NEURO-SEMANTICS
AND NLP TRAINERS TRAINING
Developing Mastery in Presentation and Training
TRAINING MANUAL
NEURO-SEMANTICS & NLP TRAINERS TRAINING Certification Training for becoming an official and commissioned Trainer of NLP, Meta-States, and Neuro-Semantic Trainings under the Trademark name of
Neuro-semantics® and the ISNS — International Society of Neuro-semantics
©2000/2004 L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. Developer of the Meta-States® Model
All Rights Reserved.
®
Disclaimer: This Training Manual is designed for training and education and should not be used as a substitute for psychotherapy or psychiatry. Even though this material was designed and written by a psychologist and a Professional Licensed Counselor in the State of Colorado, USA, neither Dr. Hall nor the International Society of Neuro-semantics (ISNS) recommend that this should be used in the place of professional psychological and psychiatric assistance.
NEURO-SEMANTICS TRAINER'S TRAINING
WELCOME! June 2000
The Training Manual that you hold in your hands is designed to apply the meta-levels of Neuro-semantics to the processes of presenting and training. The aim of the training? To enhance and enrich your platform and training skills. The overall focus here is facilitate the accessing your genius states in presenting. If NLP is as brilliant and magical as we believe it is in its transformative power, then the more we train ourselves in that magic, the more we can touch our world with it. With Meta-States, we simply move to a higher magic for ourselves and our world. What does training involve? Training involves lots of things: providing new information, teaching, encouraging, motivating, facilitating skills, coaching, consulting, and even counseling. Training involves group facilitation and so entertainment, stage performance, and group teamwork. Training involve many different facets and dimensions. It most fundamentally involves you as a trainer and so your states, beliefs, desires, designs, agendas, motivations, etc. It involves your style and skills, your way of learning and developing, your philosophy about how others learn, etc. So much! As you thumb through this manual, you could very easily begin to feel overwhelmed. While some have done that, I don't recommend it as a way to enhance your learning! Overwhelm doesn't serve very well for that. You can tell if you do if you go into an overwhelm state. Having snuck up and observed several people do that very thing, I've noticed that they usually run that program by thinking things like: "This is massive! I'll never learn all of this! We can't cover all of this in just two weeks!" "I didn't know there was so much about training! Where do I start? How will I ever develop proficiency in this? Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a trainer!" That game will not serve to empower you. If you're clear that playing Overwhelm will not serve you well, then I recommend doing what I did when I first began studying Science and Sanity, that massive 830-page book by Korzybski. At first, I experienced a moment of two of feeling overwhelmed. I say "a moment or two" because I immediately sent my brain into another direction. I knew that it would not do me any good, so I initiated a different kind of internal dialogue with myself: "This is great! This is going to provide me a gold mine of wonderful and marvelous insights that I can mine for years to come. Just a page at a time. I don't have to understand it all from the beginning, or even on the first or third reading. I'll get it. The fact that this book represents a goldmine of intellectual wealth that few seem to master only means that I have plenty of time to master it. And I will." Since that day, I have extensively read and explored the text seven times and with each new reading, I continue to learn more. I would recommend a similar attitude for yourself. Take the pressure off and give yourself a decade to master this materials, skills, principles, etc. in the field of training. Use your learnings here to guide your actions, then go play and practice with it, then return to the reading with new insights from the experience. Finally, treat yourself with grace and respect as you give yourself the time to learn and integrate the principles here knowing that you are under no pressure to be inhumanly "perfect" in presenting. Let patience also be your guide as you learn and play with this material, along with passion and excitement. In that way, you can have lots of fun as you become increasingly more skilled in training. Welcome to this marvelous and fantastic adventure of training.
June, 2004 As I have been studying the field of training itself, I have been modeling those who present and train with excellence and skill. I have been modeling their best states, beliefs, understandings, strategies, and practices. In modeling we identify the critical factors and elements, the structures and processes of someone who performs with expertise and excellence and then develop the procedures and processes for using and integrating them to make them ours. Those who are experts in training others to learn and integrate informed skills are masterful at presenting, motivating,
drilling, questioning, engaging, framing, trouble-shooting, nurturing, and supporting. These are the practices and processes of training. In modeling we identify these elements, identify their form, structure, and syntax, and then begin exploring how we can best transfer them to ourselves. This leads to developing processes for learning and incorporating the skills. In this way, modeling enables us to dramatically reduce learning and training times as well as increase effectiveness. Such modeling will still necessitate time, energy, commitment, discipline, and learning. • • •
Who are some excellent models of training? What beliefs and values support training excellence? What skills and techniques support excellence in training?
OVERVIEW NEURO-SEMANTICS TRAINERS TRAINING
NLP/NS is at attitude, developed in and by relationships, supported by a methodology, and that leaves behind it a trail of techniques.
Neuro-semantics initiated Trainers Training on the dawn of the new millennium. It was July of 2000 that we conducted our first Neuro-semantics Trainers Training (NSTT) and certified 18 trainers. Our primary objective was to provide a high level quality of training that would equip the trainers to provide top-notch training in NLP and the foundational trainings of Neuro-semantics in Meta-States. At the beginning I envisioned Neuro-semantics as operating as an umbrella of credibility worldwide and so formulated our relationships as based upon a networking of professionals. If you click the button "NS Trainers" on the website today (www.neurosemantics.com), you will find all of the qualified trainers listed there with their details, specialities, institutes, etc. that span the globe and are in 30 countries. This means that as a Neuro-Semantic/ NLP Trainer, you will be listed there with links to your email address and website so that what each of us does influences and affects the rest. In this way, our inter-dependency is reinforced and celebrated so that we operate not as lone-rangers out doing our own thing, but that we increasingly become a community of professionals who have a vested interested in the larger umbrella that provides credibility for all of us.
Our Objectives in this Training: • Congruency. First and foremost, to apply NLP and Neuro-semantics to ourselves so that we "walk the talk" and experience the personal power of Congruency as we model for those who participate in our trainings the magic that we speak about. • Excellence. We aim to apply the Meta-States model to the processes, skills, strategies, and experience of training so that we can become the best trainers we can become. Training involves many facets of communicating: teaching, presenting, coaching, consulting, facilitating. The term training in this manual is used because it includes the other terms and carries the connotation of facilitating another person or many others to become actually skilled in an area of expertise.
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Training/ Coaching. We will focus primarily on the process and experience of training. We will apply this to both individuals and groups. In using the term training, I mean more than just teaching and presenting—I refer to something more personally intensive and involved. The idea is more of a coach involved with his or her athlete or team. Training expertise. As we have applied Meta-States to other areas of interest: wealth building, accelerated learning, state management, resilience, selling, persuasion, fitness, etc. here we will apply it to training as an area of expertise in itself. Training Skills. Our objective is to model, describe, and replicate the highest quality training skills using NLP and Neuro-semantics. Since structure governs every experience, the models and tools in NLP and Neuro-semantics enable us to make these explicit and then to enhance our training skills. Beginning with the 2004 training, we have benchmarked most of the skills. Training as a Profession. Training as a profession involves improving skills of coaching, counseling, public speaking, and working with groups. We apply meta-stating processes to these areas. This enables us to use the latest state-of-the-art technology in NLP and Neuro-semantics for training. Trainings Frames. Using Meta-States as our central model, we will find, elicit, access, and install the very best frames of mind to training. Training is all about framing, about the kind of framing that enables participants to learn and use the models, skills, and techniques. Training Genius. Training covers a wide range of experiences and skills from personal coaching to group presentations, we therefore focus on both individual training and public presentations. During the three-days of Personal Genius, you will be engaged in a lot of individual coaching with new participants. During our evening sessions, you will be required to make 4 presentations to demonstrate your ability to give instructions, demonstrate processes, handle an open frame of questions and feedback, and give an induction. Adult learning. Training is needed because people are demanding greater understanding and skills. Today there is a market for continuing education and development by top-notch people who know that their competitive advantage depends on staying up with the cutting-edge models for being at their best in communicating, relating to others, and managing their own states. That's what we offer. To do that, we go first. We learn and practice the patterns for becoming peak performers ourselves.
The Design and Structure of this Training: • To become knowledgeable and skills in the field of Training. What is this field and what will it become in the next decades? We apply NLP and NS to ourselves by asking about what a well-formed outcome in terms of training excellence would look like and by exploring the neuro-semantics of training. We will explore the key principles of training and begin to Mind-to-Muscles those principles so that we can make them "our way of being in the world." • To become all we can become as Trainers/Coaches. We will use and apply the foundation of NLP skills for "running our own brain." We will focus on ourselves as trainers and presenters and what it means to become an excellent trainer. What are the top-ten trainer states? How do I access them and make them readily available to myself? What are the beliefs and values and understandings that will support
my own personal trainer state? We will use the principle that excellence is easy when we
are in the right state. To get our Ego out of the way. In this training we will work on getting ourselves and our ego out of the way. In training we inevitably and inescapably are always communicating ourselves. We can do none other. While the training is not about us, it is through us. This creates a paradox. To be at our best, we have to get our ego out of the way. To truly succeed in training, we need to become so comfortable and okay with ourselves that we can become un-self-conscious when training and focus on our participants and their needs. This means that our Congruency, passion and compassion, excitement, and alertness play a critical role in becoming top-notch trainers. To prepare and present using the best of the models. This training will focus on how to think through the process of organizing, structuring, and presenting your training in terms of the states, meta-states, frames, meta-frames, beliefs, values, etc. that you offer participants and that you utilize for yourself. We will study the very structure of excellence in effective training, practice such skills, and install the empowering patterns in ourselves. To frame, pre-frame, and outframe at all levels. We will spend a lot of time on framing in all of its forms: pre-framing, on-the-spot reframing, and post-framing. The training game is best played when we know how to work and manage our own frames and the frames of our participants so that the experience is fully experienced as a life-enriching and empowering experience.
We're Looking for a Few Good Neuro-Semanticists It was in the ongoing development of the Meta-States model that I conducted the very first Trainers Training Certification in July, 2000. The first and most immediate design of the training was to apply Meta-States to the process of training itself. This allowed us to create another extension of the Meta-States model. It also set the frame for the kind of training and trainers that will characterize the field of Neuro-semantics. We host Trainers Training in order to generate a community of trainers and leaders to participate with us in promoting Meta-States by providing certified training in the Gateway trainings. These include the following: 1) Accessing Personal Genius 2) Secrets of Personal Mastery 3) Selling Excellence 4) Mind-Lines: Conversational Reframing 5) Wealth Building 6) Meta-Learning: Accelerated Learning 7) Defusing Hotheads 7) Instant Relaxation 8) Frame Games 9) Games Slim and Fit People Play 10) Games Business Experts Play 11) Games For Mastering Fear 12) Games for Mastering Stuttering 13) Matrix Games 14) Coaching Essentials 15) Mastery Skills We developed the first six of these trainings early in the process of discovering Meta-States. The others have come later as we and others have been translating Meta-States to various applications. And in the years to come, many more application or gateway trainings will be developed. Already at this date we have extensive literature, videos, and Training Manuals to provide support for these trainings. Our goals and objective is to turn the Meta-State/ Neuro-Semantic Trainers loose with these trainings so that they can provide training in these areas in their own NS Institutes and Training Centers. In the process of having developed these trainings we have become vividly aware that we have barely touched the hem of the garment with regard to modeling projects and the wide-range of applications for the Meta-States of Neuro-semantics.
We launched the American Society of Neuro-semantics in 1999 and after that we initiated numerous Institutes of Neuro-semantics in England, Belgium, Denmark, USA, Canada, South Africa, etc. and that led to several other Societies and the International Society. This identifies another reason for the Trainers Trainings, namely, to equip and certify people in these and other Institutes to provide Certified NeuroSemantic Trainings.
Meta-NLP - The Meta-States of Neuro-semantics What is Meta-States? How does Neuro-semantics differ from NLP? Meta-States takes NLP to the next higher level as it uses the Levels of Mind model (reflexive consciousness) to chart out the structure of meaning and "mind" at its higher levels. This systemic model of responsiveness embraces NLP by providing a larger level umbrella over all of the disparate domains of NLP: beliefs, values, Meta-Programs, Milton Model, Time-Lines, "Sub-Modalities," Sleight of Mouth Patterns, etc. Meta-States as "the model that ate NLP" (Dr. Graham Dawes who created the first NLP Center in London) has provided an explanatory model for understanding NLP systemically and so unifying the different arenas of concern. Because it also functions as a unified field theory, it provides a tremendous unification of NLP (see MetaStates, 2000). Meta-States explains how we create or generate meta-programs in the first place and how perceptual styles become solidified as a fairly stable response pattern. Meta-States aligns and self-organizes the "Sleight of Mouth" patterns to create the Mind-Lines model that specifies the seven directions we can send consciousness and the language of persuasion elegance that emerges from that (see Mind-Lines, 2002). Meta-States shows how that the distinctions called "sub-modalities" actually operate at a meta-level as metamodalities—the features, distinctions, and qualities that make a difference- when they make a difference symbolically or Semantically (see The Structure of Excellence, 1999, User's Manual of the Brain, Vol. II).. In these ways, and many more, the Meta-States of Neuro-semantics creates a higher and more advanced form of NLP—what we have been calling, Meta-NLP. It not only enriches and unites the NLP Model, it expands it as it is opening up new realms and domains for exploration. Not until the mid-1980s has structure come back into NLP in a new and exciting way that it has with Meta-States. And this especially shows up in the way Meta-States enriches the modeling process itself
An Expansive International Community As Neuro-semantics has become international (trainings around the world, books translated into various other languages, trainers from various nations receiving certification, etc.), we have been building an extensive worldwide community. One of our main concerns is that we avoid so many of the mistakes made in the history of NLP itself as well as mistakes made in other fields. To avoid such mistakes we want to set the frames now, up front, with regard to what Neuro-semantics means, what training means, what it means to be a trainer, and what we want and expect from those who join our ranks. Our Vision Statement describes the kind of people and the kind of spirit which we want to propagate in ourselves and others. In a word, we want to make sure that the people who teach and train Meta-States experience the model, live the model, and congruently live lives that make the model attractive, exciting, and magical. What does that mean practically? It means that we have meta-stated ourselves with the thoughts-feelings and the frames of higher resourceful experiences: acceptance, appreciation, respect and honor, dignity, fallibility, curiosity, etc. What does not
serve NLP and especially Meta-NLP are trainers who take a superiority attitude or arrogance and/or intolerance. NLP Trainers who do not apply the model to themselves and who are not open, friendly, supportive, cooperative, but who act hostile, angry, unapproachable, etc. do not make NLP an attractive model. Their incongruence makes the model seem toxic and undesirable. We believe in abundance and so we want to operate from such. We believe that the map is not the territory and that no one has a perfect map, and that our mapping processes are fallible and always open to improvement and so we want to provide our insights in a non-dogmatic and open way. We believe in pacing and matching, and so we want to practice cooperative and supportive relationships that make others feel welcome. We believe that wisdom emergences from multiple perspectives so we want to practice an openness and flexibility in considering new understandings. As we think about setting various frames, we especially want to set a frame of being solution oriented rather than problem oriented. This means judging, being judgmental, critical, whining, etc. does not reflect the spirit of NLP and especially not the spirit of Meta-NLP. "But what if I'm just a Judger and can't help myself?" Well, first statement is antithetic to the spirit of NLP. After all, meta-programs are descriptions of functioning, not "types." They refer to the ways and styles we have learned in thinking and feeling and perceiving, not static and unchanging things. To over-identify with a particular way we have mapped perceiving misuses NLP. Further, there are various NLP patterns for changing your meta-programs, are there not? Robbins describes them in his book, Woodsmall and James does the same in theirs, and Bob and I do in ours. This statement sounds like an excuse for judging, being hurtful, not taking personal responsibility. It doesn't sound like a person who knows and experiences the power of NLP. We don't need or want critical and judgmental trainers representing Meta-States or Meta-NLP. Nor whiners, complainers, people who operate from scarcity and so who become competitive, insulting, etc. We don't need people who can't apply NLP or Meta-States to themselves. Congruency is criterion number one. Does this mean that Neuro-semantics will operate in a "policing" manner? That's is not our intention at all. Our aim is to set some solid parameters and sufficient conditions that support competency. We train for skill competency and also aim to coach people so that they will be the kind of trainers that live what they teach—who master their states, their attitudes, their fitness and health, their relationships, their effectiveness and wealth building, etc.
Welcome to the Challenge Becoming a Neuro-Semantic/ NLP Trainer is the focus and purpose of this training—may the magic of running your own brain and managing the higher levels of your mind now enrich and empower you in your journey.
Gateway Trainings Meta-States Trainings 1) Accessing Personal Genius (APG) 2) Secrets of Personal Mastery 3) Frame Games 4) Coaching Genius Frame Game Applications— 5) Games Great Salespeople Play: Selling Excellence 5) Mastering Your Wealth Matrix Wealth Building 7) Games For Accelerated Learning (Meta-Learning) 8) Games for Masterful Writing 9) Games Slim & Fit People Play 10) Games Business Experts Play 11) Games For Mastering Fear 12) Games for Mastering Stuttering 13) Games Great Lovers Play 14) Defusing Hotheads 15) Instant Relaxation 16) Mind-Lines: Conversational Reframing 17) Matrix Games 18) Mastery Skills 19) Resilience Training 20) Mastery Skills
NLP Master Prac. 1) Meta-Masters (14) NLP Practitioner 1) Meta-NLP (7) 2) Traditional (21)
Advanced Trainings 1) Modeling (4 to 6) 2) Cultural Modeling 3) NS Flexibility 4) NS Developers
NS / NLP Trainers Training 1) Trainers Training (15)
NLP Gateway Trainings 21) Coaching Essentials Meta-Coaching Trainings (A licensed Training under the MCF) 1) Meta-Coaching: ACMC and PCMC 2) Internal: ICMS 3) Master Coaches: MCMC
THE NEURO-SEMANTIC VISION The Neuro-Semantic Vision: Our Vision is to create an international community of professional men and women taking NLP to a higher level in performance and attitude. Using the Meta-States model, we have many patterns and techniques for "applying the models and patterns to ourselves" (self-reflexiveness is built into the model) empowering us to operate with integrity, congruence, and cooperativeness. This naturally results when we build higher frames of abundant creativity (no scarcity), professional ethics, win/win collegial relationships, and mutual accountability. The Neuro-Semantic Mission: That Vision leads to our Mission of extending our understanding and modeling of human experience to find or create ever-better patterns that we can use for improving the quality of our lives. One of our first missions in Neuro-semantics is the elimination of the Knowing-Doing Gap that prevents so many people from fully experiencing the great ideas and principles they already know. Eliminating incongruency invites patterns of congruency which then allows many other higher states to emerge: personal power and focus, genius states, integrity, creativity, cooperation, resilience, etc. Another central mission is the application of Meta-States to hundreds of new areas and the development of scores if not hundreds of new models. Using Neuro-Semantic modeling we are now developing new models for building wealth, health and fitness, leadership, cultural change, political change, etc.
The Vision— 2000 The following was developed during a modeling exercise with the newly created South African Society of Neuro-semantics. I took the Vision Statement that we had on the Web site at the time, the original one that Bob and I had created and the group of NLP Trainers and Master Practitioners (now Neuro-Semanticists) expanded it and operationalized the terms to generate a list of behaviors that support the Vision. I later read it to numerous people in London during the two weeks of trainings there and that brought forth more ideas. THE VISION The Neuro-Semantic Movement is a group of people who operate out of a strong belief in Abundance rather than scarcity and Cooperative Appreciation rather than Competitiveness. It is this mind-set of Abundance, in fact, that leads to professional cooperation, in fact, that describes our primary frame of mind, a frame of mind. And from that position, we graciously relate to each other as professionals with respect, and to others in an honorable way, as we seek always to find or create Win/Win arrangements. We envision ourselves as Neuro-Semantic Magicians who do our magic of framing, reframing and outframing to "run our own brains" and to manage our own states, and to do so with integrity and ecology that we will thereby demonstrate our congruency. We will "walk our talk" in a way that is obvious and attractive. We envision creating and sustaining high quality collegial relationships with each other with honor as our byword. We will willingly use feedback for Accountability between ourselves individually in order to operate ecologically as a group. We envision the exploration into the structure of human experience and meaning as an ongoing search that we conduct in the spirit of openness as we anticipate many new developments in the years to come. We also seek to give concrete expression to our vision of Abundance, Win/Win Cooperative Relationships, Accountability as responsible persons, Respectful Professionalism, Ongoing Research and Development, so that we can Leave a Positive Legacy by using the following specifics. This will give us a way to mind-to-muscle our Vision into our own lives to create the kind of congruency that will be winsome in itself. Acknowledge the contributions of others Ongoing monitoring of our behaviors and trainings for congruency Quality checking our actions and speech for balance and health
Attending regular workshops to continue our own education and training Cohering to a code of conduct that demonstrates mental and emotional intelligence & health Referring people to our colleagues for training Giving due credit for materials Sharing newly generated patterns Paying royalties Reciprocating the generosity of others Acknowledging the value of others even when we disagree Co-leading, co-training, and co-writing with others as possible Surprising people by giving more than what's expected Accepting and entering into mutual agreements Accepting the rules of our association Honorably confronting those who violate the vision to win them back to it, if possible. Caringly communicating to hold others accountable Letting others evaluate my work and skills with an attitude of openness to correction Giving account of ourselves without shame or guilt Recognizing the importance of the whole and keeping our credibility, honor, & legacy in mind. Recognizing the vital role that I play for the success of the larger Vision. Applying our model and patterns to ourselves first of all Creating products, patterns, books, trainings that enrich the human condition. Living Congruently in a spirit of open generosity Resiliently handling upsets and challenges Considering people as we speak and act Responding with care and compassion Demonstrating quality product knowledge Welcoming differences and looking for ways of cooperating Pacing as we respond to people Developing a commitment to innovation Staying open to new ideas Proactively initiating by taking risks in extending ourselves
The Empowering Beliefs that create our Big "Why" We will congruently respect each other as professionals because we believe in abundance rather than scarcity, cooperation rather than competition, because we can achieve much more together and in unison than we can alone or by conflict. We do that because we believe the rich resources that NLP and Neuro-semantics contributes to the world. We are part of something bigger than ourselves Responsible actions manifest our beliefs and increase our credibility Congruency is our power to truly make a difference in the world. We stand on the shoulder of giants.. and are part of the time-binding process. The future of NS lies in our hands. Sharing freely enriches us all and will come back to us a hundred fold. There's an attractiveness to a community that lives congruently. You are as importance to me as I am to myself. Being held responsible helps me to bring out my best, my personal genius. People are more important that money and fame. Recognizing the whole keeps us balanced.
The Meaning of "Certification Training" This is a Certification training. And as a certification training this means that mere attendance will not be sufficient, nor will academic knowledge. Attendance will get you a Certificate of Completion at best. It will not lead to any certification level or licensing. As a Certification training you can expect that there will be certain prerequisites along with numerous other requirements to reach certification.
1) Presence: To be present at all of the scheduled times and events for the classroom and practice hours.
2) Participation: To perform and practice the skills in the small group learning teams, the one-on-one practice sessions, and the participation and discussions within the larger group sessions.
3) Tasks: To fully participate in the presentations that you and your colleagues will be making.
4) Accountability: To be monitored by the Team Leaders, Co-Trainers, and Staff. The team leaders operate as team coaches and are our eyes and ears at the training. They will be observing and reporting on your knowledge and skill competency. We have empowered each and every one of them to step in and speak with you from a coaching perspective as they see fit.
5) Coachability: To be coached to shape your skills and you might be asked to perform other tasks in and outside the training that will enable you to move to the next level of competency. To be a leader is to be a good team player and therefore coachable, that is, one who is looking for areas for further shaping, refining, developing, mastery, etc. Are you willing to be coached? Are you willing to let coaching change you?
6) Testing: To be tested throughout the process on your knowledge and skills in coaching rather than formal testing on paper-and-pencil testing. Certification depends on a minimum of a 2.5 average competency on the benchmarking of the essential presenting and training skills.
7) Authenticity: Training is about relationship- entering personal relationships with participants. In this sense it is dynamic and alive and calls upon us to rise up to a new and more profound level of authenticity. In Neuro-semantics "apply to s e l f and personal Congruency is our first priority as we integrate the knowledge so that it is neuro-semantic.
DAYS 1—4: PLATFORM SKILLS What are Platform Skills? We begin with the Skills that enable us to speak and perform "on stage." We call these Platform Skills. What are involved in these skills? What do these skills entail? Confidence to stand in front of people with ease, grace, and comfort. Ability to think on our feet before a group. Ability to engage a group and to elicit the kind of open, curious, and learning states that facilitate a training or presentation. Ability to elicit states in an audience and to anchor those states. Ability to effectively work with semantic space in terms of movement and gesture on stage. Ability to create an effective experience for participants to engage in experiential learning. Ability to work with and through people while presenting from the staff and assist team to the participants. Ability to use metaphors and stories as framing tools.
THE TOOLS OF OUR TRADE The tools of our trade involve our powers of speech and behavior by which we express ourselves and create a context for the content of our presenting and training. 1) Express Yourself Succinctly. Speak tersely, use expressive terms... with lots of action words (kinesthetic terms) in the active tense, language your presentations with precision. Use the Meta-Model as the language of precision to communicate in very precise and specific ways. Give see-hear-feel referents so that people can easily track with you. This is especially important for instructions. 2) Express Yourself Hypnotically Use the language of trance or hypnosis when you want a person or group to "go inside" and generate their own referent structures and construct resourceful states. The effective use of storytelling will entrance an audience. In this, never under-estimate the power of a relevant story or metaphor. 3) Make the Presentations Drama and Engaging. Build motivation into the presentation. Use engaging features and components: variety, questions, etc.
HANDLING CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE
1) It begins with incompetence. When we begin, we have no skill and we don't even know that we don't. In this blissful state of ignorance we are Unconsciously Incompetent. Here we have no discipline, no learning, no skill development, no challenge. Here we live in our Garden of Eden, blissful and happy. And also unskilled, unchallenged, and unable to enter into a domain of excellence. 2) It then shifts to painful awareness of incompetence. Then we become conscious. Then light appears and we realize that a whole new world of excitement, skill, expertise, and knowledge exists. We bite into the forbidden fruit of the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." Yet this creates a certain amount of anxiety, pressure, distress, unpleasantness. We now become Consciously Incompetent. Here we face for the first time some of the reality constraints about what it would take to become competent, the work, the process, the struggle, the challenge. Here we feel confused, inadequate, incomplete, "dumb," and incapable of handling this domain. And so we are. In the stage of Conscious Incompetence most people will feel tempted to run back to the Garden of Innocence. We don't like feeling incompetent. And if we run some head-programs of comparison, perfectionism, impatience, etc., we may go into a state of self-judgment. "I hate being put down like this." "What's wrong with me that I can't get this?" "Why does it have to be so hard?" "I'll never get this" Here it seems like the "discipline" of apprenticing ourselves to the new domain seems so "hard," overwhelming, uncomfortable, and rigorous. Here many people turn back. They refuse to go on. They don't have a good relationship with learning itself, with unsuccessful attempts, with using so-called "failure" as just feedback, etc. They don't seem to know how to give themselves a chance—an opportunity to grow, develop, get better. They judge and evaluate themselves so harshly. If only they would take a kinder and gentler approach, validating and celebrating every little step of progress. 3) Then we Get Good and Know it! If we do the "work" in the second stage, we find ourselves eventually in the marvelous and wonderful place of the third stage. Then, in Conscious Competence we feel great! Now the discipline seems easy and delightful. We have attained a level of competence and so enjoy it as a skill, confidence and continual development. We have become a practitioner in the science or art. We know our business, and we do it well. And though we know that we have many more things that we can develop, we delight in the level of mastery that we have attained. 4) We we become mindlessly Masterful Eventually, however, it all habituates so that we lose awareness of how we do things—even of what we know. We just know it. And as it drops outside of awareness, we have stepped into the next level of development —Unconscious Competence. The discipline now seems like "a piece of cake." We experience it as "No problem." We can do it without our mind. The programs for the competencies have become installed in our very neurology. Now we do it "intuitively." There is literally an "in-knowing" (in-tuition) about the skills. Here the mastery has become quite pronounced. 5) Up to Becoming Mindful about our Unconscious Competence Experts and masters are at the level of Unconscious Competence. This means that the expert, typically, will not be able to explain his or her expertise. They just do it. They have lost awareness of how they do it. So to move beyond that, and up to a newer and more complex level of Conscious Competence we have to bring back into awareness the structure, form, and process for the excellence in order to train others in it. This represents 2
the fifth stage in the development of competency.
PRESENTATION PREPARATION Before We Begin —
DO NOT PROCEED UNTIL YOU HAVE DROPPED ALL JUDGMENT! Our aim here is to access our Top Training States to develop the frames and states that will allow us to be at our best when training. We will take the highest and most principled understandings about learning, training, human development, growth and transformation and incorporating them into the way we talk, walk, interact, etc. If the trainer is not having fun, the participants probably won't be having fun either." You are about to enter a
It is required that you be kind to yourself as a trainer. Refuse to be your own worst enemy by bringing judgment, criticism, harsh evaluations, insults into the process. Trust the process. You will become a competent trainer! Enjoy the awareness of incompetence so it does not put you off! The first Meta-Stating to do with yourself is to establish a frame of being kind and gentle with yourself. Let no harsh judgments be allowed!
RELEASING OF JUDGMENT PATTERN If you are accustomed to judging yourself or others, that very mind-set and attitude as a meta-state frame will work against you in this training, undermine your progress, and interfere with building the kind of community we're building in Neuro-semantics. Self-Judgment and the judging of others, in fact, represents a dragon state that we constantly work to tame and/or slay. And so we will here — in hour one of day one of this training!
1) Access Self-Judgment. Has there ever been a time when you have judged and criticized yourself? Any time when you beat yourself up in a harsh way? Said cruel things to yourself? Recall that time, amplify it, anchor it, increase it so that it becomes a really bad experience. Break state, stand up and shake it off. 2) Access a State of "Mere Observation." Have you ever just observed something? Have you ever been in an audience and watched a movie, a play, a concert? Have you ever sat in a balcony and just watched? Heave you ever gone to a mall where there were layers and levels of floors and looked down? What is it like in your body when you are just observing? 3) Access Acceptance and Appreciation and apply to Self. Access a simple and pure state of Acceptance, then increase to Appreciation. While you could really get yourself into an agitated state of frustration, stress, and irritation about the traffic, the weather, etc., what small and simple things that you don't particular like do you just accept? Apply observation and acceptance to yourself Access and apply each of these resources to yourself as a person ... And to yourself as a trainer. What is that like? How does that transform things? Notice what happens when I fire the self-judgment anchor now. 4) Quality Control the meta-stating. Are all facets and parts of your mind and emotions fully aligned with this? 5) Enrich the new State. Bring kindness, gentleness, and nurturing to bear upon yourself. Access these states ... when have you experienced a good representation of nurturing? 6) Give yourself plenty of powerful and valid reasons. What lines (mind-lines) would enable you to formulate your new understandings? Find them and practice them until they are your automatic self-talk lines: You can't be kind to others if you are hateful and ugly with yourself! If you treat yourself horrible on the inside, your neighbor better watch out when you love him as you love yourself! Kindness accelerates learning and mastery. 7) Refuse to let Judgment or Harshness to set the frame.
