Excellence – Walking the Talk

You know one of the most common words I hear banded about when I’m talking with consultants and when I’m consulting myself in organisations is the word ‘excellence’. And invariably people say that they want it or that they would like to see more of it. But what I don’t hear so often is people talking about how they would ensure that within their own organisation and within their own practice they would make certain that their excellence was consistently being achieved. That I think is rather more challenging and in a way excellence is a bit like charity, you know, it begins at home. 

So it is all very well talking about achieving an excellent product or an excellent service but who’s to say it is excellent and would you be willing to submit yourself to the scrutiny of assessors who would determine on a comparative basis how excellent is your excellence? This was a process that many years ago set us thinking about how we might ensure that we really did walk our talk. I am mindful of this today especially because a little why ago I had a call from the ITS office telling us that for the 9^th consecutive year we have just been awarded our IS0 9001 badge because of outstanding organisational excellence. What that means is that the ISO inspector has been on the premises for much of the day looking at the way we do things and determining do these work to the benefit of our clients and customers and do we have practices in place that ensure that pretty much whatever happens we have a consistent way of working which delivers. 

While we might like to think we do, the real test is when somebody from outside, who is passionate about this kind of excellence subjects us to scrutiny and tells us yay or nay. And actually here we are as I say for the ninth consecutive year, ITS has just been given a big thumbs up with compliments to the team regarding the quality of those processes and how they have improved over time and every year rather than us being told well you’re nearly there instead we pass with flying colours. There might be some little tweak that can be offered which is actually very valuable where we learn other processes which we can add to what we do.

So this set me thinking, much talk about excellence but I don’t know how many organisations are willing to subject themselves to this kind of scrutiny, to really do what it takes to say ‘Yes, we want to know’ and ‘Yes, we want the feedback’. It is only when you are willing to do that can you get an external view on ‘where are we?’ and ‘what might we do to enhance performance?’. So this is just by way of course congratulations to the team doing an absolutely outstanding job and frankly for doing it whilst carrying on with business as usual. It is now at the point where the structures are so robust that it is not some frantic last minute preparation before an examiner comes in, it is just a way of doing business. I think that there is a lesson here in terms of creating structures that allow excellence to just bubble forth and to be the norm.

So, another year and I have no doubt that we will be enjoying our tenth year, a year from now because we will be putting our minds to it and making sure that we don’t just talk about excellence we really do it. Congratulations to the team and all this in the hope that we can better serve those who are our clients and whose lives we seek to benefit by offering the kind of experiences that are part of the parcel of what makes us who we are.

Until the next time. 

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New Learning and New Techniques

Well at the beginning of this week I had a communication from one of my publishers telling me that the very first book I ever co-authored, ‘Principles of NLP’ is virtually ready in its second edition to be launched onto a new world indeed in a new millennium even. It was very striking for me because it is as if what was the beginning is still incredibly relevant. They were very excited at being able to get the rights to be able to publish it again. And so the principles that are at the heart of NLP remain the very same principles from when I first  started writing. But of course the difference now is that we have the potential of demonstrating from the neuroscience just why those principles really matter and what it is that makes them so incredibly effective when you have ‘how-to’ techniques and the technology that goes with those ideas. Really simple things like the classic example, ‘the meaning of the communication is the response it elicits’. Now what does that even mean? Most people think the meaning of what they say is what they decided it means. Well yes, except that if you really want to know what you think you said, you want to find out what other people think it is that you have just said because whatever they think it is you have just said is actually what the meaning is as far as they’re concerned. So you have this really curious paradox which is the true meaning of what a communication really is is what the receivers  of that communication make of it.

This has got unbelievable  implications. I can remember some years ago being involved in some earnest discussions with Civil Defence Authorities about emergency communications and how very frequently they just didn’t seem to get it when a communication was issued in a test for for instance in a fire, earthquake or what have you and this was in the context of Italian Civil Defence and people just didn’t pay attention. The curious thing was that the authorities in question, decided that that just meant they weren’t paying attention as opposed to saying ‘No, the meaning of our communication is a response it elicits’. If it doesn’t produce a response we want, namely ‘leave now to stay alive!’ then we need to change the way we’re communicating.

