Our Cultural barriers to excellence.
Nigel Heath and Others!!
This is three reports rolled into one. My observations, Jenny’s ‘aha’ and Ken’s perspective and P.S. If you were there and have more to add please email me.
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This all began with my evaluation of our year of Modelling and some patterns I thought I had observed.
Are there some underlying values and beliefs in British culture that preclude us from acheiving excellence? Or is it a strength that we know when good enough is good enough so we don’t try any harder or go that extra mile?

My intention for the evening was to pose some questions and through open discussion get the group to devise some exercises which would elicit any hidden cultural agendas.
My planned lack of any exact plan caused those in the group who like structure to feel uncomfortable! We also spent some time caught up in the semantics and meaning of words. Gradually we moved to exploring values and beliefs and then one of the group shared an experience of excellence with a knowing and a result that coincided in a winning situation as part of a small team. There was an exploration of the submodalities of this experience and a ‘reliving’ of the feelings and thoughts of this memory.  How was this received by the group? What emotions did we experience? What emotions were we prepared to admit to? Were some of us ‘jealous’? Did we think this person was showing off? Were there any thoughts of ‘how un-british’? Were we excited and ‘there’ with the experience? Did it conjure up our own thoughts of past glories or past failures? There was talk of schooldays and the person in the school we all secretly or not so secretly hated for being good at everything. Or our own experience of being good and not admitting it for fear of reaping other’s hatred. (Is this dragging people down to the lowest common denominator a British trait or is it more universal?) We reached the break without having devised any exercise to make this a more personal and meaningful evening, but as usual the break provided the opportunity to talk in smaller groups and allowed us to move quickly into threes after the break and explore ‘states of excellence’ we had achieved or had been party to in others. Some patterns emerged from this and an attempt was made to capture these. The capture was not as successful as we might have hoped and at the end of the evening I was unsure of any clear way to move this subject forward to the next speaker. This was clarified by some wonderful feedback from one of the group and a timely reminder that the real value of this group is in its ability to share experience and honour difference. I will ask for feedback at all meetings in future rather than relying on my own interpretation of each meeting.
The thrust of this extra feedback was that the focus kept moving to similarities. (one way of spotting patterns and undoubtedly what had led me to explore this topic). If the similarity is a ‘cultural’ value or belief, what differences can we notice either in ours or other cultures  that will give us a new perspective and a new way of moving to a level of excellence that is comfortable and yet challenging? Is this whole subject just one of sameness versus difference? We hate the school swot because he / she is different. We don’t want to be on a pedestal because it sets us apart from our friends and the rest of our society. Even at ‘lower’ levels of thought and action we ‘hate’ supportes of other football clubs, people who don’t share our religion, people who are more beautiful than us, a different colour, a different shape, size etc.  How endemic and devisive is this need for sameness? Should we be looking for strategies that allow us to be different and be happy about it, and allow others to be different and  be happy about that too? I remember a quote from a teenage girl. “ I don’t want to be the same as my friends, I’m happy being different. But I wish they were more like me in that!”
Feedback from Ken.
I had an interesting time last evening. I felt frustrated for most of the first part of the evening, enjoyed and fully engaged with the exercise, and then reverted to frustration for the review and wind-up.
So, what was happening for me, I ask myself. I used to be a confirmed reflector-theorist in terms of learning style, and would have engaged fully in the initial discussion. Now I seem to have flipped into a pragmatist-activist learning preference, and from this perspective found the first half to be an attempt to agree the correct definition of words, and the discussion developed into discussing more and more abstract concepts and away from the experience itself.. There did not seem to be a lot of listening going on. There seemed to be a lot of disagreeing going on, and not a lot of acceptance or recognition that words are not precise, and that words can mean different things to different people and thats OK and part of the richness and diversity of people and that there is useful learning from difference as well as from similarity.
On reflection, I would have liked the group work to start much earlier, even at the stage of formulating what questions or experiences we wanted to explore, within the framework of cultural barriers to excellence and genius. Out of this initial groupwork there could be sharing of possibilities, and then perhaps again back into small groups where people picked what interested them to work with, rather than everyone working on the same thing.
In the review and wind-up, I noticed a focus on picking out similarities and ignoring differences in the various experiences and modelling of experiences. For me, the high point of the modelling is the differences between strategies. The similarities seemed to lead back to generalised concepts, and Jenny's summary again focussed back on generalised concepts, and for me the richness of difference had been lost.
On reflection, straight presentations of strategies without interpretation or attempts to intellectually compare and contrast might have been more productive.
For the future, I flag up the potential danger that in working on the output from last evening in the next session, detail and difference will again be lost, and that in the year end review pulling it all together, the focus will be on more and more generalised similarities, rather than the "difference that makes the difference", and exploring the differences.
Having aired my views, I will view my airs -the sunrise over the sea this morning was glorious.
Wishing you and Jenny a full of wonder month.
Ken
Note from Jenny:
The strength of a group like ours is the willingness to have a go and experiment.  I also find the supportive environment means I can get carried away with the moment, revert to ‘preferred behaviours’ or those which are  more appropriate to other environments and forget some of the basic tenets of NLP.
One of these basic principles featured strongly in the training programme Nigel and I experienced:
                   ‘Focus on the process not the content’
It takes practice to do this (I clearly need more!) and the reason for it is so fundamental - the content is very seductive and leads you into making assumptions about other peoples’ models of the world, re-shaping them to fit your own model, rather than valuing the rich diversity of models that exist.
This month I sought to observe and report on the patterns emerging from Nigel’s loosely formatted experiment with national culture. I like looking for patterns in chaos and with hindsight I did split my findings into process and content - but I skipped over the first in my haste to get to conclusions about the content. Those conclusions are immaterial - they are mine alone - my model of the world - my opinion about our national culture.  The process which could provide some food for future thought was only just beginning to emerge. Although we’d prefer it not to be so, some of our valuable insights come from getting things wrong. Thanks to those of you who offered gentle and constructive feedback which helped me to have another little ‘aha’ moment.  Thanks also to my NLP trainers who have successfully schooled me into accepting feedback positively and in maintaining a positive state - when what I might have wanted pre-NLP was simply a positive image.

.. and a P.S. from Ken..
The three descriptions of the same event celebrate the richness of each persons unique experience/model of the world/ expectations/ ways of being/ ways of making sense of experience.
Some of the potential "distinctions/different ways of perceiving" to explore further are "similarities and differences" and to expand on Jennys' model perhaps "experience and content and process" where for me content is a verbal description of the multi-dimensional richness of the experience itself and process is a verbal/visual/metaphoric representation of patterns within the experience.
So, apart from the above, nothing further to add.
Let the richness of the game of life proceed..
. and finally! Is the nub of this, focussing on process rather than content? As Jenny says content is very seductive. Its the ‘story’ element. Are the cultural values I’m so concerned about merely a modesty about bragging, not a desire to be mediocre?
A wish to appear the same, whilst knowing in fact we are all different?
I’m now looking forward to next month and a Modelling session with Joseph Pritchard to make some sense of where we have perhaps got to!!

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