Given that in one reference I discovered that there are over 6,000 titles on leadership and that’s just in English, what can we add? What’s new in the area of leadership?

Ultimately, leadership is not a thing, but a process and therefore more accurately described using verbs than nouns. As a process, it’s about what and how we what we do. There’s only leadership when someone is leading out in thought or action and there are people who like that leading and so follow that lead. This makes the whole leadership thing an interactive interpersonal process involving communicating, relating, framing, acting, collaborating, giving and receiving feedback, and many, many other actions. This makes any and every leader’s leading a present-tense dynamic dependent upon ongoing exchange of vision, mission, values, style, etc.

My longing was to find a pattern for “applying to self” and that’s, in part, what kept gnawing at me in the back of my mind about our self-reflexive minds. Paths are envisioned and pioneered by the presence of problems, difficulties, conflicts, stresses, distresses, traumas, and things not going right or things not working well. It is our of our necessities that we become the most creative. Therefore leading and training others to lead obviously involve enabling and empowering people to have embrace problems, welcome conflict, develop opportunity-seeing eyes when things are not going well. Such is the soil for creative leadership. So, given that, who’s game?

In addition to that, I have so much better things to do than fuss about whether everybody likes me. I’m working on several new models, I have a book I’ve looking to finish on self-actualization, I have trainings to conduct, research to continue, a beautiful lady to love, a wonderful daughter to spend time with, rental properties to manage, a book business to look after, etc. Why would I want to waste time with trying to control the whining complaints of people who don’t like me? Hey, they are giving me free rent in their heads!

Leadership Reflections #2

The first two reflections about leadership regarding anyone leading in any area of life, in personal life, business, in thought, in innovations, etc. are these
1) envisions and sets visions about the future, a bright dream and then
2) will be both loved and hated for that,
Given this, this leads to the next reflection which is a tough one, especially for those newly stepping up to a leadership role. Namely,

If you respond to the call for leadership (and in Neuro-Semantics, we see the roles of training and coaching as leadership roles), then get ready for the heat. Get ready for the pressure of criticism and accusations. If you’re doing anything significant, you’re giong to face it. Leadership, in the end, is not about wealth, fame, glory, and recognition, it is about serving people, adding value, and being true to your vision.

Leadership Reflections #3
Review of reflections about leadership.
1) Leaders envision and set visions about the future.
2) Leaders are both loved and hated.
3) Leaders have to be able to take the heat for leading out.
Two more reflections about leadership for now:
4) Leaders are leaders only to the extent that they add value.

5) Leaders live the vision

If leadership is a co-created social construct arising from interpersonal interactions, then it inevitably involves sharing of one’s authenticity. It involves hearing what the leader truly thinks and feels, truly believes and cares in, truly envisions and wants. Leaders who only tell what they think people want to hear undermine the very heart and soul of leadership.

of superior performance in every activity,

no matter what the level of skill or the age of the performer.”

Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Focus-power is special. It is magical. And when you have it, you have that which gives you “genius” or mastery or joy. Focus power is being able to stay focused on what you’re doing when you’re doing it. That sounds simple enough, does it? So focus must be a simple matter, right? We wish it were.

This is an article about focus power that describes how it relates to the heart of Meta-States, Accessing Personal Genius.

Do you want to know why we run “accessing personal genius” as we introduce Meta-States?

Would you be interested in knowing why we consider “genius” a matter of focus?

Would you be interested in developing more focus and concentration power in your own life?

When the Lack of Focus is the Problem

Everywhere I go, I hear people complaining about the lack of focus. More than anything else, I hear that the lack of focus is one of the key problems that most people have. Working with highly motivated people, business people, men and women of immense creativity, what I hear as often as anything is, “I’m so distracted with so many things on my plate!” “If only I could stay more focused.”

I also am asked over and over again about my own focus. Well, I’m not asked about that as directly as I am about efficiency and getting a lot done. “Don’t you ever sleep?” “Do you do anything other than write?” “How are you able to get so much done when you are traveling, training, and meeting people? The secret is focus power.

Focus power is the ability to be all there. That’s the essence of the problem, isn’t it? We’re not all there! Part of us is still back at home. Part is off in our future taking a trip, solving a problem, working on another project, taking a holiday, etc. Yet when we focus, when we are able to totally and completely to focus on what we’re engaged in, then we are able to actually and fully show up. This is good. It’s good to show up for whatever you do. To be present. To be in sensory awareness. The power of showing up is that we are present with all of our mental-and-emotional resources available. This makes a tremendous difference in our experience, our learning, our performance, and our effectiveness. This is focus power, showing up and being present with intention, decision, and energy—what we mean by “personal genius.”

With focus power we are in that state that world-class athletes call “the zone” and what psychological researcher, Csikszentmihayli calls “flow.” Ah, yes, the flow state! And when we are in that state, we can ease through tasks and challenges that we would otherwise find difficult or impossible. Now how would you like to have that state at any time you choose? Suppose you could just “access” that state, turn it on and go for it? That’s what “personal genius” means in Neuro-Semantics.

When we’re in the flow state, interruptions are nothing. They still come as they always will, but we are in charge of ourselves when they do. We have a higher level meta-states that enable us to respond to those that we commissioned as important and to not easily dismiss the others. Then we won’t notice those that are unimportant and those that are, we simply step out, take care of them and then return … return fully and completely to the engagement state of focus with no loss. That’s effectively handling interruptions! With focus power we will experience more productivity, creativity, and personal vitality. What a way to live, wouldn’t you say?

We all know that we do our best when we are focused. Isn’t that true for you? Whether you are writing a report, doing customer service, playing a game, marketing a new product, watching a movie, or reading a book—don’t you perform best when you are focused? Don’t you enjoy the experience more? Don’t you remember things more thoroughly? No wonder Gallwey says, “Focus is the quintessential component of superior performance in every activity.” Focus improves the quality of our mind, learning, enjoyment, and so much more.

Say Goodbye to “Attention Deficit”

Today it seems that everybody has attention deficit. Many, of course, use it as an excuse. Others have been mis-diagnosed. Yet anyone passionate about living life fully probably has too many things on his or her plate. As a result, some of the signs or symptoms of ADD (attention deficit disorder) show up:

• Difficulty staying focused.
• Ideas, feelings, demands constantly interrupting.
• Distracted with 127 things on your “To Do” list.
• Feeling the stress and pressure of too many demands.
• Low motivation, fatigue, and even depression from the over-load.
• Wondering if what you are doing is even worth it?
• Doing more things and more activities with less enjoyment.

So we ask, Is that any way to live? I don’t think so. Would you call that “living” in the first place? Is that how you want to spend your life? I don’t. Wouldn’t it be far better to learn the skills of focus power and live more intentionally? That’s precisely why we have developed the Meta-States training, Accessing Personal Genius.

Focus: The Pathway to Mastery

Actually, focus is the secret of everyone who has mastered an area or skill. To live more powerfully and purposefully—we have to rise up to our highest intentions to create the kind of meanings that will revitalize and excite. So, are you ready to jump up to a new level of experience and performance?

In the pathway to mastery, there is a formula for creating focus power. What is it? We take the prerequisites for mastery or “genius,” mix them together in a three-day training, excite you about the possibility of taking an intentional stance in life that defeats all ADD, and give you the keys for running the higher levels of your mind. That’s what Accessing Personal Genius Training is all about.

Accessing Personal Genius is a training being taught world-wide to empower people not only to “run their own brain” but also to take charge of the Matrix of their mind—of all of the frames and attitudes they carry with them. In three days, you will learn to manage your states, power-up for new vitality and creativity, take an intentional stance for aligning your everyday attentions, feel more alive and congruent as you step into your energy bubble for that laser-beam focus power.

Why is this important?

Focus power is important if we want to experience a higher level of self-mastery over our own passions, visions, and values so that we can get ourselves to do what we know and want to do. That’s true mastery. And as you close your own personal Knowing-Doing Gap, you’ll become more focused, resilient, energetic, passionate, optimistic and present in your work, relationships, health, fitness, and vitality. You will be easier to live with, productive and successful, you’ll experience richer relationships, and make more money.

So much of what we have been focusing on in Neuro-Semantics in recent years is summarized in focus power. That’s because without the power to focus your attention and concentrate on what you’re doing— you’ll be distracted, torn, inwardly conflicted, and ineffective. Without a strong and intense laser-beam focus of attention, you will either get bored and unmotivated or stressed out and over-loaded with too many commitments. Either way you will miss mastery.

Without focus, decisions will be difficult. Engagement in an experience will be challenging because you will be somewhere else. Focus power gives you the edge. It accelerates your learning because when you are all there, you are fully engaged and then memory and comprehension is improved. Focus power enables you to put yourself into your activities, relationships, and engagements … to truly be “in-ter-ested” —inside the essence of something (“est” to exist, “in” inside of).

With focus power we have the ability to translate what we know to what we’re engaged in and so close the knowing-doing gap. This makes us more congruent and aligned. It chases away the old dragons that otherwise lurk in the back of the mind.

The Day of the Radio Interview

“So Michael, what’s this ‘personal genius’ stuff really all about?”

That’s exactly what Jim said. I was in his studio at a local radio station promoting both the Writing Mastery and the Wealth Mastery workshops. Jim had interviewed me the previous year when we brought Accessing Personal Genius to Colorado as part of our Neuro-Semantic trainings. So on this day I again mentioned that we would run “the genius pattern” so that aspiring writers could step into their “writing genius state” and never again suffer from writer’s block.

“‘Personal genius?’ So what is this ‘personal genius’ stuff you keep talking about? What is it really all about?”

“It’s about focus. It’s about the power to focus your mind and emotions on a single thing so that you are all there. Does that make sense? Don’t you often find yourself distracted with thoughts in the back of your mind or interrupted by other people and then blocked or sabotaged from doing what you know how to do best?”

There I said it. I didn’t mean to say it. I had not planned to say it. But that’s the way live radio and live workshops are—sometimes the nuggets, the jewels, the diamonds, the hot buttered biscuits come and you get to the essence of a thing. That’s what happened in that interview. Accessing Personal Genius is about stepping into your “genius state of laser-beam focus” and being all there with all of your mental and emotional resources available and then you are in that flow zone! Hmmmmmm. And Bob says, “Look, I think Mikie likes it!”

“Yes, I know what you mean, Dr. Hall. Anyone in radio knows that experience all too well! But what is this Genius state’ and how do you get into it? Don’t you just have to wait until the flow experience comes?”

“Ahh, time to explode the first myth of the morning. We don’t have to wait around for the genius state of focus—it’s our state. We created it. We created it inside of our mind-body system and we can learn to turn it on and off at will. That’s what the training is all about.”

“Really? You’re not over-selling this, are you? How can you just turn it on and off?”