Now that is true at a general level for a large population for potentially a life and death matter but it is equally true in our own lives, in businesses where we  change what we want to say so that other people can get it so that we say it in a way that makes sense to them. What we now have is an understanding at the level of Neuroscience about why does this matter? What is going on in the brain?  And so for me there is enormous excitement about the fact that we’ve got this technology, we’ve tested it over many years and now we can actually demonstrate increasingly why it works and have a cognitive understanding of what is going on in the brain which of course is why I get excited about the next practitioner starting in a couple of days. 

This new programme that we’ve created, whereby people both learn the tools and techniques of NLP but then have the Neuroscience input which gives them an understanding of what is going on in the brain and allows them to speak with authority I think about their new learning. This is proving to be a very successful synergy and the new synthesis is incredibly stimulating certainly for both myself and my colleague, Professor Patricia Riddell with whom I co-train this material. So we have in a sense what has been developed over many years and which is there in that very first book I wrote, ‘Principles of NLP’ has now been revised, developed further, new generation of techniques and tools have been added to it and now we have the neuroscience to make sense of it in a way we really couldn’t when we began. 

So for me it is just a fabulous opportunity to build on our learning and see this coming together across disciplines really, promoting a new understanding of practical tools that we can use in our daily lives that change what we can do professionally and enhance our lives personally. I can’t wait and I know Trish is looking forward to it as well. So, until the next time.

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What Work Would You Like to be Doing if Money Didn’t Matter?

I think one of the most rewarding things I probably do is working with people to clarify just what it is they want to be doing in life and in which direction to be going in in order that they have a sense of engaging in purposeful activity and indeed meaningful work. I think this is particularly on my mind at the moment because in the last two weeks I have been focusing on this area with different people of wildly different ages and yet the same kind of questions arise. So, talking with a number of people who are in their very early twenties who really have been grappling with ‘what is my career path?’, ‘where am I heading’ and ‘what should I be doing?’. The kind of schools career approach didn’t seem to be really very helpful for them apparently and so I tend to go a different route which is to actually fall back on a number of ways of asking questions that take us to the heart of the matter.

To give you an example, many many moons ago, Alan Watts had an interesting question that he would ask in a variety of different ways but essentially it would all boil down to saying that if money was no object what would you like to be doing? However you choose to come at that you’re really of course saying let’s separate money and remuneration from the activity and let’s be clear about what would be the optimal activities as far as you’re concerned and what would you want to be doing?

This immediately takes us into questions about what is satisfying to you, what is meaningful to you, what is energising for you and what allows you to feel that what you’re doing is worth continuing to do and could be the basis of a fulfilling life. Now obviously there are very good reasons for wanting to get clear about this, not least if you spend about a third of your life working it might be a smart idea to be doing something that is rewarding. But of course people often think that rewarding must mean financially and yes, you need to be able to eat, you need to be able to pay the mortgage or whatever it may be but I think very often people jump straight to economic necessities they perceive rather than getting clear about what I would really get turned on by doing is this. Now, how could I do this and derive some kind of worthwhile income from doing it. At the start of a professional life it is an important question but you know it is just as important down the road, thirties, forties and fifties.

 I have worked with people who have been in the bizarre position of spending years doing something they really did not enjoy because they felt that they were restrained and they had to because it was the only way they knew how to bring home the bacon. That doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me just because you end up then living your life doing something you don’t like in order that you can do more of it tomorrow again. What? So really whatever one’s age these I think these questions get to be really important.

And myself I know that, many moons ago, I became very clear that the most rewarding things for me were being able to engage with people so that they could create the kind of life that was meaningful to them. I just found it incredibly rewarding, basically to be assisting people to become really more of who they could be. I also found it very motivating , it got me up in the morning and made me create a variety of businesses that are based on that fundamental premise that it is possible to find what is meaningful to you, it’s possible to move in that direction and you don’t have to give up the day job necessarily but you gradually edge in the direction that makes sense to you. For me that has been unbelievable satisfying, fulfilling, and frankly, intensely moving so that I end up having people coming back. A couple of weeks ago I had someone who said they would like to give me their book, and that without me it would not have been written. There was also a little dedication inside which was lovely.

