chapter I’ll show you a very simple model for assessing and “answering” questions. You’ll learn the two key frames for evaluating questions,

and a five step process for generating useful responses to any participant’s question. Sound useful? Then read on! Frame One: Timing Have you heard that joke where the other person asks you if you know what the essence of good humour is? Then, as you start to answer they quickly interrupt and say “Timing!” Timing is in some senses the essence of good teaching too. The whole point of designing your teaching is to ensure that participants are able to learn material in chunks that are manageable and interesting, and that they go through the most useful sequence of preframes and learning experiences to learn what you are teaching. Of course, your students don’t know the rationale of

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this design before they complete your training, so they are quite likely to ask questions which invite you to teach in an entirely different order. In a previous chapter I discussed Bernice McCarthy’s 4MAT system (McCarthy, 1987), which suggests that effective teaching moves through a cycle of four stages with each topic. These stages are represented by different learner questions: Why?, What?, How?, and What if? McCarthy suggests that it’s useful first to answer the question “Why are we learning this?” Many students will not be able to engage with the learning process until they feel they have a reason, or a motive for learning. Once this question is answered, the next step is to give the information about the topic; answering questions about “What?”. Only then, when the core information has been imparted, can participants usefully move on to experiment with the subject, doing an exercise or observing a demonstration. Such interaction answers the question “How [do we use this]?” Once they have a practical experience, then participants can successfully explore questions which consider “What would happen if?” –for example “What would happen if this didn’t go the way we expected?”, “What would happen if I use this in a different setting?” The challenge is that the actual human beings you teach have preferences for asking a particular one of these questions. Students who have a preference for “What if?” questions would love to start off the session by speculating about using the things you will teach in novel situations. They don’t feel the need to bother themselves with the details of how you do it in “the usual” situations before experimenting with the unusual. On the other hand, people for whom the “Why?” question is significant may well interrupt your demonstration to ask “Excuse me, but why are we doing any of this?” Timing Your Response I find it important to quickly assess which type of question I have been asked in terms of this time sequence. “Why?” questions need an immediate answer, because those who ask them will not begin learning until they have had them answered. In fact, I check that I’ve elicited as many as I can early on, by asking “So from what you’ve heard so far, would learning about this be useful to you?” “What?” questions about the information only need answering to the extent that they enable people to do the exercise you intend. Any more than that is “optional material” I elicit them by asking “So what more do you need to know to make sense of

this?” I also recommend books and audiotapes for true “What?” learners to explore further in their own time. Similarly, “How?” only needs to be answered to the extent that learners can complete the exercise. Before sending people off to do an exercise I ask “So what else do you need to know to do this specific exercise easily?” I need to check carefully for questions which ask about exceptions and unusual developments of the exercise; “What if?” questions being “sneaked in” before their time. These are excellent questions, as I make a point of telling the questioner, and they will make even more sense after the exercise. In fact, most of them will be answered by doing the exercise! My experience is that answering a lot of “What if?” questions before the exercise creates a sense of anxiety and confusion. It also lessens the state of energy and enthusiasm we have been building before the exercise. After the exercise, I actively solicit “What if?” questions with a comment such as “So what did you learn, and what questions do you have?” So the first thing I am listening for when I hear a question is the time frame. When students are about to do a rapport exercise, breathing in time with someone, the question “How will I know when the person is breathing?” may be a “How?” question. The questions “What should I do if the person starts hyperventilating?” or “How would you use this with a person when you are making love?” are probably “What if?” questions (unless your courses are of a different kind to the ones we run). These latter questions will be more usefully answered once the participants have a sense of what simply breathing in time with someone is like. “Why?” questions are answered immediately. “How?” and “What?” questions only “need” to be answered to the extent that they meet your goals for the current exercises, and “What if?” questions are best left until after the exercise. Keeping clear about our time frame lets us know When to answer a question. Frame Two: Depth You may recall from Chapter 1 Robert Dilts’ Neurological levels model (Dilts with Bonissone, 1993, p 55-60). I think of questions as having a “depth” to them which corresponds to the levels of this model. Some questions are oriented more to the environment than to the inner needs of the questioner. These are questions that allow the person to share their knowledge and views with the group. For example, imagine someone asking you: “Didn’t Milton Erickson actually say that your clients are your clients because they are out of rapport with their unconscious minds. That adds