“Watch the Olympic athletes turn it on and off, the gymnasts, the divers, the sprinters. Watch them take their stand, access the state and then explode!”

“Are you saying we all can be Olympic athletes? That we can be or do anything we want to be or do? Does it go that far?”

“Perhaps, who knows. My focus is on the focus state itself—on running our own brains so that we can get the best attitude, mood, and performance out of ourselves. Wouldn’t that in itself be enough to make your day, Jim? What if you could simply step into a highly focused state when you are here in the studio or when you are creating a new show or when you are with a loved one… wouldn’t that make your life a little bit more wonderful?”

“Yes it would. That really would. … And you will teach how to do this in the training?”

“Definitively.”

“And what about you? Are you able to step into … what did you call it, ‘the genius writing state?”

“Yes, people often ask how I can write so prolifically, create so many new patterns, come up with new models … and I can only say that since running the ‘genius pattern’ on myself in 1996, I have not had writers block but can step into my genius focus state of mind and let the world, time, and self all just go away.”

The Genius State as your Power Bubble

While I’ve been talking about imaging a state as a bubble for a decade—that’s when I started drawing states as bubbles, Andrew Sercombe, an NLP coach in the UK drew my attention to “Power Bubbles” after a training. He’s been working on a book by that title. Years ago I suggested that we take the NLP “circle” of excellence and let the circle become a Sphere … a full body sphere to step into as an energy field. From there we can fill up that sphere or bubble and imagine moving in and out of it like the Star Gate experience. In the Movie and TV series, Star Gate, moving into the Star Gate takes one into a different world, a different dimension.

We can do the same with our “genius states”— we can step into them and out of them leaving them intact as a “space” or “place” of mind-body-emotion. John Grinder calls this making “an impeccable state shift.” We added the visuals and meta-stated layer upon layer until the executive part of our mind commissions this and fully aligns it with all of our other values, criteria, relationships, and concerns. That’s the heart of accessing our “personal genius state.”

And inside, ahhh, here’s the magic— inside that Bubble of Focus, all of our intentionality, resources, and skills have a chance to “get in there and kick.” And why not? You are all there. And now you know why we call this, focus power. Want some?

As we move into the twentieth-first century, to be successful in our everyday lives at work in our careers, in making money to become financially stable and independent, in our relationships with our loved one and our friends and associates, in our health and fitness, etc. we need the focus power to show up for life, and to be present with all of our resources. And to do that we need to find or create a big enough reason and a meaning that’s exciting enough. Then we can wake up in that frame of mind every day for the rest of our lives! Isn’t that the way you would like to do life? That’s what you’ll experience in Accessing Personal Genius.

Where There’s no Focus Power —There’s Distraction

Compare focus to distraction. What happens every time we lose focus? We are not all there! Sometimes this can be funny when our absent mindedness makes us walk, talk, and act like a slap-stick comedian. Sometimes it is tragic as when we lose focus driving and then lose control of the car. When we lose focus, we make more mistakes in our performance, understanding, and learning.

Attending to whatever we are engaged in is one of the essential variables that make a critical difference in almost everything. Attention is critical for learning, comprehension, and creativity. It’s critical for being productive and efficient.

• So what’s the problem?
• What causes the loss of attention, the lack of focus, the distractedness of mind that prevents us from honing in on a subject and staying with it?

Distractions

There are several things that can trigger the loss of focus. Recognizing them is the first step in addressing them.

1) We lose focus when we are distracted.

Even when our focus is very intense and riveted to something, other things can still enter into our awareness and “grab our attention.” This is good. It is really a survival mechanism that prevents life and death emergency situations from occurring without us responding. Of course, the problem becomes when we let every little noise, movement, and image to enter into our engagement as if it were an emergency. This explains why the more we have on our mind, the less we’re able to focus. Focus takes a quiet and calm mind. The more turbulent and distressed the mind, the less the focus.

2) We easily lose focus when our interest/ desire is weak.

What drives focus? Interest, desire, and a sense of choice. The more we choose what to attend, the greater our focus. We are more apt to “pay attention” if it is an attention we choose. And if we are interested in the object of our attention, the better. The more we “put ourselves into something” the stronger grows our focus. So with desire, desire powerfully drives focus. We find it easy to focus and stay focus when we’re doing something that we have chosen to do.

Focus results when we align our truest desires and highest intentions with our actions. When we do this, focus is easy. It spontaneously occurs.

3) We lose focus when we are stressed or caught up in negative emotions.

We focus best when we’re calm, relaxed, or moderately excited. Perhaps this is the smooth easiness of focus. When the emotional intensity becomes stronger, focus becomes harder to maintain. And when we experience strong negative emotions, stress, frustration, anger, fear, focus becomes almost impossible to maintain except for moments. With the more on our mind, the more easily we are distracted (the first factor in the loss of focus). .

4) We lose focus when we’re not in a physically resourceful or balanced state.

Just as focus evaporates with negative emotions, it evaporates with ill-health, fatigue, disease, and anything else that puts the body into an unresourceful state. When the body is not at ease, comfortable, and vigorously alive, it distracts and interrupts us from our focus. Pains and problems intrude to grab our attention.

5) We lose focus through conflicting motivations and intentions.

Just as having too many things on our mind can weaken focus, so can having different motivations and intentions. We feel inwardly torn between this motivation and against that agenda when this happens. Focus shifts from this agenda then to that one.
Focus Power Checklist:

The Magic of Focus Power

When we are fully engaged with something so that our focus of attention is strong, riveting, and sustained, it feels good and is magical. We experience an economy of effort. Every thought, emotion, and action seems smooth and elegant. Our actions flow as if in an effortless fashion. We’re “in the one.” We are in flow.

Casting a Spell for Focus-Power

What is the spell that needs to be cast upon us so that we enter into the magical state of focus power? What are the component elements that make up this empowering state? In Neuro-Semantics we call this laser-beam focus state a genius state. That’s because being all there with our resources and showing up so that we are fully present enables us to act with more congruence, alignment, and engagement.

1) Sensory Awareness in the moment.

Being in sensory awareness means being fully present with our mind and body. It means seeing and seeing, hearing and hearing, feeling and feeling. While that may sound easy, it is not. While any child can do that, most adults cannot. Most adults have lost that ability or only retain it minimally. Why? Because we can so easily move up the levels of the mind and get lost in the ozone of abstractions. When that happens, our mind gets in the way—our concepts, beliefs, understandings, etc. When this happens, we can no longer see the world innocently. We see th world as colored by our concepts and beliefs. The solution is to “lose our mind and come back to our senses.”

Via sensory awareness, we are able to see and hear and feel afresh. We are able to just be aware and observe what is. This is a rare gift.

2) Running our own brain.

It’s hard if not impossible to focus if you are not in charge of running your own brain. Do you have that option opened to you? Is that a choice you can choose? Of course, to run your own brain, you have to know how to run it. To move to the place where we truly have choice in our live we have to have the ability. Without the power to choose, there is no choice. And choice means that we have multiple options. To only have one option is to have no choice. When we have two options, we have a dilemma, this or that. It is only through having a multiple choice list of options that we have choice.

3) Clarity of what we value as important.

Focus also emerges from clarity of priorities. If we do not have a clear vision of what’s important or choice of our priorities, we will not have a focus of attention. What’s important to us? Why is that important? What do we get from that? What do we understand about that? Focus weakens at the rate and degree that our clarity of purpose becomes less and less clear, more confused and ambiguous.

4) Trust of ourselves and the focusing experience.

The spell for focus must include self-trust. It is self-doubt that distracts. It is self-fear, self-contempt, self-worry. For us to focus on one thing and give our full attention to it, we need to believe in ourselves, and trust our ability to learn, decide, and choose. Anything less weakens focus. When we release ourselves to that which we’re engaged in and let go to the experience of focused engagement—we experience the flow state of top athletes in the zone. Then the magic happens.

5) Resilience in returning to focus.

In focusing our aim is not to create an focus and never lose it. Focus ebbs and flows as the stream of our consciousness moves and flows. Our aim is to more quickly return to our engagement when we lose focus. Losing focus is just part of the way “mind” works, returning to focus means we’re able to catch ourselves and re-evoke the focused state.

6) Challenged to sally out from one’s safety zone.

Czikszentmihalyi postulated that the flow state operates between the extremes of challenge and safety. With too much safety we feel bored; with too much challenge and we are overwhelmed and so feel anxiety. When we have a balance so that we have enough challenge to our skills to be drawn and attracted we move into “the flow channel” that’s just right for optimal engagement and learning. This keeps the excitement up without threatening the basic security.

Focus fades with the negative emotions of anxiety, insecurity, and demandingness as it does with boredom. In boredom, our focus weakens until we fall asleep, alertness fades.

7) Practicing the skill of focusing.

Focus is a skill and, as such, is learnable. The nice thing about learning how to “pay” attention is that as we learn to focus and then come back to our focus and to ignore distractions and let follow our interest, we become more skilled at it. Doing so necessitates becoming meta-aware of our focus so that we notice where our attention goes, what grabs it, how strongly it is grabbed, and what we can do to keep returning to our focus. What are the key variables in your awareness that supports a more intense focus? When thought balls pop into the court of your consciousness, just notice them and decide—decide what you most want.

8) A energetic sense of decisiveness.

It takes a decision to focus our attention on an event, person, or idea. And it takes a decisive state of clarity about intention, understanding, and purpose to say Yes to our attention and No to everything that would interfere, interrupt, or distract from that intention. Decisiveness is the state that drives focus. Indecision weakens focus and nurtures inattention and distractive attention.

In practicing focus, most physical acts (i.e., exercise, gardening, hobbies) because they are willed give us a way to develop our intentional capacity. William James suggested the practice of “the useless exercise” for those who want to strengthen their will power.

“Keep alive in yourself the faculty of making efforts by little useless exercises every day. Be systematically heroic every day in little unnecessary things; do something every day for no other reason than its difficulty; so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. … The man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentration, attention, energetic volition and self denial in unnecessary things will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and his softer fellow mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.” (From Personality and Personal Growth, James Fadiman)

So What are the Secrets for Focus Power?

It was in my research on resilience that I first happened upon many of the key secrets of focus power. It was really an accident. I was looking not to understand focus, attention, or concentration, but how to model the state-upon-state structure of resilience. That led to the discovery of Meta-States. This model describes the levels of the mind which explains why and how we never just think. No. We think (and feel) about our thoughts and emotions. This reflexiveness of the mind creates our frames of mind and layers of frames—the matrix of our frames.

Accessing Personal Genius is a three-day training that enables participants to mix 12 essential factors or prerequisites of “mastery” to create the emergent experience of focus power. This describes the genius-like state that every top-performer experiences from Olympic athletes to world-class leaders and speakers, to inventors, to successful entrepreneurs, and even lovers. With focus power you will be able to do so much because you will be all there, in your best states, in the zone, in “flow.” This is the state that makes attention deficit problems, stress, feeling defeated, blocked, etc. redundant.