So, I guess it doesn’t matter what age we are, the question is if you separate the money from what you love to do, what would you love to be doing and how might you begin to move in the direction of doing more of that?

Creating your own legacy happens on a daily basis by having the intention to move in the direction that is right for you. 

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“It’s All Moving Forward Mate!”

The past ten days or so have been really extraordinarily fulfilling because various projects have come to fruition in the way that I could only have dreamt of until their realisation. The weekend before last we completed the first of the new NLP Practitioner and Neuroscience programmes which has just been a blast because it has been so fascinating putting the two together; myself teaching the NLP and Professor Patricia Riddell, who is the professor of Applied Neuroscience talking about the Neuroscience of what we’ve been doing. I’m not too surprised but I am delighted at how people have been absolutely fascinated by this overlap and the kind of rigour that Neuroscience now can offer to an understanding of what it is that NLP can do and has been delivering on.

So there has been that on the one hand and then this past weekend we have just been seeing how  it is coming into its own  in the domain of coaching because we have just done three days together as a kind of double act on Neuroscience and Coaching; the applied dimension of neuroscience and how having an elementary understanding of some of what is going on in the brain can make a huge difference to the way you think about, ‘well how do I function?’ and indeed how do clients function? If you are planning on being a coach this is clearly got lots of applications but frankly a lot of people in the room aren’t planning on being coaches but they do want to know how to coach people in their teams more effectively how to draw out the best in them, how you would use what you could call a ‘coach approach’. The room was amazing, people were just hungry for this knowledge and were enquiring for more about the brain and ways in which they can practically apply their knowledge.

These last three days have just been so inspiring and not just for me, I’m talking for Trish as well. Afterwards she was saying she had been waiting thirty years to be able to do this, it is no good being in the lab unless it can come out and having this practical application. Well, we can see now that the dreams we both had when we started talking about how this could be really are possible.

This morning my kind of Monday weekend I went out for a walk and it was just gloriously sunny. It was the pleasure of just being out and about with a feeling that things were moving in the right direction and that really a vision I had had some years ago had finally started coming  to fruition. As I am on my walk I notice that there is a guy who is delivering a new empty skip to a house which is being built nearby, but I notice what he’s got in his truck which is across the road and is properly stabilised are two skips. One is empty and then that is containing another skip that is full to the brim and what I see the machine doing is raising up both, taking them over and dropping down both then he goes along takes the chains off the bottom one and then puts the chains on the full one and lifts that back onto his truck. I asked him if it was a new way of doing things  as I used to think you had to bring the empty skip, put that down, pick up the old one, put it on the truck and move the new one into place. The man told me that is exactly what you used to have to do, he said it took “Bloody forever, Gov.”. He then said something which I was thought was so, so brilliant, “You know, it’s the new technology, it’s all moving forward mate”. And of course he was talking about his skip but I thought how true and what a great summing of my experience.

So, I think I could say, along with man with the skip, it is this new technology, it is all moving forward and it certainly is. I am looking forward to it all moving forward. Certainly we’ve got plans for the next moves and I’ll tell you about those but for now it is just great to be enjoying simple ways of making good use of the brain that each of us has been endowed with.

So, it’s all moving forward, mate. Until the next time. 

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A Confident Future - New Possibilities

Well this past weekend, snow notwithstanding, we had our second ITS 25th anniversary Celebration Day and I was really struck with how celebration is also about moving forward in time and celebrating possibilities for the future. One of the themes of the day was very much about confidence and how important it is to understand what kind is needed, where and when, and how there are different kinds. I’m particularly struck by this because later next month I’m going to be talking to about 400 independent financial advisors who have a one day conference put on by MDRT (Million Dollar Round Table) which is an organisation specifically for financial advisors. 

