Before the meeting began Steve and I were chatting about NLP and he told me there were two kinds of NLPer. The ones who think NLP is a toolbox with a set of tools to ‘use on other people’ and those who feel NLP is part of them and embrace the ‘wanton curiosity’ route.
Well I couldn’t let that go unchallenged so quick as a flash I took my ‘six step reframe’ out of the box, unwrapped it carefully from the greaseproof paper and balancing it across my forearm let him have it with all six barrels! Its been a while since I used this particular tool so my aim went a bit awry, but I did manage to ‘reframe’ one flip chart, two chairs and a set of fairy lights!
Putting it carefully back in the box I discovered the ‘new belief generator’ lurking in the crumbs and bent paperclips at the bottom and wrestled it out. Before I could begin applying it to Steve I noticed it had merged itself with the ‘museum of old beliefs’ into a bit of a sticky mess, so I threw it back into the box and decided to see what would happen if I just allowed NLP to be a part of me.

 We chose an object we wanted our volunteer to touch and when they came back in helped them to find it by shouting “NO” at them every time they went the wrong way. One volunteer found the object anyway, so there! The other volunteer couldn’t see the point of bothering when we were all being so rude.
Out they went again and we received new instructions. This time when they returned we were all sweetness and light and helped them find the object with positive strokes. The volunteer who didn’t respond to negativity immediately found the object. The one who ‘brazened’ out the negative assault took longer to find the second object. (Maybe she didn’t trust her group, or they just were not as good at being nice as we were!)
We re-convened to sort out our state in that exercise and concluded that constant negativity results in no action or delayed action. Whereas praise and encouragement leads to better results.

We had drawn a picture like the one above on a piece of paper and then taking two minutes wrote feverishly to fill in the squares with all the things we were a genius at, excellent at, good at & c**p at. Then we found a friend to play with. A, the client was helped by B, the coach to represent the four squares on the floor and to step into the c**p square and notice how it was, B ran through all representational systems, (jargon for how does it look, feel, sound, smell etc) and maybe even some submodalities, (jargon for bigger, smaller, in colour / black & white, weight, shape, size etc). If you were there and working with a good friend they would have moved you out of c**p to good fairly quickly. If they didn’t I just hope you got your own back when it was their turn. And so on until inexorably you found yourself enjoying the heady bliss of genius. I want to come back to this word again and suggest that if you got or get a reaction to this word that you find a better one for you. This square is about being the best you can be. It may only hold one thing, that one thing you know you really are at your best when you’re doing it. From this square we looked back at excellent and noticed the difference, looked back at good and maybe looked back at c**p. Taking the representations and submodalities from genius (you know what these are now) we moved with help from B back through the other squares. I didn’t bother to revisit c**p, and my ‘client’ left her squares at excellent.

Receiving graciously, honours the gratitude shown. “Its my job” is not a good response. Neither is “You were great too!”
“Thank you” said with a smile will do nicely.
Steve mentioned here a film and a book. The film is “Freedom writers” about using brain friendly learning to help a group of dissolute youngsters turn their lives around, and “The Naked coach”. By David Taylor. He’s also sent me some other titles worth investigating: The Solutions Focus, Mark McKergow. Making Questions Work, Dorothy Strachan. Time to think, Nancy Kline.

We were on a roll now and confident of fitting all of Steve’s Big Five into the evening so straight on with “High quality questions”. Questions that elicit a response can be good questions. Those that send someone off on a ‘trans-derivational search’ are high quality. (They say “wow that’s a good question” and have to go somewhere in their head to find an answer.) High quality questions do one of three things and sometimes all three.
1) They create resourcefulness.
2) They generate options.
3) They compel action. All of these for the ‘client’.
So playing in fives now we took it in turns to be ‘stuck’. No content here to distract our questioners, they just had to come up with questions. Our responses from ‘stuck’ could be “no help” to “Wow” “thank you”! Interestingly once we had found some “Wow” questions in my group we carefully avoided using them again, must have been some unspoken rule we had all made up. Steve has sent me his current list of ‘High quality questions’. I may pass them on if you ask nicely. One he shared was from Susan Scott “What are you pretending not to know about how you are contributing to this situation being exactly the way it is?” Taken from her book, Fierce Conversations.

Three minutes to go and only one category left. “Success teams.”
Despite any thoughts you may have here let me tell you, you are not alone. You have got where you are today with the help of many people. More homework. Pick your favourite sport. e.g. Rugby. Who is in your team? List the people close to you (for rugby that’s 15 people and up to 7 subs) and those who inspire you, and put them in your team. Rate the relationship you have with them from 1, not close, to 5, very close, and think what you can do to move those on 1 towards 5. People help more willing when they like you, rather than when they just owe you a favour.
So we galloped to the end of the evening, just 10 minutes over the allotted time, but hey we were there anyway.
Thanks Steve for bringing us the Kaizen flavour of the REAL world. What I really liked was your energy and the way you received our gratitude!
You can contact Steve here steve@kaizen-training.com and read all about brain friendly learning at www.kaizen-training.com I especially recommend visiting the site and going to ‘our team’ and reading the biog of Kai their ‘wild’ presenter!