Summary

My invitation to you is to check you the Accessing Your Personal Genius training. It is now being taught around the world by many Neuro-Semantic Trainers … it is your introduction to Meta-States … and it is your introduction to a world of focus power.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. invented Meta-States to give structure to self-reflexive consciousness in 1994 and so launched the Meta-States Model, Neuro-Semantics, and more recently the Matrix Model. See for much more about this … and for a calendar of upcoming trainings … and for Neuro-Semantic Trainers around the world.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

There is a tremendous gap today between knowing and doing. We know so much more than we do. Isn’t that true for you? We know more about healthy eating and exercising than we put in practice. We know more about listening, being patient, validating, being affirmative, and other relationship skills than we do, especially when we’re under pressure and feel stress. If we were to measure our level of actual performance against our level of knowledge, we always under-perform. We always over-know. This is normal and as it should be. Yet sometimes the lag in the transfer of knowledge to action becomes too much of a gap. How big is the gap in your life? How much of a gap can you endure?

Why is this? What causes this? What can we do about closing the gap?

Let What’s In the Mind Be in the Muscles

I first became aware of this Knowing-Doing Gap when I was involved in the research for the wealth building training. As I researched the literature of the field, almost everything was written in terms of principles, statements that generalized the basic knowledge of the field into summary declarations. As I read the literature of the field and came across wonderful insights, I would think, “Great ideas!” “Yes, great ideas. If only we could get ourselves to practice them.”

A little later I was reading about the importance of building up capital for investment, and that the beginning stage of any wealth building system involves the use of capital. You can’t get money to work for you if you don’t have some capital to work with. Then, almost accidentally, I took one of those great wealth building principles, one that was so simple and yet so profound and spoke it out loud. “Capital is built by saving a small percentage of one’s income on a regular basis.”

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out!” I thought in the back of my mind as I repeated the insightful statement out loud. And that meta-comment about the great idea reminded me. I already had this knowledge in my brain. But was I acting on it? Was I actually using and implementing this knowledge? No. So why not? What was stopping me from doing what I know? Knowing was already in place, what stopped it from activating my motor programs so that I could actually use that knowledge and turn that knowledge into power? What was creating the Knowing-Doing Gap?

“Maybe I don’t believe it?” I thought. “No, but I do. I do believe it.”

“But do I really?” I wondered? So speaking out loud again, I used the words,

“I believe that capital is built by saving a small percentage of my income on a regular basis.”

Saying that felt different from saying the first statement. It felt more personal. And it felt like it was more in my muscles and not only in my mind. So I said it again and again each time imagining that I was saying it to someone or a group and doing so in a way that was fully congruent and believable. And as I did, the words began to change. The words become even more personal and the feeling of the statement began to feel more integrated into my body.

“I believe that capital is built by saving a small percentage of my income on a regular basis.”

“I believe that I can build capital by saving a small percentage of my income on a regular basis.”

“I believe I will build capital as I save at least a small percentage of my income every week.”

It was funny how saying these words seemed to make the ideas more and more real within my neurology. But then again, that’s what a belief is. Unlike a general idea or principle, it is a command to my nervous system. I also knew that repetition activates neurology and runs neuro-pathways and so I repeated the belief statement several more times. When I finally heard myself use the term “will” as in, “I will build capital…” I realized that I was now uttering some more and other than a just a belief, I was uttering a decision. It was at that moment that I consciously turned the statement into a volitional statement of choice.

“From this day forward I will build capital as I save at least 10% of my income every week.”

Saying it like that seemed to invoke even more feelings. So I tried it on with different phrases indicating that the idea was of my own personal choice and volition:

“From this day forward I choose to build capital for my own personal wealth building plan as I save at least 10% of my income every week.”

“From this day forward I will refuse to put off building capital for my own personal wealth building plan and I will save at least 10% of my income every week.”

Saying this seemed to involve my feelings and neurology even more. It then dawned on me what I was doing. I was turning an abstraction principle into a belief into a decision and into actual neurological feelings. So I wondered, What am I feeling?

“Planning my wealth building plan by building capital for investment by saving a little bit every week makes me feel a little anxious about things … and excited … and curious … and hopeful … and confident …”

At first the emotional awareness came slow, but as I got into it, feelings began to rush in and as they did I felt a neurological push from within to do something. Ah, I had activated my motor programs with sufficient neurological energy that I now felt as if it was time to act.

I questioned myself, So what is one thing I could do today that would really give some reality to this idea?

“Well, I could write this down as my weekly goal.”

And what is one other thing I could do?

“I could ask a friend to hold me accountable to this by giving him permission to ask me about it.”

With this, I suddenly I realized that I had come down the levels of the mind with what I was doing. I had started by recognizing a great idea or concept of some piece of knowledge in my head and I have transformed that knowledge so that it took the form of a belief, then of a decision, a feeling, and finally into an action, into a muscular response. In this way, the bare-bones of the Mind-to-Muscle Pattern was born. Since then I have used the pattern to mind-to-muscle all kinds of great ideas in my head so that they become muscle memory in my body–my way of being in the world.

The Mind-to-Muscle Pattern utilizes the power of language to represent step-by-step the levels of the mind that offers us a bridge from a concept down to belief, decision, state, and finally to action. But the process doesn’t end there. We then begin cycling through the process over and over. This taps into and utilizes the power of repetition to habituate a new way of operating. As a neuro-semantic pattern, we activate more and more of the body as we bring a conceptual state down and translate it into other words so that it can operate at the lower levels. That’s why the linguistic phrases almost always change as we bring the idea down.

And by looping back up and adding in other meta-levels (identification, expectation, pleasure, outcome, intentionality, etc.), we set up a spiraling of the mind so that it embeds the everyday actions inside of multiple frames of meaning.

How We Extend the Gap between Knowing-Doing

Conceptual knowledge fills our minds with great ideas. Most of us know lots of truly great and inspiring ideas, ideas that are transformative, awe-inspiring, and fabulous. And in those moments when we spend time with such ideas, we live in a very different world. But then we come back to reality. And more often than not, we leave the life transforming ideas in the world of mind and do not bring them back with us to our everyday realities.

Why did we do this? Why do we not enrich our lives with them?

It seems so obvious that great ideas, insightful plans and intentions, and larger level perspectives ought to be transferred into our everyday thinking so that we enhance our performance level. So what prevents us from translating them into our neurological patterns? What holds us back from letting such in-form our way of being in the world?

Actually, lots of things.

Some of them have to do with operating from a confused map, a map that tricks us.  It comes from confusing true action with deceptive substitutions that only give the impression of doing.  We take a pre-action and consider it an actual action.  Some of the things that clog up the gap between Knowing and Doing have to      do with giving in to the inhibition of fear.  We become afraid and so inhibited from acting.  We freeze up, we become paralyzed.  Then there are the taboos that forbid and prevent us from taking action.  There are the structures or lack of structures that increase the gap-systems that don’t allow the translation from Knowing to Doing.  And finally there are more personal things like failing to be action oriented, excuses, etc.

Other things that extend the gap between knowing and doing have to do with giving in to the inhibition of fear. We become afraid and so we feel inhibited from taking acting. We freeze up, we become paralyzed. In this case, we know but we cannot do. Another frame is getting in the way. The fear evokes a higher frame about the knowing. We set a fear frame that says, “Danger. Too risky. Avoid.” It is that frame that makes what we know further and further from what we do.

People who suffer from this one think that if they only know more. So they buy another book, attend another training, sign up for another course, consult with another coach, etc. But this also broadens the knowing-doing gap. As they are learning more, they are still not doing. The problem is not in knowing and so the solution will not be in more learning. The problem is the fear frame. The refusal to face the fear and just do it. The problem is the refusal to take an intelligent and calculated risk.

Then there are the taboos that forbid and prevent us from taking action. There are the structures, or lack of structures, that increase the gap–systems that don’t allow the translation from knowing to doing. Do you have a structure set up for acting on your knowledge about exercise, fitness, eating right, saving money, etc.? You don’t? Then no wonder the gap keeps widening between knowing and doing! And finally there are more personal things like failing to be action oriented, excuses, etc.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton (2000) have identified the following:

Pseudo-action Deceptions:

1) Thinking that knowing is sufficient for success.

2) Thinking that talking (meetings, committees, reports, etc.) is action.

3) Thinking that measuring things is action or contributes to performance.

4) Thinking that making a decision is the same as taking action.

5) Thinking that planning is the same as action.

Clogging the Gap by giving in to the Inhibitions of Fear:

1) Fearing complexity, lack of clarity about what specifically to do.

2) Fearing risk, mistakes, errors, and imperfection.

3) Fearing competition, focusing on what others are doing and trying to get ahead.

4) Fearing the new, the different, the unpredictable, falling back on precedence (standard operating procedures) and so mindlessly defaulting to what you’ve always done.

Taboos that prevent and forbid action:

“Don’t make a fool of yourself.”

“Don’t risk making a mistake, it’s too dangerous.”

“Don’t be imperfect.”

Lack of structure for action:

No structure for following up.

No structure for rewarding learning from mistakes.

No structure for rewarding risk taking.

Personal items predisposing us from taking action:

Not being action oriented in our person, being inactive and passive.

Making excuses and letting excuses stop us.

Discounting small actions.

Deceived by Pseudo-Actions

Question: When is an action not really an “action?”

Answer: When the action does not actually lead to performance.

Many people extend the Knowing-Doing Gap by thinking that studying, reading, and learning alone is sufficient. It is not. Yet another book, workshop, training, or tape set will not in itself change anything. That will only fill the head with more knowledge. And it may very well be the best knowledge in the field. Yet, if you do not act on it, it will have the same effect as if your head was filled with the most worthless non-sense and useless information. Waiting until you “know it all” or have an “expert knowledge level” is one of the worst deceptions.

We have to get out there and make mistakes.

Yet, fear of making a mistake is yet another key way that many people widen the Knowing-and-Doing gap. They know but won’t do because they fear messing up, making a mistake, risking failure, etc. So they excuse themselves from the most basic form of learning, “trial and error” learning. Do something, experiment, see what happens. Did it work or not? Take the “or not” in a matter-of-fact way. It’s just information, just feedback. No big deal.

If you want to really worsen the Knowing-Doing gap and make the gap bigger and bigger, scare yourself with horror stories about the terribleness of making a mistake. Fill your mind-and-body full of fear and dread and terror at risking a mistake. That will prevent things in your mind from getting into your muscles.

Confusing talk with doing is another major way that we fill our heads with more and more and weaken our performance muscles from actually doing anything.