DEVELOPING AN INTENTIONAL VISION Principle: We train best when we operate from our highest intentions, true to ourselves, and clear about our objectives. This principle challenges us to discover who we are and can be and to become all that we can be. In NS we distinguish two parts of thought" 1) Attention: what we have on our mind and 2) Intention: what we have in the back of our mind. Behind every thought we have yet another thought, and another and another. We have lots of thoughts in the back of our minds about things. Since our thinking always involves thoughts in the back of the mind (the Meta-States model), we need to begin by accessing those frames and making sure that the higher levels serve us in terms of developing our skills as trainers. Rollo May (1969, Love & Will) noted that the meta-level state or frame that we call "will" boils down to to facets: Intention and Attention.
1) What is your Attentional Focus about training? What do you have on your mind about training, about yourself as a trainer, etc? How do you represent training, and being a trainer? The answer to these questions flush out what you have on your mind, the quality of your representations, and your primary state.
2) What is your Intentional Focus, your teleological outcome about training? What is your motivation, reasons, agenda, what do you intend? What thoughts, feelings, memories, expectations, beliefs, values, identifications, fears, worries, permissions, taboos, etc. lurk back there in the shadows of your mind about training? Our Thought-Feeling States move forward by these two dynamics of our intentions and attentions. Attention directs us to the primary state content whereas Intention directs us to the meta-level frame and desired outcome, our positive intentions and nested intentions.
Energy flows where Attention goes As Determined by Intention
BECOMING AN INTENTIONAL TRAINER TAKING AN INTENTIONAL STANCE Investigation shows that a trainer's success in group handling depends largely on how clearly he has represented the outcomes he is after and whether or not these outcomes include participant satisfaction." Lucas Derks, The Social Panorama (p. 230) "
1) Identify a work-related activity that you perform as part of your plan for becoming a skilled and excellent trainer. [You can choose something very positive or very negative, just as long as it is important.] What are some of the tasks that you engage in as part of your process for developing more skills? What do you need to do in order to succeed? Good, let's use that activity as a reference point to explore your higher intentions. 2) How is that activity important to you? I take it that that activity is significant, right? How is it significant? How is it valuable? Meaningful? In what way? What else is important about that? How many other answers can you identify about this activity? 3) Move up the meta-levels.. one at a time. So this activity is important to you because of these things. And how is this important to you? What's important by having this? What important about that outcome? And what's even more important than that? And when you get that fully and completely and in just the way you want it, what's even more important? [Continue this until you flush out and detect all of the higher values.] 4) Step into the higher Value States of Importance so that you feel them fully. That' must be important to you? [Yes.] So just welcome in the good feelings that these meanings and significances invite, and just be with those higher level feelings for a bit. Do you like that? [Yes.] Let those feelings grow and intensify as you recognize that this is your highest Intentional Stance, this is what you are all about... isn't it? Enjoy this awareness. 5) Bring the Higher States/ Frames of Mind down and out Having these higher feelings in mind... fully... imagine this intentional stance getting into your eyes, into your body, into your way of being in the world and imagine moving out into life tomorrow with them... and as you do ... and as you engage in that work-related activity that's part of your wealth building plan, notice how the higher frames transforms it... And take all of this into tomorrow and into all of your tomorrows... Imagine this becoming the basis of your inner life.
7) Invite other Resources. Would you like to bring any other resource to this intentional stance? Would playfulness enrich it? Persistent? Passion? Etc.
ENVISION YOURSELF AN EXCELLENT PRESENTER A Vision: "Even more so than platform skills, flexibility, etc., we think what makes a good trainer is someone who really cares about the responses of their audience. They get their kicks out of training people. Their reward is seeing people in the program grow and benefit. If you have that, and that's your goal, then you'll keep noticing what things work better and refining what you're doing. If you don't have that as your end product, you are not really teaching; you are just presenting information. If we ever stop caring we'll stop teaching." Robert Dilts & Todd Epstein
* How do you see yourself as a trainer or presenter? * How would you like to see and experience yourself? * What could stop you?
1) Identify a cue picture Use your current self-image as a trainer. What could evoke doubt, insecurity, or unresourcefulness in you? (See that trigger clearly. We will use it for the Cue Picture.) Or, use your current self-expectations to visualize your "cue" picture. Or, what would you see, hear, or feel that would give you problems as a Trainer? 2) Identify your Fully Resourceful Self Specify and edit an internal image in see-hear-feel terms (VAK) about "The You" for whom presenting and training would be "no problem" at all. Is this fully compelling for your brain?
Keep editing in the traits, qualities, and behaviors that you would like to have. As you think about the kind of trainer you want to be, what qualities would you add to your picture? Let these ideas and images transform your image so that it becomes a movie. Use the most compelling and driving features of your internal sights, sounds, sensations.
3) Swish your brain. Swish to the resourceful image to "The Me" for whom training is no problem. Start from the cue picture, fad out and swish to the Resourceful Self-image. Do it repeatedly 5 times.
SETTING ENHANCING CORE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR TRAINER STATE "Core" questions are those central, essential, ultimate, highest framing questions that drive our states, focus, attention, energy, and responses. What are your core questions as a person — as a trainer? Are they learning? Having fun? Developing new resources? Getting it? Am I presenting well? How am I doing? Do they like me? Accept me? Think I know what I'm talking about? What can I enjoy learning from these people? How can I make this even more practical, useful, memorable, etc. for them?
1) Recall a training situation or context that you have been in. Notice your representations. What questions were quietly guiding your attention, behavior, and activities? What were you noticing? Checking for? Focusing on? Trying to do? What are the Questions in the back of your mind? Float above that memory and ask the question from a meta-perspective. 2) Repeat with a training that you will one day experience— as you imagine a future training. When do you expect to be involve in a training that you'll be presenting? What are the Questions that you will be asking? 3) Contrast What question would be the opposite of your original question? Imagine being there and asking the opposite question of yourself? 4) Exploration. What question/s could you be asking that would enable you to use your Training Principles? 5) Quality Control your Core Questions. What is presupposed in my questions? What modal operators am I using? What verb tense (past, present, future)? What emphasis in terms of self- or other-reference? Is the orientation positive or negative? Are there comparisons? Are the questions opened-end or closed-ended questions? Do I have any "how much..." "How well..." type of open-ended questions? What direction do the questions suggest? How ecological are the questions? 6) Adjust your essential questions and design engineer new and better questions. Change any of the features so that they enhance your Trainer State. Operating verbs: "control"—> understand, relate to, influence, contribute to. Put feedback loops in the way you ask questions and represent things. Put in a dual focus of self and other. What would be a good balancing question to have in the back of my mind? What am I missing in my presentation style? How could I make this even richer experience for them? How can I add more fun, order, humor, charm, etc.? How can I bring out the natural intelligence of the people here? How can I empower these people for more state management? How can I influence with my own integrity? What am I missing that could surprise even me?
DAY 2: WORKING ON STAGE Presentation skills involve working on stage and that brings us to the foundations of working with an audience.
PRESENTING FROM THE BEST STATES It's all About States -To be at your best as a presenter and/or a trainer and to begin your journey to being a top trainer, you need topnotch state management skills and the ability to access your best states at will. This means finding, developing, and cultivating your superior states. For this, you will want to apply everything you know about NLP and MetaStates so that you can easily, effortlessly, and automatically access your best states as just your way of being in the world.
We train from a state to a state. We train from our mental-and-emotional state and we present to participants who are in various states. Effectiveness in training necessitates being able to access the best states and to operate from the most resourceful states. Yet all states are not equal. There are different kinds of states. There are primary states, meta-states, and gestalt states. Our meta-states are the crucial ones that govern our lives. They define our overall attitude, mood, perspective, and frame of mind.
Benchmarking — Eliciting or inducing States: Definition: To invite and call forth a mind-body felt experience. To say words or tell stories that invite a person to recall or imagine a mind-body-emotional experience. To use voice and gestures in such a way that a client begins to think-andfeel as if in that way of thinking and feeling. In terms of groups elicitation, using inductions and meditation times, thinking strategically about the induction of states (What states do I want to induce in my participants? How will I induce these states?) Going first by stepping into the state and expressing it so that the energy of the state gets communicated to participants. Telling metaphors and/or stories that presupposes the state.
5—
Asking participants to amplify the state and to fully experience it in breathing, walking, moving, gesturing, speaking, etc. Teasing and testing to see how much of the state the participants are experiencing. Amplifying it and anchoring the state for further use.
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Speaking in metaphors, stories, and using other indirect methods to induce the state so as to layer multiple suggestions to induce the state. Asking participants to be with the emotions of the state and to manifest them more fully in the body.
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Speaking with a voice that sounds like the desired state. Going into the state first so that it comes out in you voice, gesture, etc.
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Asking about the state and suggesting it. Some matching and mirroring to pace the person's current state and then mentioning the desired state.
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Mentioning the state with a monotone, without a tone or voice that sounds like the state. The speaker not in the state, but in a state different from the desired state (impatient when wanting to evoke patience, tired and fatigued when evoking motivation).
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No mention of the desired state, no tone, tempo, story or anything that would evoke that state. Or, mentioning the state and asking participants to experience it. "Don't feel afraid, feel courage."
In Genius or Excellent Presenting State
Definition: A state of flow, clarity, and presence of mind; simple, succinct, direct, and perfectly aligned with the subject and the audience.
Required Skills: A state which combines apparently mutually exclusive resources, (in-time / through-time; spontaneous / planning, etc.) excellent calibration, sensory acuity, management of our physiology, energy levels, fluidity of movement, good modulation of voice parameters, alignment of thoughts with words, tonality and body language, clarity and presence of mind, clear intentionality, focus, un-insultability, empathy, good management of time and of shifting across time frames, good management of the content/process relationship, multi-tracking (content + delivery + structure; environment + its effect on participants + self), the ability to quickly and smoothly switch meta-programs, the fluidity of shifting across perceptual positions, the awareness of consequences and ecology of an action and inaction, 5—
Perfectly aligned delivery, presented elegantly, effortlessly, with spontaneity. Trust in self, relaxed posture and delivery.
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Presentation flows easily from point to point with smooth transitions, content balanced between describing, demonstrating asking questions, etc., with some spontaneity and creativity.
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Presentation conveys central message yet seems "rehearsed" in the transitions are rigid and stiff and call attention to themselves, presentation is formal by reading more than speaking, speaking is sometimes easily thrown out of balance by questions or things that happen in the group.
2 — Erratic presentation, disjointed, disconnected words and ideas, loses place, struggles to keep attention focused as evidence when says, "Now, where was I?" Often thrown off track by participant feedback. 1—
Nervous gestures in presentation, pacing stage, idiosyncratic movements and gestures that distract, poor sequencing and managing of multiple tasks; distracted often, talking about many things; going back and forth on different topics.
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State of overwhelm or total lack of awareness regarding the multiplicity of tasks.
Principle: We train best when we train from our Best States. A workshop participant once asked Dr. John Grinder, "What are the most useful things for a trainer to pay attention to? To which John said, "First pay attention to your own state. Second, pay attention to your own state. Third, pay attention to your audience's state. " (O'Connor, p. 103) "Have you ever noticed that the most effective teachers and trainers are those with high energy and personal power? ... Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote of personal power ... He characterized Te as the potential energy that comes from being in the right place at the right time in the right frame of mind." (James and Shepherd, p. iv)
What states do you need to access and develop in order to become truly dynamic, charismatic, delightful, fascinating, etc. as a Trainer? The time has now come for us to engage in design engineer work as we pick and choose and custommake some states and meta-states for ourselves. RECOMMENDED LIST OF MINIMAL STATES FOR TRAINER EXCELLENCE: Choices: States to Avoid Self-Acceptance Self-Appreciation Self-Esteem Empowered: Ownership of Power Zone Centered in the Responsibility For Zone Able to Distinguish the Zone of Responsibility To " Centered in your Values and Visions Self-Confidence about Presenting/ Training Skills Care, Compassion, Empathy Calm and Relaxed Open and Receptive Attentive — Uptime Gloriously Fallible: Authentic, Real. Passionate, Ferocious, Excited, Ernest Committed, Focused Congruent Un-Insultable Presence of Mind in the Midst of Stress, Poised able to "think of your feet" Knowledgeable, Prepared — confident Playful Respectful, honor Flexible Energetic: Integrity, credibility Sincerity Warmth, compassion Outrageous, Dramatic
Self-Judgment — Criticism Conditional Self-Esteem Helplessness
Other-Referent in your Values Self-Questioning/ Doubting Uncaring Anxious, worried, stressed Closed, Defensive Downtime, preoccupied Afraid to be Fallible Bored, Dull Distracted, Scattered Incongruous Easily Offended
Insecure, Incongruent Serious Insulting, Disrespectful Rigid, Closed-minded Tired, fatigued Not Walking one's Talk Insincere Distant from People, Withholding
Prerequisites of Presenting and Training Excellence How sets some people apart in terms of their excellence in presenting and training?
1) In the Zone: Speaking and performing from a great state.
2) Competent: Clarity of mind and skills in the area of expertise.
3) Intentional: Clarity of mind about the desired outcome of the training.
4) Sensory acuity: Able to see and recognize responses in people.
5) Flexibility: The flexibility to shift and change to elicit new and different responses.
6) Elicitation Elegance: High level skills in state accessing, induction, and application. Skilled in building propulsion systems in people.
7) Verbal skills: Able to communicate with clarity and precision and for communicating hypnotically.
8) Non-verbal skills: Able to communicate using the non-verbal channels.
9) Highly Resourceful: Able to handle the process and audience with resilient, un-insultability, playfully, empathetically, etc.
10) Perceptual about Perceptions: Skilled in recognizing and utilizing the perceptual filters of people.
Exercise:
LMH'S CHECKLIST OF TOP STATES Some of my best states have now become so integrated and a part of my very sense of self, that they have become higher meta-level states, and I don't have to access them, because I never turn them off, I never step out of them. Centered: Centered and esteeming one's self in order to become self-forgetful and to get one's ego out of the way. Not needing or needy for approval, applause, recognition, able to make people right without caring who gets the credit. Responsibility. Assume the power to make responses in communicating, acting, etc. The sense of ownership of my power-zone which builds a sense of control in life. Authentically real: Sense of being fallible and fully "okay" with it, little need to play the role of the "expert," to be able to talk and respond as one human being to another. Playful, Passionate, Excited: Having an "eye of the tiger" motivation, genuinely passionate about NLP and NS, a ferocious state of feeling alive, vigorous, vital, and energetic.
1) Competent, Knowledgeable, Informed, Prepared. Actual ability to act skillfully within a domain of behavior usually due to learning, practice, and rehearsal. Expertise developed over time and experience. 2) Confidence, Knowing that I Know. The feeling of an assured expectation, based upon adequate preparation, knowledge, skill level that one has, faith in oneself to pull off a certain behavior or skill. 3) Playful: The ability to play, experiment, be silly, get out of your usual frames of reference and just enjoy the experience, wondering curiously about what might emerge. Playfully notice your intent as a trainer: to convince, support, manipulate, gather information, be an expert, be right, win? How serious or playful do you approach this experience? Imagine some references for playfulness. Who offers a marvelous model of that for you?
4) Respect, Honor, Appreciation, Empathy, Compassion Appreciating that people will respond in their own way, time, style, and processing. Honoring their values, criteria, understandings, model of the world, meta-programs, etc. Able to care, feel concern, etc. for those participating in the training. Take second and third perceptual position to participants.
5) Flexibility in Varying Responses, adjusting to circumstances: Ability to vary behavior as needed which provides more choices, more options and more of a sense of freedom. Flexibility includes the ability to use the full range of the perceptual positions in gathering information and exploring another's reality, able to be realistic in checking on information, accuracy, need, etc. •
6) Creative: The ability to put things together in new and sometimes weird ways, to innovate new suggestions, to think out of the box, to not be limited by former solutions or ideas.
7) Disciplined. The personal discipline that allows us to actually do what we believe in and want to do, the ability to followthrough on our visions, values, and promises, the ability to personally organized our minds, emotions, time, behaviors, etc. so that we accomplish things of importance to us. 8) Generous and Abundant. The attitude of mind and heart that sees the world, personal resources, and others in terms of Abundance rather than scarcity, that looks for Win/Win solutions, that refuses to compete in a Win/Lose way.
10) A Sense of being "at ease" with self before others. Releasing tensions, stress, and worry about self, about impressing others. If self-consciousness makes us awkward, focused on ourselves, it also breeds an uneasiness in us when we stand before others. This typically undermines confidence. Developing an easy style before others comes from a sense of self, sense of humor, sense of proportion, sense of purpose and focus, etc. It means being okay with our fallibility, enjoy such and not trying to cover it up.
EXERCISES FOR PRACTICING PLATFORM STATES
2) Enrich it and texture it with other resources Calm relaxation: a sense of being "at ease," composed, relaxed. Alert sensory awareness Caring empathy Self-confidence 3) Fill it up as a Sphere of Excellence for your trainer's position or stance.
ACCESSING A GREAT STATE In the Game of state accessing, we identify the state that we want —elicit it, make sure it is strong and robust, step into it, quality control it and then begin associating it and linking it to other situations and contexts. 1) Identify the state that you want and identify the thoughts that correspond to, evoke, or relate to this state What internal representations, beliefs, values, etc. relate to this state? How would you describe this in sensory-based language (see, hear, feel, smell, taste)? How would you describe this in evaluative language? 2) Access: Use the two state induction invitations to access the state. "Think of a time when you fully experienced this state... " Have you ever experienced this state before? Even in a little bit? When, where, what was that like? 'What would it be like if you did fully experience this state? " If you fully pretended that you were experiencing this state, what would you imagine? How would you feel? 3) Amplify the state. What would increase this experience even more? What else can you do to amplify this state so that it doubles in feelings? How can you juice it up even more? 4) Anchor the State. Is this state anchored by this touch or image or sound? Nod when this state is fully amplified and I'll anchor it so that it becomes fully linked. Do you have an 8 or 9 on a 0-to-10 scale? Good; Let's anchor the state. Set a physical touch on arm, knee, or forearm when person reaches the peak of the state or use a tone, sound, music, image, or metaphor. 5) Repeatedly Re-Access the State Break state. Then re-access and do so repeatedly as you future pace the state for presentations and training events. Practice stepping into and out of the state using the anchor until you can do so cleanly and effectively. 6) Analyze. Let's check the ecology to quality control this state. Does it enhance your experience? 7) Appropriate into the Future. Imagine taking it with you and putting it into your future.
ELICITATION POWER The Art of Elicitation for Demos and Presentations Eliciting states and meta-states lies at the very heart of NLP and Neuro-semantics. This makes the art of elicitation crucially important. Elicitation refers to a natural and inevitable process whereby we invite and facilitate or coach another person to access, create, and/or experience a mind-body state. In NLP, we typically focus on using memory or imagination to help us in elicitation. 1) Memory; Think about a time when you felt or experienced X. 2) Imagination: What would it be like if you could fully feel or experience X? Yet there is a lot more to the art of elicitation then this. The following offers some fine-tuning so that you can become much more skilled and artistic in your Elicitation Skills.
1) Get into your own best resourceful state for eliciting. What state do you need to access and operate from in order to most effectively elicit states in others? Find that state, develop ready access to it and then anchor it so that you can quickly "fly into" that state. For example: Relaxed and at ease, fun and playful, mischievous, curious. Set your own frame: Elicitation is about getting someone into a state.
3) Provide a menu list of choices that assist the elicitation. Give a list of examples and sample references, even stories about people being in such states. 4) Create the context for the person to "go inside" and access this neuro-linguistic information. Set the frame: "In just a moment, I want you to close your eyes and just let your mind float back to a time and a place when you learned something so easily and naturally that it hardly seemed like learning, like when you first began to play baseball..." Use downward inflections to speak in command mode. The person accessing needs to be protected and facilitated into the process. You are essentially communicating, "Go back and see the pictures in your mind that correspond to appreciation. Now, go back and do that." If you get lots of "I don't knows," you are not commanding enough. In Commands: your voice, eye brow, tone, etc. goes down. In Questions: make your output channels go up. 5) Use presuppositional questions and statements to make the elicitation and accessing easy. Do not say, "Can you think of a time...?" Say, "As you do this..." "While you ..." 6) Help the person sort things out. Once a person has begun to access a state or to even help them begin to access, ask lots of Indexing Questions: when does it start? Where? What color is the picture (not, "Is there color?"). If you ask a question like that after you have already presupposed that there is a picture, you can confuse.
ENGAGEMENT "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. Never lose a holy curiosity." Albert Einstein "When used well, questions make people curious, and curiosity and its magical cousin fascination are the two most powerful learning states." Joseph O'Connor (p. 167)
Questioning Surprising Demonstrating Inducing States Framing Using Eyes and Energy Involving
We must Engage an Audience! No engagement—no learning. Engagement follows from connection and alignment and is one of the most crucial factors in training. We engage the hearts , minds, and lives of our participants and invite them into a new world. To engage your participants —get them involved doing something. Without engagement, we're wasting our time and breath. It is through engagement that we create motivation and energy. The engagement process involves engaging through asking questions to catch attention. Via creative metaphors. Via sharing a personal experience by telling a story. Via provocative statements and actions. Via a dialogue with the audience. Via surprise and shock. Via stating your theme and use it as a constant refrain. Via involving the group. Via humor, being playful with words, teasing. Via creative use of silence. Via personalizing by self-disclosure and vulnerability. Via compelling story. Via giving lots of examples. Via pacing the current situation: put into words the states, emotions, and experiences of the participants. Via making eye contact with everybody. Via setting a powerful intention. Via an immediate demonstration. Via flushing out vital information. Via using ice breakers. Via doing something stark, surprising. Via being provocative Via incorporating whatever happens
The size of the group plays an important role in the way you design and conduct a training. In smaller groups, you can devote more time to individual coaching. With a larger group: "How many here have a background in NLP and know the model, at least somewhat? Good. How many are brand new to this field? Great. NLP virgins! Wonderful. How many here want to apply this training to business? To personal life and development? To health?"
Demonstrating: Can you engage people by asking a question? Would that work? What do you think? Nothing engages a group as to have someone come up and go through a transformative pattern. Arrange with someone prior to
beginning, someone who is ready, who understands the pattern, who is responsive, etc. This will set the frame for responding—and demonstrate not only the particular process, but your respect and style in working with people in front of the group.
Questioning right out of the Gate! We train best by questioning. This is where training elegance comes from. It creates an exciting, charming, and playful way of questioning.
"Who here really wants to develop the kind of mastery over your states that you can say that you have your states rather than they have you? Anybody with that kind of an outcome here?" "Since we're going to be journeying into the realm of Meta-States, I wonder how many outcomes you've brought with you that you might like to apply to this learning?"
Framing and Meta-Questioning Framing; The quality of the answers (the quality of our questions) and learnings that we create — come from the quality of our questions. What is the most useful question I can ask right now? What is the most useful way to think about this? What am missing that could be very important? What would answering that question get for you? Moves to higher level. What has to be true for you — in order to even ask that question? Questioning to create Training Contexts: Questions create context. They set frames. They establish the form of our interactions and sends the brain off in directions. Become aware of any questions you may have about the material covered so far and notice whichever ones could be the most useful to you and possibly to the others here and ask the when you feel ready. When running out of time: "Were there any other questions we don't have time for?" What other questions didn't you have?" "I'll take the final question in this area before we move on." "Were there any other questions we don't have time for?" What other questions don't you have now?" Using Your EYES to welcome, create rapport and calibrate We can use our eyes for greater effect in trainings. There are two ways of seeing: Focal or foveal vision is excellent for focusing in on someone or something. Peripheral vision is excellent for catching movements off to the side, seeing/sensing an entire audience.
Use eye contact to engage people. Look at people, get intro the habit of looking at individuals and holding your gaze, without staring, soften your eyes, and smile. With our visual powers, we can learn to looking at our audience in new ways and to visually anchor a group. Bring them in by scooping them in with your eyes.
Using Personal Energy You can use high energy engagements right from the start. You can use it to demonstrate and convey that you are in control of your own state. An Energy Start may include surprise, drama, humor, etc. By all means, avoid a low energy, passive, dull, uncertain start! That only induces apathy! To a trainer, only non-engagement is a serious concern. When people feel bored, uninvolved, not connected, that the training is irrelevant, etc., you need to do something different! Use energy breaks: stretching, jumping up and down, massages all around,
high fives, deep breathing, dancing.
Inducing active and intense Learning States Isn't this what we ultimately want? People totally engaged and operating from an accelerated state of openness, receptivity, with all of their motor programs ready for application? It's no big secret that when we train, we need people in a learning state if we want the training to "take," stick, and last. We train best when we assume responsibility for eliciting, provoking, and inciting top-notch learning states... accelerated learning states in the people who come to participate. Aim to effectively manage the learning experience as you teach, demonstrate, train, etc. in order to install new understanding and skills Training facilitates adult learning and development. Therefore one of the central and key outcomes for the trainer must entail keeping the participants in an excellent learning state. This means facilitating the motivation, interest, attention, and state accessing of the auditors so that they operate from high learning states.
Ordering the training for high quality learning states. The best learning occurs when we have a context of relaxation and calmness, safety and playfulness, curiosity and interest, in an atmosphere of cooperative Win/Win thinking, and one wherein there is the passion of excitement. Given this, you will need two seemingly contradictory states in your auditors/learners: 1) A State of Arousal: interest, motivation, attention, arousal, energy excitement, passion — "Juice," 2) A State of Relaxation: comfort, playful, non-stressful, humorous, warm, compassion— Ease.
What Learning States to look for?
People highly motived to learn, to receive. People must see the learning as meaningful, worthwhile, and valuable.
Benchmarks for Engagement or Engaging: Definition: To captivate the mind-emotions of participants to attend to the ideas, experiences, patterns, and processes of the training.
Using more than 10 engaging behaviors, audience in rapt attention, responding with breath (including gasps), eye contact, laughter, etc. to content of speaker, entranced (totally focused, no non-engagement behaviors).
Using 5 to 9 engaging behaviors with audience very engaged, matching speaker as speaker has matched audience. Non-engagement behaviors lessening. Using 3 to 5 engaging behaviors with some good results. Audience attending and looking. Some yawning, looking around, fidgeting, whispering (behaviors of non-engagement). Attempts at engaging via stories, eye contact, humor, examples, self-disclosure, connecting with current situation, asking questions, etc. Doing so incongruently, lack smoothness of expression, clumsy in actions that brings awareness to self. Beginning to use a few items that might engage: stories, eye contact, etc. Mostly acting as if bored or disconnected by not smiling, not looking at people, de-focused eyes that see an "audience" rather than individuals.
SPATIAL ANCHORING The Theatrical Art of Using Space Mindfully:
Principle: The tools of our trade involve what we say (our words) and how we express those words using gestures, eyes, our bodies, space, etc.
Managing Semantic Space Spatially Choreographing Intentional gesturing Pantomiming your ideas and concepts
Spatially Choreograph with your body establishing group anchors and creating Semantic Space
The design: To intentionally design and use spatial, visual, and tonal anchors for the group so as to take charge of the space on stage and in the room and transform that space into semantic space. Establish your gestural world by mindfully and intentionally designing how to use "space" in such a way that it supports your communications. Once you do that, then commit yourself to practice the movements until you develop a consistent structure and ease. Here we work with and create Semantic Space. Think of it as your own 3-D holographic training area. We can use our appearance and actions to convey who we are, what we are about, what we are seeking to achieve. We can do that via posture, our energy, clothes. First impressions do make a difference, they set frames. Dress appropriate to the occasion. Warning: Nervous movements will detract! Therefore avoid all meaningless gestures that signify nothing: pointing with the finger when you are not "scolding," tapping, fiddling, fidgeting, rocking to and fro. Think about your actions as the pantomiming of representations. It lies in the discipline of our imagination that we can create vivid visual images through the control of our movements.
Step back from the training room and view it with fresh eyes: Architecture, structure, form, color, light (natural), etc. How "busy" or simple is the stage? Seating format, flow of traffic, etc. Managing a group's attention: What can you do to manage and control a group's attention as you speak, make transitions to different events, call a group back to attention, etc.? Practice using the quiet "shhhhhh" and the gesture of raising your arm. Practice saying "Stand up." "Close your eyes." Gesturing. Extend this into an even wider range: Sexy and seductive: Fearful and horrifying Commanding with authority Urgency Pleading Giving Room: After you invite people to make internal pictures, step out of the way. Let them do so without tearing up their pictures. Also give process time both auditorially and visually. Let them have the experiential moment.
Time: past, present, future. Visually and kinesthetically establish the parameters for setting up spatial anchors for "time." Then you can put various ideas/ concepts into this structure: 1) Goals, desired outcomes, preferred futures 2) Toward and Away From energies for propulsion systems. 3) Attractions and aversions. Degree of intensities: Up and Down Gesturing This gives you a way to V/K the ideas of "amount," more and less, etc. Reflexivity: Meta-layers, frames, frames of mind, etc. Use the flow of your hand to gesture feedback loops, feed forward loops, etc.
Emphasis: Use tone, volume, hands "up" and "down" Yes/ No: for valid/ invalid; confirmation/ dis-confirmation Use stop, crossing-out, etc. Use "come here," victory signs, etc.
Process, Completion Use hand movements to gesture movement, progress, process, Use chopping hand movements to indicate sequence, step-by step Use hands stopped, open palm for complete, finished. Important/ Non-Important Use hand movements to gesture from down/ low (unimportant) to up/ high (important). Congruency: To indicate rapport and the lack of rapport/ or resistance. Aligned "Relevancy" / Not-Relevant. Put on the Time-Line: past, now, future. Put away from yourself.
Questions: curiosity, wonder. Propulsion Systems: A propulsion system has two internal forces operating simultaneously upon us and powerfully moving (swishing) us forward by both pulling on our values, passions, desires, hopes (the attractors) and by pushing us from behind (i.e., kicking us in the butt) by creating intense aversion, revolt, and disgust to the dis-values (the aversions). Attractors of values, desired outcomes, passions, etc. pull a person forward toward into his or her future. Gesture with hands a Carrot dangling in front of us, a hand of seduction.
Benchmarks for Platform skills: Definition: To move on stage in an effective way that supports the presentation and its meaning. With a group we effectively stand and move about on stage when we stay calm and focused on the tasks and learnings at hand, when we use the sound system and microphones in ways that do not bring attention to them, when we think on our feet (presence of mind skills), when we demonstrate the skills we're describing, that we effectively use visual aids (not getting in the way, standing to the side when drawing, etc.).