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another whole dimension to what we’re learning about rapport doesn’t it.” This question doesn’t really need an “answer”. I tend simply to thank the person for their added perspective or information. It’s as if the person asking this type of “question” has engaged the part of their neurology that is aware of their social environment primarily. To the extent that you respond to sharing of information as a “question” it tends to create a “What if?” style of question, inviting you into a more collegial relationship of shared exploration with the speaker. Appreciating and acknowledging such sharing, in the “What if?” time of the course, is an important step in the learning cycle. At the level of behaviour and capability, some questions are oriented towards clarifying the information and skills you are imparting. These questions tend, time-wise, to be “What?” and “How?” stage questions. For example, “When you breathe in time with someone, is it necessary to breathe in when they breathe in, or can you be doing the reverse to them?” is probably a question at this level. So is “Who first discovered this way of creating rapport?” or “Has there been research on the effects of using these rapport skills within marriage?”. These questions suggest that the person has engaged the areas of their neurology that collate information and skills. Such questions can be simply answered with the information, if you have it and are at the appropriate time of the learning cycle. If I don’t have the information, I can go to any combination of the three obvious sources: the questioner themselves could be directed to a book, the other people in the group could be asked for the answer, and I myself could agree to find out later. A third type of question is asked at the level of beliefs, identity or spirituality. When these areas of a person’s neurology are engaged, the person asks a question which indicates a deeper issue than the need for a specific byte of information. When we ask NLP Trainer Trainees what questions they fear being asked, the answers are all in this category. They don’t lie awake at night wondering if someone will ask them what “the four keys to anchoring” are. Instead, they worry about questions like: “If NLP’s so good, how come you’re not a millionaire [or not in perfect health and body shape] ?” or “When you heal something with NLP, what happens to the pain you didn’t deal with?”. These questions indicate differences in basic values, metaprograms, or even sense of identity. “How long will these changes last?” and “Do you think this can work for someone like me?” are other examples. Altering Presuppositions

Another way of describing these neurologically deeper level questions is to consider them questions which contain presuppositions which need to be altered in order to effectively answer them. They are of the same order as the famous “How long have you been beating your spouse?” question. Your reply needs to deal with the underlying assumptions. Often these questions are “Why?” or “What if?” questions, though they may be disguised as “How?” or “What?” questions (eg “What stops the change reversing itself?” is pretty close to the “What if?” question “What if the change reverses itself?”) To deal with the underlying assumptions, it helps to be clear about how people get their assumptions. An assumption or presupposition is simply a set of internal representations that is already installed, so that we take it for granted. To ask “How long have you been beating your spouse?”, I need to have an internal representation of the spouse-beating, already installed in my mind. To change a presupposition, we want most of all to simply install a new set of internal representations. If this process is effective, the person’s thinking will be changed in such a way that they simply would not ask their old question. There are several well recognised ways, in NLP terms, to change presuppositions (see, especially in terms of questions, O’Connor and Seymour, 1994, p 166-181). Many of these have in common the concept of taking someone through a sequence of internal representations (what non-NLPers call “an experience”). Here are some examples of ways to do this: Demonstrate, in answering the question, the reality of the opposite presupposition: For example, one of the skills we teach in our Transforming Communication seminar is reflective listening. Often a participant has had bad experiences with this process being used ineptly. They say something along the lines of “Don’t people get annoyed with you restating what they’ve already said?” The following conversation goes a little like this: Q: “Don’t people get annoyed with you restating what they’ve already said?” T: ”Because it doesn’t add anything?” Q: “Yeah. I had a friend who drove me nuts saying “So you feel…” all the time.” T: “And it was a sort of obvious cliché; a format he was using; you mean?” Q: “Right. It really turned me off as soon as I heard those words!” T: “So you want to make sure what you do is natural, rather than clichéd.” Q: “Yeah.”