“Well, we convened a meeting and talked about it!”

“Of course, we did something, we formed a committee to discuss the problem.”

“Do something about it? We definitely did something, we spent $20,000 on this report about it!”

To these responses, another response comes to mind, namely, “Duh?!”

Talk is not doing.

Talk may prepare us for doing. Talk may empower us to formulate our plans and motivate us, but talk in and of itself is not doing. Companies that have a culture of talking about things can get so off-target with this that they even become highly skilled in creating great overheads, awesome PowerPoint presentations, memorable pieces of literature (the reports), and really believe that they are doing something about a problem. They are not. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton (2000) write about this attitude:

“The purpose of the sessions wasn’t really to learn from other parts of the organization,. Instead, the agenda was to impress your colleagues with the quality of the presentation you were giving. We’re not in the business of making over-heads! This firm is just one of many we have seen in which leaders act as if having something in their mission or values statement meant that it must be true.” (p. 40)

Nor is measuring things.

The U.S. Post Office is a great example of measuring things and assuming that “measuring” is actually doing something that makes a difference. I have a friend who is a supervisor who measures the feet of mail that has to be sorted each day, who follows delivery people on their routes from time to time to measure how long it takes them, how they park their vehicle, how many feet from one place to another, etc. She knows that none of this matters in the long run. None gives better service. None improves quality. She does it as forced regulation to satisfy Union fears that the employees will work too hard or not be compensated enough.

Why do they do it? To satisfy regulations. And because it is easier to measure time, space, weight, volume, and other tangible things than the things that really count: sense of responsibility, friendliness, helpfulness, attitude, cooperation, willingness to pitch in and help even if its not your project, etc.

Measuring things is an action, but most of the things that really count can’t be measured. And if they can be measured, they cannot be measured with precision. This is where fear comes in again. Because systems of interactive parts are complex and involve multiple contributing causes, we often become inhibited in action because we fear the complex. We fear not knowing for sure what we are doing.

Turn your abstract philosophical language into action-oriented language. As you do, you will be saying the same thing, but saying it with a sensory-based simplicity so that you know with crystal clarity what to do.

Summary

Because the knowing-doing gap prevents the actual implementation and undermines top-quality performance, we are making the business of closing the Knowledge-Doing gap a primary focus in Neuro-Semantics. Already we have identified and develop several patterns that help to translate knowledge into real life actions. These include:

Currently we are exploring other processes that will allow us to develop a frame of mind that makes embodying knowledge part of our “way of being in the world.” That’s what we do. We find knowledge that makes a difference, knowledge that maps a piece of expertise, and we incorporate it so that it informs our very motor programs. It becomes what we do. No more excuses, we just get things done. No more inertia, no more procrastination, no more taking counsel of irrational fears–just effective action.

Do you have any knowledge that has un-tapped power and potential just waiting to be released?

Would you like to release it so that it becomes the engine in your performances?

Would you like to know yourself as an efficient person who takes effective action?

The future does not lie in the hands of those who think, plan, imagine, dream, and hope but don’t do. It lies in the hands and feet of those who do.

References:

Pfeffer, Jeffrey; Sutton, Robert.  (2000).  The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action.   San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publications.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., Psychologist, International Trainer, and Entrepreneur who lives in the Rocky Mountains. Developer of the Meta-States Model and co-founder with Dr. Bodenhamer of Neuro-Semantics. (P.O. Box 8; Clifton, CO. 81520; 970 523-7877; fax: 970 523-5790), www.neurosemantics.com www.runyourownbrain.com

Since we began using the phrase, “Neuro-Semantics,” and trade marking that term, we have developed two different references for it. On the one hand, Neuro-Semantics refers to an idea and to a model of human functioning. On the other hand, Neuro-Semantics refers to a network of people all around the globe, to the Societies and Institutes of NS and hence, to a business. While it will take several years to fully sort these out and to fully develop both the model and the business, the time has come to at least begin that process.

If you were with us during any of the Neuro-Semantics Trainers Training in the past three months, you know that we have been doing this. In fact, the vision and plan for NS as a business, as an international association, has been coming together with the voices of the 50 Trainers that we now have.

Neuro-Semantics as a Model and Idea
First and foremost, NS is a model. It’s a model about consciousness, mental-and-emotional functioning, the structure of experience, and human nature. Emerging from Korzybski’s work at the beginning of the 20th century, Bateson’s in the middle, and Bandler and Grinder’s at the last quarter, Neuro-Semantics builds on from the Cognitive Sciences, the neuro-sciences, General Semantics, System Theory, NLP, and Cognitive Linguistics.

You can see the latest summary that I have been sticking in the front of all of the NS training manuals on the following page, “Models Used in This Training.” That summary identifies NLP and Meta-States as the immediate sources of Neuro-Semantics.

Defining the field of Neuro-Semantics

In my opinion, NLP made a major mistake when it failed to define the field as such. John Grinder and Richard Bandler never defined the heart or boundaries of NLP as a model. Robert Dilts seemed to have tried to do that. His book on Strategies and Modeling, “NLP: Volume I” (1980) came very close to setting forth some of the definitions of the field. Yet during the first 20 years of NLP, there were really no comprehensive books of the NLP model. Only in the mid to late 1990s did some works begin to appear providing an overview of NLP. The book that Bob and I write, User’s Manual of the Brain, surprisingly has come as close as anything to doing that.

As a consequence, early in NLP’s development, people began bringing all kinds of things into “NLP” and mixing it with many other things. This confused the public with regard to what NLP was. Many thought it was some facet of the New Age Movement, others thought it was a new form of hypnosis, or therapy, or manipulation, or personal development, etc. Yet though NLP can be and has been applied to all of these things, NLP is not any of these things. NLP grew out of the context of therapy (Gestalt Therapy and Family Systems Therapy) and for that reason it is often confused as a psychotherapy. Yet it is not psychotherapy. Very early, Bandler and Grinder modeled Erickson to create the hypnotic language patterns of Milton Erickson. Yet NLP is not hypnosis.

NLP is a meta-model about other models. At its heart, it is a description of the structure of experience whether that experience is therapy, hypnosis, family systems, systems, sales, business, relationships, etc. Because NLP is about modeling, it falls into the category of the Cognitive Sciences (Information Theory, Cybernetics, etc.). It therefore operates strictly as a scientific model regarding how things work. Robert Dilts devoted several pages to this theme in NLP: Volume I. (1980).

The same holds true for Neuro-Semantics and more so.

Neuro-Semantics has grown most directly from NLP and then secondarily from General Semantics and Cognitive Linguistics. I developed the foundations of Meta-States from modeling and “mining” the riches of Korzybski. Later I conducted trainings in London on “The Merging of the Models: NLP and GS” (now is called “Advanced Flexibility”).

I also took a lot from the Cognitive Sciences and Psychologies inasmuch as that was the focus of my doctrinal work. I took much from systems theory, Ericksonian models of Brief Psychotherapy, Narrative Therapy and Solution Oriented therapy. More recently I have taken much from chaos theory, fuzzy logic, mathematics, etc. as NS continues to grow and expand.

This means that Neuro-Semantics is also first and foremost a description of the structure of experience and especially the higher levels of mind or consciousness that creates contextual or framed “meaning.”

With regard to religion and spirituality, Neuro-Semantics is neutral. It’s only a tool. It’s only a description of the structure of how we organize our mind-body, brain / nervous system to experience whatever meanings we process. As a model, NS does take a stand about the ideas that we can postulate about the origin or destiny of the universe or about the existence of an intelligence in the universe. However, NS does take a moral and ethical stance in that it does value the essential ethics of the scientific model, namely, honesty, truthfulness, disclosure, respect of colleagues, openness to new and different ideas, willingness to test, experiment, and validate results, the human treatment of people and animals used in research, etc. Why? Because these are the essential attitudes necessary for searching, researching, communicating, and taking an open and explorative stance.

Philosophically, Bandler and Grinder tried to make NLP philosophically free and neutral. They did that by saying they had “no theory.” They argued that NLP is “just a model.” Of course, they then turned around and snuck the theory into NLP in terms of the presuppositions that they said were unquestionable because they only viewed them as “useful lies.” Well, that was a slick reframe, perhaps the first NLP Sleight of Mouth, but as we know, it was not true.

NLP is full of philosophical assumptions: constructionism, some empiricism, lots of pragmaticism, a touch of positivism, within the tradition of the human potential movement, etc. Yet because Bandler and Grinder set it up so that NLP presented the image of being philosophically neutral, it refused to allow its epistemology to be examined. This is what Bateson meant when he talked about NLP having a “shoddy epistemology.”

By way of contrast, I have sought to make the theoretical and philosophical foundations and frameworks of Neuro-Semantics manifest and explicit. I have done this by identifying them as located first of all in the NLP presuppositions and then secondly in the list of Meta-States principles which we have published in Meta-States, the Training Manuals, and NLP: Going Meta. Soon I will put this into the first Volume of Neuro-Semantics.

What does this mean for NS in terms of philosophical frames?

It means that NS is―

• A facet of the Cognitive Sciences and the Neuro-Sciences
• Partly Constructionism (we construct maps of the territory)
• Partly Pragmatism: we seek to identify what works, but without making the end justify the means.
• An expression of Cognitive Linguistics. We follow much of Lakoff and Johnson’s work (Metaphors we live By, Philosophy in the Flesh, etc.). Most of all we recognize the embodied nature of our metaphors by which we live and that frame our thinking.
• Democratic: we seek to find the structure of the best experiences in order to equally support and validate all people in all cultures and to encourage the democratic ideas of equality of all, fairness, justice, etc.
• Human Potential Movement: as NLP, Gestalt Therapy, Family Systems, Rogerian Counseling, etc. grew out of the Human Potential Movement, so NS is a beneficiary of that tradition and similarly seeks to promote human well-fare, empowerment, health and vitality, etc.

Generative focus: we seek to find and promote generative models rather than remedial because we believe that except for disease, genetic damage, etc., people are not broken, but work perfectly well. It’s not the lack of the ability to become resourceful, the lack of genetic possibilities that’s the problem, but the lack of top-notch maps (frames).

Figure 1:
Models Used in This Training

NLP―

A Model of Communication about human processing that empowers us to “run our own brain.” Using the “languages” of mind (our internal cinema of sights, sounds, and sensations) along with language, we “think” and frame things using these see, hear, and feel dimensions. As we represent data to ourselves on the inner screen of consciousness, that internal movie signals our bodies to go into a state-a mind-body or neuro-linguistic state and that governs the quality of our life and experiences. Developed by a linguistic and computer student about human excellence and genius, NLP provides insights and specific step-by-step techniques for running your own brain, managing your own states, communicating more effectively and elegantly with yourself and others, and replicating human expertise.