Spatial Anchoring speaks about the kind of anchoring in and with "space" or territory itself so that we consistently use verbal and visual anchors that we set, that we mindfully use gestures to convey concepts, that we choreograph our use of space intentionally,
Movements totally support content of presentation and so well choreographed that they are unnoticed in themselves, gestures and movements all direct and invite participants to completely get lost in the presentation. Movements flow smoothly and elegantly, gestures have a consistency about them so that they more effectively anchor concepts. Movement on stage smooth and calm, gestures in terms of audience's perspective rather than speaker's, gestures still obvious and sometimes mentioned by participants. Moving about on stage calmly, nervous gestures reduced significantly, only barely or occasionally present. Gestures and movements more congruent with words and content of message. Moving about on stage in ways that bring attention to self or to presentation. Gestures, movement, anchoring seem stilted, affected, and unnatural. Moving about on stage by pacing back and forth, moving arms and legs in nervous gestures that anchor everything and nothing, gesturing by using one's own internal mapping and not reversing for audience.
©2004 L. Michael Hall
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NS/NLP Trainers Training
GETTING AUDIENCE RAPPORT We first design a training. Then we market it. When the day comes, our first task is to connect with the participants who show up. We can and do connect at many levels. We can connect at some pretty high level —at the level of beliefs, values, outcomes, etc.
Principle:
Matching Energy, interest, value, metaprograms, meta-states, Matrix. Respecting, honoring, caring. Atmosphere creation Tying Outcomes to activites to create a sense of relevance and practicality
Validate and support people where they are so that you can lead them to where they want to be.
Respecting and Honoring: Presenting and Training excellence makes people "right," and never makes people "Wrong." Pace, pace, pace in order to validate the persons and utilize their skills and experiences. "Education" means "to draw out." Making people "right" and never wrong. Training begins with rapport and pacing. In practice this takes the linguistic form of validating, affirming, confirming, and making people right. To do that we have to search for positive intentions, incorporate what people offer, search for and operate from agreement frames, and take the time to explore more fully their comments and questions before responding. In terms of our meta-programs, as a trainer we have to stop mismatching and shift entirely into matching.
What states and meta-states will you need for yourself to be able to reach out and extend yourself to others? To invest your own psychic energy into the welfare of those who have come to receive your expertise? What are the frames that you need to set in your own mind and heart so that you can "bring out the best" in people? Set a positive frame about the training, about yourself, and about the participants. Actively engage the people who have come to participant before, during and after the training. Create a personal contact with them; gather information about your people. Appreciation Centering in your own Values and Visions Honor for People Respect for the learning styles of others Recognition of the uniqueness of others Being Professional Win/Win Cooperativeness
Almost completely focused on others with connecting behaviors, matching meta-programs and metastates, using lots of validations in language. Much more matching (80% or higher), continually coming back to asking about people, using names, matching meta-programs, expressing more authenticity (see Authenticity). More actions of connecting than disconnecting. More emotional congruence in body with connecting behaviors than not. 60 to 70% of the time matching and pacing people in behavior and words. Increasing number of actions that indicate attempts at connecting and equal number of behaviors indicating the lack of such. Some actions (1 to 4) that indicate connecting but mostly using behaviors that show disconnect and poor relating. No actions that connect speaker with audience: meeting and greeting, shaking hands, making eye contact, using names, mentioning personal things, support or empathy, or matching words or behavior. Doing things that violate a sense of relating: ignoring, quickly dismissing people with curt answers or responses, acting aloof by looking elsewhere when talking, being incongruent between words and actions when talking to individuals.
Benchmarks for Empowering Participants: Definition: To infuse a new confidence in learning, changing and transforming in participants. This skill corresponds to the belief that people have the resources within and that they only need to be called forth and activated. With an audience we do this by nurturing and supporting people (see Supporting), by cheer-leading successes (see cheer leading), by being protective of participants, by facilitating experiences and inducing states (see Inducing States), by using exercises and involving people in the processes, and in handling questions well. Celebrating and honoring the successes of participants, inquiring about results and staying with the exploration until a full account is given of what worked, to what extent, how well, what else needs to be done, what are the next steps, etc. Challenging participants to rise to new challenges and to believe more fully in themselves, giving assignments that presuppose finding and/or creating new resources. Asking questions that engage participants to look within to access new resources, building up new resources from small examples, showing excitement when participants respond, asking lots of questions about the practical experience with a new plan or strategy. Altering the percentage to 15% / 75%, making statements of belief in the potential and power of participants. Inviting participants to find and access resources, giving time to do such. 50% of the time teaching and telling participants, and 50% of time asking questions, inviting discussion or dialogue. Telling participants what to do in a "controlling" manner that gives little or no room for them to participate in discussion to ask questions, to explore.
USING YOUR VOICE EFFECTIVELY As we move, gesture, use space we affect ourselves and our participants and we establish semantic space as we uses these non-verbal facets of communication. These non-verbal facets of experience can powerfully support or undermine our verbal elegance. It depends on our state and our use of our voice. Are we coming from a state of energy, relaxation, excitement, passion, boredom, fatigue, etc? What is the quality of our voice? We can powerfully communicate attitude through our voice. To use your voice effectively, pay attention to your breath. Breathe fully so that you can squeeze the juice out of your words. Speak congruent, use pauses effectively, develop flexibility of tone and tempo.
Voice Detection and Awareness: Your skill with your voice begins with awareness of the sound and quality of the sounds that you produce with your voice. Learn to listen to yourself on the outside in order to detect the range, pitch, tempo, tone, melody, etc. Speak from your diaphragm. While standing in front of a wall, cup your hands behind your ears and deliver your content from high, medium, to a low vocal range as you calibrate. How do you need to shift your voice for maximum impact? Hit some low notes and then raise it to the highest. Find the places where your voice experiences glitches and work on those transitions.
How much flexibility do you have with your voice, tone, tempo, etc.? Practice developing a voice pattern for: Questioning, denying, appealing, enticing, demanding, commanding, nurturing, giving pleasure, giving pain, etc. Practice saying the following using the list of adjectives and adverbs: "You wouldn't dare!" Confidently, fearfully, amazed, in a cocky way, composedly, scornfully, hatefully. "Hold you the Watch tonight?" Businesslike, divinely inspired, determined.
"We do, my lord. "
Impersonally, militarily, eagerly, grimly, as if puzzled, matter-of-factly, cautiously troubled, aggressively, passively, submissively.
Exercise: Describe "Accessing Pesonal Genius" using five different states. Cycle through the five different states repeatedly.
Exercise: Turn to the person next to you and tell him or her why you like what you're doing using your top three training states. Sound like those states (i.e., calm, confidence, excited, playful, curious, sexy, etc.)
Using the Voice for Maximum Impact. Voice variability involves volume (soft to loud), speed (slow to fast), pitch (deep to high), rhythm (monotone to variations), tone (voices, accents). Voice Exercise for Flexibility: 1) Groups of 3: practice saying the following statements as Questions — Statements — Commands. 2) Repeat with a focus on squeezing all the juice out of the words that you want to emphasize. Check: Are you speaking in a way so that it sounds like what you are saying? (Congruence) Vary the pace of your words so that you slow down and enunciate the emphasis of the words very clearly. 3) Repeat and tonally mark out certain phrases as embedded commands. Words: Linguistic Elegance. The richer your vocabulary, the better. Let verbs do the work for you, keep things in the active tense. Multisensory. Define new words, use them in context several times, repeat. Set frame that it's perfectly alright to ask about strange or new words. Learning to Use Pauses... Reasons for stopping in the middle of a process (exercise/ demonstration): 1) To highlight and underscore a point, learning. 2) To let the person process and to internalize. 3) To speak to the audience.
#7) Benchmarking — Communicating: Definition: To send and receive message that accurately and effectively facilitate learning. With a group, using great mind-lines (conversational reframes) to succinctly express your theme, asking engaging questions, using memorable statements, using metaphors and stories, poetry, or a variety of kinds of statements: Statements that explain Questions that explore Exclamations that declare Narrative Dialogue Refrains that set themes Poetry Music Metaphor Open/ Closing of Loops Using your voice with good range an vocal expressiveness, anchoring vocally with your tone and tempo, with pauses, with the projection of your voice, by being succinct and precise, by keeping things relevant and focused.
Communication Questions: How precise, accurate, and succinct are my communications? How clear is the vision or picture that I describe in word or in print? How compelling, inspiring, or motivational are my words? Do people seem drawn and compelled by the word pictures I draw or the frames that I set?
Benchmarks for the Effective Use of Voice Definition: To use one's voice to output verbally using volume, tone, rhythm, etc. to effectively enhance our communication as we elicit and induce states and frames; to anchor, and analogically mark one's use of language; to project effectively to utilise one's full vocal range and make use of sounds elegantly and appropriately; to make appropriate use of speed of delivery, pause, and silence. Seamless use of voice as an effective tool to use in communicating. Words clear and precisely pronounced, large range of voice variation, appropriate volume control and use of silence, alignment of sounds with meanings of words, elegant analogue marking and embedded commands. Use of pause and silence, analogue marking, ability to imitate other voices and/or sounds. Matching of voice and state, excellent voice projection that allows all to hear easily whether talking conversationally or whispering, matching of predicates. Using clear articulation and emphasis, variation of rhythm corresponding to intention of communication, modulation, some use of inflection in voice; full variation and use of all voice parameters; the voice matching gestures; projection appropriate to the environment, good voice management even in momentary poor health. Some use of rhythm, speed, and emphasis, matching what is said with gestures that fit. Some modulation of volume and pitch. Mumbled words, voice incongruent with meaning, no voice variation, no volume control, no analogue marking to induce states
Able to create crystal clear images and movies for the mind that move people to take action, that succinctly states with precision the next step and that calls for action. Able to effectively match and pace a group of people and call them into a community, mostly able to get to the point and to be succinct, more precise descriptions. Able to put into words the hopes and dreams of others, but verbose and close to get to the point, not always clear or precise. Oral and written words partly focused on a vision, dream, or new idea, still half or more of it about self, either very talkative or offering not enough description to be inspirational. Moderate amount of words, some suggesting a vision or dream, communications mostly vague, fluffy, undefined, perhaps wordy, redundant, not getting to the point. Or words almost always about self or coming back to self as if needing to put forward. No or few words or communications that lead forth to anything new or different. Only words of complaint or dislikes. Only words that relate to self not others.
Exercise: IMPROVISING
1) Get into groups of four persons and invent a story. Each persons says one sentence at a time that adds to the story. The first person begins with the line, "Once upon a time..." Or, "The other day, I was in the bathroom..." Use linkage words (as, and, when, after, because, inasmuch, etc.) to tie the parts together. Go round and round the circle until a story emerges.
2) In round two, tell a story that will add insights, skills, and resources to becoming a brilliant trainer. First as a group make a menu list of needed insights, skills and resource. "What I need to become a truly brilliant trainer is..." Someone keep track of the desired resources. Begin telling a story, one line at a time ... weaving in things that will bring out the lessons.
MAKING IT MEMORABLE
5) Induce (and keep re-inducing) a relaxed yet alert state. 6) Distribute the practice into short study periods broken up by rest intervals. We remember best the things that strike us as having primacy (the first things we learn) and recency. Things in the middle get lost or forgotten more easily. Remember "the magic number seven" principle. Chunk larger pieces down to 5 to 9 pieces at a time. 7) Utilize the power of not closing frames. People tend to remember best uncompleted tasks than completed. Closure ends the search. 8) Get people using the information. Invite participants to practice, recite, rehearse, and use the information as soon as possible. Then come back to debrief what they have learned and how the experimenting went. 9) Consolidate new information. You can consolidate through debriefing discussions, through summaries, additional demonstrations, hypnotic inductions, etc. You can review previous learnings and keep layering it back from session to session. Memory Tools that you can Utilize:
1) Associations/ Anchors. By linking, associating, and connecting things you have a way of gluing mental understandings, emotions, experiences together. Use stories and metaphors.
2) Drama. Make the things you say and do dramatic so that the way people represent it will stand out in vivid imagery, bizzare, wacky.
4) Synesthias. Create and anchor various cross-circuit wirings so that the participants get to connect and build up various synesthesias.
5) Mnemonics. Numerous mnemonic devices exist by which we can provide easy ways to remember ideas: rhymes, diagrams, cartoons, places, stories. Use various memory pegs and cues.
6) Variety. Keep shifting and switching between various learning and teaching styles: concrete experiences to abstract conceptualizations.
7) Review. Summarize, continually backtrack and orient. Research in reviewing information shows that reviewing data for ten minutes a day, a week, a month... makes the retention process very strong.
8) Leave tasks uncompleted. This will stimulate response potential.
Three strategies for Remembering
1) Studying. Going over information, rehearsing it, initial exposure. 2) Ordering. Some way to sort it using a format or template that's easy to recall. 3) Intending. Caring about it, intending to remember, making a point to want to remember it, having a reason. Benchmarks for Making Presentations Memorable:
Definition: The ability to present the subject utilizing appropriate use of anchors, emotion, stories, tonality, gestures, questions, meaning relevant to the audience's needs, demonstrations, explanations, exercises, reviews, frames, strategies, integration, assimilation, and future pacing to ensure appropriate retention (remembering the right things for the right reasons). Presentation smoothly integrated and interwoven, delivered in all modalities simultaneously; multiple state changes. 7 to 9 applications smoothly delivered in multiples modalities; good debriefing and unpacking; good questioning for personal relevance; future paced for integration and application. 5 to 7 applications delivered in several modalities, relevant to the audience's needs, not fully integrated as a whole; demonstrations explained to group's satisfaction, some debriefing, some questioning of relevance. 3 to 5 applications, some engagement, some state elicitation and anchoring, but with erratic effect; more connected with the audience; some demonstrations; no debriefing. 1 to 3 applications of memorable features, poorly utilized, without relevance to the content or awareness of the audience, no demonstrations. Monotone, using many nominalizations, no interaction, engagement, review or integration, offering a minimum of any external stimulus, no apparent relevance to the learner, delivered from self perspective. "Shut up and listen."
Using games that install learnings in the process of presentation. Using all choices in meta-program learning styles. Skillfully using 10 or more behaviors consistently that create atmosphere of safety and enjoyment. Engage all learning styles and preferences. Using 5 or more of the behaviors that encourage safety and trust: discussion, dialogue, group ice breakers, cheerleading succeed. Beginning to use processes that make learning fun and enjoyable: laughter, fun, playfulness. Validating persons, setting frames that make mistakes part of learning. Using more behaviors that create sense of safety in the learning: matching, pacing, validating, empathizing. Yet still letting comparisons and judgments to occur from time to time. Using a few of the learning facilitation behaviors: stating benefits of the learning, giving examples, inviting discussion, using group exercises but doing so in awkward way. Allowing some of the behaviors that invite threat and danger to be present. Using words that suggest threat or pressure, that challenge people to measure up or get out. Inviting comparisons between participants. Using words and/or tone of judgment.
EXERCISES FOR PRACTICING PLATFORM SKILLS
Learning to Project Love, Energy, Vitality, and Excitement Walk onto the stage and take a few seconds before you begin to speak to project out onto the group various emotional states: love, energy, vitality, excitement, etc. Notice how you can embrace the participants with these energy states with your eyes, gestures, movements, breathing, etc. Presenting with Elegance 1) State your frame ... the statement that you want to make that's part of your presentation. 2) Use your frame and keep enriching it. 3) Express it in at least 3 different ways: command, question, statement. Playful, serious, in anger, in fear, discouraged, tired, sad, joyful, etc.
Attention Tracking As one person makes a presentation in front of a small group, a meta person stands behind him or her. The meta person will point to certain individuals in the group from time to time who will then gradually cease to pay attention to the trainer. This prevents the trainer from recognizing who is being so influenced. The trainer's task will be to notice and track the attention level of the participants and to catch their attention again as smoothly as possible. Stop after five minutes. Notice the different strategies in each trainer to track and recover attention. 2 minute Presentation. Present a basic NLP pattern (Swish, Phobia Cure, Time-Line Elicitation) in small groups of 4 persons, at first practice reading the scripts with emphasis and passion, and then saying them to each other... shifting to your own words where you need to. The design is to tune each other up with regard to our presentations.
Benchmarks for Storytelling: Definition: Expressing information in the form of something that happened to someone. Using creative metaphors in presentation, using trance induction and meditations for a guided tour. Storytelling Questions: Was there a story? Was there a story that tied things together? Did it seem personal and real?
Elegant use of stories that don't seem like stories at all, that induce state and that entrance an audience so much that there's a total rapture with the story to hear it out, typically very personal stories that somehow bring the point of the lesson home. Using stories very effectively and powerfully, stories that move and induce states. More personal stories. Stories that capture 75% or more of the audience's attention. Using stories that exemplify the theme of the presentation. Using stories from time to time as a comic relief, but not as a story with layered meanings. Tossing in a little story from time to time. Minimal use of the story, usually only a "canned" story, nothing personal. No stories, only propositional statements and "academic" information. Using only a "teaching" or lecturing style of presentation.
GLORIOUSLY FALLIBLE Do you want to become a masterful trainer? Great! Then forget "perfection!" Forget "flawless" performance. How many people want to see you acting like a god or goddess? How many will think that anything you can do, they also can do when you come across that way? The best trainers—present and disclose that they are human beings. Fallible ones. That's gives hope to them! Let's set some different frames then around any and all expressions of human fallibilities. Let's reflexively bring back some positive ideas regarding the everyday states that we so often take and use for self-contempting, self-depreciating, self-judging, etc. Suppose, that instead of bringing some negative thoughts-and-feelings against ourselves, we set a more neutral or, even better, positive frames of reference. Consider frustration: Acceptance about your frustration: welcomed frustration Curiosity about your frustration: learning about frustration Anticipating what good will come out of this frustration: anticipatory frustration Calmness/Relaxation about frustration: calm frustration Loving self and others: thoughtful, considerate frustration How about those frames? These would establish a very different frame game. Do you think of them as strange altered states of consciousness? Would you like to go there? Would accessing such frames give you a more resourceful handle on things? What game would they create? If we play the "I'm Okay" game, or the My Self-Esteem is a Given game, then we don't move through life feeling that either ourselves or others are broken, defective, or substandard. We're just perfectly fallible human beings. Nothing more; nothing less.
Meta-Stating to set an empowering frame for self-appreciation, Self-Esteem, and Gloriously Fallible 1) Check for a sense (and frame) of internal permission. Do you have permission to esteem yourself highly, unconditionally, with potential, loveability, and to be a fallible human being, etc.?
3) Outframe with Self-Esteem-ing thoughts that fully accept your fallibility. What would it be like to accept your fallibility fully and completely while hold your sense of appreciation for self, esteem and value for self? Let this acceptance of your fallibility become richer as you accept your right to be fully fallible, dependent on others, ignorant about thousands of things. Notice how these T-F of worth, value, and significance transforms your sense of X (i.e. frustration).
HAVING FUN BY BEING GLORIOUSLY CENTERED 1) Fully accept and Own your core "responses" What is it like now when you reflect on your powers of mind-and-emotion and on your powers of speech and behavior? Reflect and then step into your power zone fully so that you feel grounded. How much have you taken ownership of them? How much does the word "Mine!" enable you to do that? What is it like now when you turn up the appreciation so that you see them with the eyes of appreciation? 2) Distinguish Responses To and For. What are you responsible for? To whom are you responsible? And about what? How thoroughly integrated is this in you now? 3) Fill up your Space with your Values and visions What do you most of all care about? Why is that important to you? What's your highest intentions? What is your highest dream and vision for yourself? For your trainings? 4) Mind-to-Muscle the feelings and anchor them. What is it like when you let your body fully feel this? What kind of a stance does it in-form you with? What can you use visually to anchor this? What word will you now use to anchor this? With what tone, volume, pitch? Any other sounds? 5) Meta-state this with respect and glorious fallibility. How much can you now celebrate your fallibility? What would it be to embarrass yourself now that you can fully maintain your dignity in such? Imagine really embarrassing or making a fool of yourself and do so with glorious fallibility! What's that like? What other resources do you need? 6) Outframe with outrageous fun and silliness. When have you had outrageous fun and silliness? What would or could be the worse nightmare for you as a public speaker? Imagine that fully. Use the words of George Bernard Shaw. When he was asked how he learned to speak so compellingly in public, he replied, "I did it the same way I learned to skate—by doggedly making a fool of myself until I got used to it." (Dale Carnegie, The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking, p. 28). 7) Future pace for training situations.
DAY 3:
CLEARING THE PATH
PACING META-PROGRAMS As we prepare to present, we do so out of our perceptual frames (or meta-programs) and so naturally prefer to speak to our set of Meta-Programs. To balance this so that we don't leave out the frames of minds of others, we therefore consciously develop the flexibility to dance back and forth between the poles of various meta-programs. This allows us to incorporate the majority of the frames of mind or meta-programs that we find in groups.
Match/Mismatch: How do participants respond to the materials and activities? Do they use a frame that sorts for sameness or difference? Do they like similarity, matches, connections, etc.? Are they conservative with new ideas, want continuance of the same? Or do they like new things, different things, etc.? What's the relationship between things? Does one look for common themes and patterns or contrast differences? Sameness: Difference: Representation System: Visual: pictures, movies, images. Auditory: sounds, volumes, tones, pitches. Kinesthetic: sensations, movement, pressure Auditory Digital: words, language Value Direction: Toward: Future Possibilities Away From: Past Assurance. These tend to over-analyze information then act on it. The need lots of assurance. Use lots of words, and want to understand all about it. Will counter-example constantly. Adaptation Style: Judgers: adapting life and events to us Perceivers: adapting to life and events Operational Style: Options: alternatives, choices; random Procedures: rules & steps, doing things the right way, sequential Authority Sort: To what do you give credence for authority or information? From within or without, internal or external? Those with the Internal reference for authority depend on their own values, beliefs, experiences, understandings, etc. They know and recognize that the decision is theirs. They can be hard to convince, stubborn, not easily influenced by traditional proofs. Those with the External frame need proof and evidence from the outside. They are much easier to influence and go along with the group. Internal External
Attention Sort: Where do you put your attention? On Self or Others? Do you pay attention to others and seek to either attend to their needs and concerns (or feel that their needs are imposing) or do you attend to what you think and feel and want? Self-Referent Other-Referent Modal Operators (Modus Operandi) Necessity: must, should, have to. rules Possibility: could, would, might, may, will. options Desire: want, desire Impossibility: can't, shouldn't must not, constraints Choice: want, will, choose Experience of Emotion/Body: Associated: stepping in experiencing information while in state Dissociated: stepping out and thinking about the information with little neurological investment Convincer Sort (Believability): How participants become convinced in terms of which information systems: Visual: looks right (observer) Auditory: sounds right (hearer) Kinesthetic: feels right (feeler) Auditory Digital: makes sense (thinker) Experiential: experiencer (doer)
Time Experience: "Time" does not exist as a primary state experience, and so those "inside" of time don't notice it, they are lost in it, caught up in the activities, aware of "time" as a concept. Those "outside" of events, can observe, notice, sequence, and manage time very well ("through time"). Tell them to be back at 10:15 for a break. Tell the In Time people to be back at least by 10 o'clock. In Time: Random:, spontaneous, Primary state. Through Time: sequential, Meta-State Level Black-and-white (Either/Or) versus Continuum _ Black-and-White: Polar, Static Continuum: Non-Aristotelian Linear, sequential, Static Non-Linear, Systemic, Dynamic
By Andrew Bryant
What can Stories and Metaphors be used to? Among the many things, key are these: Induce states of mind-body-emotion Build rapport Cause the listener to access mental resources Entertain Bring one state to bare upon another state (meta-state) Break state Reframe content or context of a situation Frame learnings Reduce resistance to change or new ideas Anchor states Punctuate trainings
What is a Metaphor Metaphor is a Greek word made up of two smaller words, meta meaning above or about and phorine which means "to transfer" or "carry over." When we use a metaphor we cause the listener to go meta to meaning which creates awareness which creates choice and choice allows change. We meta-state when we use metaphors by putting one thing in hierarchy to another. The philosopher Aristotle (circa 300BC), knew this when he said, "Metaphor is the application to one thing of the name belonging to another." So a metaphor is "A figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another by way of suggesting a likeness or analogy between them."
As a exercise, write five metaphors that can be used during a Neuro-Semantic/NLP training for a specific purpose. If your first reaction is to run to the book table to buy a book on metaphors—I know, that was my first reaction when given that task. But that's not necessary. If you look about, the best metaphors are staring you right in the face. You are living in them. They are everywhere. It's like the fish asking, "Where is the water?" In fact, it is more difficult to find something that is not a metaphor. Just prior to writing this I was coaching a client on the phone who was berating himself for personalising someone else's anger. "Can you imagine someone learning to shoot basketball hoops," I said." Some shots they get in and some they miss. Eventually they get more in than they miss. You have only just learned about map-territory distinctions, so it's OK to drop the ball occasionally as long as you learn and improve." Metaphors don't have to be long, forty-five minute stories; they can just be no-big deal everyday events that cause you to look at something from a different perspective (meta position). Comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld and Billy Connoly are masters of this. How do you construct a Metaphor? There are a number or ways to construct metaphor depending on whether you are using it for a state induction or for helping an individual or group to overcome a particular challenge. A good practical skill with the Milton Model language patterns will stand you in good stead. To create a basic metaphor use the following steps.
1) Displace the Referential Index It's axiomatic that almost no one likes to be told; they like to discover the answers for themselves. By changing the reference of the story from the listener to some other time, place or person reduces resistance by allowing the listener to draw their own meanings. For examples of this refer to the parables of Jesus of Nazareth e.g., casting seeds, faith like a mustard seed, etc. 2) Trans-Derivational Search By using non-specific descriptions your metaphor will induce trance by causing the listener to go into a downtime state and to fill in the details from their own map or experience. 3) Isomorphic For the metaphor to be effective it needs to have the same structure as the problem it sets out to gain perspective on. 4) An Outcome The metaphor needs an outcome or resolution that will add resources to the listener; this will often be in the form of a reframe. Metaphor Play: Exercise 1 1) Form a group of 4 or 5 people. 2) Identify a problem that a group or individual might have. (Menu list: Learning, fear of asking questions, remembering, information overload, the trainer is the messenger not the message) 3) Identify the outcome, states of mind and resources you would like the listener to get. 4) Displace the referential index—set the scene, time and characters (fictional or otherwise). 5) Map the structure from problem to resolution. 6) Rehearse the metaphor in a way that induces light trance with a transderivational search. 7) If time allows present the metaphor to the entire class.
Exercise 2 Using a similar process, construct a metaphor that induces the states of wanton curiosity, playful learning and courageous problem solving. The Delivery of metaphor If you are not already a natural storyteller, set an outcome to hone your skills, listen to others who have the "gift" and then practice. If you have children, read them bedtime stories and then practice creating your own. If you can enthrall a child you are well on you way. A metaphor must be meaningful; it needs to pace the elements of the student's intellectual level, experience and current situation. Good storytellers gather information about their audience and not only pace content but pace their delivery. No two audiences are the same and so a single story may vary in length and detail depending on how it is being received. Just as with state induction the storyteller must use his or her voice and physiology to act out the story for maximum impact.
Benchmarks for Creating and Using Metaphors: Definition: The ability to talk about one thing in terms of another thing, to use to induce states, resolve problems, install resources, and teach skills. Metaphors appropriately reflect the message and fitting to the situation; expansive variety of the use of metaphors. Metaphors induce specific states that fit with the message; nesting of metaphors and closing of loops of stories within stories, elegant matching with gestures and tonality. Use of stories with good correspondence with outcome, listener comments, "This fits with my problem." indicating presenter's awareness of the story and it's connection to the situation; some substories, many uncompleted (without closure); some matching with gestures and tonality. Some attempt to use metaphors to communicate one's message; some correspondence between story and outcome; no sub-story inside a story. Some use of metaphors, but poorly delivered, use of cliches as metaphors. Minimal use of metaphors; accidental cliches, no awareness in using stories as evidence when asked about the use of such and speaker not even aware of using such.
DISTINGUISHING RESPONSIBILITY TO/FOR 4-2 Responding
The Pattern: 1) Access your Power Zone Access, acknowledge, and appreciate your four neuro-linguistic powers of thinking-emoting, speaking and behaving. Step into your power zone and own it fully (bring "ownership" — as expressed in "Mine!" to the Power Zone).
2) Distinguish between For and To. I am able to respond (response-able) for my thinking, emoting, speaking and behaving. I own and acknowledge my ability to make such responses. They are mine and I will not hold anyone else responsible for these powers. I am not able to respond (response-able) for the thinking, emoting, speaking, or behaving of anyone else! I cannot and will not assume any ownership over their Power Zone. It belongs to them. I acknowledge that, appreciate that, and will honor that.
4) Apply to Training. Imagine a training group or an individual person who has contracted for you to train. Apply the Responsibility To/For Distinction to that relationship. Giving permission, protecting, avoiding any feel of "manipulation" or playing with them in a negative way.
Day 3:
CLEARING THE PATHWAY FOR POWERFUL PRESENTATIONS
DANCING WITH DRAGONS The Art of Taming, Transforming and Slaying Dragons "Dragons" refer to non-enhancing, non-productive, and problematic states. As such, Dragon States sabotage our resourcefulness as trainers and prevent us from being as effective, dynamic, powerful, and wonderful a presenter as we wish to be. • What dragons have you already found? • What incongruencies have you already discovered? • What are they? Name your dragons.
How well will you be able to train if you have dragons breathing down your neck? • What, if anything, holds you back from accessing and using your most exquisite Training States right now? • What states and/or meta-states can hold you back? • Does fear, hesitancy, self-contempt, anger, stress, etc.? We cannot truly or fully succeed until we take care of our internal "dragons." As long as we have internal conflicts that tear us up, sabotage our best efforts, turn our energies against ourselves, or that prevent us from becoming congruent and aligned, we can't move on. We know this experientially. We already well know that every program of internal conflict inside us puts the brakes on our efforts or undermine those efforts. This is why we need to slay and/or tame our dragons. There are 5 basic steps. These are not necessarily in the order or sequence you will use. Start by attempting to name the dragon and then do whatever seems most appropriate as you chase the dragon and circle his cave. You may have to do that many times before you get the real dragon. (See Dancing with Dragons) 1) Name the Dragon 2) Embrace the Dragon: Kiss the Dragon 3) Analyze the Dragon (Use the Meta-Model sword on it) 4) Starve or Interrupt the Dragon 5) Frame or meta-state the Dragon
Frames for Taming and Transforming Dragons: 1) Acceptance of reality, of whatever is. 2) Self-Esteeming oneself and separating self from behavior. 3) Dis-Identification: the Not-Me Pattern that distinguishes our thoughts-emotions, speech and behavior from ourselves as human beings. These are just human experiences and expressions, not identity. 4) Meta-Cognition: when we re-enter a state with a higher level awareness, we enter with awareness, with observation, love, compassion, and resources. This changes everything. 5) Playfulness. The ability to lighten up and stop being so serious about ourselves provides great relief and a lot of sanity. 6) It's Just an Emotion. The NS definition of "emotion" as the difference between Map and our Experience of the Territory means that we don't have to get angry at any emotion. They are just emotions. They are not demands upon us.