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T: “So how am I doing now? Do you notice that I’ve been using this process for the last few sentences?” Q: “Well I…. Oh yeah…. Wow, that’s weird. I guess it’s different when you…” T: “Know how to do it casually?” Q: “Right!” Refer the person back to a previous demonstration of the new presupposition: For example, one of the questions Trainers say they fear is when someone with a counselling background asks them, “So with these NLP change processes, what happens to all the pain that’s left inside the person from the original experience?” This question has such different presuppositions to NLP that many of our Trainer trainees go “Huh?” That can be a useful response too; and here’s one more. At the start of my trainings I use a process where people move their arm around and see how far they can point behind them before it gets tight. They then imagine turning further easily and feel what that would feel like, check what they’d see if they went round further etc. Then, they turn round again, and discover that they’ve now gone much further. If a question comes up later about where the pain goes, I can simply say “Well, remember back in that pointing exercise we did…. When you turned around the second time, where did the stiffness go?” I can add an explanation for their conscious mind (eg “The stiffness, or the pain, doesn’t exist somewhere out there; it’s created by your internal representations as you do things.”) but without the experience of the pointing exercise to recall, this is far less convincing. Why? Because the experience creates a series of internal representations to link the new presupposition to. Set the person a “task” to perform a demonstration of the desired presupposition, either in the teaching session or later: An example would be if someone asked me “How long does an anchor last?”. One of my choices is to say “You know how sometimes you have a song that really reminds you of the wonderful time you were having when it was first released. Remember that song now….The whole feeling of that time comes back when you hear that song…. Well, let me ask you; will that still work a year after the song was released? Will you still get back the feeling?… What about five years after?… Ten years?… Fifty years?” As another example, if someone asks “How can this change be installed “at the unconscious level”? What does that mean.” I might say “Just fold your arms for a moment…. And now look and see which arm is on top. Okay; now fold them the other way,

with the other arm on top.” As they try to do this I’ll add “Notice that you’re not even quite sure how to do it. Arm folding, a seemingly simple activity, which you may even have thought you could do “consciously”, is really an automatic process. So will this be.” Tell a metaphor which creates a vicarious demonstration: Sometimes the easiest way to give an experience of a new presupposition is to tell a metaphor, and let the questioner create the internal representations as they listen to a story about someone (or something) else. A common question I get is along the lines of “What do you do about things like Compulsive disorders when they’re hereditary?” Rather than argue head on with this presupposition of inherited problems I might say “It’s as if my friend comes to me and shows me his digital watch. He says “This watch is broken. It’s always showing the same time.” I look at it and see that the watch is flashing 12:00, so I say “Yes, that’s right. But there are buttons on the side that you can press to change that.” And he says “No, no, you don’t understand; this didn’t just happen today. This watch has been broken ever since I bought it!” And very gently I explain, “Yes. Well if I can just show you these buttons on the side….” And he interrupts me to say, “No, no, no. You don’t realise how serious it is. This watch came from the factory like this. It’s from a long line of watches they’ve been producing just like this!” And once again I gently explain, “Yes; and if you know where the buttons are, you can change that.” Human beings are not broken. They just may not be set the way they want to be. Some people are stuck flashing “Compulsion” all their life; and they come from a long line…. This training is about learning where the buttons are.” Give the person a question which causes them to generate their own new internal representations: Such questions include what NLP calls Sleight of Mouth patterns such as “What’s the larger question of which this is a part?” or “What’s your purpose in asking this question?” (questions which chunk up to a more generalised perspective). Such questions also include metamodel comments which chunk down (ask for details), such as “Has there ever been a time when you didn’t….?” or “How specifically?” A Model For Responding To Questions By now maybe you’ve recognised that you already use these methods and others for responding to questions. You may also be wondering “That’s all very well; but how do I generate these intriguing ways of responding to each question. So far, I’ve noted that questions have a time frame, in terms of the 4MAT cycle, and that they have a depth, in