META-STATES®―

A Model of Reflexive Consciousness that extends the NLP Model, taking it to the next level. It details precisely how we reflect back on our thoughts and feelings to create higher levels of thoughts-and-feelings and layers of consciousness. In so using our thoughts-and-feelings thoughts-about-our-thoughts, feelings-about-feelings, we create mind-body states-about-states or Meta-States. Primary States involve primary emotions like fear, anger, joy, relaxed, tense, pleasure, pain, etc. and thoughts directed outward. Meta-States involve a layering of higher level concepts to involve structures like fear of fear, anger at fear, shame about being embarrassed, joy of learning, esteem of self, etc. Meta-States describe the higher frames-of-references that we set and use that create more stable structures (beliefs, values, understandings, etc.)

NEURO-SEMANTICS® ―

While it sounds like a big word, it refers to a simple fact. Namely that we create meanings in our minds (semantics) and we get those meanings incorporated into our bodies (neurology). That why, when things mean something to us-we feel it in our bodies. The meanings show up in what we call “emotions.” The meanings take the form of values, ideas, beliefs, understandings, paradigms, mental models, frames, etc.

Neuro-Semantics provides a model of how we humans make meaning as we evaluate experiences, events, words, etc. It’s a model of how we then live in the world of Meaning that we construct or inherit. Neuro-Semantics describes the frames of reference we use as we move through life and the frames of meaning that we construct. It creates the Matrix of Frames in which we live and from which we operate.

Neuro-Semantics arose from the Meta-States model which provides a way to think about the levels of states or mind that we experience all the time. That’s because we never just think. As soon as we think or feel-we then experience thoughts and feelings about that first thought, then other thoughts-and-feelings about that thought, and so on. Technically this is called self-reflective consciousness. Practically, it’s the Frames for the Games that we play in life.

Neuro-Semantics as an International Association and Business
We also use Neuro-Semantics as we refer to the associations of people who have learned the model, who are thrilled and excited about the possibilities of the model, and who plan to use the model to extend human knowledge and skill. In this, Neuro-Semantics stands for the growing community of all of those who see in Meta-States a model that extends and expands NLP. It stands for those who make up the NS movement that is spreading around the globe. It stands for all of those trainers and practitioners who use and plan to use Neuro-Semantics for creating models and training programs for education, relationships, business, health, government, leadership, etc.

Trade marking Neuro-Semantics has given us the ability to use the model for training, certification, networking, creating associations, etc. It has brought into being the first dozen or more Institutes of NS and the first Societies of NS. Structurally we have organized the networking of relationships under the trademark of Neuro-Semantics in the following way.

Figure 2: The Structure of Neuro-Semantics as a Business

Because the Institutes of Neuro-Semantics represent the local NS training centers, this is where the business of NS actually makes contact with public life. It is at the NS Institutes where NS trainers will be presenting public workshops and trainings in “Genius” and the other NS Trainings. Many NS Trainers will not establish Institutes, but will operate in corporate areas as consultants, coaches, and trainers. Rather than public trainings, they will influence businesses from within doing “in-house trainings.”

The Societies of NS will operate primarily as non-profit organizations (formally or informally) providing guidance and direction to the individual Institutes within their region. They will provide oversight and accountability. This will be our way of policing ourselves and making sure that those who are in the forefront of leading in the field of NS are walking their talk and providing an example of an ethical professional. Again, this was one of the key mistakes that NLP made from the beginning and which the NLP community in almost every country in the world is now paying the price for. We do not want to make that mistake.

I have put together the beginnings of a book on The Business of Neuro-Semantics. Currently it is a brief document, “Neuro-Semantics: the Vision-The Plan.” It is mostly about marketing at this point. But eventually, it will become a full-fledge description of NS as a business and how to make it work effectively.

Summary
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.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., researcher and modeler, international trainer and entrepreneur (P.O. Box 9231; Grand Jct. CO. 81501; 970 523-7877), developer of the Meta-States Model, co-founder of Neuro-Semantics®, www.neurosemantics.com currently involved in several modeling projects: wealth building, selling/persuasion excellence, accelerated learning, etc.

C           What qualifies a person to led and to step up to a position of leadership?

C           What distinguishes a person as a leader?

C           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.

C           What qualities and traits do we look for in recognizing leaders in Neuro-Semantics?

C           How will we recognize and qualify the men and women who will arise in Neuro-Semantics as leaders?

C           What criteria of leadership will we set?

C           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:

C                                                           Authenticity: being and acting from one’s true self without masks and personas

C                                                           Integrity: being as good as one’s word, impeccably honest and fair-minded

C                                                           Congruent: applying the principles to self so that one walks the talk

Doing Criteria:

C                                                           Contributing: giving of oneself to others, serving from the NS principles

C                                                           Collaborating: operating as a team player, cooperating with others

C                                                           Pioneering: leading out into new areas

C                                                           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.

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, 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.

The DOING Criteria

From being comes doing.   One of the central themes in Neuro-Semantics is closing the Knowing-Doing Gap so that we implement what we know.  This leads to the being criteria of authenticity, integrity, and congruency.  From there, we have the following criteria that manifests leadership.

4) Contributing: Giving of oneself to others, serving from the NS principles

Definition: Contribution means giving to the community and field, investing time, energy, ideas, emotion to making the field successful.  In leading a true leader serves his or her constituency by investing self, time, and energy and by contributing to the health and vitality of those who follow.

Relationship to Leadership:  Leaders lead.  To be a leader means that a person demonstrates leadership which involves participating in the community, sharing, giving of oneself, having a voice on the egroups, assisting on trainings, referring people to trainings, writing articles that promote Neuro-Semantics, being moderators on egroups forums, etc.

Examples: It may mean leading out in a specific area of expertise such as what Bob Bodenhamer is doing with the work with Stutterers and what Michelle Duval has done with Coaching.  It may be using NS in one’s commercial  branding that helps to build credibility for the movement.

Contribution Questions:

What have you contributed to the community?

What investments of your time, effort, money, intelligence, etc. have you contributed?

When was the last time you contributed to the community?

What are you doing now?

Benchmarking “Contribution”

5          Leading out in new ventures and contributing discoveries back to the NS field, making networking possible, creating websites, new products and services, patterns, models.

4          Regular contributor to egroups, participating on Assist Teams at trainings, helping out on specialized projects, monitoring egroups, sharing ideas and best practices.

3          Writing posts, offering ideas, suggestions, referring people to NS trainings, networking with others, starting practice groups.

2          Keeping ISNS membership up, regularly participating in egroups, practice groups, and events.  Networking with a few others.

1          Not keeping ISNS membership up, writing one or two posts on egroups a year, showing up for some events, but keeping mostly to self.

0          No indication of having given anything to the community.  Holding back from giving ideas, patterns, models, helpfulness. Not available to invest energy into projects, programs, etc.

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 fo 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.

4          Taking steps to work on a solution, inviting others into the process, looking at what works and doesn’t, writing posts about such, networking with others, setting up a project to explore such.

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.

C           What are the key belief frames, value frames, understanding frames, etc. about business?

C           Given your frames about business, do you have a business matrix that allows you to be effectively successful?

C           Does your matrix of business frames empower you as an entrepreneur?

C           How much business intelligence does it endow you with?

C           How does business work?

We put business, and all of our mental maps about business, in the World Matrix.  That’s because Business is one of those worlds Aout there @ that we have to navigate and deal with.  This becomes even more so when you set out as an entrepreneur to find and create new business opportunities.

Even though one of my university degrees is in business (a Bachelor of Science in Management of Human Resources), I only really began to understand how business works when I began researching, exploring, and modeling for the Wealth Building Training (Mastering Your Wealth Matrix).  What I discovered was something that actually surprised me.  For the first time I discovered the heart of wealth, what Awealth @ is.  I had always assumed that it was money or some aspect of money.  I didn’t know it was a mental-emotional skill.  I didn’t know it was seeing, creating, and adding value to things and experiences.

Several new Neuro-Semantic patterns emerged from that awareness: Inside-Out Wealth, Mind-to Muscle, Seeing and Seizing Opportunities to name a few.  And because Aapply-to-self @ is the core attitude in Neuro-Semantics, I immediately began applying it to my real-estate business of investment properties, my publishing company, and my training business.   That lead to the buying and selling of many properties, expanding the publishing, and new developments in the trainings.

Similarly, I began applying the principles to Athe business of Neuro-Semantics, @ to building the business side of this field, to training, sponsoring of trainings, developing Collaborative Partnerships with people, and more recently to Meta-Coaching.  This came to light as Michelle Duval and I began asking questions about what stops most people from translating their skills of doing business (working in the business) to using them to work on their businesses?  There is a difference you know.  Working in a business refers to all of the skills and knowledge that you bring to doing whatever it is that you do.  Working on a business refers to your skills of business development and planning.  It=s about your leadership and managerial skills in creating a vision, business plan, and then managing that plan on a daily basis.

C           Why do so many people in the personal development field have such a hard time being successful in business and as a business person?

C           Why do people with great Apeople @ skills often lack great Abusiness @ skills?

C           What meaning frames do successful business people have that empowers them in that arena?

To address this we have been putting more and more information, material, and patterns for skill development in the Meta-Coaching manual.  We have even taken the Matrix and used it as a template to create a Matrix Business Plan.  The design is to enable people to develop better frames and relationship to the idea and experience of Abusiness. @

Neuro-Semanticists and Entrepreneurial Skills

So how do we develop more business intelligence?  What are the qualities and features of having more business sense?

Recently I have interviewed and modeled several entrepreneurs to see if what a real live entrepreneur thinks and does fits with the research literature on the same.  To that end I interviewed Brian Hattingh, Michelle Duval, and Graham Richardson.

I met Bryan in Johannesburg, South Africa, when he invited Michelle and I to be on his radio program, ARisky Business. @    Bryan is an entrepreneur in the IT industry and executive coach.  He has created and run seven successful companies creating innovative designs in software development.  Michelle Duval is an executive and personal coach, and CEO of Equilibrio which is a coaching organization in Australia, one of the fastest growing and successful organizations.  She now has ten coaches working with her and two staff members. She was nominated in 2003 for ABusiness Woman of the Year @ in Australia.  And she co-created the Meta-Coaching program with me and the Axes of Change model.  Graham Richardson is an executive coach in Sydney who specializes in management competencies, career alignment, and leadership development.  He is an associate with Stephenson Partnership, the largest Executive Coaching organization in Australia.  In addition he has his own company is Horizon Unlimited Pty Ltd which he launched five years ago.

What are their secrets?   What are the frames of mind that allow them to lead out in pioneering new things, creating new companies, and adding value to what they do?