THE NEURO-SEMANTICS OF PRESENTING/TRAINING
What ideas, concepts and understandings do you have for the various aspects of presenting? Research and preparation Selling and marketing yourself Standing up before a group Being on stage, being watched Failure, making a mistake Feedback, criticism, rejection Competence in being skilled Stuttering for words Losing your place
Troublemakers Difficult participants Creating materials Embarrassment Risk taking Confidence in knowing your subject Being good enough Comparing yourself to someone else
Do you have any negative or unpleasant reference experiences that need to be dealt with? If so, what?
Each of these, and a hundred other ideas (beliefs) about training make up the frames (and frames of mind) that we have and use to think about, feel about, and respond to the subject of training. • • •
Do you have a good relationship with all of these ideas? What, if anything, holds you back from being at your best? Does anything stop you from developing your best skills as a trainer?
S.W.O.T. ANALYSIS COACHING Use the SWOT analysis as a way to explore yourself, what you do (skills), and your practice as a presenter and trainer.
Strengths: Advantages What are your advantages? What competencies and proven skills do you have? What do you uniquely offer? What expertise do you bring into coaching from other areas? What are some of your passions and interests? Weaknesses: Dis-advantages What are your weaknesses? Where are you deficit of critical skills? What skills do you need to develop to be fully effective as a trainer? Opportunities: What opportunities do you see before you? What circumstances could you use as an opportunity? What problems or needs to you have a passion to address? Threats: What factors might impact negatively on you and your situation? What changes might be threatening or upsetting? What stresses and stressors?
Reflection: What have you learned from this? What does it mean to you? What will you do about it?
DESIGNING A COMPELLING AUDIENCE How you think about your audience will radically affect your performance. Your Social Panorama of your training group sets a frame for how you'll think and feel, the states you'll experience, and how you will do in the training situation.
#4. Representation of Participants. We train best when we represent participants in a warm, friendly and human way. How do you represent and conceptualize your "audience?" Do you represent them in a way that makes it easy to talk to each of them in a warm and personal way?
1) Recall a speaking event Think about speaking to a group. Notice how you represent "an audience..." Nice audience: Recall a time when you spoke to a group, felt great, performed at your best, got the kind of responses you wanted. Juice it up with imagining it even better. Notice where you put your audience, their size, what they look like, the submodality distinctions by which you encode this.
Nasty Audience: Recall a time when presenting seemed especially difficult, when the audience was not with you. As you recall this event, notice how you represent your audience. What are the key differences between your nice and nasty groups? Between those that scare you and those that make you roar with a passion.
2) Adjust Your Cinema of an Attractive Audience Where do you put "favored" people (the ones that you like, feel comfortable with, and who respond positively to you)? Adjust the size, shape, location, expressions so that everything invites you to be at your best, share your knowledge, etc. How else can you make your representations so that you see people as real, human, friendly, kind, etc.?
3) Identify and Transfer Resources to Your Audience. Does your internal images of your audience have enough resources? Do they need to be more excited, warm, accepting, welcoming, etc.? Identify the resources that they need and then imagine that resource becoming a Resource Cloud that you can send to your audience.
4)Trainer Editing nd
After you have developed a resourceful perception from which to view your audience, now take 2 position ... float out into various people in your audience and look back to You the Trainer in front of the group. From this perspective (or this multiple perspectives) how can you coach the Trainer You to become more effective? Experiment with being various participants. Do this now from 3 position— float back to the camera man and see the group and the Trainer You participating together, interacting, etc. Offer coaching suggestions to that you from the camera man's point of view. rd
5) Confirm and Future Pace Do you like this? Will the executive level of your mind make this yours?
What stops you? What gets in your way? What sabotage your success?
What state or states do you experience as morbid, toxic, non-enhancing? What negative states of thoughts and/or feelings have you turned against yourself? What have you tabooed in your life? What states, feelings, experiences, etc. do you become intolerant about? What states do you not allow yourself to experience? What states do you forbid yourself or others? What wishes do you not allow into awareness? What impulses do you condemn as not acceptable? How do you feel about (think, perceive) your negative states? What negative judgments do you make about yourself? about the future?
Self-Expectancies: Use any of the following sentence stems to flush out dragons. Do that by generating 5 to 12 statements. Just begin writing. Do not censor whatever comes to mind. Let whatever thoughts come and intrude... just to find out what comes up for you in regard to the following experiences. When I'm disappointed about a training — When I can't get rapport with a group or someone rejects me, I feel or think — When someone criticizes me about something I said or the way I performed— When I find myself being angry or afraid during a training — When I feel exposed or vulnerable, I feel — When I recognize I've made a mistake — If I became highly skilled at training — To become excellent at training and successful, I would have to — When I compare myself with another trainer and feel that I am not as skilled — When we have a smaller group than I wanted in a training — When we have people leaving the training — When the training goes into the financial red —
Step 2: Embrace the Dragon (Kiss your Dragon!) Permission: Do you have permission to experience this emotion, thought, awareness, experience, etc.? Go inside and give yourself permission in a calm and resourceful voice. "I give myself permission to experience this emotion (anger, fear, etc.)... because it is just an emotion... and I am so much more than my emotions... " "I give myself permission to experience this activity, event, etc. because it is just an event and it doesn't define me anymore than I let it..." How does that settle? Do you need to give yourself more permission? How many more times do you need to give yourself permission before it will begin to settle more? Who took permission away from you? Does the taboo really enhance your life? Or does it simply turn your psychic (mind-body) energies against yourself?
Step 3: Analyze the Dragon Ask lots of questions. Dragons are made out of words and sentences that encode our negative thoughts and feelings turned against us. Such language feeds the dragon. By asking lots of indexing questions about the dragon, we challenge it and gather high quality information about it. Ask: when, where, what, how, with whom, etc. Meta-Model the Dragon with Specificity:
Step 4: Starve the Dragon What specifically would help you starve your dragon? Are you willing to stubbornly refuse to allow the old ways of thinking, talking, imagining, remembering, etc.? What referents will you have to say "Hell No!" to?
Interrupt the Dragon: What interrupts your Dragon? What behaviors, thoughts, imaginations, etc. would make your Dragon flee?
GIVING YOURSELF PERMISSION TO BE EXCELLENT! Permission refers to a higher level of mind wherein we sort for proper/ improper; right/wrong; moral/ immoral; authorization/ lack of authorization, etc. Do you have permission inside yourself to be absolutely excellent as a trainer? Will the higher levels of your mind allow that? What will it allow?
The Pattern: 1) Check out your level and nature of permission. Go inside and say, "I give myself permission to X..." Then just notice what arises to awareness. Do you have any sense of an objection? Do any voices, words, conversations, memories, images, etc. come to mind? Do you have a sense of "No " at a higher level of mind preventing, forbidding, objecting?
2) Test it repeatedly until you develop a crystal clarity about permission. Repeatedly go inside and declare your permission. Begin to notice the quality, nature, and texture of the permission. Do you have full permission? How much permission do you have? To what degree? Under what conditions? 3) Quality Control your Sense of Permission How enhancing? Empowering? Validating your sense of your self? 4) Integrate Valid Objections into the Permission. Use any objections that you consider valid to re-write a new permission that honors the concern. "I give myself permission to speak up to authority figures and will do so in a professional and considerate way, recognizing my own equality and rights as a human being, willing to listen to the other person..." 5) Accept and Release (or refuse) Invalid Objections. Use the power of "No!" to reject any objection that you know isn't valid.
THE EXCUSE BLOW-OUT GAME We become emotionally intelligence and access our own mastery when we refuse to let excuses dominate our lives. When excuses do dominate our lives, we essentially choose our excuses over our values and visions. Some excuses are legitimate and useful while most are illegitimate, stupid, and useless. Most waste our time and sabotage our goals. Develop the intelligence to refuse to sell yourself short to such excuses.
1) Access a Desired Outcome What do you want that's very important to you? What outcome do you want to achieve or go for that you know is well-formed and ecological? What is something that would really improve the quality of your life? 2) Let the Excuse or Excuses emerge When you think about carrying it out, do you find that numerous excuses come to mind and stop you from acting on your desired outcome? Take a moment to imagine going ahead with taking action ... and notice what happens. How do you excuse yourself from it? Listen to your internal voice. Feel the excuse. Notice where you feel it in your body. What does it feel like. In your body? How do you know to call it an excuse? 3) Quality Control the Excuse Is it just an excuse? Do you want this excuse? Do you need it? Does it serve your life at all? Does it enhance you or empower you? If there is some part or facet of the excuse that you might need or want to preserve, what is it? What facets of the excuse may serve a positive purpose for you? 4) Preserve the Excuse's Values and Benefits Go inside and preserve any part of the excuse that might prove useful to you in some way at some time. Suck out of the excuse any element (a value, belief, understanding) that could be useful. Suck it all out so that the rest of the excuse remains as an empty shall, devoid of any usefulness at all. Notice the value of the reason— an understanding, belief, or state that you want to keep with you.. Note it and store it as something you can have apart from this particular stupid excuse. Is it now just an excuse? Just an empty shell of an excuse? [Yes] If not, repeat until you just have an empty shell of an excuse left. 5) Reject the Empty Shell of the Old Worn Out Excuse Access a strong "NO!" state, a "Hell, No!" state. Amplify that state of "Rejection, Refusal, or Disgust" that comes out as a "No" fully until you feel it very strongly. Anchor it spatially in a spot and feel it in your hands and in your feet. Let it radiate throughout your body. When you have it accessed very strongly, imagine the empty excuse immediately in front of you and step into that excuse with the NO!" state and Stomp on the excuse with the power of your "hell, No!" Stomp it to the ground. 6) Test Now imagine the desired activity that's ecological and notice what happens as you think about moving toward it... What do you feel? What comes to mind? Do you have any excuse lurking that you might use to excuse yourself from life, love, and commitment?
7) Access Your Executive Decision State Will you do this? Will you allow it to become an attractor in your mind so that as you think of this activity, how you will do it will simply become a matter of discovery and of building the resources so that you can .. and will, will you not? Go to the part of your mind that makes decisions and commission it to go ahead and decide to engage in your desired activity.
Day 4: Excellence in Presentation
UN-INSULTABILITY •
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There is a state of taking insult. We all know that one. There is also a state of being Un-insult-able. The uninsultable state empowers you to take criticism effectively and positively, handle communication interchanges, conflicts, confrontations, and people in bad moods with much more grace and resourcefulness. Un-insult-ability eliminates the emotional black-hole of criticism and enables us to positively take communications so we can use them constructively. This allows us to hear out complaints, even harsh and cruel criticism, without getting defensive. Since everybody seems skilled at dishing out criticism, most people must have the ability to take it well and use it for learning and growth. Right? Not quite. Most of us are sensitive to receiving criticism. Few seem to know how to make good use of criticism. Most use criticism never think of responding to criticism with good feelings or of putting the best twist on criticism. Most take insult all too easily. How do you typically respond to criticism? Would you want a state that allows you to move through the world Un-Insultable? How easily can you move into a meta-state about a criticism viewing it as just information and feedback? How easy can you respond from a state where you take it with no displeasure, dismay, discouragement, depression, but with contentment, delight, appreciation, understanding, etc.?
Elicit your Strategy for Taking Insult: Insultablity 1) Identify a referent experience: When have you been insulted that you didn't handle it all that well? Have you ever took insult from someone? How did you do that? What enabled you to do that? How did you current think or feel about the criticism? How easy do you take offense? What do you think-and-feel about the person criticizing you? How aware are you that the intent behind most criticism is to make things better? What do you say to yourself when you're criticized? This is insulting! I don't want to hear this. They don't have the right to criticize. __ These words mean I am inadequate. This is attack of my self-esteem! What Dragons emerge at the first sign of criticism? 2) Explore your Strategy and Insult Matrix: How do you think-and-feel about criticism? What's the first thing that comes to your mind? What do you think-and-feel about the person of the critic? Do you inevitably feel a sense of displeasure? 3) Check for the following features: Representations: How encoded in the movie that you play? How fast does the information come in? Others: Caring about what the other thought. Boundaries: Lack or weakness of personal boundaries. Self: Lack of a strong sense of "self," confidence to handle things. Intentions: Lack of a strong sense of values, Visions, etc. Meanings: Map/Territory confusion.
Design Engineer a Meta-State Structure of Un-Insultablity: 1) State Boundaries: How strong, present, how much energy and strength in your boundaries? Do you need to slow down the speed of the process? Give time and space for reflection?
2) Sense of Self: Do you have a strong and unconditional sense of your Core Self? Access your Power Zone (responsibility) and take complete ownership of those powers. Access Acceptance, Appreciation, and Awe (Esteem) and apply to Self. Access your confidence in your Skills and Abilities (Self-confidence). 3) Others: Frames of Meaning about Insult, put-downs, reputation, honor, etc. What can you believe about words and actions "out there" in order to keep them "out there?" What supporting beliefs, meanings, etc. would enable you to reframe "insult?" How do you represent Others? Pattern for installing un-insultability 1) Identify a referent event What do you want to have more choices, flexibility, and power in handling? Identify in your mind a trigger event of insult. What is that like?
Step aside from the content Psychological distance Ownership of your Power Zone Appreciation Curiosity: "tell me more..." Defusing Skills Humanize the critic Optimistic Explanatory Style Distinguish Language and Meaning Say "No!" to criticism that doesn't fit
Keep presence of mind about the criticism Refusal to take personal Self-Integrity Ability to listen with a quiet and receptive mind Discern Responsibility To / For Able to stay emotionally centered Self-Esteeming Distinguish Behavior from Person Recognize as Feedback; just words and not the territory
3) Sequence the states that you want to set as Frames in terms of being Un-Insultable. What sequence of resources makes the most sense to you? What is it like to access each individually and applying them? When you feel this and notice how it transforms that criticism, do you feel un-insultable yet? 4) Keep Layering until the Gestalt emerges. What belief frames, value frames, decision frames, identity frames, etc. will support you along the way? Have you identified the best frames for un-insultability yet? 5) Solidify with higher supporting frames. Do you like this? Want to keep it? How would enrich your life? And you'd like that? Are you willing to keep it? Provoke to elicit a meta-No in losing it. You won't remember it! 6) Quality Control the new gestalt state. Would this empower you as a person? Enhance your life? Are you fully aligned with it?
7) Future pace and Commission at a higher executive level
Menu List of Resources for Un-Insult-ability:
Defusing Skills: Are you skilled at defusing someone who is hot, angry, irritable, etc.?
Others Matrix: Distinguish the Person of your critic from his or her Behavior and words: Are you willing to refuse to confuse your critic's behavior with his or her person? Are you willing to esteem your critic?
Appreciation: Are you able to appreciate your critic or the criticism? "I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. It offers me feedback that could possible benefit me." The idea that "There is no Criticism, only information," enables us to thank our critic.
Humanize your Critic: Suppose someone screams obscenities to you, adopt a humanizing perspective, and listen empathically: "Interesting words. His words, of course, not mine. He has the right to say such. He must really feel insecure and grumpy to talk this way." Un-insultable! "I really want to hear what you've got to say. It sounds like you feel very angry at me, and I will hear out your anger. But when you cuss at me like this, I have a hard time hearing you. If I promise to listen to you would you promise to stop the obscenities?" Un-insultable!
State Matrix; Get a sense of Distance: What happens when you imagine the criticism coming from two blocks away? What happens when you imagine the critic speaking from behind a wall of plexiglass? Meaning Matrix; Invent lots of empowering reasons for explaining the criticism. Since in order to feel insulted, we have to "take" insult, do you have some compelling reasons to stop that? It's just Information: Do you know at the feeling level that words are just information? "Would you tell me more? Just how do you think I exist as a turkey, or why I am clumsy. How specifically do I remind you of a turkey?" Optimistic Explanatory Style. Will you use the optimistic style to explain why your critic criticizes? Distinguish Language and Meaning: Do you know that we supply the meaning to words? Just Feedback: Do you understand that criticism is just words, symbols, and feedback? Power and Others Matrices; Refuse to Counter-Attack:
Are you willing to respond kindly rather than counter-attack? "It sounds like you have some things about which you really want to set me straight. Does that represent your position? Do you feel that this comprises your best choice to accomplish this? What do you hope to accomplish by this? How do you expect me to respond to you as you so express yourself? I want to hear you out, would you express yourself so that I could feel you offer this within a context of care and respect?"
Hold a critic responsible: "If I do this wrong, what do you suggest I ought to do? Will you help me to do it right?"
Just say "No!" to criticism that does not fit. Are you willing to say "no thanks" when someone offers a criticism that you think inappropriate? "Thanks, but it does not fit at this time." Listen to criticism and explore it without buying it wholesale. Evaluate it: true or false, accurate or erroneous, useful or irrelevant.
ACCESSING YOUR PERSONAL GENIUS AS A PRESENTER 1) Access the new desired focus state What focused state of engagement would you like to build? What do you call that state? Have you ever had a little bit of it? Good. Access that bit seeing what you saw, hearing what you heard, and feeling what you felt. Go there and be with it fully. Amplify. Use your imagination and the "What If..:" Frame to assist. 2) Access a simple state of Just Observing Step in and out of this new genius state, practicing a clean state shift, in order to make the distinctions that allow you know how to have it upon cue. 3) Use your Executive Mind to further develop the genius state Re-access the state and then rise up in your mind to the part of your mind that makes decisions and answer the following questions. Time: When should you have this state? When should you not? Place: Where should you have this state? Where not? Reasons: Why should you? Your reasons, agendas, motivations? Why should you not? Style: How should you? In what way, with what style? How should you not? Contexts: In what context or contexts? In what contexts should you not? Criteria: According to what other criteria and qualities? Resources: What other resources would you like to add to this state that would even more fully express the quality and efficiency that you want? Any other resources to add to the genius state? Love, respect, daring, fallibility, balance, etc.? Value: Why should you have this state? How would it be valuable to you? Relationship: With whom? With whom not? Meaning: For what significance or meaning? What meanings to not give it? Emergencies: For what will you be interrupted? What emergencies will bring you out? Other: Any other considerations that you would like to determine the boundaries of this genius state? 4) Commission the Executive Meta-State and Future Pace • Are you willing to take full responsibility for setting these parameters for this commitment state so that this person can fully experience this commitment state? [Yes!] • Are you willing to take responsibility for letting this person fully experience this intense and passionate state? For knowing the limits and boundaries, when to have it and when not, how to have it and how not, will you signal X when to step out? • As you imagine moving out into your future, are you fully aligned with this? Any objections?
PRESENTING WITH "PRESENCE OF MIND" AS THINKING ON YOUR FEET
What is pressure for you as a speaker? How do you experience such pressure? What triggers the fight/flight response when on stage? Menu: time pressure, non-acceptance of your message, non-involvement, yawning, conflict, disagreement, inner demands, the "shoulds," financial pressures, etc
2) Identify Resources and the best structure. What resources do you need to have in order to handle such pressures? Menu: calm, fun, playful, self-efficacy, centered, grounded, appreciation, respect, focus, passion, courage, mischievous, humorous, connected, wonder, excited, etc.
3) Design Engineer the new state. Use your discoveries to design engineer the meta-stating for the gestalt to emerge. Spatially anchor 3 to 5 resources states around the pressure state. 4) Access and Amplify each resource. Use small and simple examples until you access the state, then keep layering it with more of the resources. Practice stepping in and out and applying the resources to the pressure state. 5) Apply to your primary level situation Future pace this enriching resource to how you think, perceive, feel, talk, and act at work, home, in relationships, or wherever. 6) Install by making an empowering Decision for it, then Meta-Yes it. Are you willing to make this your program? How will it affect your self-definition?
SUPPORTING BELIEFS FOR PRESENTING Training isn't for the faint of heart! Do you need to beef up your attitude about training? Would you like to? How would you like to beef up your beliefs as a trainer? If beliefs are commands to the nervous system, what would you like to believe? Beliefs do not have to be true to be useful, just enabling principles. Which will you choose to "believe?"
List of Limiting beliefs that sabotage our best as trainers: People with more education than I have are intimating. People with more money are intimating. People from a different culture, race, are intimating. To be video-taped means I have to be flawless.
Marketing yourself is hard. Preparation is long and hard. I can't stand being criticized.
Make a list of empowering ideas that you'd appreciate and enjoy "running your programs" as a presenter/trainer.
What beliefs do the trainers who you know and respect seem to use to navigate their way? What beliefs correspond to
the training principles?
Menu list of beliefs: "Training is an ongoing process." "My personal significance and importance is not dependent upon my training skills." "I train because it's fun empowering others." "There is no failure in training, just lots of feedback about how to do it better, and better." "Every participant has all the needed resources and only needs some training with them."
PASSIONATE TRAINING Bandler focuses on being Ferocious enough to "Go for it!" This describes a Passion that's big enough to handle anything Here is his Puma Induction from Persuasion Engineering: "Before you look at your client, what I want you to do is to stop, and I want you to just put out in front of you, float up in your mind, and look down and see a forty foot puma. Sleek with big white teeth, black fur, shining, and what I want you to do is, in your mind, I want you to float down inside of that Puma. Look out of its eyes. See. And what I want you to do is to put a big mountain on either side of you and be at the beginning of the ravine that goes down and way down that ravine, and look at your client down at the beginning of it. I want you to paw the ground and see them actually lift off of it. I want you to lick your chops and roar for a minute and feel yourself purr, that purr that says, 'Your ass is mine.' "But I'm not hungry just yet. I want you to look on the mountain on either side of you and see the electricity crackin' down that ravine, striking on either side of that client of yours, and realize that the lightning is coming from your fingertips. Now, when you look down at the client in your mind, right now, my question is, 'Do you feel the same?'... (pp. 88-89).
1) Access awareness of your Passion about training. What are you passionate about? What else? How hungry are you for that? What if you began to feel yourself drool for it? Hear a growl rising up in your throat! 2) Put this passionate ferocity into your circle of excellence. Now imagine turning this loose... and letting it rip .. how does that feel? 3) Step in and fully experience it As you let yourself say "Yes!" to this... Feel it and enjoy it and wonder, really wonder, what parts of you will have to shift and transform to stretch this far.... now. Remembering that NLP/NS is at attitude, developed in and by relationships, supported by a methodology, and that leaves behind it a trail of techniques. And now you have the attitude, do you not?
1) Identify a response you don't like: behavior, emotion, habit, response. What response do you make that you don't like? Describe in sensory-based terms the primary state experience level that you want to become more skilled and resourceful in. 2) Meta-state it regard its Positive Intent What do you seek to accomplish of value for yourself by this response? Keep asking this positive intention question of the behavior. This part or behavior has become organized to accomplish something significant and important for you— but what? 3) Meta-state about Positive Intent of that Positive Intent and repeat What will that response do for you that you deem of value and importance? What will that do for you that's even more important?
5) From the highest meta-states future pace back down through other states to the primary state and beginning "problem." If you had this resourceful fully and completely, how would that transform things for you? Answer quietly within taking all the time you need.
Benchmarks for Self-Evaluating: Definition: Evaluating a person's skill level using an agreed upon criteria list with sensory-based behaviors to improve knowledge and skills over time. Regularly evaluates knowledge and skills against agreed criteria in many contexts over time. Validates own rating by seeking external evaluation by others against the same criteria. Develops own criteria for defined newly differentiated skills. Uses proven criteria to evaluate self knowledge and skills for increased effectiveness in a single context over time. Uses ranked criteria to evaluate own knowledge and differentiated skills to improve performance. Compare performance with personal ideals and only against a list of skill gradation differentiated by the criteria definition in a minor way. Compare self with others, seeks to improve by emulating them. No evaluation of skills, no sensory feedback about skills; responding to self with statements of judgment, praise or blame.
Benchmarks for Modeling: Definition: Identifying the structure and patterning within an experience and using it to replicate that model. Being a good example of state management, being uninsultable, modeling the skills, information presenting.
Definition: Using knowledge and skills within the framework of a specific model (like the Meta-Model, Meta-Programs, Meta-States, Matrix, Mind-Lines, etc.) to elicit other patterns of human behavior which leads to replications etc. Using knowledge and skills in the framework of a model for consistency and efficacy that leads to successful outcomes, retrospective analysis, greater understanding of the process, synthesis of other models and consistent replication of successful intervention. See and hear client through a model and make judgements and analyses based on experience and current evidence, which lead to a strategy for effective interventions. Populates model with client data, uses such to inform practice, uses model in thinking and speaking to facilitate change processes. Understands a model and uses it for retrospective analysis and developing understanding. Describes how the model provides structure and insight. Knows of models, speaks about them, and even uses them, but with little effect. Knows of models and seeks to relate it to practice under supervision and training. Seldom remembers to use the model to look for patterns. Talks only about the content details of a subject with no reference to any model, behaves as if there's nothing above the contents.
CERTIFICATION ACTIVITIES Presentations: 1) Presentation of content: something in NLP or Neuro-semantics. 2) Demonstration of a process or pattern 3) Handling Open Questions 4) Introducing a speaker 5) Speaking Personally
Evaluation Criteria: The evaluations of your presentations will be made according to the following things: 1) Engagement 2) State Induction 3) Effectiveness of the communication: Voice, Space, Language, Memorable How well you use the tools of our trade: what you say and how you say it. 4) Frames Debriefing on Presentations There will be several questions that we will ask after every presentation. These will enable us to focus in on a number of critical factors in presenting and training: 1) Engagement: Did it grab you? Were you engaged by it? Did you get caught up in the content of the presentation? Did the presenter scoop you in with his or her eyes and make you feel included? 2) State Induction: How did you feel? What states did the presentation induce in you? What states were conveyed to you about the presenter? 3) Frames: What frames did this person set? How? What preframes? How can this trainer take his or her skills to the next level? 4) Overall Effectiveness (gestalt from everything else): What really worked well in this presentation? What worked well linguistically? What gestures really worked well? What use of space? What opening and closing of loops?
5) Recommendations for enhancement and enrichment What suggestions can you offer? What would you like to see different?
INTRODUCTIONS And now will you warmly welcome As trainers and presenters we will be introduced and we will introduce people. This is a crucial part of the pre-framing that can tremendously influence things. Don't leave this to chance. Help your introducer out by having something prepared.
Task: Write one to three Introduction pieces to yourself. How do you want to be introduced? What do you want the emcee to say about you that will introduce you to the audience and set some frames for why and/or how they should listen to you? 1) Write an Introduction for a Professional Gathering. 2) Write an Introduction for a Training in Personal Genius. 3) Write an Introduction for you at a free Introduction Night for NLP and NS.
Possibilities:
Considerations: Do not start with the person's name, build up the introduction so that you end with the person's name. "And now ... will you warmly welcome Dr. Bobby Bodenhamer!" Do not "read" it with your head buried in the paper. Read it several times... so that you can use quick glances at the paper as you keep in eye contact with your audience. Sell benefits and mention features. Mention what the person has done and can do and will do for the audience. Build up reasons why the people gathered should pay attention to this person. Mention things that build credibility and interest.
DEVELOPING PRESENTATION ELEGANCE
1) Engagement: Share personal experience by telling a story. Surprises Ask a question that engages? Catches attention. Drama: act out something Begin a dialogue with the audience. Silence State your theme and use it as a constant refrain. Mime Use humor: be playful with your words, tease yourself. Use of title or quotation Personalize the presentation by a piece of self-disclosure and vulnerability. Give lots of examples. Use of Metaphor Pace the current situation: put into words the states, emotions, and experiences of the participants. Use engaging eye contact. Flush out vital information. Do something stark, surprising. Incorporate whatever happens 2) Desired States: Identify a list of states that you want to induce and have ways of eliciting those states. Go first: step into the state and begin to express it... let the energy of that state lead your audience to it, Tell a metaphor that presupposes the state. 3) Frames: Make a list of the frames of mind that you expect people to be in and those that you want to set. Identify how you will set the frames — what tools and mechanisms you will use.
4) Effectiveness in your Communications: Use great mind-lines to succinctly express your theme, ask an engaging question. Use statements that are memorable. Use metaphors and stories. Use poetry. Rap. Use a variety of kinds of statements: Statements that explain Questions that explore Exclamations that declare Narrative Dialogue Refrains that set themes Poetry Music Metaphor Open/ Closing of Loops Use of Voice: Tone and tempo
Pauses
Projection of voice
EVALUATION CRITERIA Choosing Your Criteria What criteria do you want to evaluate yourself on and have others use to evaluate you? Make a list of your highest desired criteria that you're willing to use for your evaluation as being the kind of training and providing the kind of trainings that you want to provide. Look at your Top 10 Training States. What do they say about your highly desired criteria? Menu List of Criteria: Smooth Dramatic Variety Thought-provoking
Compelling Energetic Firm Reassuring
Simple Playful Charming Warm
Practical Respectful Layered Concise
My List (2001): 1) Playful and fun 2) Engaging and entrancing 3) Insightful and practical 4) Inspiring in helping people catch a bigger vision of the abundant potential that's available. 5) Direct and forthright... giving clear instructions. 6) Suggestive and teasing — yet not telling all. 7) Personal, personable — warm and authentic. 8) Magical — having a touch of magic.
Speaking Personally When we speak from our heart about our relationship with a group and about our feelings, we speak from our inmost self and this allows people to see us— see us for who we are. This makes us much more masterful as trainers. In accessing the state of authenticity, we want to become comfortable and composed in just being ourselves. What frame do you need to set to do this? It's okay to be me. It's excellent to present self as a model and exemplar, even if an imperfect one. People need to know who we are and that we care before they listen to what we have to say. How do we do this? We do it by saying something that's important to us. "The most important thing in my life is..." "My most exciting hope right now is..." "What I want to do with my NS Training is..." "One of my goals in the next year is..."
DAYS 5
TRAINING SKILLS (Days 5 to 8) "Nobody can force change on anyone else. It has to be experienced. Unless we invent ways where paradigm shifts can be experienced by large numbers of people, then change will remain a myth." Eric Trist (The Change Handbook)
Training Skills differ from Platform Skills and offer another set of distinctions about how a trainer uses the stage or platform for facilitating the development of new skills. • What are the critical and essential Training Skills? • What are the skills that are critical, crucial, and essential for a trainer? • What skills must a trainer have? • What are the skills of an excellent and masterful trainer?