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terms of neurological levels. I’ve considered some examples of responses to questions which are based on presuppositional differences (deep level questions). I have a five step process which I go through each time a question is asked. Though here I am considering this process as applied to teaching, identical strategies work to respond to questions in individual change work. The steps are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Elicit the question Clarify the question Place it in terms of timing and depth Respond Calibrate and Check the result

1. Elicit The Question Firstly, remember that, far from being an interruption to your teaching, questions give you information about what is working and what needs adjusting, and simultaneously give you an invitation to make direct interventions to alter your trainees’ maps of reality. Eliciting questions is a valuable art in itself. Like most NLP trainers, I have an area of the “stage” (front of the room) where I go to ask for questions. Even in Japan, where questions are less a part of the learning culture, within a few days I need only stand in that spot to generate questions. Notice that, in the discussion of the 4MAT above, most of the examples of my invitations to provide questions are themselves open questions. When I don’t want to elicit questions, but merely to check if someone is not happy, then I ask “Are there any questions?” (a yes/no closed question).But to elicit questions I say “What questions do you have about X?” (open question). If there is no immediate response, I assume this is because people are not fully “warmed up” to their questions, and ask them first to turn to the person beside them and tell that person what questions they might have. This rehearses them through the process of asking their questions. 2. Clarify The Question The most important thing to know about how to respond to questions is that I usually don’t assume we have understood the question as first stated. I use three skills (Described fully in the book Transforming Communication, p 93-135) to clarify the question. These skills are: ♦ Invitations to talk, eg “Can you say a bit more about that?” ♦ Open questions, eg “What sort of situation are you thinking of?”

♦

Reflective listening, eg “So you’re wondering…” “Can I just check; do you think…?”

An example of the use of reflective listening is given in the section on Altering Presuppositions above (“Demonstrate, in the teaching session, the reality of the opposite presupposition…”). This skill in itself frequently reframes the person’s question so fully that they change their presupposition, or enables the person to clarify for themselves the answer to their question. At that point I can simply answer “Yes; that’s probably just the answer I would have come up with too!” As I clarify the question using these skills, I am gathering information about where the question fits in terms of timing and depth. The reflective listening process allows me to take all the time I need to decide how to respond. Here’s another example of this clarification stage in action, followed by the response and a final check that the questioner is satisfied: Questioner (just before doing an anchoring exercise): “Can this anchoring process work for anyone; even if their brain is maybe damaged in some way?” Trainer: “Can you say a bit more about that?” Q: “Well, I know that when I was a teenager I did a lot of drugs, so ah…” T: “You’re not sure if it will work for you after that?” Q: nods T: “So can I check first; how have things worked for you so far?” Q: “Oh fine. I just got worried when you said about brain synapses and stuff, because I think mine are pretty screwed.” T: “Well, let me tell you about an interesting experiment. What they’ve done is they’ve taken Planaria, which are little flat-worms, and put them on a metal plate. And they flash a light and send a mild electric current through the plate. So the flat worms wince a bit (this is may not be such an ethical experiment for flat-worm lovers, by the way). And then after a couple of times, they just flash the light, and the flat worms jump as if they got an electric shock. And that reaction is then anchored as their normal response. Now I figure that what this really means is that to use anchoring successfully, we only need the response potential of a flat-worm. So I’m pretty certain that anyone who could organise themselves to get here today for this course has got a lot more going for them than that. We don’t accept flat-worms on the seminar, in fact. “ Q: laughs and nods, then leans back in the chair. T: “So how’s that?” Q: “Like switching on a light!”

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T: “Okay; lets jump to it!”

1.

Notice that in this example, the initial question could have provoked an answer about using anchoring with people who’ve had brain damage from motor vehicle accidents, or have been dismissed as a “What if” question not worth responding to until after the exercise. The clarifying process made it clear that this was a deeper Beliefs level issue (a presuppositional question) which needed dealing with before the “How?” based exercise would be successful.

2.

3.