They are passionately sold on an idea that captivates them.  This means that they believe in the product and services that they provide. They not only believe in what they do, they believe in themselves, and they believe that they add so much value to their clients.  They believe that what they do will totally enrich and empower the lives of their customers and clients.  Knowing that as deeply as they do, they have no problem valuing what they do, their time, effort, trouble, etc., which allows them to charge as they do.

They see opportunities everywhere and wisely choose which opportunities to seize.  When interviewing these entrepreneurs, not only does their natural enthusiasm and excitement bubble over, so does their incredible ability to see opportunities.  This is one of the things about the mind-set that differs from most people.  Not only are they Aoptimistic, @ as we would expect, but they are absolutely captivated and awed by all of the opportunities that are all around themCbegging them to respond to.

In other words, they live in a world of opportunities.  They live in an abundant universe where everyday they are surrounded by all kinds of possibilities … just beckoning them to take a look and step up to the plate.  For the person who doesn’t have the frames of mind that can even comprehend this, these entrepreneurs seem wild-eye, fantastic, unrealistic, crazy.  But then they go and make good on the opportunities!  They start businesses, they win awards, they do things that others only dream about and wish for.

They have a fantastic solution-focused attitude.   Here=s something that you might find strange.  The optimism of these entrepreneurs is not that of the Apositive thinking @ brand.  They do not think Apositive @ in that way.  In fact, this is what sets them apart.  They do not easily dismiss headaches, struggles, hardship, difficulty, or problems.  In fact, they love problems.   Throw a problem at them and it=s like throwing fuel on a fire!   They love it.  And they have a boldness about how they face unpleasant realities.

What=s on their mind is solving problems, inventing new processes, patterns, products, and services, and doing what everybody else says is impossible.  It is this solution-focused mentality that drives them.  It is, in fact, when they are totally and absolutely stumped, they are most activated!  And it is this that they seek.  They want the challenge.  They long for it.  They love Ainventing it as they go @ and beginning a project without a clue … without the foggiest idea of what they are going to do.  How about that for a different frame of mind?

These entrepreneurs begin with the problemClooking it straight in the face and asking a thousand questions about it.  Then they begin thinking about all of the possibilities for solving it.  They don=t have to know Athe one right way. @    They easily embrace ambiguity and not-knowing.  And they live with that ambiguity believing that they will eventually figure it out.

I’ve written about how opportunities are not seen with the eyes, but with the mind.  And it is this frame of mind, this attitude and spirit of an entrepreneur which involves welcoming problems and diving into them so that they can see beyond and behind the difficulties and challenges.  Entrepreneurs know how to treat problems as the foundation for their success.

They intelligently embrace risk.  There=s something else about these entrepreneurs that=s pretty incredibleC they have frames about risk that set them apart from the majority.  They not only embrace the risk of not-knowing, the risk of feeling uncomfortable, the risk of failing, but they also embrace the risk of looking the fool, and being vulnerable to the ridicule of others.  This is their boldness.  They are passionate believers in their idea, what they do, and themselvesCand to those on the outside this can seem foolhardy.

I found this same attitude when I modeled Afinancial independence @ of the self-made millionaire.  They turn ideas about risk upside down.  They actually think that the most risky thing in the world is to work for someone else!   For them, that=s insecurity.  They consider that the most risky thing of all to do.  Their frame of mind is that the person they can most trust is themselves.  They would rather trust their own skills and passions then be dependent on someone else.   For them, getting a paycheck is risky, launching out on your own is security.  Talk about reframes!

No wonder it takes a lot of self-trust, self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-efficacy to be an entrepreneur.  You have to find your security in trusting and believing that you can use your skills, powers, knowledge, relationships, etc. to add and create value for others.

Risk in the marketplace is a given for the entrepreneur.  In response to that, these entrepreneurs embrace and value that risk and treat it respectfully as something to be managed.  They then deal with as any problem is addressedCby studying it, understanding it, developing skills to handle it, creating plans, living by their plans, and using their intelligence to take calculated risks.

They do what they know, apply to themselves, and effectively manage their time, energy, and emotions.  I found another trait in these entrepreneurs, they Aapply to self. @   Rather than having answers and solutions for others first, they take the attitude of trying things out on themselves first.  This does several things for them.  It makes them congruent.  It makes them aligned with what they present.  It builds a reputation that they Awalk their talk. @

We know that effective entrepreneurs are self-motivated, self-directed, take initiative, and are highly proactive.  But where does this come from?   It comes from first applying to self.   Obviously, the person who cannot manage his or her own states, motivation, time, energy, daily structure of events, billing, office, marketing, etc. will not do well engaged in a business that depends entirely on his or her own efforts.  Self-management is critical for the self-employed and for anyone who wants to operate as an entrepreneur.  When a person applies to self, he or she experiences an inner self-knowing about their idea, product, or service.  This adds to being convinced about it.

It=s from applying to self that entrepreneurs then get themselves to act on their plans and decisions.  They don=t just see opportunities, they sort through the ones that are right and appropriate, they create plans for taking action, and then they courageously seize them.  They are not just full of talk and big ideasCthey take action after they meta-detail the specifics.

They develop a discipline for efficiency and focus.   From the self-management of Aapply to self @ comes another critical trait for the entrepreneur.  Namely, the ability to be efficient and effective, to make the best use of time and energy, to govern and regulate one=s own energy and efforts.  After all, when there is no one to report to, no one to direct one=s activities, the entrepreneur engages in self-regulation.  He or she keeps a regular schedule, regular office hours, and monitors the activities to determine which are most effective in running the business.

They create a plan and live by that plan.   I asked these entrepreneurs as I did others, how they developed their efficiency and they all spoke about setting specific, realistic, and exciting goals.  I expected that.  So far so good.  Trained in NLP, they all knew and used the Well-Formed Outcome pattern.  But highly successful entrepreneurs go further, they then monitor their progress on a regular basis and hold themselves accountable to their action plan.   They also set up systems of accountability so that others also hold them accountable.  Their attitude is not Ahow little can I can get by with? @ but, Awhat new levels of performance can I reach? @

These entrepreneurs not only accepted feedback, but longed for it, craved it.  Why?  Their frame of mind is that it is only through feedback can they develop further, take their skills to the next level, and make ever-finer adjustments to their skills, products, and services.  For the entrepreneur, making and following a plan eliminates the expenditure of time and energy to keep re-deciding things.  One can then default to the carefully designed plan.  Once developed, a person can then refuse to revise goals downward when frustrated or set-back, and to let the carefully chosen goals continue to beckon them into one=s future, regardless of current performance.

They build systems that support their products and services.   These entrepreneurs also were highly skilled in setting up people, systems, and administrative systems for their business.  They developed financial systems for monetary accountability and monitoring, for handling employees, suppliers, clients and customers.

Entrepreneurs at Work

Throughout the last century, business evolved and changed, and business in the twenty-first century will continue to change.  With the Quality movement, business has been moving more and more to seeing the financial wisdom of building quality as an ongoing process.  With the pace of change and the global market, business now recognizes the importance of continual learning, improvement, and training.  Continual learning is no longer a luxury, it=s an essential.  Today we need not only an informed workforce, but people who care about what their doing, and find meaning and purpose in it if we want them to be responsible, creative, and contributing.

Leadership and management has also been changing.  Successful leadership invites people to become collaborative partners as they provide a vision and then co-create an action plan that allows people to tap their potentials.  Today as never before we are recognizing that the most effective leading and managing are using the essential coaching skills to lead and manage.

What does all of this mean?  It means that the spirit of entrepreneurship is precisely what is making and will continue to make the biggest difference for anybody and everybody working in a corporation.  It means people at all levels of a business or corporation need to adopt more of an entrepreneur=s attitude. Who will succeed?  The workers who add value and have eyes to look for adding value.  The supervisors and managers who consider everybody inside and outside of the business as customers to please and delight.  The owners and CEOs who recognize that continual learning, improvement, and feedback is the only way to stay current in the marketplaces.

Gauge Your Entrepreneurial Spirit

C           Do you have a passion that you absolutely believe in?

C           Do you have a passion that absolutely adds value to your customers and clients in your present work?

C           What value does it add?

C           Do you see opportunities all around you?

C           Do you live in an abundant universe with a thousand opportunities beckoning to you?

C           Do you have the courage to act on the right opportunities?

C           Do you welcome problems and get turned on by them?

C           Do you delve into problems knowing that embracing the problem will reveal its secrets for solution?

C           Do you love solving things and have a solution-focus mindset?

C           Do you love risk?

C           How comfortable are you at handling what others call Arisk? @

C           What do you view as true Asecurity @ Ca paycheck or relying on your skills and wit?

C           What risk management skills do you have?

C           Do you congruently Awalk your talk? @

C           Do you like yourself as a manager (in your self-management role)?

C           How disciplined are you in your expenditure of time and energy?

C           Do you have a five-year plan?  A business plan?

C           Do you follow it and keep refining it?

C           Do you hold yourself accountable to the goals and outcomes that you set?

C           Do you invite others to hold you accountable?

C           Do you crave feedback and integrate it so it changes your behavior?

C           What systems have you set up that keeps you on track with your goals?

Gauge Your Entrepreneurial Spirit

C           Do you have a passion that you absolutely believe in?

C           Do you have a passion that absolutely adds value to your customers and clients in your present work?

C           What value does it add?

C           Do you see opportunities all around you?

C           Do you live in an abundant universe with a thousand opportunities beckoning to you?

C           Do you have the courage to act on the right opportunities?

C           Do you welcome problems and get turned on by them?

C           Do you delve into problems knowing that embracing the problem will reveal its secrets for solution?

C           Do you love solving things and have a solution-focus mindset?

C           Do you love risk?

C           How comfortable are you at handling what others call Arisk? @

C           What do you view as true Asecurity @ Ca paycheck or relying on your skills and wit?

C           What risk management skills do you have?

C           Do you congruently Awalk your talk? @

C           Do you like yourself as a manager (in your self-management role)?

C           How disciplined are you in your expenditure of time and energy?

C           Do you have a five-year plan?  A business plan?

C           Do you follow it and keep refining it?

C           Do you hold yourself accountable to the goals and outcomes that you set?

C           Do you invite others to hold you accountable?

C           Do you crave feedback and integrate it so it changes your behavior?

C           What systems have you set up that keeps you on track with your goals?

Summary

To you know how to put on your Abusiness hat @ and develop and use your business intelligence?  Like everything else, there is an inner structure to Abusiness sense. @   And we can use the Matrix model to describe the frames of mind, intentions, and states of such.  Are you ready to make some money?  To add value through what you=re doing, to become passionately involved and committed?  To take on risks and put your feet and hands and cash where your mouth is?