1) Engagement 2) Spatial anchoring 3) Establishing rapport and relationship 4) Using voice effectively 5) Eliciting or inducing states 6) Framing Reframing, Pre-framing, Post-framing, Outframing 7) Communicating through stories, metaphors, inductions 8) Giving Feedback 9) Receiving Feedback 10) Installing 11) Demonstrating 12) Handling questions 13) Making things memorable 14) Facilitating learning 15) Setting up exercises 16) Challenging safely 17) Designing trainings 18) Opening and closing loops 19) Unpacking demonstrations and experiences 20) Relevancy: Keeping things relevantly focused 21) Transitioning: Providing a variety of transitions 22) Presenting from genius or focused state 23) Pacing meta-programs 24) Modeling 25) Thinking systemically 26) Trouble-shooting problems 27) Handling group dynamics 28) Monitoring progress 29) Facilitating and coaching dialogue
Organizing and planning a training Negotiating for venue, mailing, etc. Creating and preparing manuals and hand-outs Preparing the training room: environment, structure, access, atmosphere, etc. Sponsoring and co-sponsoring Marketing: finding and create your market Positioning yourself in the market Establishing credibility, branding Selling your services Working with media: radio, television, newspaper, magazines
INTRODUCING TRAINING WHAT — WHY — FOR WHO "The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage." Arie De Geus, Head of planning for Royal Dutch/ Shell Organisations, UK. The importance of businesses becoming learning organizations to keep current with the market place, and especially if they want to lead the marketplace identifies the role of trainers and training. Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization "The head of training for Motorola recently estimated that the company is getting thirty dollars back for every dollar it spends on training its people. This is said to be the highest payoff investment of time and money that the company can make." (p. 162) Brian Tracy, The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success
WHAT IS TRAINING? Training is first and foremost about facilitating and coaching. While training is also involves presenting, teaching, questioning, leading discussions, demonstrating, framing, etc., the heart of training is the art of assisting another to develop an informed skill and have it at his or her command.
WHY TRAINING? Here's some great news—we train because "knowledge" is not just a thing of the head. True knowledge is experiential. It is felt knowledge that's "in the body." And that's where Neuro-Semantics comes in. We train because knowledge alone doesn't produce the skilled ability to do things. We need an integration of our neurosemantic system so it is in our perception, touch, movement, muscles, and attitude.
This is good news? Yes. This is great news for the trainer. With the new workplace becoming de-stabilized, people need more skills for what has been called the "soft" skills of emotional intelligence (E.Q.): flexibility, communicating, getting along, handling stress, framing and reframing, understanding their own emotions and handling them effectively, etc. There is a new and growing need for consultants, coaches, and trainers. Today training is in the competitive advantage factor in business and entrepreneurship. Those who do not
The most successful organizations, corporations, and groups are those whose leadership enables the entire organization to use all of their resources. Among any company's best assets and resources are their people, their talented and energized people. Most companies give lip-service to this. Personnel departments are now called "Human Resources." The problem is that most are not truly empowering people to think, question, look for better ways, etc. The knowledge in the field of business and the principles of success far exceed what most businesses actually do.
DiKamp(1996): "If organizations are really to be dynamic, effective, and resourceful, they need to be full of dynamic, effective, and resourceful people. This means that they need individuals to 'buy in' to the change and commit themselves to being a part of it." (p. 10) "To be effective in a world of constant change and development demands an ability to be constantly learning and developing." It is only recently that concepts such as 'the learning organization' and 'life-long learning for individuals' have come to the fore. These concepts have to be turned into reality by enabling people to view training and development as a positive and vital continuous learning." (p. 18)
Positioning Ourselves for Training in Business
Meta-Training moves to a level higher to specific content and works with attitude. Training starts with need assessment, skill identification, benchmarking or modeling best practices, transferring skills, installing supporting beliefs, values, decisions, understandings, and doing so both explicitly and implicitly.
1) Why? Why is this training important? What will it achieve? What will it do for the participants? Why do you want to provide it? There's a relationship in training between our outcomes and the outcomes of participants. "I know that you don't have a choice about attending this training and I know that can get in your way and my way of you getting any value out of this experience, especially if this training could provide some information or skills that would enhance your work."
2) What? What will you teach, present, and train? What is your offering? What is the training about? What content, ideas, skills, patterns, etc. will you facilitate, teach, and coach? What ideas, understandings, models, etc. will you present? What skills and processes will you want to train people for or in? Aim for structured flexibility, not for flexibility in structure, that leads to chaos, or for structured structure that leads to rigidity. 3) How? How will you do it? How will you offer what you have to offer? What processes, techniques, and training patterns will you use? How will you carry the training off? What will be the style of your training? The feel of it? Will it be dynamic, boring, matter-of-fact, rehearsal of traditional ideas, cutting-edge, exploratory, meeting the demands of an organization, energetic, playful, entertaining, respectful, insulting, challenging, comforting, etc.?
4) So what? What different will it make tomorrow, next week, over time for the participants? What if... ? Consider the things that get get in the way. What are the constraints about using a given pattern?
The 4-MAT Design 4-Mat System
Learning Style
Kolb
Bernice McCarthy
1) Why? Reasons and explanations Why are we doing this? Why learn this? Start with the whys to create motivation.
Discussion
Abstract
2) What? Information, facts, data. What is this about? What is the subject
Teaching
Concrete
3) How? Practical how-to knowledge How does this work?
Coaching
Active experimenting
4) What if? Exploration of possibilities What would happen if I did this? Explore the consequences and possibilities
Self-Discovery
Reflective observation
Training Activities Design: Typically in NLP and Neuro-semantics, what we do in a training involves:
1) Explanations: We explain and describe what NLP and NS is, what it can do for you, how it works, etc. In doing this, we use propositional language that's forthright and direct. This is the "teaching" part and can degenerate into lecturing. Here also we can use storytelling, personal disclosures, and case studies.
2) Demonstrations: Overtly and explicitly, we demonstrate and show how a process works. Covertly and more implicitly, we also demonstrate by how we do our training itself
3) Exercises: We offer hands-on processes and patterns and encourage people and coach them to try on the patterns and see how they work, what they experience, and what they learn.
4) Debriefing and Open discussions: We engage in dialogue exchanges to find out what participants have learned, what worked well, what did not, etc. This employs the use of feedback and invites people to develop a new and better relationship to feedback and to continuous improvement.
5)Inductions:
Benchmarking the 4-Mat Analysis of a Presentation Definition: Checking for the why, what, how, and what //"dimensions of a presentation. Why describes the reasons, benefits, values, outcomes, intentions. What? describes the information and content presented; How? describes processes, strategies and techniques. What if? describes possibilities (both positive and negative), consequences, and alternatives.
Why: Reasons presented elegantly and seamlessly, integrated to content, no attention to reasons as separate part. What: Description complete and clear, many illustrating metaphors, well balanced in information. How: Process information given in multiple ways, direct sequential information, story, metaphor, demo, so that it is 'installed' simultaneously. What if: Many examples of other possibilities and consequences offered, no questions about other possibilities.
Why: 2-3 statements suggesting benefits or the harms if not. What: Subject not sufficiently defined, as evidenced by the questions about the subject. How: Process information given, but insufficiently to carry it out; poorly sequenced, lack of linear structure. What if: Some mention but only briefly, without any details or follow-up.
Why: No reason given for learning the subject, no mention of benefits and values. What: Failure to even mention of the subject content; all focus on why, how and what if. How: No process information; all information solely about theory, concept, reasons. What if: No alternatives as to other possibilities, no pre-framing for trouble, shooting difficulties.
DEVELOPING YOUR MATERIALS
1) Clarify your main idea Clarify your main idea until you have a clearly defined and articulated description of the training. Write the basic idea of the training down. What is your overall theme? Is that description memorable, motivating, compelling, understandable? You are not ready until it is. Establish outcomes for the training every hour or couple hours to establish sub-goals that build up to the larger outcome of the training. 2) Brainstorm and download all of your ideas Brainstorm about how to put together the pieces that will make up the training: presentation, demonstration, readings, demonstrations, hands-on experiences, etc. Arrange these in an order that logically moves participants from present state to desired state. This will endow your training with direction and coherence. 3) Create an outline that tracks the line of reasoning and the states. Once you have an outline or flow chart you can use it to test and govern the structure of your materials. Give your training a memorable title.
Sequencing the flow of events during the training: Design a flow chart that designates the pathway for the learning and skill development. Does it move from simple ideas and exercises to increasingly complex ones? Does the training build? Does it move from safe exercises to more risky ones?
5) With your model in mind, Meta-Detail it: By overview, you orient both yourself and your participants to the subject, the direction and movement of the training. Then you can use your principles and outcomes as your meta-level governor to guide yourself and the group. • What am I presenting? • To whom am I presenting? Who is my audience? What do they need? • Where am I in the process? Is it working? Would another format or sequence work better? • What outcome am I moving toward at any given stage in the process? What outcome does my audience need?
Clarity of Purpose, Intention and Outcome can then lead to INTENTIONAL TRAINING With your outcome in mind, who are your participants? What do they want Do they want knowledge, skill, states: beliefs, values, character, remedial training, generative training, public or in-house training? What is the content of your presentation?
OPENING AND CLOSING LOOPS Training can be seen as a whole series of process outcomes nested one inside another like a Russian doll, all aligned with, and included in, the main outcome." (O'Connor and Seymour, p. 127)
The Skill of Layering and Embedding Messages: What is a loop? A loop of what? We can "open" a subject, thought, theme, or story and then "close" that loop much later. Leaving something unfinished tends to elicit thoughts and feelings of tension and stress which then drives the need for closure in people who have the meta-program of "Closure." For them, this can build response potential, an inner hunger or need for closure. Closing it later creates and installs a mental contextual frame around whatever was said between the leaving open of the loop and the closing of it.
Layering of States Upon States State Information the evokes worry stress, dread about conflict State Information that evokes calmness, relaxation about the emotion of fear State Information that evokes curiosity, excitement about empowerment over emotions State Information that evokes playful fun about State 1
3
4
3
Advanced Metaphors (Opening/Closing Loops) Andrew Bryant The multiple embedded metaphor is technique for creating overload, confusion and amnesia. It is an expansion on the Milton Model Pattern of the Extended Quote. The basic process is to tell a story within one or more other stories. Bandler refers this to as opening and closing loops. Each story can make multiple points that the listener can use to find solutions to his or her problems. In fact, this is a way to address several problems at once. The reason for creating amnesia is that this keeps the conscious mind from sabotaging the solutions generated in the unconscious searches. The structure of an embedded metaphor is like this: | Introduction: A conversational induction that may or may not link to the first story. | Story A begins: This follows the basic metaphor formula | Story B begins: This grows out of the first story in some way, e.g., a character in the story tells a story (extended quote). Story B story stimulates the listener to access resources | Story C is told to completion: This story grows out of story B and is told to completion and contains hints and tip for the listener to solve their problem. The story may emphasise support systems, imagery, words and phrases and new behaviours. | Story B ends: A connection is made back to story B whose ending links ideas and resources from story C to the desired outcome. Previous resources from B are reiterated to reinforce the point. | Story A ends: A connection is made back to the first story. This closing further reinforces resources and solutions and future paces the outcome. The ending can be logical or a surprise. Finishing with a suitable quotation can add weight as well as increase the amnesic effect. | Re-orientation: The listener is brought back to the present with positive commands to continue to work on the change which is presupposed to be already in progress.
Metaphor Play: Exercise 1: Write and advanced metaphor to be used in a NS training. Practice the delivery over the next few days and be prepared to deliver it to the whole class.
Exercise 1: Write 5 basic metaphors that you will use in a NS training prior to introducing a new topic.
META-PROGRAM DESIGN In order to maximize the state of accelerated learning, get people motivated right from the start, put the information in the formatting (metaprograms) that match most people, give meaning and context to the pieces in the training, evoke a sense of achievement and accomplish at each step along the way, use all of the representational systems, have people step into their representations, build in redundancy so that you repeat the strategy or knowledge or skill in numerous ways.
Invite both matching and mismatching: For those who sort for things to match and who ask themselves, "What fits? How does this match what I already know?" Give them things to match that they already know and agree with. For those who mismatch and ask themselves, "How does this differ from what I already know? What doesn't fit here?" Give them things to mismatch and tell them things that they can't do or understand. They will then work to defeat you!
Designing a Presentation: 1) Design a 1 hour presentation on rapport, anchoring, or "sub-modalities." 2) Design a 3 hour training on an NLP Pattern. 3) Structure it to answer the 4 questions: Why, What, How, So What?
DEMONSTRATING Demonstrations are engaging and offer a model for how to do a process. • What criteria will we want to use to evaluate our demos? • Validating, safety, and security, what did it actually demonstrate? • Was it effective? • What frames and states did it elicit? • Was it engaging? • Did you focus both on the participant and the audience?
Frames to set for those who Volunteer for the Demonstration:
1) Appreciation: Thank you for being so brave as to come up here and show these people what it really means to have a "go for it" attitude!
2) Privilege: It really is an honor to go first and I want to honor you for doing this with me.
3) This is just to practice a process: 4) Content free: I don't need much detailed information. Nosy people can buy the gossip sheets at the grocery store. This isn't for that.
5) Safety: Frames for selecting someone to volunteer: 1) Use Qualification questions. Who has...? Who has something that would fit the format of "When I want to do this, I start but then something gets in my way?" 2) Offer a menu list of examples. This will "prime the pump" and enable people to begin to select what to work on.
Frames to set if the demonstration wasn't quite what you wanted.
1) Acknowledge and lead in the direction you want. "Now that took longer than I expected... so I want you to be more efficient than I was here and finish this in just ten minutes."
Benchmarks for Demonstrating:
Definition: Presenting a process that engages the audience in how to do a process or pattern by introducing its components in a step by step fashion, using the demonstration to teach or illustrate, clearly sequencing between working with a volunteer from the audience and speaking to the audience about the process being illustrated.
Smooth sequencing from one step to the next, weaving the audience in the interaction, validating the volunteer, immediately made relevant to the audience, excitement and eagerness to do it, as evidence by people saying "When can we do this?" Celebrates and utilizes the unexpected. The demonstration occurs seamlessly and elegantly making the point and show participants how to do the process, the process introduced and debrief to satisfaction of participants, it is future paced for the audience; if unexpected happens, remains unperturbed but explains and post-frames; appreciates the unexpected. Well paced and timed, directions given clearly in a step-by-step fashion, maintains balanced rapport with both the volunteer and the audience; presenter focuses attention on the process not self, audience still asking some questions on how to do it, accepts the unexpected. Clearer sequencing, smoother transitions, loses rapport with the audience while speaking to the volunteer, can be disoriented and lose balance if something unexpected happens. Demonstration is not framed at all, or poorly framed about its purpose, role, and/or process; no sequencing of the steps, no rapport with audience or participant, no sense of time, no outcome, presenter interrupts process in a jarring way leaving the volunteer looking frustrated , upset, or embarrassed; no audience involvement, completely overwhelmed by the unexpected. No demonstration, forgets to demonstrate, fails to schedule time for demonstration.
UNPACKING The Skill or Art of "Unpacking" Definition: By unpacking we refer to being able to describe the structure level or process level of an experience and to provide insightful understanding so that participants can go and then do the process. 1) Relevance: Listen for relevant structure and points for the participant's level of learning. What structure will you be listening for? (MP, Matrix, MS, etc.) How did it work? What was critical about what happened? You'll need the Procedural meta-program to be Sequential, step-by-step. Active MP - in expressing succinctly. Global to detail: hence meta-detailing... Difference to Same MP: to identify the critical factors that make a difference, point those out and match for sameness with audience so that it can be replicated. 2) Succinctness: Express things succinctly. Not a "presentation" time, but a "getting to the heart of things" quickly. Get out of the "teaching" mode. Not about teaching. Access a "let's get down to business" state of mind and body. 3) Questioning: Express via Questioning Coach the group to identify the structure via asking questions
4) Behaviors: Focus on Behaviors. It is about the actions, behaviors, processes that the trainer did that you are unpacking. It is not about the trainer him or herself. It's not about praise. What did you see? What did you hear? 5) Reinforcement: Highlight what has already been taught. (i.e., rapport, matching, etc.) Did you see X? Did you spot Y? Highlight these factors in order to reinforce them in the behavior of participants.
6) Invisible structure. What's not been said? What frames-by-implication have been set? Form: Interruption Space for client Rapport and matching Highlight or put the spotlight on structural features: MP, MS, language, movie structures, tracking skills, etc.
FEEDBACK What is feedback? "Mistakes are toothless little things if you recognize and correct them. If you ignore or defend them, they grow fangs and bite." (Dee Hock, 1999,
Birth of the Chaordic Age, p.280)
P r e c i s e S e n s o r y - B a s e d behavioral information O u t c o m e o r i e n t e d a n d relevant Action-able t h a t gives next s t e p in small e l e m e n t s without judgment with care, interest, and benevolence as immediately as possible
Principles: "There is no failure, there is only feedback; and all feedback can be used positively for refinement of skills." We need feedback. We need good, accurate, useful, and reflective feedback that truly assists us in tuning up our skills and getting new patterns down. Giving timely feedback depends upon the exercise. Typically do it after you have practiced a pattern. Review the process—what was superb? What needs some tuning up?
RECEIVING FEEDBACK: 1) Meaning: Identify your current frame (meta-state/s) about feedback (correction, error detection, etc.). When you think about someone informing you (telling you) that you made a mistake, error, messed up, did something wrong, etc., what thoughts and feelings come to mind? What state does that put you in? What do you believe about that?
2) Meaning: Deframe the old Frames of Meaning to Dragon Slay or Tame the old States. Do these states enhance your learning abilities? Do these states, frames, meaning serve your creativity, growth, understandings, etc.? How do they represent ill-formed maps? 3) State: Separate feedback from the person and even the style. Most people really do not know how to given sensory-based feed back. They give judgment, evaluation, mind-reading statements, hallucinations. Refuse to let their incompetence or sloppiness to deprive you of useful feedback. How? By coaching them to translate their judgments into sensory-based referents so that you can receive it and experience it as "just information." Meta-model them with indexing questions. 4
4) Meaning: Frame and reframe feedback. What do you now want to think about feedback so you find it acceptable and even valued? Intention: Why do you want to receive feedback? How will it help you? For what purpose? 5) Texture your state with the qualities and resources for a Robust Feedback State. What do you need to texture your feedback state with? Do you need more patience, acceptance, appreciation, recognition of positive intention, commitment to yourself, to your learning, to your budding genius, etc.? Have you the frames set to texture your state for receiving feedback with the most robust Matrix? Have you decided to refuse to let another's incompetence or sloppiness in giving feedback deprive you of the feedback? How hungry are you for feedback? Enough? Are you able to invite another to specific the feedback in precise sensory-based behavioral terms? Will you make the sensory-based/evaluative distinction when someone communicates in judgments? Will you help the speaker translate from judgment into feedback? Will you also stubbornly refuse to buy into feedback that doesn't fit for you? 6) Update your Matrix for feedback. Do you have a robust feedback Matrix? What resources or states do you need to create such? What frames about Others, the World, your Powers, your Self, or Time? 7) Future Pace Imagine moving forward with this way of operating with your feedback Matrix fully robust and ;powerful in this way — do you like this? How well will it enhance your interactions and relationships?
GIVING QUALITY FEEDBACK We need feedback, but we do not need judgments, evaluations, or mind-reading. We need precise, accurate, and sensory-based feedback that assists us in tuning up our skills and incorporating new patterns. All forms of coaching involves giving precise, accurate, immediate, useful, and sensory-based feedback—feedback that truly assists the client in refining responses and honing skills. Feedback differs from evaluation. The first is sensory based and behavioral, the second is an interpretation that comes from a person's model of the world.
1) Rapport-based: Establish respectful rapport. Do you have rapport? Do not start until you do! Are you and your client in resourceful states? Have you used the pace, pace, pace ... lead pattern? Is your feedback sensory-based? "You have a nice way of quickly engaging and setting the frame of the exercise... it seemed however that you moved a little too fast..." Do you have physical rapport—have you matched your client's output channels? Do you have conceptual and meta-rapport—have you matched beliefs, undersatndings, values, etc.? 2) Outcome Relevant: Identify the Outcome of the Feedback. What is the outcome, design, or objective of your client? Have you tied your feedback to the person's outcome? "In light of your goal for this exercise of integrating these two parts, I noticed ..." "In light of your desire to become more people oriented as a manager, I noticed that you didn't use anybody's first name in the meeting today." 3) Tentative: Offer feedback tentatively while seeking the person's validation or dis-validation. Have you made your feedback tentative? "In view of eliciting the learning state (objective), you only paused two seconds for her to recall a memory, and just when her eyes defocused, you jumped in and asked her to make the picture brighter (sensory based), I got the impression she needed more time to process... Did you need more time?" 4) Timely: Make the feedback timely. Did you share your feedback when the action or experience was fresh? Was your feedback timely rather than waiting days, weeks, or months? 5) Person/Style Distinction: Elicit your client to separate feedback and from the style of the feedback. Have you invited your client to recognize self as more than behavior? Have you set the frame that distinguishes person from behavior and feedback? 6) Helpful and Supportive: Invite the client to set the frame or reframe feedback as acceptable and valued. How is feedback valuable to you? What other values can you give to it? What positive values and meanings do others give feedback? 7) Sensory Specific: Give sensory specific behavioral feedback. Have you avoided personalizing by translating all feedback into specific behaviors? Is your feedback completely in see-hear-feel terms? "As you fired off the anchor on her arm, I noticed that you put your fingers down about 1/4 of an inch from where it seemed you set the anchor a moment ago."s . "It seemed to me that your use of the term 'you guys' was too informal for the board meeting of directors today."
Benchmarks for Giving and receiving Feedback: Definition: The mirroring back what was outputted, and the inputting of that mirror reflection for learning and change. With a group, evaluating skills and learning development and monitoring progress.
Giving Feedback: A balanced evaluation of a specific behavior that leads to an improvement in performance. All feedback from Level 3 and 4 are delivered with measured steps for improvement, it is made in a tentative way, it invites responsibility and it excites the client to make even more positive changes. All of the behaviors from Level 3+ are respectful and well-framed feedback. It is individualized and balanced, it is feedback that opens up new possibilities for the client. Giving specific feedback that paces the person's matrix, is factual, concise, succinct, relevant, sensory-based, and useable for moving on toward objectives. Giving convoluted and/or vague feedback, non-descriptive, using one's own values, about behavior, not the person's. Giving feedback with negative energy, criticizing, blaming, arguing, telling, making it personal. Withholding any response or giving judging behaviors.
Receiving Feedback: Taking and integrating external responses to improve personal performance. Actively seeking and appreciating feedback, celebrating it, recognizing patterns and efficiently implementing changes in behavior that enhances personal performance. Appreciating feedback by questioning it in seeking clarification, asking for more, and reflecting upon it. Accepting the feedback by showing trust and acknowledgment of it, demonstrating acceptance of being personally fallible. Silent listening to feedback and some pondering of it. Negatively engaged in feedback: arguing, deflecting, discounting, disagreeing. Disengaged to feedback: walking away, avoiding, not dealing with it.
HANDLING QUESTIONS Training in a masterful way necessitates the ability to adapt on the spot and to be highly flexible in getting to your outcomes. This flexibility especially shows up when we set an open frame to entertain comments, questions, and to facilitate a learning dialogue.
Why ask for Questions? Dangers: 1) To clarify message 2) To engage and motivate 3) To set frames 4) To gather meta-program information 5) To check on and use feedback
1) Seduced into teaching more and more. 2) Chasing rabbits. 3) Defending self.
1) Set your aim to never but never make the questioner wrong! Do everything you can to not embarrass, insult, threaten, laugh at, make fun of, etc. Set the question in your mind: How does this make sense? How can I use this.
2) Thank, praise, celebrate. Thank you for asking that... questions that challenge me stretch me and help me to grow.
3) Answer with a sense of calm confidence. That communicates the sense, "I know my subject well... and what I don't know excites me and challenges me for new growth."
4) Usually it is wise to answer a question by asking for more information. This is wise because it helps us to not answer the wrong question. Don't answer too quickly. Explore what the person is really asking.
5) Refuse to be seduced by just answering. Go into the learner's mode and explore the question, what it is truly asking and what's implied in the question. Tune your ears to hear really great questions. What is the question behind the question? What is the meta-question?
6) Be ready to let the group answer the questions. "Does anybody here have an insightful answer to that?"
Benchmarks for Handling Open Questions:
Definition: Asking for and responding to questions about a presentation or demonstration. Inviting audience participants to inquire about how a process works, what it means, etc.
Required skill set involved: Validating. Paraphrasing, Open body language. Rapport. Sensory acuity. Flexibility. Language skills. Questioning. Meta-Questioning. Giving and Receiving feedback. Awareness of structure. Celebrates the question for new insights it offers the presenter; elicits the meta-question implicit in the question. Expresses appreciation for the question, validates the questioner, addresses the question and uses it to pre-frame new learnings, checks to see if the question was answers to the questioner's satisfaction. Repeats the questions, asks for clarification, addresses the question and outframes with prior learnings. Accepts and starts to explore the question.
Failure to ask for questions, fails to hear the question asked and answers a different question, responding with words, tones, or behaviors that are rude; deflecting, disconfirming, and making the questioner wrong by making statements of judgment, answers from unresourceful state of frustration or anger, no exploration of the questions.
SETTING UP EXERCISES
Criteria for Exercises: With every exercise, make sure you have clarified three key things: Process: Give step-by-step descriptions that set out the procedure. Outcome: Make the outcome overt and explicitly (unless covert by intention) Time-frame: Number in the group, roles, expectations, how to do that.
Design exercises to create a sense of success and accomplishment, with a bit of a stretch.
Frames for Group Work; Cooperation: Move into this with a Win/Win attitude. This is not to play One Upmanship Games with the others. It is to create a strong sense of "We." There is a social nature of any group, to being in an audience, to experiencing community. The "we" feeling comes as an emotional connection, a sense of like-mindedness, as being part of a valued in-group. We seek to help participants to both belong to the group and to transcend it at the same time. Respect and Honor each person's learning style and uniqueness
Learning Passion: Be hungry to get all that you can from the experience. For this reason, don't chit-chat in the groups! If you do, you will not learn the patterns or have them as well installed, you will have less skill, less confidence, less
competence.
Installation: We do this for installation and accelerated learning
Feedback: Give and receive enhancing feedback
Practicing patterns, not manipulating each other We will be watching and will not tolerate any kind of manipulation or trying to "fix" another. Be respectful and maintain an awareness that allows you to be ethical in your inter-actions.
"When we get into the small groups, more than anything else the amount of mental and emotional energy you're willing to put into it and to support the others in the group, the more you will get in terms of incorporating these skills into your own behavior. This really is not a time to socialize and chatter; it's a time to practice the magic. Are you ready for that? Do you know the process? Good. Then go for it."
Enjoy it and have fun. "I've noticed that some of you can really get earnest... serious... and I know it's a real skill, but in this context getting serious tends to make people stupid. So I want you to access a state of enjoyment and fun ... got it? Feel it? Show me fun on your face. Come on. Now with that in mind... Move out playfully into the groups."
Avoiding Self-analytical Loops. "Working with the spirals and winds of consciousness as we are here as we work with meta-level states, it's easy to evaluate or analyze something and then use that analysis in a reflexive way to go into a spin... a loop of analyzing our analyzing and paralyzing ourselves. I think some of you might have been tempted to do that one. 'Why did I do that?' 'There I go again. Why do I always do that?' What does that mean about me?' Why can't I get control of myself?' You know that one? You know how that can just vanish... so that it seems to become very slippery and unable to hold... always wanting to sound like Pee-Wee Herman?"
Just for the practice of it. "This is not designed to fix someone; it is simply to practice a pattern and to gain skill in that practice. Even when you're ready to use these patterns, remember, we don't even believe that people are broken, only need coaching about how to use their resources in more efficient ways.
The Trainer as Coach during the Exercises: The design of experiential learning is that we allow participants to discover the principles, skills, and processes. The danger is that we will want them to get it too much and then go and explain to them what they need to discover on their own. Explaining puts us into the "experts" role, and that undermines the discovery mode they need to be in. They only
Where are you in the process? What step? Are you clear about the next step? What outcome are you going for right now? What have you discovered so far?
Do not explain the discoveries Do not run the exercise for them. Ask questions to elicit the key parts that you want to highlight. This will also enable you to integrate the discovering to validate progress in the development.
Day 6:
TRAINING PRINCIPLES
"True 'freedom' is not the absence of structure... But rather a clear structure which enables people to work within established boundaries in an autonomous and creative way." Rosabeth Moss Kanter (The Change Masters) "Training is a circular, co-operative venture, and the trainer has primary charge of creating a context where it is easy for people to learn. Everybody is responsible for their own learning.... If the trainer is not learning, the trainees are unlikely to be either." (O'Connor & Seymour, p. 60 Training with
NLP)
Excellence in presenting/training masterfully occurs when we operate from the following Principles.
#1. States and State Management: The best training occurs when we operate from our best training states. We train best when we've trained ourselves to be at our own personal best. We train from out of our highest frames (including our self-definitions). These determine our states—states and attitudes that we will communicate. We train from a mind-body-emotion state and we train to the states that participants are in. When it comes to training and getting the best results, state is everything. What are your best training states? How well rehearsed are you for "flying into" those states? What are your top ten? #2. State Induction Skills. We train best when we operate from a high level of state awareness and management. We not only need to be in our best states, we need the meta-awareness of our states and the meta-skill of shifting states as appropriate. As we monitor our own states and meta-states, we are much more able to elicit the best states in those at the training. What states do I bring to and apply to people? Remember: If you are not having fun as the trainer, the participants probably won't be having much fun either. #3. Solidly Centered in Self so able to Focus on Others. We train best when we get our ego out of the way. Being un-self-conscious is the ideal since the training is not about us. We train best when we have a solid and positive sense of self.
Do you have a great and solid sense of yourself? What are you trying to do when you're training? Training is not about us, it's always about giving the participants who have paid money to come to receive whatever it is that we are offering. It is about what they need in order to become more informed, resourceful, skilled, etc. The training is not about our excellence, good looks, intelligence, wit, or success. The training comes through us. We are always involved, always being presented. In that sense, you won't be able to hide, so, be a wise and safe guide. There is an "authority" and "power" in presenting, in training so we need to use our role as a trainer with care, grace, and compassion. When you stand up to present, you are in the role of an "expert." This can be intoxicating especially if you have low self-esteem or problems with your sense of self. In this, it takes a lot of self-esteem to handle the ego-satisfactions that can come along with the expert role, your "authority" in the training context, and the praise that can come. How does the idea of being an authority or expert settle with you?
#4. Representation of Participants. We do our best training when we think of our participants in a warm, friendly and human way. How do you represent and conceptualize your "audience?" Do you represent them in a way that makes it easy to talk to each of them in a warm and personal way? Cheryl Gilroy's supporting belief when training with an angry group is, "They are all just angry geniuses." Warning: Don't buy into the labels that people tell you about a group. "They are a demanding group," "They are a bunch of deadheads." "You'll have to watch them, they will sabotage what you're doing any time they can." #5. Intentional and Purposeful We train best when we take an intentional stance regarding our outcomes and objectives in the training. We train best when we operate out of an intensely focused genius state.
#6. Congruence and Credibility. We train best when we operate from our personal power of being congruent, walking our talk, and being a living example of NLP and Neuro-Semantics.
Many things build up personal credibility— congruence is one of the most important. The more credibility people grant you, the more power and effectiveness your training.
INSTALLING NEUROLOGICALLY Put your Creed into your Deed (Ralph Waldo Emerson) "We know too much and are convinced of too little " (T.S.Elliot) Use the Mind-to-Muscle Pattern, then ... Add other levels— Identity: "I am..." Expectations: "I can expect..." Validation: "Yes, I like..." Values: "I consider this important because..." Pleasure: "I enjoy this because..."