The theme of the day is ‘A Confident Future’ and in the present economic circumstances it is a particularly interesting theme because it is of course rather important to know how to boost confidence, whether it is your own, or indeed clients’ confidence in you. Arguably it is one of the most important business skills you will ever develop and the interesting thing is that by using some of the more recent discoveries in the neurosciences, harnessing those with some of the techniques developed with NLP it is perfectly possible to say that whether you want to boost your own confidence or clients’ confidence in you this is now a learnable skill there is no two ways about it. But actually that wouldn’t be enough because if you want to enjoy a confident future you will also need to know what to do when things don’t quite go the way you'd imagined and this is a time when people experience a loss of confidence or even a crisis of confidence. So I think in a funny sort of way the real test of confidence is when it is in some way challenged.

Nobody is just confident all the time. Part of the art of being able to have that resilience, that capacity to bounce back is recognising how important innovation is to being able to be confident about the future; your own and others. This shows up in a mind-set, it is not just about trying very hard but it is a way of thinking. Again, it is learnable. 

Here is an example, there are so many I use when I am talking but here is one: Pretty much everyone I know uses a microwave and you take it for granted but a microwave has a very curious history. It actually came out of the Second World War not by design at all, it was the direct result of one man having an understanding of possibilities. Specifically what happened was there was a man called Percy LeBaron Spencer and he was involved in designing combat radar equipment. At the time, the heart of radar equipment was a magnetron which was a huge piece of equipment, very precision made and consequently very few were made in any given working day which was a bit of a problem for the allies. For instance, in 1941 the production line was about 17 a day and by the end of that year the US had entered the war and a different way of doing it had developed so it went up to 100 a day but that is still very little. By 1945 they had figured out a way of generating 2800 of these a day. While all of that is going on at the same time in 1945, Spencer just happens to be standing in front of one of these operating magnetrons and he has got a bar of chocolate in his pocket and blow me down he finds that it has melted. For a lot of people that would just be a source of aggravation, but of course what happened for him was he became curious and begin to think about possibilities. He went to get a bag of popcorn, puts is close to magnetron and low and behold a few moments later it begins popping. He then goes to get a pale of water, an egg and starts boiling this egg which dually explodes and splats itself all over one of his colleagues. So then he realises this huge potential here and he focuses on how this could be used for cooking. No one had thought of this. The first microwave ovens based on this principle were six feet tall weighing 350 kilograms, so huge they had to be cooled with water and it was not until 1955 that the first domestic microwaves pop up.

But you see there is a mind-set, a way of thinking. It is innovative, it is confident and it creates new  possibilities and that is so much of what we need. That is partly what I’ll be doing with these independent financial advisors but it is also what we’re going to be doing with ITS throughout this coming year. New possibilities, I’ll tell you more soon.

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New Year…Some Truly New Possibilities!

Here we are at the start of a new year. Already half way through January. How are those new year’s resolutions by the way? It is around this time that many of them seem to evaporate or don’t quite happen in the way that you imagined. I hope that yours are still with you  because I know that for most people when they make them they are real aspirations, they are things that would make a big difference if you can make them happen. If you’re wanting some assistance to be able to achieve this then this Sunday is a special time for me because it will be a time of real celebration as we start the second 25^th anniversary celebration day for ITS and one of the things we will be doing is looking at what neuroscience can do to help us make resolutions that actually work. Gosh, what a concept. I think I said in the last update, that this was the year of neuroscience and it most certainly is because I am delighted to say that we now have got  to a point where Professor Patricia Riddell and myself have been able to draw together the many strands that comprise the field of research that is neuroscience and apply it to ways of working that are going to be useful to people in ordinary everyday life. We have a certificate in Applied Neuroscience which will be happening later in the year, but before that just a happy day together with people, some of whom I have not seen for years and I gather loads of people are coming this Sunday.

We are actually going to kick off with what I think is one of the most important topics in pretty much anybody’s life, namely confidence and how to have it and experience it. I had not really appreciated how important it was until I wrote the book on it and it became a really fundamental insight for me as it is so pervasive to be able to have confidence. I have just recently been asked by MDRT (Million Dollar Round table) which is an organisation for financial advisors if I would speak in their very prestigious  London conference in February  called ‘A Confident Future’. I shall be talking about the business of confidence because I think it is so important for each of us in our own personal lives but also in our business lives. That will, therefore, be part of what I want to share by way of a thank you during the celebration day. I have some very particular tools I want to offer people because I think confidence is something people really don’t understand, they often think they want a lot of it or more of it but in fact we are already confident in some areas and not in others. Understanding the difference and how we can build on what we’ve got and supplement where it’s needed is a skill and it is easy to learn.