Author: L. Michael Hall is a research psychologist and modeler who has developed many cutting-edge models in NLP and co-developed the field of Neuro-Semantics.  He’s a prolific author with over 35 books and an entrepreneur living in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

References:

Secrets of Personal Mastery (1999)

Frame Games (2000)

Games Business Experts Play (2001)

Mastering Your Wealth Matrix (2003)

with people who feel like losers.

To play a game—any game—

you have to be in a game-playing frame of mind.”

Jack Stack

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

C          “The great game of business” —what is that?

C          Why compare business to a game?  What’s the value of that?

C          If we were to view business as a game, then what are the rules, how do we win, what do we win, how do we keep score, and how do we play?

Games —in Neuro-Semantics we have taken the metaphor of games and used it to describe our actions, responses, and interactions.  That enables us to think about and describe behavior, relationship, and performance in a playful way.  Then, in recognizing that with this we are talking about the outer game, it has led us to back up to the inner game—the game that we play in our mind.  The inner game of our frames of meaning.

The Inner and Outer Games

With the advent of the Meta-States model, we now recognize that when we have a “second” thought or feeling about a previous thought or feeling, we have set a frame of reference in our mind which creates our inner game.  That’s important.  Why?  Because we can’t play any better outer game than out inner game allows.  So, how’s your inner game?

The inner game of our frames gives us a practical and useful and non-psychological way to talk about the stuff of the mind.  It enables us to explore our thinking, imagining, remembering, and conceptualizing about things that set up the game, creates the rules of the game, and empowers or limits us in playing the game.

In our inner game we construct a world of meaning around something.  We then live in that world.  This world of frames about meanings then is our Matrix that governs the game.  It governs what things are (to us), what things mean (to us), how we read and interpret things, and the skills and behaviors that result.

This is what we mean by neuro-semantics, the neurology and physical embodiment of our inner game that structure our perceptions and understandings.  So what?  What does this mean?  It means that it is not what we think that makes the difference—it is rather our second thoughts, our thoughts about our first thoughts.  Each layer of thoughts govern the first as a feedback loop governing other feedback loops in cybernetics and computer science.  It’s in this way that we reflect on our thinking and layer levels upon levels of ideas.  This creates our frames of meaning within frames of meaning.  It creates our mental matrix of understandings.

How much difference does this make?  A lot!   It makes a world of difference.  Why?  Because the outer games we play in life by the way we act, talk, communicate, behave, and relate come from the inner games of our frames.  In fact, we cannot play a better game than our frames.  So if our outer game in business, health, relationships, learning, skill development, feeling great, etc. isn’t all we want it to be, or believe it can be—the problem isn’t us, it’s our frames.

In Neuro-Semantics this gives us two wonderful metaphors: frames and games.  And that has lead to Frame Games model and a series of Games books and trainings.1 Now we can ask a provocative question:

If business was a game,

then what are the rules for playing it

and for winning at it?

Business Games

In 2002 I wrote a book on business, Games Business Experts Play.  In the research I did for the book, I explored books on business, management, leadership, finance, etc.  In that process, I examined what had been written in the field of NLP on business which is actually a lot.  Then after the book was published I came across a book by a CEO of a remanufacturing corporation.  Jack Stack, the CEO of Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation had written a book that the title of this article, The Great Game of Business (1992).

This book is actually a heroic story about how a frazzled work force become empowered and turned around a failing business.  Interesting enough, CEO Jack Stack found that by setting the game frame as a metaphor for business, he could educate, empower, and enable the blue-collar work force at the factory to completely change the way they thought about their jobs, about work, and about business.

The achievements of this business is chronicled in The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack. There he tells about how he not only transformed a business, but the work force of that business.  In the process he turned the work force into budding entrepreneurs.

It all started when Stack, a college dropout, returned to work in a broken-down International Harvester diesel engine retrofitting plant.  When he got there, things were a mess—products were inefficient and of low-quality.  The work force was dispirited and fatalistic.  Sounds like an opportunity, right?  Given the poor morale, lack of training, and dilapidated infrastructure, Stack at first even wondered if the division was salvageable.

Then something turned him around.  It occurred when he noticed how skilled the workers were at memorizing and following the sports statistics of baseball games.  That gave him an idea.  If they could understand the numbers behind baseball, they could surely understand the basics of business and business numbers.  So working with that dishearted and unmotivated group, he taught and coached them to think of business as a game. And as a game, he knew that they would want to understand how to play it, what’s the score, who’s playing, what they need to do to score, what’s the scorecard, and how can they win.

So the game began, the great game of business.  Stack led a retraining effort that created a startlingly difference work force and this from people who had been unmotivated.  Lathe operators learned to read a balance sheet, sheet metal workers came to appreciate inventory turns and returns on investment.  And all of the employees who were not even in the game one day, soon became business literate entrepreneurs the next.

What happened?   Well, by using an “open book” approach coupled with the most outrageously unbalanced leveraged buyout in corporate history (89 parts debt, 1 part equity), the Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation stepped out from International Harvester and began playing its own game.  That lead to a remarkable success path, an 18,200 percent stock price increase in eight years, zero layoffs, and sales growth exceeding 30 percent annually.  Pretty impressive, wouldn’t you say?

How did all of that happen?

In Stack’s own words:

“The first two laws of business sum up our success: they emphasize how thoroughly dependent we are on one another—and how strong we are because of it.  The best, most efficient, most profitable way to operate a business is to give everybody in the company a voice in saying how the company is run and a stake in the financial outcome, good or bad.”

“Two critical factors in business, one is to make money and the other is to generate cash.  As long as you do those these things, your company is going to be okay, even if you make mistakes along the way, as you inevitably will.” (p. 4)

“In business, you can have great customer service and fail.  You can have a terrific safety record and fail. You can have the best quality in your industry and fail.  People are told what to do in an eight-hour workday, but no one ever shows them how they fit into a bigger picture.  We constantly strive to paint the Big Picture for the people out on the factory floor.  We try to take ignorance out of the workplace and force people to get involved, not with threats and intimidation, but with education.   We want to close the gap between workers and managers.”

“The ignorance of top management assumes that people down the ladder are incapable of understanding its problems and responsibilities.  That’s where the Game comes in.  We tell people that they have the wrong idea about business, that it is really a Game—no more complicated than baseball, or golf or bowling.  You don’t need to be an entrepreneurial genius like Sam Walton to succeed in business.  What you do need is a willingness to learn the rules, master the fundamentals, and play together as a team.” (p. 7)
Consider Stack’s great game of business in terms of the Matrix model.  He began with the Meaning matrix as he empowered his people with more meaning and purpose about things.  He did that by informing and communicating the big picture.  He set a game frame so that “business” made more sense and the numbers of business (ROI) could be understood.   This led to a higher Intention—to win at the game, to be part of a winning team, to use one’s skills and talents to the full, to secure their jobs, etc.

“The only way to know if your job is safe is by looking at the financial statements.  We developed a system that in effect delegates the responsibility for job security by giving people a scorecard and a way to influence the score.”

This describes the open book policy that Stack established in the corporation.  This, in turn, lead to the people feeling empowered, important, significant, and a part of the solution.  And that resulted in people taking ownership of the processes.  It invited them to think like owners.  Talk about the Power and the State Matrices!

“I don’t want people to just work for a job.  I want them to have a purpose in what the hell they are doing.  You can’t have high productivity with faceless people.  They’re not happy with themselves, they’re not happy with their jobs, they bring you down.   Why would anyone think a job was more than a job when that’s all the company expects it to be?  But if you set up the work to be a step on the path to something else, then it takes on a new meaning.  It becomes more than just a job.” (p. 13)

Stack writes that “Ownership is a state of mind” rather than a set of legal rights.  This also is the attitude that we’ve written about in Wealth Building.  When we look at the world from the perceptive of how we can add value, we have entered into the heart of building true wealth.

“We want to get rid of the employee mentality.  The big payoff to us for playing the Game is that we become a more educated, more flexible organization.  We can do all that  because we have a company filled with people who not only are owners, but who think and act like owners, not like employees.  That’s an important distinction.  Getting people to think and act like owners goes far beyond giving them equity.”

It’s this change of attitude that transforms a “mere worker” into an entrepreneur.  It invites the workers to begin to dream and to have higher reasons for what their work.  With those States and Resources, when the workers show up for work they show up and are present and have an eye on the future.  Now that’s the kind of Time matrix you want people to be in, not living in the past whining about all the things they don’t like.
Thinking about business as a great game lead to changes in both leadership and management in the Others matrix.  What do you think?

“We establish credibility … and you only build credibility by telling the truth. You simply can’t operate unless people believe you and believe one another.  Lying and dishonesty are bad business. … Being an SOB gets you nowhere.  That’s why I get angry at the loudmouths who talk about winning through intimidation.  They are dead wrong and are promoting a destructive myth.”

“A big pitfall of managers at all levels is the notion that we have to be perfect. To build confidence in people we have to show them that we’re human, not God, that we don’t have all the answers, that we make lots of mistakes.  Failure is part of the process.  You can’t succeed if you don’t fail sometimes.” (p. 28)

“No company can pay the Great Game of Business with people who feel like losers.  To play a game—any game—you have to be in a game-playing frame of mind.” (p. 39)

Isn’t that great!  Is that the way your manager or CEO thinks?  If you are the leader, is that how you think and relate to your people?  Since “pride comes before ownership,” empowering people who work together to feel like winners necessitates that they learn how to take pride in themselves and in each other.  To do that Stack describes the art of celebration that he developed in his corporation and how he taught the employees to learn to look for positive things to celebrate.  “Celebrate every win” is his motto.
Since the world of business (the World matrix) is about making money and keeping sufficient cash flow so that the business can operate, open books, understanding of numbers, creating quality products and services, creating fewer barriers between management and staff, etc. are key ways that we play the great game of business.

“Once people understand the numbers, once they see how the Game works, once they get it, business makes all the sense in the world.  It puts everything they do into perspective.  It makes them understand why they’re here.  It shows them what their contribution is and why it matters.”

“The big picture is all about motivation.  It’s giving people the reason for doing the job, the purpose of working.  If you’re going to play a game, you have to understand what it means to win.  When you show people the big picture, you define winning.   Most of the problems we have in business today are a direct result of our failure to show people how they fit into the big picture.” (p. 57)

“The more people know about a company, the better that company will perform.  This is an iron-clad rule.  You will always be more successful in business by sharing information with the people you work with than by keeping them in the dark.  Let your people know whatever you know about the company, the division, the department, the particular task at hand.  Information should not be a power tool—it should be a means of education.”  (p. 71)

These quotes speak about the great game of business and the quality of people you need to play the game, do they not?  What are the qualities that enable us to play and to win?  Openness, sharing, operating from a sense of abundance, cooperating, collaboration, being a team player, celebrating each other’s successes, looking for positives, being solution oriented, giving the best quality, owning responsibility, etc.—that almost sounds like the Vision Statement of Neuro-Semantics, doesn’t it?