Since the NLP Developers found and codified some truly powerful principles from the world-class communicators that they modeled, we have in the NLP presuppositions some of the best, most ecological, and profound principles for communicating, being effective, and succeeding. Now that we know about the mind-to-muscling process, we can take these NLP presuppositions and the meta-level principles in Meta-States and install them within us as our operational programs.
1) Identify a Principle or Presupposition. What is your favorite and most empowering NLP presupposition or training principle? How succinctly can you state that premise now?
2) Amplify, Anchor and Experience. Is that a good expression of the presupposition or principle state? What do you need to do to juice this up even more? What happens when you do that now? Anchor the state spatially and invite the person to step on a space of that state. Now show me that state in your body... What does that state feel like in your body? Invite the person to give you behaviorally, using their full physiology, the look, sound, and feel of the state. 3) Walk with the State. What is it like when you turn that state into your walk? Invite the person to take that state with him or her into the future. On a kinesthetic time-line invite them to take a step into tomorrow with that attitude— that spirit, that frame of mind. When you imagine having that fully today and you take it with you into tomorrow... how does that transform things for you? 4) Confirm and Commission. Do you really want to let this principle become the operational program in your mind? Really? You wouldn't really want to train while in this state, would you? Provoke the person to keep confirming and validating it for him or herself. Well, can your highest executive level of mind commission it and install this principle so that everything selforganizes under it?
FRAMING
To a great extent training is all about framing. The art and skill of framing — setting frames and solidifying frames is what allows us to take charge of the training and make sure that it moves in the direction that will enhance the lives of those who come to participate. We Frame— Preframe a training to eliminate problems Frame for rapport and connection Frame for engagement and motivation Frame for exercises and experience Frame for spatial anchoring Frame using the tools of our trade Frame comfortable challenge Frame installation "for the rest of your life" Frame demonstrations Frame closure
Asking about empowering beliefs, values, decisions, etc. (Meta-Questions) and using induction skills (see Inducing States) to set new categories. Asking about layers of categories, asking challenging questions about such. Giving space and time to explore the higher embedded layers of awareness. Reminding participants that all perceptions are just maps. Asking or calling attention to the classification of the details and asking about awareness in participants, providing menu list of other filters, quality control questions about filters and categories. Speaking as if there is only one other classification and imposing that upon participants by rhetorical questions. Using either/or expressions. Tone of judgment, right/wrong, talking more than client to impose the other way of seeing things. Talking about the classification, pattern, or structure of the details as if that map is the territory, as if no other classification is possible. Using universal quantifiers (all, nothing, always, etc.) and absolute terms. Speaking and feeling from perspective of being inside the box of participants' story, problems, and challenges. Talking about and asking questions in the very words and details of the story without giving evidence of the classifications or categories of the details. No distinguishing between content and structure.
FRAMING EXPECTATIONS Framing Audience Expectations: We explore self-expectancies in Meta-States to flush out our own higher frames, we can do so with regard to participants. People come to and show up at a training to achieve certain outcomes. They come with expectations. What do you expect about this? You sell a group on buying the intangible product of your knowledge and expertise, your own experiences and trainings, and they have invested money, time, and self into receiving what you have to offer. What can you expect from them in terms of their states, thoughts, feelings, worries, fears, etc.? Let's adjust ourselves to the reality of the training world.
"I can expect...." Some to not be sure, to wonder if they have made the right choice, if it is really worth it. Some to fret and worry about the cost and time involved. Some to be preoccupied about other things in their lives. Crisis events frequently arise just prior to them leaving to come to the training. Some to go into harsh self-judgment at any little sign that they are not getting it, that someone is picking it up quicker, etc. Some to come with agendas —to embarrass or harass you, to show you up, to win clients for their own trainings, etc. Some to not be feeling well, to be in very unresourceful states: grumpy, irritable, etc. Some to need to show off, present their intelligence, and some to not know how to adopt a learner's position or a supportive position. Some to get upset and walk out. Yes, some will walk out on you— on your training! They do with Tony Robbins, they will with you! Are you ready for it? Or do you expect that you can please
everybody?
Just Observe: "Some of this may challenge your beliefs. When that happens, just notice the challenge, notice how you feel and put this aside for future evaluation. This will allow you to walk through the experience and make a good decision later." A Different Kind of Thinking:
Ask for Help if you need it: "You have come to embark upon a new journey, a journey into mind, and into emotion, a journey into the higher reaches of mind... a journey that will allow you to track the feedback and feed forward loops in your
neuro-linguistic system that involves body and mind and so I want you to know that I am here for you and so are all of the Associate trainers... so that if at any time you want some assistance, just call on us. That's what we're here for. I am committed to you so that you get as many of your outcomes as possible... "
Take a Vacation from Judgment:
You are in charge of your own learning. "You have come here with all of your Meta-States intact, those that govern your values, beliefs, expectations— you have your preferred way to learn, and I may or may not use that style. I do plan to use discussion, presentation, demonstration, hands-on practice in small groups, etc. Some of these will mean more to you than others. If you use your strengths to overlap to the others, you will at the same time expand and extend your learning skills." In these statements we have frames for "Trusting the Process," "Embracing Confusion," "I'll be responsive and accountable to you," and "Judgment is not needed." I regularly set those. What other frames would you want to set? Which frames have you been setting? Boldness: You are very bold and brave for courageously investing in your Development. Fun: I want you to have fun, be playful, and allow yourself a chance to become more resourceful. Considerate: There are others here, so be thoughtful, considerate, non-judgmental, and empathetic. Passionate: Be absolutely hungry to get everything you can out of the exercises. Diversity:
Installing.
How Do we Create some Great Pre-Frames?
My commitment to training is to always thinking through every training prior to it and afterwards in order to develop and refine my preframing skills. After a training (after every training) set down and think about the situations that arose during the training, situations that created problems, challenges, doubts, etc. Then use the following format for thinking through how to preframe your next training.
What can you expect in a training?
What frame or frames are being activated?
What can you expect of participants?
Judgment Helpless Frustrated
How can I reframe this? How can I give it a new and more enhancing meaning?
Must be perfect I should get it quickly Confusion is bad. I must be stupid.
Confused
Write 5 emotions, thoughts, fears, worries, situations that you can count on people experiencing in your trainings.
Your reframes become your preframes for the next time which then makes irrelevant the problem.
Day 7:
PRINCIPLES FOR TRAINING THE WHAT What we actually do in training revolves around how we manage the training process itself.
PRINCIPLES:
#8. Validating and Supporting. We train best when we are committed to making people "right," and to never making people "Wrong." This means pace, pace, pace... in order to validate participants and utilize their skills and experiences. Believing as we do, that people have all the resources they need, our work involves coaching and facilitating those resources, drawing them out.
MO. Welcoming Problems. We train best when we preframe problems, objections, and difficulties as acceptable and as part of the learning process. Make it safe for people to question, explore, and ask "hard" questions. Doing this will get concerns out on the table where they can be dealt with. It sets the frame of security and your own confidence that you're not afraid of tough questions. Use criticism, resistance, etc. as valuable information and incorporate whatever is offered to you.
#11. Playful Flexibility. We train best when we are playfully flexible and when we graciously roll with the punches. Don't aim for flawless perfection. Don't wait until you know it all; you never will! You will always be a learner. So be a learner—an excited, fascinated, and curious learner. Be the kind of learner that you want in your trainings. Model it. Let your vulnerability be your strength— not any so-called or imagined "perfection." Flexibility is your power, so aim to continually expand your personal flexibility. Frequently, we have to let
go of the form and trust that we can be spontaneous in a way that's relevant and meaningful in that moment with that person or with that group. It is self-trust that allows this to occur.
#12. Succinct Expressiveness. We train best when we express ourselves succinctly and effectively. Aim to be concise and to the point. Make your own use of language magical and powerful. Model what you're training. Boredom, lengthy monologues, abstract ponderings, etc. kill the passion of trainings. #13. Dramatic and Engaging. We train best when we make the training dramatic and engaging. Endow your training style with a touch of vividness and drama. This will make it memorable, fun, and engaging. People who are not engaged in the process will not receive all that you have to offer. #14. Installing. We train best when we install the learnings and states throughout the process of training. By incorporating installation processes and patterns within our presentations, demonstrations, questions, we install knowledge and skills along the way. #15. Pacing Learning Styles. We train best when we pace the way people learn so they can learn their way. There are many styles of learning. As we pace the learning styles in our audience, we can then lead them to expand and stretch their minds. To pace the learning styles of participants use the VAK and language modes, use the Gardner's seven intelligences, and the Meta-Programs. Using these models will enrich our style and be multi-dimensional enough to satisfy everyone. #16. Connects to Vision. We train best when we give people a vision of something great along with supporting reasons for that vision. Build in and induce the appropriate states for participants to catch a vision of Why they should become fully engaged in the training. Keep "selling" the reasons and value of the training so that it communicates that the training is meaningful to the participants. Keep connecting the training's outcomes, values, etc. to specific behaviors. People need to have a big Why. Meta-detailing means that as you provide the details of the training, you do so by continually refreshing the meta-frames that establish its importance. So always keep aligning, pacing, and confirming the desired outcome. #17. Sense of Abundance. We train best when we train from our own sense of abundance. Don't train when you have a poverty mentality or are operating from scarcity. It will bleed through everything you say and do and leave that feeling.
#20. Protective. We train best when we consciously protect the vulnerability of participants. In training, we invite people to open up and explore new possibilities and to trust us as wise and caring guides. This necessitates that we stay aware of their vulnerabilities, sensitivities, the wounds some will bring into the training, the role of "power" and "authority" (being "the expert" in their eyes), and the ethical demands this creates. Training excellence should involve no manipulation or "control" for our agendas. Instead, we should aim to make the learning environment safe for those present... so that they know that they are safe and protected when in our hands. Develop a firmness to set firm boundaries. You will need this when someone tries to highjack your training. #21. Structured. We train best when we develop effective training structures. The 4-MAT form is one such structure: These quadrants gives us a simple organization using Why, What, How, What if, So that... what? The "Present State—to Desired State" sequence provides another structure. A governing Metaphor can do the same. Create a flow chart of the training. #22. Cooperative. We train best when we cultivate and develop a sense of cooperation and team spirit with the participants. The attitude of cooperate and collaboration helps to build a better learning environment. When people feel that they own and buy into the experience or process, they are much more likely to get more from the experience and to enjoy it. #23. Energy. We train best when we are physically feeling good. Be healthy, focus on maintaining your energy and vitality via exercise, stretching, eating right, sleeping well, etc. Don't give these things up. #24. Team. We train best when we work and network with others. Decide now to expand your skills through co-training, through assisting others, through creating a resource team for yourself. Don't even try to do it all yourself. Bring others in and team them how to be a team with you. Model being a great team member.
INSTALLING
Among the very processes and mechanisms that "install" we have the following:
Mechanism for Installing
Questions for Trainer and Learners
Do I have the materials/ experiences ordered, structured, sequenced, etc. so that it invites clarity? Can I represented the ideas and skills with clarity and vividness in my mind? Do I feel excited about this? How much excitement do I feel? What have I built into the training to make it exciting How is this valuable to me? Do I feel a need for this? Does this idea or skill fit for me and for my participants? Is this aligned with my highest values? Am I aligned with this skill? Is this fitting to my identity? Am I willing to let this become a part of my identity? Have I taken personal responsibility for making this skill mine? Have I owned the learning? How much ownership am I willing to take for this? Have played around with this new idea or skill? Am I willing to play with this?
Have I used repetition to learn this myself? Will I work with this often enough so that it becomes habitual? Will I playfully repeat it enough so that I can do it in my sleep? Is it memorable to me? Have I made the idea memorable? What memory devices have I used to assist both short-term and
long-term memory of learners? Have I invited learners to vividly image these ideas and skills? How will this play out in the future in my relationships, job, health? Have we set up role playing experiences? Have I played around with role-playing these skills?
Do I have group experiences planned and scheduled? Am I willing to learn via small group experiences?
Have I extended these states and skills in my own behavior? Will I delight myself with the playfulness of extending the parameters of the new states? Do I give sensory based feedback in the groups? Am I willing to receive feedback to refine my skills?
Have I kept interferences and distractions down?
Have I made the training playful and fun? Have the participants had fun in the process? Have I elicited humor or used jokes? Have I appealed to the higher levels? Are participants able to step out of content and into structure?
Have I used the higher levels to embed or install information? Are these the meta-levels that make most sense and have the most power?
INSTALLING UNCONSCIOUSLY Conscious engagement involves what's on our mind, whereas unconscious engagement involves those things that we pick up in the back of our mind. This gives us an advantage with Meta-States since we are already dealing with things "in the back of the mind." All of the meta-levels are "unconscious" or outside of awareness until we call attention to them.
Processes: 1) Overload conscious attention: and induce an open, receptive, pleasant state and participants will be open to receive other information unfiltered. 2) Incorporate via trance: give time and process for incorporation. 3) Repetition and Rehearsal. 4) Mind-to-Muscle patterning. 5) Tell stories to entrance and set a covert context for installation of specific strategies and information. 6) Use covert frame setting processes (see Frame Games Training Manual), such as presuppositional languaging. 7) Layering 8) Embedded commands, questions, and suggestions. 9) Open loops without closing them. The non-closure will have an unconscious effect on those who need closure, building up a response potential, 10) Stage Anchoring typically operates outside of conscious awareness. 11) Use frames by implication to slide in presuppositional frames.
CHALLENGING SAFELY In training, which shall it be? Comfort or challenge? What does our group need, want, or expect? How much of comfort and challenge does the group want? We begin by pacing, connecting, creating rapport to comfort, assure, support, and empower. Then we begin leading— challenging, pushing, deframing, inviting confusion, mystification, tease, play, etc. We push and extend the boundaries. This makes the dance between equilibrium and disequilibrium an ongoing and constant dance. So we have to use confusion effectively so we don't push too hard or too far.
How can we tell how much or how far to push someone? There's a dance that we engage in between challenge and comfort. So how can we know just how far we can "push?" How do you know just how far to push a group in stretching? How do we decide about the appropriate or optimal amounts of stress, challenge, and relaxation, comfort, security?
Preframe for both Challenge and Comfort: • "In this Training, we will be assisting you to find that center place where you can rest in that ultimate assurance of your worth and validity as a person so that you can sally out on adventures and journeys for growth and discovery."
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Continuing explorations into unpleasant present and futures, doing so with more confrontation that prods, pokes, and nudges the client to feel the need to move away-from current situation.
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After mentioning and asking about current reality, exploring further into how painful, unpleasant, and undesirable things will be if unchanged. Doing this in a matter-of-fact tone and attitude. Inducing a state of intolerance and high level frustration about current state and direction.
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Mentioning and asking questions about current reality to induce the client to feel the need to move away from the current situation, problems, and anticipated consequences. Inviting client to stay with the emotions and awarenesses even though unpleasant. Asking SWOT questions.
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Mentioning and asking questions about current reality, but moving away from such if the client begins to feel frustrated, upset, angry, anxious, or fearful. Quickly moving to a "thinking positive" mode, rescuing client from facing the current reality of his or her situation. Mirroring or pacing back current reality.
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Briefly or slightly mentioning the client's current situation, but not dwelling on it, quickly moving away from speaking about anything unpleasant, negative, or that would lead to painful consequences.
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No mention, questioning, or elicitation about current reality, only speaking about the past or future, asking or mentioned outcomes and goals.
5 Intensity of questioning increases as client is called upon to act immediately, respectfully doubting whether the person has the guts, balls, or courage to take action. 4 Questions and statements with a tone of teasing, playing, nudging, mimicking ideas and concepts that create problems for the client, even mocking and playfully insulting. 3
Questions and statements that invite discomfort, irritation, pained awareness and that call for action and that doesn't stop even when the client manifests a negative state. Mimicking physical gestures and tones.
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Questions and statements that explore the client's matrix of frames from every angle and that invite a level of awareness that creates discomfort, yet no statements that call the client to take immediate action.
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Questions that get to the heart of things and invite a client to face current reality in the face and so to feel "challenged" (see Challenging).
THINKING SYSTEMICALLY
• • • •
Language: Linguistics and the sensory based neurological languages (the VAK). Perception: Perceptual filters and sorting devices — thinking patterns. States and Levels: State dependent neuro-linguistic experiences—the mind-body or thought-feeling states in which we live and from which we operate. Representation: The Cinematic features that determine the quality of our mental movies. ("SubModalities," or Meta-Modalities).
The linguistic distinctions (the Meta-Model) occur in the Meta-Programs as perceptual distinctions and then in the thought-feeling distinctions of our meta-states to effect the mental movies playing out in the theater of our mind. A person's experiences have all of these facets and dimensions: linguistic, perceptual, and state distinctions working selfreflexively. So over time these dynamics create a system of interactions.
l)The Meta-Model:
The Meta-model identifies the form and structure of mental mapping. This provides an understanding of the linguistic magic that governs our mental mapping and it provides us the structure of precision. We move up into the meta-linguistic domain of evaluative words from primary representational.
2) The Meta-Programs: By the habituation of internal representations arises the magic of the Meta-Programs—our structured ways of perceiving. At a meta-level, they govern our everyday thinking-and-feeling and become our perceptual filters. Because these also show up in language, they have counterparts in the Meta-Model. For example, we have favored modals that describe our basic modus operandi (modal operators) for operating: necessity, impossibility, possibility, desire, etc. And because they originated as meta-level thoughts or feelings, they were first meta-states. As they coalesced into "our eyes" (and so get into our muscles), they become meta-programs. 3) Meta-States: Our thoughts-and-feelings generate our states become meta-states when we apply them to other states. In this way we create meta-programs. When we generalize the state to our basic style of thinking or perceiving. A driving perceptual style can become a meta-state. Consider a gestalt thinker who sorts for the big picture to such an extent that he or she always frames other states with global thoughts-and-feelings. Or, someone who sorts for "necessity" and who thereby brings a state of compulsion to bear on every other thought-feeling state. 4) Cinematic Features ... "Sub-Modalities" or Meta-Modalities: The cinematic features that govern how we have coded the mental movies playing on the screen of our mind. Called "sub-modalities," these distinctions are the editorial frames that we use.
Asks and talks about the feedback and feed forwarding loops of the system, the multiple variables of the system, time contexts, cultural contexts, time-binding effects, etc. Inquiring about spiraling loops of responses and interactions, the contexts and contexts of contexts, the layering effect and emergence of new properties in the system. Integrating multiple models to offer an explanation about something and acknowledgment that the models are all just maps and therefore inadequate. Talking and acting more in Both/And terms, recognizing multiple causes, the fact of simultaneousness. Some talk and action about multiple causes, still mostly linear in thinking. Either/Or statements, Aristotelian statements assuming things are static and unchanging. No words, actions, or attention to the system of interactions. Talking on in linear cause-effect terms, stimulus-response terms.
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META-STATING ATTRACTORS FRAMES "Self-organization theory is a branch of systems theory that relates to the process of order formation in complex dynamic systems. ... According to 'selforganization' theory, order in an interconnected system of elements arises around are called 'attractors', which help to create and hold stable patterns within the system." (Robert Dilts, Strategies of Genius, p.
What are you Attracted to? What functions as an Attractor in Your World? 1) List the ideas, beliefs, understandings, values, experiences, references, etc. that pull on you, that keep you repeating a pattern or style of responses. 2) What drives them? What empowers them? 3) What Attractors have you had that have become non-operational? How did it become de-commissioned? What destablized the attractor? How did it become destablized? 4) What new Attractors would you like to set (meta-state) as your Neuro-Semantic frames?
ENERGY FLOWS WHERE ATTENTION GOES AS GOVERNED BY INTENTION
HANDLING GROUP PROBLEMS When Things Go Wrong Whenever we train someone or a group, we ultimately work with the person's states and meta-states. We elicit, evoke, interrupt, construct, and anchor the states. The way we meta-state a group sets the pace for how we will also handle resistance, hecklers, interruptions, etc. What frames can we set as we thinking about meta-stating the group for greater effectiveness?
As trainer, you manage the training process itself—what is done, how and when. As a process manager you have to be in uptime, alert, and out of time in order to gauge the time. Model a permissive, yet firm and empowering influence. You are the one responsible for creating the training culture. Track the group When its flagging When it needs a break The speed of learning in the group Variety of expectations Role play/ case studies, discussions, demonstrations, videos, tasks, rehearsing, drills, puzzles, brainstorming, trance, etc.
Hold Your Principles in Mind Respect, honor, etc. Treating people as if they are their behaviors only entrenches the behavior. In your mind, separate person and behavior. Refuse to argue. You will only discredit yourself I you have to be right at all costs. Make it safe for people to question, explore, and ask "hard" questions. This will get concerns out on the table where they can be dealt with. It sets the frame of security and your own confidence that you're not afraid of tough questions. Use criticism, resistance, etc. as valuable information. Incorporate whatever is offered to you. #1) TOO MUCH TALK, QUESTIONS, IRRELEVANCIES Sometimes people just ask too many questions, go on and on talking, and chase rabbits that are irrelevant to the training. At such times you need to charge and set some mind-lines that reframes things: "Now there's a rabbit to chase...! " "I can't answer that with the camera on... see me at the break." "Why doesn't that sound really like a question? Do you hear a statement behind that question that you're wanting to make?" Meta-comment on the question itself: "How important is that question in terms of this exercise?" Let me think about the best way to answer that and I'll get back to you. That's an important point, but not really useful right this minute about this exercise. Utilize whatever is given to you and incorporate it for the sake of the training.
#2) RESISTENCE: 1) Gather information. When you feel resistance meta-model the resisting itself. What is the resistance? How is he resisting? Resisting what? For what purposes? "Resistance" typically indicates that we do not having sufficient rapport. We have not spent enough time validating and supporting the person's world of frames and meta-states. How have I contributed to this
resistance? 2) Acknowledge the resistance and pace it fully. 3) Sort out space in your training area for cooperation, play, learning, etc. and a space for "resistance," feeling negative, pain, hurt, etc. 4) Build new reframes for preventing this resistance next time. 5) Set frame on the fly that move everybody into thoughtfulness, respect, and Win/ Win attitude. "That is one way of looking at it, given this model, let me offer you the Meta-States take on thatThen later you will have sufficient knowledge to decide on the strengths and weaknesses of both." "That's an interesting view point. What I think would probably be best at this moment is to ask that you suspend disbelief for the sake of really learning this and then you can figure out which offers you the most resources." 6) Apologize as appropriate. Options: Defer to a break Identify the Positive Intention Reframe the meaning Incorporate into ongoing experience Ask to be allowed to continue Invite group pressure Challenge relevancy
#3) META-STATING HECKLERS Remember that it takes two to have a conflict, so refuse to play a part in it. Adopt a centered, focused, and playful state from which you can stay totally resourceful in the midst of any storm. Set it as a principle to never argue and never get defensive. People can and will understand if you are wrong about something, that in itself won't undermine authority or expertise. But you will discredit yourself if you cling to being right! "Enjoy playing with hecklers and be so patient that the group controls them.' (O'Connor and Seymour, p. 165) Options: 1) Treat resistance with curiosity and interest — and use them to set new frames that will prevent it from arising, next time. 2) Playfully turn the tables and invite the person to be skeptical enough to test the material thoroughly to see whether it really works. If you were me how would you deal with a comment like that? Invite the heckler up on front onto your territory. It's much easier to heckle from the safety of the audience. "Either enjoy playing with hecklers or be so patient that the group controls them!" 3) Use the Relevancy Challenge on statements. How does this relate to our topic? 4) Invite the person to become the devil's advocate for the group. 5) Utilize what the heckler says and turn it back upon them. Being heckled is a good challenge. Stand-up comedians, far from avoiding them, love to interact with them. 6) If you suspect hidden agendas, flush it out and tackle it openly. Flush out projections as well. People who project, disown their statements. "Let's check that out." Exercise: In a small group of 7 people, exchange roles as speaker with someone really skilled at heckling giving them heck.
#4. WHEN THE GROUP'S ENERGY FLOW I've been told that some people actually get tired in trainings. In the likelihood that this could possibly be true,
design energy breaks, trance breaks, memory breaks. "Let's do a state gauge. How do you feel? Need a blast of some energy? Then let's take 60 seconds to energize ourselves. Have you ever felt a blast of energy that renewed you in the midst of a project? Do you know what it's like to get such a blast of new enthusiasm?" "It's time to go away... So do that... just go away... to a place ... inside ... where you find a sense of delight and comfort... and just rest... take a daily vacation in that special place... as you find some rejuvenating resources to bathe yourself in..." (O'Connor, p. 68, 54)
#5. TROUBLE-MAKERS. When you have to ask someone to leave, get sensory based data for the why. Constant interruptions, irrelevancies. 1) First, notice, then pace in order to incorporate. 2) Flush out the hidden agendas with them. 3) Invite fairness for all. 4) Call attention to the responses being generated by the behavior. 5) Challenge the Relevancy of what they are doing in midst of the group. 6) Appoint the person to play the devil's advocate (Prescribe the Symptom and thereby give it a new meaning and role). 7) "Excuse me, you may have forgotten that you have already used your number of comments for this session, we need to let others get their turns." 8) Refuse to argue at all costs. 9) If it is due to a mistake on your part, graciously apologize. Then, extract foot from mouth.
FRAMING CLOSURE With every training event, there are actually 3 trainings: 1) They one you prepared to give. 2) They one you actually gave. 3) The one you wish you had given.
Set your aim to end Pleasure and Celebration. How will you end your training? How do you want it to end? What makes for a good ending? Why end with Pleasure? We want to end trainings with pleasure for several reasons: • To integrate the learnings and skills in a memorable way. • To send the participants forth ready to use the newly learned skills. • To coach and frame people about possible new developments that they can anticipate. • To backtrack through the learnings to give a sense of closure. • To give a sense of direction into their future. • To end on a high note with lots of fun, playfulness, and pleasure. Good endings will have: • Information backtracking and review that integrates and future paces. • An emotional impact that fires off anchors set during the training about things of much importance and meaning to the participants. • Future pacing that projects the use and power of the training in the future. • A sense of closure that ties up lose ends and creates a sense of a complete package • A sense of a new opening as new doors of opportunities and pathways for exploration suggest that the adventure has just begun.
• •
By future pacing and putting the new learnings and skills on each person's time-line. By using pleasurable processes like trance, celebrations, rituals, commissioning, etc.
Set another aim to end with an Quality Control on the training itself. "Training without outcomes is throwing money down the drain." (O'Connor and Seymour, p. 201)
Intentionally plan how you will evaluate them: How will you evaluate the training? What difference has the training made? How will you look at the results and track them? What criteria will you use in the evaluations? Effectiveness/ Efficiency/ Productivity /
Designing Your Trainings with self-reflexive questions: What do I want people to leave this training with? What outcome/s do I have in mind? How will I know that the participants have achieved these outcomes? What things will I use as my evidence procedures? What do the participants want to take away from the training? What personal outcomes do they want to achieve to evaluate it as successful? How will they know that they have actually achieved it? What things will they use as their evidence procedures?
Your Own Evaluations Insert Chart/ Evaluation Form
Intro. Setting Frames Breaks Exercises •
Demos Exercises
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Elegantly and compassionately or firmly addressing the trouble and bringing it to resolution using group processes.
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Matching and pacing the trouble, setting higher frames of the group's purpose and intention to outframe the trouble, creating supportive atmosphere so participants feels safe in the trainer taking the lead in dealing with the trouble.
3 — Direct recognition and acknowledge of the trouble, attempt to address it forthrightly, but with result that trouble still dominates, group becomes divided or dissatisfied with lots of complaints. 2—
Recognizing trouble and bringing it up, but ineffectively so that it continues and the presentation or task at hand gets side-track to whatever agenda the trouble creates for the group.
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Recognition of difficulty, but no forthright working with it, peacemaking and/or pleading with a group. Trouble only finds expression in gossiping and complaining in the corridors.
0 — Losing control of a group to confusion, disorientation, arguments, insults, refusal to work together as a team. No effort to confront a person or issue and work through to resolution.
5 — Lots of variety for group, utilizing comments, questions, and responses, matching meta-states, metaprograms, and challenging/ supporting participants in becoming better team players. 4—
Pacing and leading group to more fully experience and learn, saying words that give overview of things, content of what's happening or will happen, lots of group activities for variety in learning.
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Pacing group's mental and emotional states, asking questions of group about needs, checking time schedule aloud about the group's activities.
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Scanning to calibrate the group, some pacing words to match participants, recognizing whether group can see and hear as you move on stage.
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Scanning room to notice the group. Yet no mention of the group's needs, no pacing words about where group is.
0 — No or little contact with the group, focused almost exclusively on self or one other individual no sign of awareness of the group's need for breaks, energy, focus.
FEEDBACK FORM Name (with title or position) Address: City, State, Zip: Phone (Home/ Business) Email / Web Site: Overall value of the training to you Transformational value of the training for you Enjoyable, fun, engaging Balance between presentation, discussion, experience 1) Most Impactful. What insight, idea and/or skill did you find most important, useful, or impactful?
2) Immediate Use. What learnings or skills will you immediately use in the coming days and weeks?
3) More Information. What information or patterns would you want to know more about?
4) Improvements. What could be improved to make more effective? Problems to be addressed?
Signature: Name
Date
SPONSORING TRAININGS • • •
How does the business of training work? How does one build a training center or Institute? How does one go about "getting business?"
When it comes to training, there's the activity and process of training—that's working in the business. Then there is the activity of selling yourself as a training, selling your trainings, getting training assignments, negotiating, building a training center, building credibility, and so on—that's working on the business. Each demands a different set of skills. There are many excellent trainers who can train, but not create a successful training business. There are many excellent business people who can get the training assignments, but who lack distinctive in the training situation. It takes both skill sets to succeed. For trainers to succeed in this business they have to know as much about how to work on the business as to work in the business. We have to shift to becoming consultants, coaches, sales people, entrepreneurs, and good financial planners. Unless you work as a trainer within a large business or corporation, you will operate as an entrepreneur in your own business. As an entrepreneur, you will have to have the flexibility to shift and to play many roles: 1) Business manager and CEO. Do you have a business plan? 2) Financial planner. Have you worked out a yearly budget? 3) Marketers. What is your market? How do you market it? What studies are you doing in this area? What new trends and markets are occurring in your area of expertise? What is your niche market? How are you creating a brand for it? 4) Sales persons of your own business. What's your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? How well refined are your sales skills? 5) Collaborator and networker with partners. Who are your collaborative partners? Who are you co-training with? 6) Negotiator. 7) Consulting skills: When we contract for training with an organization, we need to use the very tools and skills in communicating, dialoguing, and negotiating with the company representatives as we will be teaching and modeling in the training. Why do they want this training? What is their first level request? Meta-request? Highest intentions? What exactly do they mean in requesting a given training? What form do they think the training will take? How much flexibility or rigidity is there in their requests? What is the company's culture? What results (benefits) do they want? How will they know that they have those results? How will they measure the results? Do they have any measurement scheme?