3. Place The Question In Terms Of Timing And Depth 4. Respond 4. These steps have been discussed in previous sections. Many presuppositional issues are so predictable that it pays to develop preframes for them and to have standard replies ready for the questions. Reading this article, you’ll probably have been adding to your supply of such preframes and answers. In general terms, when I hear a presuppositional question, I ask myself “What sets of internal representations (eg memories, beliefs and ways of sorting experience) must have been installed to lead this person to ask this question?” and “What different set of internal representations do I have installed that result in this question not occurring?” I then design a “reply” to install the new set of internal representations. It’s important to realise that when you answer one person’s question, everyone else was also listening. Comments which you include in your reply for the benefit of a third person will tend to be accepted by them far more easily than direct suggestions. 5. Calibrate And Check Verbally For The Result When someone has their question answered, they tend to nod, and to sever connection with the trainer in other non-verbal ways (contrary to what the questioner in the example described, they tend to look like their flight attendant call button is now off). Calibrating that response is useful. You can check that verbally with a question such as “So does that answer your question.” This is particularly useful when your reply, as in the example above, was a longer, metaphorical one. Summary Questions are a wonderful opportunity to assist someone to change. As a trainer, you can easily and elegantly respond to them by using a five step process:

5.

Elicit questions by asking an open question: “What questions do you have about X?” Clarify the question using invitations (“Tell me more.”), open questions (“How would that be a problem?”), and reflective listening (“So what you’re saying is…”) Place the question, firstly in terms of the 4MAT cycle, as A) “Why are we doing this?” B) “What are the facts?” C) “How do we do this exercise?” Or D) “What would happen if…?”. Then place the question in terms of depth as A) Sharing views and information socially –at the environmental level, B) Asking for facts -at the behaviour and capability level, and C) Asking questions which involve the presuppositions of the training –at the beliefs, identity or spiritual level. Respond. “Why?” questions need an immediate response. “What?” and “How?” questions are responded to based on your training design, and “What if?” questions are left until after the exercise. Sharing can just be acknowledged, and factual questions replied to with information. With deeper questions there are a number of ways to install more useful presuppositions. These include demonstrating the new presupposition as you answer, or in an exercise immediately afterward, referring to a demonstration already in the person’s experience, using metaphor, and getting the person to discover their own presupposition by asking questions which chunk up or down. Calibrate the person’s nod and movement out of the interaction, and check verbally (“So does that answer your question?”)

Exercise 10.1: Practice With Questions Imagine that you have just been teaching an area of content you are familiar with. You ask, “So what questions are there about…?” and get five questions. List some you might get. For each, 1) Check whether you’d classify it as “Why?”, “What?”, “How”, or “What if?” 2) Check whether it is “socially oriented”, a question about the content, or a question demonstrating a difference about the more basic presuppositions. 3) For each question which challenges presuppositions, identify the new presupposition you’d like the person to have, and think up three ways you could either ♦ demonstrate the new presupposition as you answer, ♦ demonstrate the new presupposition in an exercise immediately afterward,

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♦ refer to a demonstration already in the person’s experience, ♦ tell a metaphor demonstrating the new presupposition, ♦ or get the person to discover their own new presupposition by asking questions which chunk up or down. 4) Check how you would answer the question, pacing it, clarifying it, responding to it, and checking it was answered for the person. Examples for having taught the NLP “Metamodel” a) What’s the point in asking these metamodel questions, again? b) What if you ask a metamodel question while doing a trance exercise. Would it bring them out of trance? c) Don’t you think people ask themselves too many introspective questions already? d) What is the difference between a cause-effect statement and a complex equivalent? e) How would you use metamodel questions in a business setting? Is there anything we should not do there in terms of the metamodel? f) Aren’t these questions essentially the same questions as Virginia Satir already listed in the back of her book "Conjoint Family Therapy” a decade before NLP? g) Would these questions be useful in conflicts with my husband? He uses a lot of mind reading.” h) What if I really can tell what’s going on inside someone else’s head, and they ask me a metamodel question about how I know? i) Sometimes someone really does make me feel bad. Is that a cause and effect? j) Don’t you think this is all trying to be too rational and logical about things that are more intuitive in real life? k) Are there any other modal operators other than modal operators of possibility and modal operators of necessity? l) Why is a lack of referential index called that? m) Do we have to remember all these complex terms?

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