I also want to start the year, not just focusing on neuroscience but also discussing how can people build their own dreams which is why I shall be working with Adrian Baker who has much experience in working with people to help bring things into being, be they full-scale businesses or aspirations that could potentially change people’s lives. They may involve generating revenue, they may not but together we’ve been speaking about this for years and we are now ready to roll with it so I see this as an excellent opportunity to make new dreams possible. It is absolutely independent of whatever the economic circumstances of the larger nation’s state may be and we’ve done this in different ways at different times. So all in all I’m really looking forward to a day of celebrating by giving new things to whoever chooses to be there and there will be lots of people from very varied backgrounds.

If you’re interested in how to have those resolutions come to fruition and be part of your life in an on-going way then I shall I be delighted to tell you the basics of success and we will also have a look at the neuroscience that supports it and gives a new understanding for how some things work much better than others. That is all to come, but in the meantime the year is well under-way, it seems to be racing along already and I trust that yours will be a fulfilling and rewarding one in which you will not just be successful but also enjoy the experience of being happy. I look forward to assisting you in that should you be interested. 

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What I did on my Holidays

On my travels I’ve certainly seen some different parts of the world and this past Christmas, Paulette and I were in a place that neither of us had ever spent a festive season in before. If I was to tell you that in that particular part of the world you can walk down the street cast your eye to one side and see a very non-descript parking lot with a sign affixed to a broken down brick wall which says ‘parking lot available for film hire’ with a phone contact number, I guess you could probably figure out what part of the world we were in. Yes, only in LA.

We had a good time and we happened to be there at a rather interesting time because the end of the world was supposed to be happening  according to some people given the complete
misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar which a number of people had
decided to take upon themselves. On the particular day in question we were actually at the Griffiths Observatory which is a wonderful observatory that also has a newly re-conditioned beautiful planetarium. When you walk in the observatory main doors there was a great big design above the doors about the Mayan calendar saying that the end of the world was not happening and that the show inside the planetarium consisted initially of the apparent end of the world. Somebody then says ‘Stop, hold it all!’ and walks down and begins to say ‘no it isn’t ending’. It was a splendid show and we got down to some real science. By the way, the thing about the Mayan calendar, which I find so fascinating, is that it is very striking to me how people often are of an apocalyptic disposition and have a very linear mind set in that it is always going to be a complete end. There is no conception of a cyclical process because of course the Mayan calendar is just going through a process of ratcheting up numbers to come to the end of a cycle; very much as a milometer does on a clock where it gets to 999 and then goes to 000 which of course does not mean the car no longer exists.

I had a very pleasant opportunity while I was there to kick back with Albert Einstein, unfortunately he was only there in brass form but nevertheless a memorable meeting. We then went on to a very extraordinary part of the world, the La Brea tar pits which are quite remarkable. They are pits which are in the land close to the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art and they have an amazing number of animal specimens, about three and a half million in fact at the last count and there are far more than that now. They are the result of fossil fuels that have become liquefied and bubbled up because of the extraordinary environment that is part of the fault in LA, faults that are in the earth. They were absolute death traps for animals who got stuck in them rather like you would in tar and have produced amazing fossil remains that go back 10 to 30 thousand years. You can actually see the excavation taking place, all of this with traffic going by on the highway nearby. So, a very interesting experience and they also have some animals that you can be photographed with if you wish.

A different kind of Christmas which was absolutely in order. I recommend it , getting away and being somewhere different in another world. We had a great time but I am now back and looking forward to a different kind of year as we are moving in to new opportunities. We are celebrating the 25^th anniversary of ITS by preparing for new ventures some of which we will be talking about very soon on the celebration day. You will hear about them I’m sure, if you’re interested, because the world of neuroscience beckons making it something approachable, useable and understandable in a practical way. That’s where we’re going next, tell you all about that soon. Until the next time. 

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