How realistic are the results they want? What do they expect of me as a trainer? Who will I be dealing with? Will this be a single event or a series of trainings? Do they want a proposal plan? How much time, effort, etc. will this involve? Will there be any reimbursement for this?
Creating a vision for the business, communicating it on a daily/weekly basis to the team or organization (formally and informally), able to express the USP succinctly. Creating Win/Win alliances with people, learning about and using negotiation skills, delegating tasks to others. Devotes as much as 10% of time and energy to working on the business and 90% in working in the business; detailing business structure and needs, creating Business Plan, taking time to think and plan ahead. Studying and learning about Adm. tasks, modeling best practices. Using some phone skills in business. Only as little as 3% of time devoted to administrative needs and tasks. No or little awareness or focus on administrative tasks and needs.
How to Create Success in the business of Training 1) Treat training as a business and meta-state yourself with business intelligence. Be professional: run a SWOT analysis on yourself so that can both play to your strengths and work on your weaknesses. Do you have a personal / professional coach? Do you look professional? How's your clothes, image, and first impression? Do you talk professional? Do you carry yourself in a professional way? What will you do this next year, next 3 years, etc. to keep up your professional learning and development?
2) Develop a Business Plan. Use the Matrix Business Plan and create a 5 and 10 year plan for what you will do. Use a Wall Calendar so that you can see everyday specifically what you done and are doing! Do you have a long-term vision? Do you have the patience and persistence to keep at it?
3) Specialize. Find or create your niche market and specialize there.
4) Develop credibility. Marketing and selling your trainings is all about credibility. What forms and expressions of "credibility" have you already achieved? How can you increase and expand your credibility with your customers and clients?
5) Meta-Detail what you need to do and then do it. Do you have a database? How will you build and maintain your database of clients? Do you have a website that promotes you and your speciality? Does the website constantly drive traffic to it in order to build up your brand? Do you have a newsletter and does it add value to people so that people look forward to it? Do you have the tools that you need for writing proposals, doing needs analysis, etc.?
6) Learn all you can about marketing and selling. Do you know that you have to sell yourself? How comfortable are you with that? How skilled? What are you planning to do to increase your competency in selling yourself? We all sell— we sell our ideas, services, and benefits. What do you sell? How do you present and articulate your USP? What solutions and value do you create and give? Why should someone buy your services or products? How will you advertise? Where will you market yourself?
7) Create a good balance between public and private. Do you work both publically and corporately? Are you contributing back to the community, doing anything pro bono as a gift?
8) Get plenteous practice. The key is practice, practice, practice. Are you willing to give yourself to public speaking and training every opportunity you can create? Who will you co-train with this year?
It takes a lot to put on a Training! Over the years I have put the following together about how to host or put on a training. Whether you are doing the training or whether you are bringing in someone to do the training, these are some of the things you need to be aware of and plan for. Initially I put this together to respond to the question about how to put on a training. What's involved?
conducted many days of training with no profit. What does it take to create a successful training? How do you get sufficient numbers of people to a training to make it financially profitable?
Selling a Training Consider what's involved in selling a training seminar. This "product" is one of the toughest things to sell for a number of reasons. Consider what it is that you are selling. You are selling:
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An intangible product: Something people can see, hear, or feel, namely, the learning of new skills, models, understandings.
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An experience An intellectual and personal experience that will enhance their life and empower them as a person.
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The experience of studying and learning. You are asking people to give up their days, evenings, or weekends to sit in a classroom. Most people find this turn them off—and you want them to pay for it? A challenge to the way people have been thinking and feeling. After you get them to pay to study, use their brain, you are going to challenge their precious limiting beliefs!
2) Promotional Materials: •
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Send 2 or 3 pieces. One mailing is seldom sufficient. Most people need 2 or 3 or more reminders. Current wisdom in the field of marketing recommends at least 3 mail-outs: A postcard 3 months prior to the training: a sales letter (4 to 6 pages) 2 months prior; and another flyer 1 month prior. We have been developing many different forms of sales letters, flyers, extensive brochures, etc. and we are constantly improving these. We will make these available to you. You should plan to invest minimally $400 and depending on the size of the training, perhaps $3,000 for printing of the flyers.
3) Networking in your local community and beyond: • What networking can you do with other training centers in your area, Human Resources in various businesses, etc.? Create a co-sponsoring arrangement with others if possible. Look into cross-marketing. • You can marketing using Press Releases to your local media. We have samples of actual press releases that we have used. • You can market via special people by providing them "tickets" to come as your guests—as you barter for an
• •
endorsement, recommendation, access to their mailing list, or something else. If you have a boo, you can set up Book Signing events at local bookstores, interviews on radio and television, newspaper interviews. You can see if your local Chamber of Commerce has ways of helping, buying their mailing lists, going to meetings to network with people, contacting local clubs and groups to present something about the upcoming training.
4) Other Preparations: • • •
The venue for the training room needs to be secured at least 3 months prior to the event. For larger events, we often do it a year prior to the next training. Developing your Assist Team to help you out. Depending on the size of the training this could involve people who will greet, sign-in participants, run cameras, handle book table, resource coaches, etc. Parties during the training: Graduation parties, Acquaintance Parties, Introduction Nights, Banquets, etc.
Facts to Consider with regard to Hosting a Training:
1) Minimum numbers: •
Generally it takes a minimum of 15 people to just break even after venue expenses, marketing, training fee, flight, and other overhead expenses. Aim to have at a minimum 25 people and push it toward 50,75, or 100.
2) Typical expenses for a 2-to-3 day training: 1) 3 Mailings; advertisements, marketing: $500 to $2000. 2) Flight: transportation, travel, food, lodging, etc.: $1500 to $3000. 3) Training fee that I charge Institutes of NS is $600 to $1200 per day. 4) Training manuals: Generally about $10 per participant. 5) Training Room: hotel, school, etc.: From $100 a day to $650 a day.
3) Training fees when you bring in a trainer: • A shared risk agreement means that above and beyond expenses (which is itself negotiable), you as a trainer
•
•
•
will share the financial risks with the sponsor. I have done this often. For example, I may accept $400 training fee as part of the expenses and then share profits 40/60—60% to the sponsor. Then, whatever happens we either receive or pay according to that percentage. I have also contracted for no training fee in the expenses and taken a straight 50/50 share of whatever we make above and beyond expenses. When I am invited to come and train at an established Training Center, my training fee per day is $ 1200. Some centers have fee schedules that provide more based on the numbers, others offer percentages, 50/50 of profits, 20/80 of profits. With Corporations, my daily training fee is $2500. With individuals or Centers or the Institutes of NS, I begin by asking for $600 for the daily training fee as part of the expenses and then ask for a 40/60 split of profits. This is negotiable because there are always many variables to consider. Using a Contract Agreement with the trainer and possibly others of your staff just to keep expectations and understandings clear and up-front. They protect everyone.
About Marketing, Materials, and Promotions 1) Materials. •
The more you spend on making the ads, sales letter, postcards fancy, color-coded, the more you waste your money. Marketing wisdom (Jay Abraham, David Garfinkie, Joe Vitale, Robert Olic, etc) says keep it simple,
down-to-earth, plain. •
Forget trying to compete with Career-Track and the like. The more you try to make the materials "perfect," the more you waste your time, energy, creativity.
2) Pricing: Selling the Costs or Investment for the training: • • •
My aim is to keep the price of the Training about $ 150 USD a day: thus a 2 day training: $300, a 3 day training: $450. A Frame Games training will be $450 at the door, $325 early bird (3 weeks prior). Scholarships for students or those with special needs. Add value to the trainings by mention the $49.95 Training Manual, offer new book to the first 10 participants who sign up, offer 30 minutes consultation time for first 5 people, CDs.
5) Promotions: • • •
Start the training the previous night, Thurs. evening if the training starts on a Friday morning—plan a 2 hour introduction open to those who haven't made up their minds, "Free 2 hour Introduction to Wealth Building." And/or, Social— the night prior to the training for formal or information introduction. Radio or Television Interview the day prior to the training.
Sample:
TRAINING AGREEMENT L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. P. O. Box 8 Clifton CO 81520 (970) 523-7877 (970) 523-5790
[email protected] www.neurosemantics.com Client:
This
document
describes
The Training/s: Title or Theme Dates Location Participants Times Fee Investments
an agreement between L. Michael Hall regarding the following details about a training.
and
9 am to 6 pm $ 1500 per training day Or as agreed upon: Travel (flight). Hotel, Food, Training Manuals
Arrangements:
1) Deposit for Booking. To secure these arrangements, there is a $500 non-refundable deposit of the anticipated training fee. Booking occurs when the deposit has been received. Flight payment is due 4 months prior to engagement. One-half of the total Training Fee is to be paid 1 month prior to the date.
2) Cancellation Policy. If the training is canceled before one month prior to the training date (4 weeks), the deposit on the flight will be refunded minus the costs for canceling or transferring the flight, and half of the Training Fee will also be refunded. If cancellation notice is received after one month prior to the scheduled event, the deposit will not be refunded.
3) Training Fee. Daily training fee is $2500 for business; $1200 for Training and/or Event Organizations and $700 for Nonprofit Organizations. Balance is due upon the day that we complete the training.
4) Expenses and special concerns. Additional expenses include transportation, lodging, meals, phone access for lap-top computer in hotel, etc Expenses include shipping and handling for products and materials for the seminar. The sponsor agrees to provide overhead projector, flip chart, and suitable training venue.
5) Restrictions of use of materials.
6) Audio and video recordings. The right to record, create products, and distribution, etc. shall be mutually agreed by both parties. Typically, permission is given to the sponsor to audio and/or video record, create a product, etc. at a shared value of 90% for the sponsor and 10% royalty for Dr. Hall.
Signatures Date Date
MISTAKES TO AVOID WHEN PLANNING TRAININGS
If you are going to conduct a training, host or sponsor a training, there are specific things to do. We have detailed many of them. What
One promoter I worked with had years of experience as a tele-marketer. She thought that because she could sell tickets to a training already scheduled and promoted with an international trainer, she could get in on the ground floor by planning and hosting a training. But there were several problems with her strategy. First she was very global in her thinking and so missed most of the crucial details. Her greatest skill was having the gift of gab and a pleasant charmingness at talking fluff. This allowed her to talk people into buying tickets. Yet when she confused being a great talker with selling and promoting, she thought she would use the "talking her way through anything" as the way to solve logistic problems. But she could not. She missed details right and left, didn't listen well, and lacked critical thinking skills.
2) Don't substitute emails and faxes for an actual physical brochure. I have known several people who have tried to promote a training using faxes and emails. It doesn't work. That's worse than using bulk rate for mail-outs; people consider it junk mail and so often do not even look at it. A recent promoter thought he did a great job. He bragged to me that he sent out 4,500 brochures. When I got there, I asked to see one. he didn't have one. It was an email invitation! He blamed "the Europeans" for being closed-minded to NLP and Neuro-semantics. People need something concrete in their hands... something that can look at, read, take with them. It needs to be of good quality, descriptive, compelling, having the pictures of the presenter, etc. They need at least three exposures to a brochure, sales letter, or flyer.
Tony Robbins already had name recognition value there, he already had a team together, he already had lots of investment money upfront for generating a hot calling list.
4) Don't ignore networking and getting people to share the burdens and responsibilities. To go it alone makes it all much harder than it needs to be. To create alliances and to share the risk with others who can bring in other skills, interests, and expertise enables us to double and triple our efforts. Fear of cooperating, of being taken advantage of, of losing control, etc. leads to being more independent and notconnected.
MARKETING WHAT IS MARKETING? Marketing refers finding, or creating, a market of people for a product, service, or event. We market our offerings through ads, mailers, phone calls, etc. and through personally talking to people to sell them. In this way we bring a product, service, or event to a market. This means that marketing involves multiple facets of presentation. Directly, we market when we— • Create and run ads in newspapers, journals, and mail outs. • Get publicity for a new product, service, or event. • Send out Press Releases. • Call people on our mailing list and sell them on a book, training, etc. Indirectly, we market when we— • Let people know who we are and what we do that adds value to their lives. • Create Web Sites, offer free articles, techniques, etc. • Provide top-notch customer service that backs up and supports our offerings. There's a difference between finding a market that already exists of people wanting or needing a service or product and creating a market for those things. Marketing is about attracting people to what we do and offer, humanizing ourselves in their eyes, and making our products, services, and events increasingly more desirable. It means giving a personal touch, a touch of meaning and value to everything we do, from how we treat each other, our partners, associates, employees, etc. to how we treat and support our customer. We create loyalty in all these relationships as we give things a personal touch. Customer service is absolutely critical for keeping our market and basing it upon quality of service. Marketing is "selling" to the extent that in marketing we are informing people in our market (and people who will become our market) the what and why of buying. We tell them why to buy We tell them how to buy We tell them what to do We tell them why to do it now.
Marketing involves developing our skill in presenting these questions in a compelling and simple way. The more smoothly, personably, passionately, respectfully, authentically, and congruently we do so, the more powerful our communications in terms of getting results.
Marketing is about building a reputation in the mind of customers, creating a demand for our products, building credibility, et
WHY DO WE HAVE TO MARKET? If we want people to know about and respond to our offerings. People will not respond (buy) if they don't know what we have to offer. Marketing is communicating in order to inform people. If we are going to establish ourselves in a market. What is our market? Who makes up the demographics of our market? Why are they interested? What got them interested? Who else could be a part of this market? How do we keep them involved? What would satisfy them and turn them into loyal customers? If we want to develop and maintain rapport with customers. This means marketing is also building relationship, building trusting relationships with consumers, extending ourselves to understand them, meet their needs, etc. Marketing means coming to truly understand what customers need and want, providing high quality products and services that actually deliver the goods, and building a business upon that exchange that guarantees our own integrity. If we want to become profitable and successful in our business. Marketing is the interface activity between our product and those who invest in it.
What do we Market in NLP and Neuro-semantics? We market and sell such things as — Change and the management of change. Resources and how to access personal resourcefulness. Excellence — models of how experts perform at top performance. Solutions to problems that satisfies a need or want. Tools or technologies that allow us to do things. Ourselves — who we are and the relationship that we set up. To whom do we Market? 1) People who have had enough of something that doesn't work and are ready for a change. People sick and tired of not running their own brains, managing their own states. 2) People who are changing and/or in the process of change, transition and need tools for doing so. 3) Change agents and those involved in coaching, training such change.
HOW DO WE MARKET EFFICIENTLY?
We can spend a fortune on marketing with very little to show for it in return. Advertising, mailing, creating artwork, display ads, etc. are not cheap. If we want to get the most for every dollar we invest in marketing, and not waste our money, then we have to think in terms of Marketing Effectiveness.
So, how do we develop market efficiency?
By Adding Value •
We focus first and foremost on the benefits. People buy benefits. They invest in our products, services, and events because they see, hear, and feel it as valuable to them, significant, meaningful, beneficial. Generally, only when customers believe and feel convinced that the offering is valuable will they buy. 4
•
We develop a powerful focus on communicating benefits to the customers by thinking in terms of "What is there here for the customer?"
•
How can we guard against making statements concerning features without benefit? Silently add the words "Which means..." to the end of every statement you make during a sales presentation. This will translate all the objective, intellectual features of the product into the meaningful, desirable benefits. Doing this translates features into the language of the customer, whose only question is, "What's in it for me? "
By grabbing the minds and emotions of people: • We find and utilize every technique that gets a foothold in the mind of our consumers. Just as it's the impact of the message that counts, so it is the depth of the message in the mind of the customer. We have to engage, interest, and seduce the customer's mind to notice, pay attention, receive, hear and consider our offering.
•
We have to touch the customer's emotions. Regardless of what we sell, the important things are actually the intangibles, things like value, benefit, meaning, and specific emotions. Customers see our offerings in terms of what it will do for them.
•
We differentiate ourselves and our products. We develop a unique and special offering that meets the needs or wants of customers.
THE GOVERNING PRINCIPLES OF MARKETING
1) The WHY to buy is more important than the WHAT. Tell people why the product, service, or event is critically important to them. Link it to their highest values, emotions, passions, desires, fears, etc. Give people great big "whys" for buying. Marketing is about motivating.
2) Marketing involves investment of thought, creativity, and design over time. Marketing doesn't work magically overnight like a magic pill. Rather, it takes time. It takes the time involved in planning and creating something over a period of time and so necessitates patience and persistence.
3) Marketing costs money. It's not inexpensive. It involves time, energy, thought. Acquiring new customers is expensive. Keeping current buyers is crucial and a source for new clients. Routing advertising costs between $70 and $250 per customer.
4) We need to find something that people want and need. Fears —> Desires. This means marketing research to find out what people really want and need, to get close enough to our customers and to look intensely at what we have to offer.
5) Marketing involves discovering and then targeting the right market. Who is your clinetele? Profiling: the key to finding customers, to personalizing the training and the experience. Who is your customer? Where do your customers live? Demographic mapping What do they want from you? When do they buy?
6) Marketing is about relationships. Develop a lasting relationship with every new customer who does business with us. Target customers: those people who are likely to buy. "Marketing as a whole is nothing more than relationships. You must have solid relationships with whomever you are trying to reach to enable your business to grow." Jay Abraham
9) Marketing necessitates a becoming great at thinking strategically. Put your mind squarely in the marketplace, and if marketing was a game, where will you focus your energies and resources?
10) People buy things to get emotions... and emotional experiences. What we all want, ultimately, is a feeling, lots of feelings, lots of good feelings. That's why we buy things, go on events and trainings, etc. We market by connecting positive emotional states (love, excitement, thrill, laughter, fun, sexual attraction, power, strenght, fitness, health, etc.) to things.
MODELING PEOPLE SUCCESSFUL IN MARKETING Jay Abraham says that he spent a lot of time thinking about the super-successful people he met over the years and that the following separates them from those less successful. What attributes can we most frequently find in successful people?
1) They have fire in their belly. Successful entrepreneurs believe so fully in themselves and in their missions that they are undauntable, indefatigable. They are also totally focused and purposeful. This makes them credible, persuasive, convincing—they believe. They care. 2) They possess extraordinary concentrated focus. They rope in their diffused energies and bridle them into a laser-like powerhouse beam of productively channeled energy that (through their commitment to continually focused action) turns into positive achievement results.
Abraham: "One of the biggest problems I observe when I'm consulting one-on-one is that people erroneously want me to bombard them with a ton of different concepts, ideas, and strategies in order to feel they've gotten their money's worth. I tell them that this is wrong. Rather they are for better advised to take one good, sound, and workable idea—and single-mindedly work it to its fullest potential before turning to another idea. Sadly, most business people become "whirling dervishes" of diffused freneticism instead of concentrating their attention on one focused concept and working it to its full potential." (97). "The real super-achievers I've known take on one really good idea at a time. Then they spend the time and attention necessary to fully perfect and optimize all the avenues of sustainable profit which that one idea holds." (98)
3) They aren't afraid of the unknown. In fact, they're eager and willing to pursue pathways they've never been down before. They're impervious to become paralyzed with fear or inaction. They can invent it as they go and don't have to work it out perfectly before they begin. 4) They persevere. Tenacity, commitment, resiliency, and unrelenting determination to accomplish their objective is their strategy. They don't "fold" at the first sign of temporary defeat. Setbacks are but a challenge, and these are people who recognize the gossamer-thin line separating "frustration" from "challenge." 5) They really prepare. They practice, do their homework, take full advantage of every opportunity, edge, and advantage that's ever presented to them. They're swift, deft, accurate, and they make their life happen. Reactive is the last thing they are. Quite the contrary, these are the most proactive people you'll ever meet. They know what they want out of life and they understand that the only way to accomplish their vision is with strategic, pragmatic, and continuous forward action.
various factors in their marketing and get measurable data on which factors produce the best result. We don't tell our market what it wants; we find out what it wants. So we ask our consumers what they want. By testing we can determine with pinpoint accuracy what our market wants and doesn't want.
This is why we don't impose our preferences on the market; but experiment to find out which approaches bring the best resp
Analyze responses for quality as well as for quantity. Analyze not only front-end response to a promotion, but also how many of those who respond convert to a sale, and how much the average sale is in dollars. Test the headlines, offers, prices, etc. that you use to determine which work best.
9) They get People to respond by calling for Action. Marketing is not just informing, communicating, it is motivating, persuading, getting people to take action. So, put a response card with most of your mail promotions. The response card makes it easy for them especially if their response doesn't involve committing to anything. Call for action toward and away from. What are you inviting people toward? Are you giving your customers adequate incentive? What are they moving away from? What are the penalties if they don't respond?
Give abundant information that people will value. People crave information. So give valuable information as part of your promotions. Do so from your generosity in sharing knowledge. This implies that you must have much more to offer than what you've shared, and also much more than what your competitors have. Give candor and forthrightness. Again, people appreciate candor. So explain your strategy. Explain that you could make more on an initial sale if you wanted to, but that you're concerned about the long run, about return business over the years. I want to give my customers the best service at the lowest price and believe that will work best in the long run.
11) They offer top-notch quality Service. Since it is much less expensive to keep the customers you have, give them the best services. Turn them into loyal customers. Refuse to neglect them. Since some of the best profits come from repeat business, the best way to get repeat business is to offer the kind and quality of service that makes that highly desirable.
Don't under-estimate the pre-emptive advantage. If you're the first to tell the public about your industry's standard, behind-the-scene services, they will consider you to be the one among all your competitors who looks out most fo
12) Put People above the Sell. Conduct yourself nobly both at the end and at the beginning of any business relationship. If a person says "No," salvage all of the good will you can by being courteous, conscientious, and extending yourself. Burn it in your mind: It will cost me dearly if I burn people. The relationship is more important than any given sell. Successful people do not burn their relationship bridges behind them. When things go bad in a relationship, don't lower yourself to the other's level of conduct. Don't take a customers relationship for granted. 13) They integrate success piece by piece.
Once you have a solid idea that works— integrate it fully into your business. Abraham: "Before you move on to testing or experimenting with another idea, make sure you've taken steps to integrate the idea you just validated into a perpetual part of your on-going operations. Perpetuation of a proven concept, and then adding layers of additional perpetual concepts on top— that's the secret to enduring growth. The way to do this is to take every marketing concept you perfect, and before you go on to another concept, sit down and figure out how to continuously profit from that perfected concept or derivations of it." (p. 100 100 Marketing Strategies) Promotion Strategy: Tell the entire story of your product/ service in the most compelling way possible! Using the "you" point of view (not "I" or "we"). State the benefits with crystal clarity. Then call to immediate action. Find the hot buttons— keep your eyes and ears on what the market wants. Nurture endorsements as you go. Publicity must be newsworthy, have value and interest for the readers. Get someone in another business to promote you. Have him or her send out to his/her most cherished customers, "I Want to buy your next NLP book for you —no strings attached!" Sending out such unsolicited gifts helps to create good-will.
ADVERTIZING MAGIC Roy Williams (1998) in The Wizard of Ads describes the art of how we can turn words into magic.
1) Find and use the energy of words. 2) Combine Intellect with Emotion to move people. Get people to use their intellect to supply the logic for justifying what they want emotionally. If you win their hearts, their minds will follow. 3) Time and money are two sides of a single coin. No person gives you his money until he has first given you his time. Win the time of the people, their money will follow.
4) Sight and sound function differently in the mind, with sound being the surer investment. Win the ears of the people, their eyes will follow.
5) Opportunity and security are inversely proportionate. As one increases, the other must decrease. High returns are gained from low-risk strategies only through the passionate of time. He who will cheat time must embrace the risk of failure.
8) Use the Power of Language Point the movie camera of language to that place in the mind where you ant the listener to go. A persuasive intellectual ad begins with a frank statement of the benefit, then quickly substantiates every claim.
9) Make your ads and offerings Memorable, unforgettable. Memorability puts us halfway to fame and fortune. Having the Right Message is what matters — not reaching the right people. Understand the overwhelming importance of saying the right thing.
10) Sell the Why... Repeatedly. Don't drone on about Who, What, When, And Where. While failing to answer the pivotal question, Why?
11) Set the Frame This powerful need for definition is rarely discussed, but it is nonetheless universal, and an ability to tap into it is often the genesis of a very compelling ad campaign. Our need for definition influences what we drive, where we live, how we furnish our homes, the clothes we wear, the clubs we join, the magazines we read, and the cola we drink.
12) Find, create, and stimulate Reasons! We are more easily persuaded, in general, by the reasons we ourselves discover than by those which are given to us by others. Blaise Pascal
Avoid being Predictable: Predictability makes advertising sound like advertising and explains why ad campaigns fail. Avoid Cliches. To be persuasive, your ads must be frank, direct, and believable. Can the listener agree with your ad? Then is believable. How do you make the listener agree with you? Tell her what she already knows or suspects.
Remind her of things you know she has experienced. We call that pacing.
Activate Imagination and get people to see, hear, and feel themselves acting on your suggestions Describe in detail what a person can expect when he arrives. No person will take action until he has seen himself taking such action in his mind. We always imagine doing a thing before we do it. The real power we have lies in our ability to help the client tell his story as convincingly as possible.
Take Effective Action on your Ambition Once you have ambition, add lots of initiative so that you can actually take action. Don't stand around waiting for instructions. Do something. Ambition without initiative is daydreaming.
Help people to Dream "All men dream, but not equally. They who dream by night in the dark recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it is vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, for they act out their dreams with open eyes to make them possible." T.E. Lawrence (151)
PERSONAL EFFICIENCY PATTERN "Do what you can, with what you have, right where you are. "
(Theodore Roosevelt) Knowing what's right isn't the hard thing; Doing the right things—That's the hard thing.
"Efficiency is one of the most important components of wealth accumulation. People who become wealthy allocate their time, energy, and money in ways consistent with enhancing their net worth." {The Millionaire Next Door, p. 71) •
Do you know that you can increase your efficiency and your effectiveness by becoming better and better at your key tasks?
• •
Are you willing to become better at the most important things you do? What do you need to be more efficient?
Think of something that you have learned do very efficiently, but which you did not always do efficiently. Think of that behavior when
3) Amplify the Personal Efficiency State How much do you feel and sense this feeling of personal efficiency from 0 to 10? Allow your feelings and awareness to double. Let it grow and increase. What else can you do to step even more fully into this state? 4) Check and give permission for Efficiency in another area. Do you have permission to be efficient here? Does it settle well? Do you have permission to "take orders?" What comes to mind when you think about being "under orders? When you have to do something? What's your attitude about the things you "have to do?" Can you give yourself instructions and positively just follow those instructions? Give yourself permission if you need to. Apply this state to your training state and tasks. Holding this state... notice how it begins to transform the tasks and core competencies of writing. 5) Neutralize and Integrate the NS of "work," self-discipline, fear of losing alternatives, etc. As you feel this fully... and let it grow... You can recall how that others call this state of personal efficiency "work " And you can too... know that it's not really work, but fun and efficiency. As experiencing this in this positive way, you can recognize that others may look at this and call it selfdiscipline, and so can you. But when you exercise your personal power to get yourself to do what you want to do, should do, when you need to do it, regardless of whether you feel like it or not, you know it's just being efficient! Do you yet have the habit of just doing the things that need to be done? 6) Connect and Align your everyday activities with your Highest Intentions. Are you clear about your goals and objectives in training? Since your efficiency arises from clarity of intention. What are your top 10 goals for this year about training? If you were to accomplish one of these goals, which one would have the greatest positive impact on my life? What is your most important goal? Second? Third? Is every part of your mind full aligned with this efficiency in the area of training? Any objections to being resourceful in this way?
7) Loop back to Identity and other higher frames If you moved out into your future with this... day after day, week after week, etc. would this affect your selfdefinition? Your identity? Would you like that? This is who you would become more and more? 8) Future pace and symbolize Imagine doing this into your future... What is this like? What symbol or metaphor... a color, song, whatever comes to mind that you can use as a symbol for this way of being.
RE-VISITING GENIUS FROM A HIGHER LEVEL — You have treated yourself to Genius states at least once, and now you get to do it again! This time, however, you will do it for a new and different purpose, for the purpose of learning how to teach and train the material yourself. The challenge is for you to step back and to take a meta-position to the training. As you do, then notice how it is formatted and how it flows. Take each bit and pattern and notice how the process works at a meta-level. On a more personal level, you may want to apply the pattern of the genius states to yourself as a Trainer to create the best flow states for yourself when training.
What did you learn from Accessing Personal Genius the first time?
What do you aim to get out of the training this second time? Set several outcomes each day for things to learn, discoveries to make, etc.
What do you need to know about meta-states or recursiveness that will allow you to put all of your learnings to better use?
What questions have you not yet asked yourself that will enable you to take the next step of development with Neuro-semantics?
DAYS 12—14
THE BUSINESS OF NEURO-SEMANTICS
Neuro-semantics® NS is all about how meaning (semantics) gets incorporated or embodied in our bodies (neurology) It is founded first upon Meta-States, then Frame Games, and finally in the Matrix model-
NS has become an international society of professional men and women who are using the model for teaching, training, coaching, consulting, writing, managing, wealth building, etc.
FACETS OF NEURO-SEMANTIC CERTIFICATION AND LICENSE
During NSTT you will have the opportunity to have hands-on practice in coaching and training people in Accessing Personal Genius. Afterwards, we will debrief the structure of that training and provide materials so that each certified NS Trainer will be able to begin training and certifying that training.
What if I already have NLP Trainers Training? Then we invite you to the 14 7 days of NSTT to add Neuro-Semantics and Meta-States to your repertoire of skills, patterns, and trainings at 54 price. What does Mastery as a Neuro-Semantics Trainer involve? To become a truly skillful and masterful Meta-States Trainer, you will need: 1) A thorough acquaintance with the Meta-States Model. 2) The experience of accessing your own personal genius and have begun to develop your own personal mastery. 3) The ability to apply Meta-States, NLP, and Neuro-Semantics to yourself. This is the basis of congruence and "walking your talk." 4) The ability to apply personal genius to your training states and to become masterful in the process of training, coaching, facilitating, and presenting. 5) A commitment to ongoing development and continual learning. The process of ongoing mastery will never end. The attitude of continual curiosity and playfulness is part of mastery. What does Certification and Licensing mean? To be certified as competent as a Neuro-Semantics Trainer means that we recognize the trainer as having the knowledge, skills, and competence in the following:
1) A good through and working knowledge of NLP. Trainers need to be completely conversant with the language of NLP, the structure of subjective experience as given by NLP, and the basic NLP patterns. Trainers should be familiar with The SourceBook of Magic, Introducing NLP, Using Your Brain for a Change, The User's Manual for the Brain. Vol. I & II.
3) The ability to apply NLP and Meta-States to oneself. This is perhaps the most important criterion for Certification. Our commitment to excellence is to make the ability of applying NLP and Meta-States to yourself essential If you cannot do this, we will not certify you. We consider this so critical to being a top-notch trainer and a representative of Neuro-Semantics that we have made this a litmus test. This means applying the models and principles to yourself, to being able to demonstrates what you're presenting. This doesn't mean being perfect or flawless, it means being committed to self-application. It means being open, authentic, working on competence, and willingness to receive feedback. Provisional Certification will be given to those who still need to complete some of the prerequisite studies and/or who need to work on specific competencies. Our commitment is to continue working with you until you achieve that. As long as there is effort, commitment, and willingness, you cannot fail. Giving up, quitting, refusing to receive feedback, to be a part of the community— these are the things that will sabotage certification and licensing. Licensing means that the licensing board grants (NS Guardians) you the right to certify the people who train under the auspices of the International Society of Neuro-Semantics (ISNS). Licensing comes from Certification and can be revoked. The process of revoking a license will operate according to the principles of Conflict Resolution that we have published on the Website and in this manual. The revoking of the license will be based upon unethical behavior and refusal to straighten such out. The ethical behaviors are those that are typical to those of any profession and are listed in the Neuro-Semantic Vision at the front of this Training Manual.
NEURO-SEMANTICS LICENSE CONTRACTUAL AGREEMENT Trainer's Copy Date:
Trainer and Institute Fees: Trainers: Beginning at an unspecified date, NS Trainers membership will be $250 annually (for Trainers not certifying, but working in corporations or other contexts) and $500 annually for those certifying. Institutes: NS Institutions membership fee will be $1000 annually. All monies will be used solely for promotion of ISNS around the world, and not for members of the ISNS board. NS Trainers are required to submit and have on file a Letter of Intent that outlines a basic description of what they intend to do in terms of an Institute. As a Trainer, if you plan to create a Training Center or Institute, you agree to presenting a "Letter of Intent" and to keep it updated on a yearly basis.
Vision and Mission Statement:
•
NS Trainers agree to the NS Vision and Mission Statement and to conduct themselves professionally and ethically according to that statement. Every person certified as Neuro-Semantic-NLP Trainer agrees to the Vision Statement and to the general principles of professional conduct doing trade under the Trademark of "Neuro-semantics. " Each Trainer has been coached about the importance of operating from respect for self and other, from abundance and cooperation, from recognition of the importance of teamwork and community. Each trainer agrees to uphold the principles and ideals of NS-NLP in order to create a more professional and healthy public image of these fields. Each trainer agrees' to take full personal responsibility to stay in community, to keep learning and sharing, and using NS to work out conflicts.
Signed:
NEURO-SEMANTICS LICENSE CONTRACTUAL AGREEMENT Copy for the International Society of Neuro-semantics Date:
Trainer and Institute Fees: Trainers: Beginning at an unspecified date, NS Trainers membership will be $250 annually (for Trainers not certifying, but working in corporations or other contexts) and $500 annually for those certifying. Institutes: NS Institutions membership fee will be $1000 annually. All monies will be used solely for promotion of ISNS around the world, and not for members of the ISNS board. NS Trainers are required to submit and have on file a Letter of Intent that outlines a basic description of what they intend to do in terms of an Institute. As a Trainer, if you plan to create a Training Center or Institute, you agree to presenting a "Letter of Intent" and to keep it updated on a yearly basis.
Vision and Mission Statement: NS Trainers agree to the NS Vision and Mission Statement and to conduct themselves professionally and ethically according to that statement. Every person certified as Neuro-Semantic-NLP Trainer agrees to the Vision Statement and to the general principles of professional conduct doing trade under the Trademark of "Neuro-semantics." Each Trainer has been coached about the importance of operating from respect for self and other, from abundance and cooperation, from recognition of the importance of teamwork and community. Each trainer agrees to uphold the principles and ideals of NS-NLP in order to create a more professional and healthy public image of these fields. Each trainer agrees to take full personal responsibility to stay in community, to keep learning and sharing, and using NS to work out conflicts.
Signed:
Conflict Resolution Agreement Trainer's Copy
Signed:
Conflict Resolution Agreement Copy for the International Society of Neuro-semantics Conflict is always bound to arise when people interact. This is not a "bad" thing. Conflict is simply a reflection that we operate from different maps, different perspectives, have different needs and wants, and are unique. In this we can celebrate and honor differences. But conflict also arises from misunderstandings, failed promises, misbehaviors, disappointments, violation of trust, frustrations, stress, and general unresourcefulness.
While this is the beginning, this is just the beginning. There is much to do and together we will be inventing it as we go. How NS will grow and develop in the years to come will depend to a great extent upon you ... upon those of you who are the first to catch the Vision and to make this a facet of your commitment.
Institutes: To create or announce an Institute of NS, Trainers need to apply to the ISNS and submit a letter of Intention. This will function as a tentative business plan about what you intend to do— your goals, objectives, and vision. We ask that you update your Letter of Intent every year.
USE OF MATERIALS
4) Cut and Paste from the T.M., description pages, patterns, etc. and giving full credit for such, using a prescribe description that I will provide for you, and create your own Manual. If you alter, change, or add to the text so that it becomes significantly different from the T.M., then we will copyright as it as a co-produced work of that product. It will then reflect both your creativity and mine and will become another version of that
T.M.
MAKE US PROUD! What we are doing is not without consequences. What we do in training, coaching, consulting, and writing will affect the lives and minds and hearts of people. And with the powerful magic at our disposal— we can harm as well as heal. We can hurt and damage as well as empower and enhance. The ethical use and the human use of this technology does not lie in the technology, but upon the user. So ... as you have learned the structure of magic and many of the secrets of magic... May you go out to do much good as you touch the minds and hearts of many. May us proud of what you do and how you do it!
Being real and human and authentic. May you experience your fallibility in glorious ways so that you truly become gloriously fallible... and instead of fearing or dreading your weaknesses and inadequacies, you develop them and play to your strengths and focus on what you can do. Yes you have quirks and yes you are quirky. We all are. And that's what makes us so loveable ... or makes us great candidates for developing new NS patterns.
Applying NLP and NS to yourself first. Don't forget to experience the magic yourself, the transformation of your personality so that you can feel and experience the power of personal congruence.
Having lots of fun. This is the rule in NS, "You must enjoy yourself." You must pleasure yourself first and then spread the fun and joy around. Your competence and congruence depends on your ability to have a delightful and appreciative attitude as you move through life. So make NS attractive by having lots of goodnatured fun every day. If you get serious, you will get stupid.
Experiencing life as richly and fully as possible... and then, double that. Make the quality of your state and your life an attractor for others so that they will say what the lady in the movie, Harry Meets Sally said in the restaurant when Meg Regan showed Billy Crystal what an organism sounds like, "I want what she has!"
THE NEXT LEVEL OF TRAINERS TRAINING L. Michael Hall, Ph.D
What is the quality of training trainers in NLP today? How satisfied do you feel regarding the currently quality of NLP trainers? If leaders and trainers are the ones who call and train a community in a given field, model or discipline, how pleased are we with NLP leaders and trainers in general? What do we need in order to raise the level of skill, competency, and integrity in NLP leaders? What problems has the NLP community experienced and suffered over the years due to problems in the training of trainers? What is the next level of quality and competency for trainers training?
For many of us in NLP who truly care about this field and want to see it succeed in terms of gaining more credibility academically, gain more effectiveness in the world of business, and gain more acceptance publically—we've got a problem. We have a lot of serious challenges facing us. After 30 years, NLP is not only not recognized for its credibility, it is all too frequently seen in a negative light. We could spend time exploring why this is so, where this comes from, who has contributed to this problem, etc. Yet to do would not help and it would not be applying NLP to ourselves. The issue we need to focus on isn't the source of the problem, we rather need to focus on constructing some powerful solutions to turn things around. Since I see this problem almost everywhere in the world—in the USA, Europe, Australia, Africa, Asia, South America—the problem must be a systemic problem. Perhaps there is something amiss in the very way that we train trainers. Actually, this isn't a new thought or one that I've invented. I hear this from NLP trainers, thinkers, and leaders everywhere. The very conflicts between various "schools" or "camps" in NLP suggests that there's some inadequacy in how trainers have been trained.
Training of Trainers —Past and Future So how are trainers trained? How do we designed trainers training? What do we seek to create or achieve in such trainings? What strategies and processes do we use? What structures and networking do we initiate that allow trainers to develop excellence, high quality, congruency, integrity, a cooperative and collaborative style, etc.?
As a result, many trainers are not very skilled, lack the competency even in the context of presenting NLP information, facilitating the processes, eliciting states in an audience, engaging an audience, and building skill and competence in participants. Among those who have this level of competency, there's a great many who do not have the business skills
for creating, building, and sustaining a viable business. And for those who do, they often lack the skills for networking, collaborating, and creating coalitions so as to not be stuck in a small proprietary business and feel that they are in competition with the rest of the NLP community. Then there's the problem of scarcity. Beyond all of the petty competition, small-minded nit-picking and highlighting of differences in this tiny little community, there is the attitude that there's not enough. This leads to fear of sharing, childish clinging to "intellectual property," refusal to acknowledge sources, and other toxic ideas, feelings, and experiences that come from a sense of scarcity rather than abundance. So, what can we do about this? How can we create a new, different, and better future?
Taking Trainers Training to a New and Higher Level Suppose we acknowledged these problems and difficulties and set our aim to step back and reflect on the training of trainers and leaders in NLP. If we did, we could begin asking some very important questions that could perhaps allow a vision of what's possible to arise. • What kind of leaders and trainers do we want? • What kind of trainers would truly represent the spirit of NLP, that is the essence and heart of what we envision NLP to be? • What qualities do we want in our trainers and leaders? • How would we go about training in those kinds of traits, features, skills, and relational qualities? • How could we measure or benchmark the quality of trainers? • How could we create a network of cooperation and collaboration world-wide and raise the vision of trainers that we are all in this together?
NEURO-SEMANTIC LEADERSHIP CRITERIA • What makes a leader a leader? • What qualifies a person to led and to step up to a position of leadership? • What distinguishes a person as a leader? • What enables a person to exercise influence with others? While leaders come in many different forms so that there are many different kinds of leadership, leaders arise and express themselves in a given context. That context is the particular values, expectations, needs, style, and culture of the referent group. This realization, of course, leads to numerous other questions—questions that are more precise to our concerns. • What qualities and traits do we look for in recognizing leaders in Neuro-Semantics? • How will we recognize and qualify the men and women who will arise in Neuro-Semantics as leaders? • What criteria of leadership will we set? • If we want leaders who lead from the Neuro-Semantic vision, what will be the prerequisites of leadership? Obviously, in Neuro-Semantics, we will look mostly and preeminently for leaders who embody the principles of the neuro-semantic vision—its principles and practice. We will look for practical leaders who are excited about the vision, who apply that vision to themselves, who look for adding value to others, and who work at translating their talk into their walk. Conversely, we will not be interested in leaders who are driven by visions of personal glory, the rank and status of privilege, or the ego satisfactions of someone driven to be a guru. To that end, we have set forth the following leadership criteria. This criteria comes immediately and directly from the Vision and Mission statement of Neuro-Semantics. As such it reflects the very qualities of individuals who are in actuality leading out in directions which fit the meaning and purpose of Neuro-Semantics. In recent years, we have become aware that we should not only wait for men and women with these special traits and qualities to arise, but that we should intentionally plan to facilitate this kind of leadership development in people. Also, recognizing that most leaders in Neuro-Semantics will come through the Training and/or Coaching Tracks, we have set forth the following 7 criteria as the foundation for leadership. These are divided into two categories: Being and Doing criteria. Being Criteria: Authenticity: being and acting from one's true self without masks and personas Integrity: being as good as one's word, impeccably honest and fair-minded Congruent: applying the principles to self so that one walks the talk Doing Criteria: Contributing: giving of oneself to others, serving from the NS principles Collaborating: operating as a team player, cooperating with others Pioneering: leading out into new areas Communicating: sharing and disclosing in ways that are clear, precise, succinct, engaging, and compelling The following is still in its formative stages and I will be updating it in the years to come. In setting forth the following criteria, I first offer a definition and then a benchmarking from 0 to 5 of specific behaviors that evidence that criterion. About reading the benchmarks, start with 0 and move upwards. With each higher number, the person demonstrates increasingly more of the positive features of the quality and less of the negative features.
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The BEING Criteria Some of the criteria has to do with the person and character of the leader. These speak about the leader's ability to lead him or herself in using and applying the models and premises of Neuro-Semantics. The presupposition is that one has to first learn the art of leading and managing oneself before attempting to lead others. 1) Authenticity: Authenticity: being and acting from one's true self without masks and personas Being real or true to oneself, to one's gifts, talents, abilities, dreams, values, visions, Definition: Authenticity refers to "authoring" one's own life from one's own thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting. It's an expression of being personally real and true to oneself. This comes from "applying to self and becoming congruent with one's own truths. Authenticity speaks about being real— being and presenting oneself as one is without the need for pretense, arrogance (arrogating to oneself traits and qualities that one doesn't have) or having driving ego-needs. Being authentic speaks about being willing to be human, fallible, to know not everything, and to not have to be the center of attention. Authenticity implies a solid enough sense of self so as to be modest, humble, and able to extend self to and for others. The opposite of authenticity is the shallow make or woman who is only known through masks, roles, personas, etc. Authenticity Questions: What do I really want and believe in? What is really important to me? What makes for a meaningful and significant life? What do I really think and feel about the things that are important to me? How true do I act on my own beliefs and opinions? What are my passions, talents, and vision? Benchmarking "Authenticity" 5 Will pay price to live up to highest values and visions and not follow "path of least resistance." Willing to stand out from crowd. 4
Willing to take a stand on unpopular issue, speaks with energy, emotion, and enthusiasm about things one values and cares about. Willing to show emotion about such.
3
Mostly speaking and acting congruently, words and gestures match content of what one says. Speaks from one's views and opinions even when in conflict with social group.
2
Sometimes speaking and acting in ways that reveals one's true heart and views. Mostly trying to please others, fit in, and conform.
1
Speaking and acting in ways that are incongruent, not sounding believable because tone, volume, style doesn't match content of words, outward expressions not revealing inward feelings and thoughts.
0
Playing roles to trick or deceive, acting as a "Yes" person to whatever is socially or politically correct or acceptable, not owning one's own voice, lack of confrontation, hesitating when confronting.
2) Integrity. Integrity: being as good as one's word, impeccably honest and fair-minded Definition: Integrity speaks first about being whole and integrated which immediately leads to a forthright and honest presentation of self. When a person has integrity, there is an honesty and reliability in the person so that the person will do what he or she says. Integrity means making promises and keeping them, It means honoring the words we utter and not breaking our commitments. Integrity leads a person to typically do whatever it takes to come through with one's word and that when we cannot, we immediately communicate that, apologize quickly, and make whatever amends seem appropriate. Integrity also refers to telling the truth even when it's difficult. It means living one's life as an open book without a lot of secrets or cover-ups. Several of the pathways to integrity is making oneself accountable to others, receiving and integrating feedback, and staying in a community where we can be available for such.
The opposite is being dishonest, lacking the strength of character to tell the truth and to be fair. Integrity Questions: Are you as good as your word? Do you generally come through with what you do? Can people generally trust you, depend on you? Do you receive feedback graciously and seek to use it? Do people have any basic integrity issues with you? Benchmarking "Integrity" 5 Comes through on promises even at great cost (financially, time, energy). 4
Lifestyle and actions shows strong and consistent congruency between word and actions. Quickly making amends or communicating about problems when cannot come through on a promise.
3
Mostly doing and acting on what one says or presents (75%). Mostly open to correction and feedback, making amends.
2
Coming through with 50% or more of what one says, acknowledging misalignment between word and action. Sometimes making excuses, getting defensive.
1
Saying that one wants to come through on a promise or idea, but evidencing little to no behaviors that match those words. Breaking agreements without making it open and explicit.
0
Behaviors that show no relationship to promises, commitments, or word. No mention of the difference between word and action. Lies, deceptions, presenting oneself in ways that do not fit reality.
3) Congruency; Applying the principles to self so that one walks the talk Definition: Congruency speaks about being harmonious, in agreement with self, and arises from the ability to "apply to self." Our speech and behavior fits with our thinking and feeling. This comes from applying and translating our ideas, principles, and beliefs to ourselves. When this happens, we can walk our talk. Our actions then appropriately reflect our principles and premises. Since "apply to self lies at the heart of NS, it lies as one of the key and central leadership criteria. Apply to self enables us to be congruent so that all of our parts are aligned and congruent with our values and visions. We are not inwardly torn, we do not fail to live up to our values. We can step back, evaluate ourselves with some fairness, seek feedback, and take responsibility for one's own responses. Congruency Questions: Does you apply NLP and NS to yourself? What are the indicators that you do? Am I aligned with my values and visions? Do others see me as congruent or incongruent? Do I walk the talk? Benchmarking "Apply to Self 5 Constantly talking, inquiring, exploring how to apply to self, improve. Explores feedback when given, and eagerly invites feedback, receives coaching, etc. 4
Applies most things to self, constantly seeking to continuously learn, develop, improve. Few incongruencies, searches for feedback.
3
Apply many things to self, asking about how to apply something to self, receiving coaching, feedback,
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and therapy to work on self, an openness to feedback. 2
Applying a few things to self, but mostly focused on what others are doing or not doing Still many incongruencies in lifestyle.
1
Thinking about how something might relate to self, but not applying to self. Word and action doesn't match, incongruency between talk and walk.
0
Never talks about applying to self, or how something relates to self, talks only about what others are doing or should do.
5) Collaborating: Operating as a team player, cooperating with others Definition: Collaborating with others means cooperating, operating as a team player, helping, assisting, etc. A collaborative style such as that presupposes the ability to reference the thoughts, feelings, values, and needs of others, to take second position, to be empathetic, concerned, and even loyal. It means matching, supporting, and following the lead of another. If the person is naturally a mismatcher, he or she can turn off the mismatching to be a member of the team. As a team player, we are able to shift from sorting by self to sorting by others and thinking of the good for the larger community. Opposite to collaborating is keeping to self, not sharing, not disclosing, not making oneself open or vulnerable to others.
Collaborator or Team Player Questions: Are you a team player? Do others describe you as a team player? How well do you support others and contribute to the overall good of the community? Are there people who think of you as not a team player? Do you come from a sense of abundance? How much flexibility do you have in shifting to Sorting by Others?
Benchmarking "Collorabative" 5
Adding to a team in creating a sense of working well together, performing as a high performance team.
4 Following the lead of someone and supporting him or her in a project (see Supporting), contributing ideas about team work, collaboration, etc. 3
Being a part of a team project, Assist Team, Coach; helping a group or team become more cohesive.
2
Supporting others in a project, collaborating with them on something that contributes to their success or that pioneers some new facet in NS.
1
Talks about collaborating, but does not get around to it, mostly keeping things to self and not sharing.
0
No participation with others, keeping completely to self, criticizing others and what others are doing.
6) Pioneering: Leading out or moving out into new areas. Definition: Pioneering refers to launching out into new and unexplored territories. As a metaphor, the pioneer describes a leader as one leading out to some new place, going first, being an example, trailblazing the path. As such a pioneer or leader sees a vision and begins acting to make it real. As others catch that vision, the follow that lead. People who are actually leading out in some area by speaking out on something, creating a product or service, doing something that's commercially viable, running a training company, developing a training, creating coaching practice, developing new program, model, idea, pattern.
Pioneering Questions: Do people follow me? Where and in what areas do they follow? Can I communicate a vision clearly and precisely? What have I provided leadership for? In what areas am I now leading out in?
Benchmarking "leadership" 5
Setting frames for solving a problem, setting forth a vision of a new possibility, inviting others to share the dream and co-invent the solutions.
3
Exploring a market gap with lots of solution-focused questions, inviting people to brainstorm about solutions, researching what solutions have already been developed or explored.
2
Exploring, talking, questioning about a problem gap that needs to be addressed, asking solution focused questions about it.
1
Talks about new directions, but does nothing, talks about needs, problems, and complaints.
0
Sharing nothing, pioneering no new directions, keeping to self.
7) Communication: sharing and disclosing in ways that are clear, precise, succinct, engaging, and compelling Definition: Leaders lead by communicating. They communicate a vision, an idea, a value, a hope, or a desired outcome. In leading by communicating, the communication typically is persuasive or influential because it has certain qualities. It is precise, succinct, clear, compelling, and inspirational. The communication effectively languages or frames the felt needs, emotions, values, hopes, dreams, fears, etc. of those who follow. Leaders lead by framing, building relationships, matching, negotiating, seeing and seizing opportunities, risk taking, and developing an entrepreneurial in attitude and disposition.
Communication Questions: How precise, accurate, and succinct are my communications? How clear is the vision or picture that I describe in word or in print? How compelling, inspiring, or motivational are my words? Do people seem drawn and compelled by the word pictures I draw or the frames that I set?
Benchmarking "Communication " 5—
Able to create crystal clear images and movies for the mind that move people to take action, that succinctly states with precision the next step and that calls for action.
4 — Able to effectively match and pace a group of people and call them into a community, mostly able to get to the point and to be succinct, more precise descriptions. 3 — Able to put into words the hopes and dreams of others, but verbose and close to get to the point, not always clear or precise. 2—
Oral and written words partly focused on a vision, dream, or new idea, still half or more of it about self, either very talkative or offering not enough description to be inspirational.
1 — Moderate amount of words, some suggesting a vision or dream, communications mostly vague, fluffy, undefined, perhaps wordy, redundant, not getting to the point. Or words almost always about self or coming back to self as if needing to put forward. 0—
No or few words or communications that lead forth to anything new or different. Only words of complaint or dislikes. Only words that relate to self not others.
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Hall, L. Michael. (1996). Languaging: The linguistics of psychotherapy. Grand Jet. CO: E.T. Publications. Hall, L. Michael (1996). Dragon slaying: Dragons to princes. Grand Jet. CO: E.T. Publications. Hall, L. Michael (2000) The spirit of NLP: The process, meaning, and criteria for mastering NLP. Wales, United Kingdom: Anglo-American Books. Hall, L. Michael; Bodenhamer, Bobby G. (1997). Figuring out people: Design engineering with meta-programs. Wales, United Kingdom: Anglo-American Books. Hall, L. Michael; Bodenhamer, Bobby G. (2002). Mindlines: Lines for changing minds. Clifton. CO: N.S. Publ. Hall, L. Michael. (1998). Secrets of magic: Communicational excellence for the 21 . Century. Wales, United Kingdom: Anglo-American Books. st
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Watlzwick, Paul; Beavin, Janet H.; and Jackson, Don D. (1967). Pragmatics of human communications: A study of interactional patterns, pathologies, and paradoxes. NY: W.W. Norton.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS Garratt, Ted. (1996). The effective delivery of training using NLP: A handbook of tooks, techniques, and practical exercises. London. O'Connor, Joseph; Seymour, John. (1994). Training with NLP: Skills for managers, trainers, and communicators. London: Thorsons: Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Metaphors: (Provided by Andrew Bryant) Rosen, Sidney (1982). My Voice Will Go With You, The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson. NY: WW. Norton & Company.
Overdurf, John; Siverthorn, Julie. (1995). Training Trances, Multi Level Communication in Therapy and Training. OR: Metamorphous Press Veale, Tony. Metaphor, Memory and Meaning: Symbolic and Connectionist Issues in Metaphor Interpretation. Thesis http://www.compapp.dcu,ie/~tonyv/ Battino, Rubin; South, Thomas L. (1995). Ericksonian Approaches A Comprehensive Manual Wales, UK: Crown House Publishing.
Hall, L. Michael. (1996). Becoming more ferocious as a trainer: Notes on the Trainer's Training by Richard Bandler. Grand Jet. CO. E.T. Publications.
Owen, Nick (2001). The Magic of Metaphor. Wales, UK: Crown House Publishing.
Kamp, Di. (1996). The Excellent Trainer: Putting NLP to Work London: Gower.
Berman, Michael; Brown, David (2000). The Power of Metaphor. Wales, UK: Crown House Publishing.
Co-Founders of Neuro-semantics L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. Neuro-semantics® International P.O. Box 8 Clifton, Colorado 81520 USA (970) 523-7877
L. Michael Hall is a visionary leader in the field of Neuro-semantics and today works as an entrepreneur, researcher/modeler, and international trainer. His doctorate is in the Cognitive-Behavioral sciences from Union Institute University. He worked as a psychotherapist in Colorado when he found NLP in 1986. He then studied with Richard Bandler and wrote several books for him. When studying and modeling resilience, he developed the Meta-States model (1994). Soon he began traveling nationally and then internationally, cocreated the field of Neuro-semantics with Dr. Bob Bodenhamer. The International Society of Neurosemantics (ISNS) was established in 1996. As a prolific writer, Michael has written more than 30 books, many best sellers in the field of NLP. Michael first applied NLP to coaching in 1991, but didn't create the beginnings of Neuro-Semantic Coaching until 2001 when together with Michelle Duval co-created MetaCoaching trainings. In 2003, the Meta-Coach Foundation was create.
Historical Development of the Meta-States Model (Compiled by Denis Bridoux, NLP Trainer with Post-Graduate Medical & Professional Education, Harragate, England) 1933: Alfred Korzybski coined the phrase neuro-linguistic training, postulated his theory of the levels of abstraction, constructed his theory of second-order abstractions, third-order, etc. in his classic word Science and Sanity. 1972: Gregory Bateson's classic work Steps to an Ecology of Mind that brought together all his revolutionary studies on double-bind theory, applications of Logical Theory of Types, going meta to meta-levels, the levels of Learning Model, etc. 1975-1983: John Grinder & Richard Bandler utilizing the idea of going meta in their NLP model beginning with the Meta-model—an explicit model about how language and VAK representations work in human experience. They distinguish sensory-based level from the evaluative level, the importance of meta-parts, and the strategy model for modeling "the structure of subjective experience." 1994: Michael Hall specifies how meta-levels of mind-body neuro-linguistic states factor into the structure of subjective experience and bring over Korzybski and Bateson ideas into the strategy model. This arose from modeling resilience and discovering that within it people have embedded numerous layers and levels of consciousness and states. Awareness by the International Trainers Association of NLP (1995) for the most significant contribution to NLP during 1994-1995. 1998: The Framing Model was developed and articulated as Frame Games This initiated a series of Frame Game trainings and books: Games for Mastering Fear, Games Slim and Fit People Play, Games Business Experts Play, etc. 2002: The 7 Matrices Model was developed from Frame Games. The Matrix Model was immediately put to use as a template to gather and sort out information and then as a diagnostic tool for a person's Frames.
Books:
1) Meta-States: Self Reflexiveness in Human States of Consciousness (2000) 2) Dragon Slaying: Dragons to Princes (1996) 3) The Spirit of NLP: The Process, Meaning & Criteria for Mastering NLP (1996) 4) Languaging: The Linguistics of Psychotherapy (1996) 5) Becoming More Ferocious as a Presenter (1996) 6) Patterns For "Renewing the Mind" (w. Dr. Bodenhamer) (1997) 7) Time-Lining: Advance Time-Line Processes (w. Dr. Bodenhamer) (1997) 8) NLP: Going Meta — Advance Modeling Using Meta-Levels (2001) 9) Figuring Out People: Design Engineering With Meta-Programs (w, Dr. Bodenhamer) (1997) 10) A Sourcebook of Magic (w. B. Belnap) (1997)
11) Mind-Lines: Lines For Changing Minds (w. Dr. Bodenharmer) (2002) 12) The Secrets of Magic: Communication Excellence for the 21 . Century (1998) Now, Communication Magic (2001) 13) Meta-State Magic. From the Meta-State Journal, (1997-1999) 14) The Structure of Excellence: Unmasking the Meta-Levels of "Sub-Modalities "(Hall/Bodenhamer, 1999) 15) Instant Relaxation (1999, Lederer & Hall) 16) The Structure of Personality: Modeling "Personality Using NLP and Neuro-semantics (Hall, Bodenhamer, Bolstad, H st
17) The Secrets of Personal Mastery (Fall, 2000) 18 Frame Games: Persuasion Elegance (2000) 19) Games Slim People Play (2001) 20) Games for Mastering Fear (2001, with Bodenhamer) 21) Games Business Experts Play (2001) 22) The Matrix Model (2002/ 2003) 23) User's Manual of the Brain: Master Practitioner Course, Volume II (2002) 24) MovieMind (2002) 25) The Bateson Report (2002) 26) Make it So! (2002) 27) Sourcebook of Magic, Volume II, Neuro-Semantic Patterns (2003) 28) Games Great Lovers Play (2004) 29) Propulsion Systems (2003) 30) Coaching Conversations (2004 with Michelle Duval)
ISNS: INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF NEURO-SEMANTICS L. Michael Hall and Bobby G., Bodenhamer trademarked both Meta-States and Neuro-semantics in 1996 and began the first Institute of Neuro-semantics. Later the USA Society was born and then the International Society. The central NS web site is: www.neurosemantics.com where you can read about the ISNS, the community, membership, etc.
Bobby G. Bodenhamer, D.Min 1516 Cecelia Dr. Gastonia, NC 28054 (704) 864-3585 Fax:(704)8641545 bobbvbodenhamerfSivahoo.com www.neurosemantics.com Bob Bodenhamer was first trained for the ministry where he earned a doctorate in Ministry and then served several churches as pastor. Presently he is serving as pastor of a mission church in Gastonia North Carolina. He has been married to Linda for 39 years. He began NLP training in 1990, studying with Gene Rooney, Tad James and Wyatt Woodsmall and received Practitioner, the Master Practitioner and Trainer Certifications. Since then, he has taught and certified NLP trainings at Gastonia College in Dallas North Carolina and led workshops from Australia to England. Beginning in 1996, Dr. Bodenhamer began studying the Meta-States model. He then teamed up with Michael co-authoring nine books with Michael. He worked with Michael early in the development of the Meta-States Model. In 1996 also, Bob and Michael co-founded the Society of Neuro-Semantics. This has taken his work to a new level, taken him into International Trainings, and set in motion many Institutes of Neuro-Semantics around the world. Books: 1) Patterns For "Renewing the Mind" (w. Hall, 1997) 2) Time-Lining: Advance Time-Line Processes (w. Hall, 1997) 3) Figuring Out People: Design Engineering With Meta-Programs (w. Hall, 1997) 4) Mind Lines: Lines For Changing Minds (w. Hall, 2002) 5) The Structure of Excellence: Unmasking the Meta-Levels of "Sub-modalities " (w. Hall, 1999) 6) The User's Manual of the Brain (1999, w. Hall) 7) Hypnotic Language (2000, w. Burton) 8) The Structure of Personality: Modeling "Personality" Using NLP and Neuro-Semantics. (Hall, Bodenhamer, Bolstad, Harmblett, 2001) 9) Games for Mastering Fears (2001, with Hall) 10) User's Manual, Volume II (2003, with Hall) 11) Mastering Blocking and Stuttering (2004).
Everyday all over the world trainings are being held. On the surface, it doesn't seem to be that big of a deal. Get a good trainer or announce a nee
It takes a lot to put on a Training! Over the years I have put the following together about how to host or put on a training. Whether you are doing the training or whether you are bringing in someone to do the training, these are some of the things you need to be aware of and plan for. Initially I put this together to respond to the question about how to put on a training. What's involved?