After the quality of people comes the World matrix of understanding how business works.  This involves recognizing the role and function of making money, creating quality products and services, working together as a team, and keeping people informed.  It involves managing for efficiency, cost, effectiveness, and looking for competitive edges in the marketplaces.

“There are only two ways to make money in business.  One is to be the least-cost producer; the other is to have something nobody else has.  Unless you have a proprietary product or service, you have to be prepared to compete on price, and you can do that best if you are the least-cost producer.  It’s always nice to be in a position to charge a little more.  To do that you have to come up with an edge that customers can’t get anywhere else, quality, particular service, etc.”

“The best way to control costs is to enlist everyone in the effort.  That means providing people with the tools that allow them to make the right decision.  These tools are our magic numbers.  Every business has them.  They are the numbers that tell you whether or not your costs are lower than your competitors.”

“Open-book management is the means by which you share those benchmarks with the people in your company, the way you get everyone involved in the effort to become the least-cost producer.  While you are striving to lower costs, you can also try to come up with additional services—services that nobody else has.”  (p. 79)

“The best argument for open-book management is this: the more educated your work force is about the company, the more capable it is of doing the little things required to get better.  Business is a game of fractions.  If you look at the income statements of corporations today, you’ll see that very few of them have pretax margins above 5%.  So a 1% improvement in profitability is very, very significant.”

As part of the Game of business, Stack created the Great Huddle.  This is a tool for generating more of a team spirit and eliciting the best and most robust attitudes in people.

“People have to see the effects of what they do or they won’t care.  It doesn’t matter if the effects are good or bad.  If you go out everyday and nobody notices whether your work is good, bad, or indifferent, you’ll stop caring.

“Our great Huddles tell people we care. We send the message out every week: we want to know what you’re doing. When we come out of the meeting, we can see the whole field before us.  We know who is where, and how the Game is unfolding and what each of us has to do to make sure we keep moving close to the goal line.

“This is the Great Game of Business.  This is how we play it, week in, week out.  This is where we put into operation all of the principles of open-book management, where we apply all of the lessons we’ve learned in previous years, where we use all of the tools we’ve developed—the standards, the game plan, the goals.  The payout levels, the different ways of wining.  This is how we constantly regenerate the mutual truth and respect, build credibility, light the fire in people’s eyes.  This is how we drive ignorance from the workplace, teaching people to make money, show them why that’s important.” (p. 175)

There’s a lot more in the book, but I think you get the basic idea.  It’s the frames that drive the game.  And if you want to play a new and better, a more productive and fun outer game at work, then it all begins with the inner game of your frames.  That’s why when we coach to both the outer and the inner games, we put the emphasis on the inner game.   That’s because that is where we win or lose.

End Notes:

1: See Frame Games: Persuasion Elegance (2000), and the series of Games books and trainings. These include: Games Slim and Fit People Play, Games for Mastering Fear, Games Business Experts Play, Games Great Lovers Play, Games for Selling Excellence, Games for Prolific Writing, Games for Wealth Building, Games for Accelerated Learning, Matrix Games.
2: For more on the book, see: Stack, Jack.  (1992).  The Great Game of Business.  New York, Doubleday.

C           What is the quality of training trainers in NLP today?

C           How satisfied do you feel regarding the currently quality of NLP trainers?

C           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?

C           What do we need in order to raise the level of skill, competency, and integrity in NLP leaders?

C           What problems has the NLP community experienced and suffered over the years due to problems in the training of trainers?

C           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 publicly—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.?

Interesting enough (and sadly enough) I don’t think I’m over-stating things to say that, like most things in NLP, the intent and design of most trainers training is primarily about making money through a training.  It’s about keeping a training center profitable by adding the pinnacle of the training track.  We put on Trainers Training when we think we can market to enough people to profitably conduct another training.  In this, trainers training in NLP does not seem very strategic or systemic in terms of thinking about the entire community.  In fact, it often seems to be the opposite, promoting a given “camp” or school of NLP.

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.

C           What kind of leaders and trainers do we want?

C           What kind of trainers would truly represent the spirit of NLP, that is the essence and heart of what we envision NLP to be?

C           What qualities do we want in our trainers and leaders?

C           How would we go about training in those kinds of traits, features, skills, and relational qualities?

C           How could we measure or benchmark the quality of trainers?

C           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?

These are among the first questions we could begin to ask if we step back and use our models and skills to think strategically about the training of trainers.  Then we put our heads and hearts together to begin designing trainers training that’s not just about helping someone change careers, we could envision community building.

Trainers as Leaders and Models

A beginning place might be to set a frame for all NLP trainers about leadership.  Whether a trainer realizes it or not, everyone who teaches, presents, trains, and even uses NLP publicly with clients is in a leading role and will be seen and evaluated as a living model of NLP.  So every fuss, every conflict, every negative comment about others, every lack of state management, etc. will be seen as “That’s what NLP is!”

In other words, I’d suggest we strategically focus on building in a strong sense of personal responsibility in trainers that how we talk, act, relate, and live will communicate as much about NLP as the content of what we present in a training.  This means that merely developing trainers who can “talk” about NLP, reason, argue, and debate about NLP should not be our goal.  Rather, we should develop trainers who can walk the talk.  That’s what a true and powerful leader does.  In fact, that’s the heart of leadership—leading out and showing the way by action.  Words come later.  Words give cognitive content to what we are actually doing.

What if we used this criteria for determine regarding when a trainer is ready to be certified?  What if how the person lives NLP and operates from congruently walking the talk became the certification point, not finishing a training, passing a paper-and-pencil test, or making a great presentation in a training?  Would that change things?  Would that refocus the meaning of “Trainer?”

What if we began to hold ourselves as trainers and newly trained trainers to that level of quality?  What if quality of living the models and patterns, of “apply to self,” became the first criteria?  And what if we created networks for that kind of accountability?

Raising the Benchmarking Level

Of course, then we would have to ask another question.   How would we measure or mark or determine “walking the talk?”   That’s pretty vague?  How do we denominalize such ideas as “congruency, integrity, leadership, cooperation, collaboration, professional, etc.?”

We speak about de-nominalizing overly vague and fluffy terms (nominalizations) in NLP all the time.  This corresponds in the academic and scientific communities to operationalizing our terms so that we can agree upon a way to measure things.  In the business and consultancy fields we speak about benchmarking best practices so that they can be replicated.  This corresponds to modeling in NLP.

In the past two years in our Meta-Coaching training, we have set out to benchmark the intangible nominalizations that are called “coaching skills.”  To date, we have benchmarked 25 of the key skills and set them out on a 0 to 5 scale with specific empirical or sensory-based behaviors to indicate degrees of the skills.  This has allowed us to set a benchmark for each of the skills and to be able to precisely measure the quality of any coach’s skill level.  Our next step is to now transfer this to the domain of training and do so with training and leadership skills, which is what we’re planning to do this year—for the first time ever—at our Trainers Training.

As we have been benchmarking in this way, it has provided fascinating insights into the structure of the experience of skill development.   It provides a mirror so that we can see where we are in terms of the quality of a given skill and what are the behaviors that will enable us to take our skill to the next level.  It also invites true feedback (in contradistinction to judgment).  Now colleagues can reflect back in specific see-hear-feel terms precisely what we are doing so that we can make cleaner and more discreet shifts in our actions, gestures, language, etc.

Benchmarking as a process also does something else.  When a coach or trainer is benchmarked against certain criteria it sets a frame that skills are skills and that they can always be improved.  In doing so, we begin to set frames in our own mind about how we want to take our own skills to the next level.   Of course, an arrogant person wouldn’t want to do that.  A know-it-all would feel threatened by such.  A trainer who wants to play the Guru Game and build up his or her own “camp” of devotees would find that too risky, too vulnerable.

Yet isn’t that the kind of trainers and leaders we need to take NLP into this twenty-first century?    Don’t we need and want authentic trainers?  Trainers who are congruent, real, down-to-earth, loving, playful, learning, growing, and open to feedback?  Wouldn’t trainers like that give NLP a much better name and reputation?

Back to “Apply to Self”

Given all this, the question undoubtedly arises in your mind, “Am I personally applying this to myself?”  Ah, the “apply to self” criteria!  Perhaps the reason we all do skip around the apply to self frame at times is that it is so challenging.  It doesn’t leave us alone.  It calls us on the carpet.  It demands that we make ourselves accountable.

In thinking through this and stepping back to more strategically think about Trainers Training, I am introducing several new things in our Neuro-Semantic/ NLP Trainers Training program this year.  This year in Australia, I have assembled a team of 9 trainers from many countries (Australia, USA, South Africa, New Zealand, England, etc.) to co-train with me—so that we can demonstrate team work and collaboration.  This year, we will use benchmarking of skills and I will give the trainers in training 3 days to benchmark my skills as they watch me do a live training (“Accessing Personal Genius”).  This year, we will spend four days on the Business aspects of Training to equip people with the entrepreneurship skills necessary.   This year, we will spend considerable time creating community and collaborative relationships and practice state-management skills for conflict resolution among us as trainers and leaders.

It’s just a beginning.  There’s much more to do.  But at least it enables us to take a few  faltering steps to raising the level of training trainers so that we ourselves develop the internal quality that reflects well on the presuppositions, models, and patterns of NLP and Neuro-Semantics.

When “Excuses” Go So Far
Into the Ozone of our Meta-Levels
that We Lose Consciousness
that We’re just “Making Excuses”

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

I came upon The Excuse Blow-Out Pattern after encountering three people in a row who complained, “But I just can’t apply NLP to myself.” Talk about an excuse!

“Yeah, this is great stuff. And I’m a wizard at NLP-ing people. I can run the patterns like a charm. But I just can’t do it on myself.”

The payoff of that excuse is pretty obvious: the person doesn’t have to be congruent, walk the talk, invest the time, trouble, and energy to change, be held accountable, and get to be really special. “Maybe I’m just more intelligent, quick, sharp, etc. I see what you’re trying to do to me when I play the subject.”

Yeah!

You can read about the Excuse Blow-Out Pattern in the Neuro-Semantic report. We have it also in the E-journal of Neuro-Semantics.

The Nature of “Excuses”

Excuses can be seductive. And when someone loads up an excuse with sophisticated sounding reasons, they seem so legitimate. And for anyone working with others (i.e., all of us), whether we manage, sell, do therapy, teach, parent, relate to loved ones, practice law, etc., dealing with excuses (our own and others) is an important part of being successful in life.

Since developing the Excuse Blow Out Pattern, I’ve had lots of opportunities to get even more acquainted with the realm of “excuses” than ever before. It has surprised me at the range of kinds, forms, and qualities of “excuses.” And given the sparse amount of research and study on “excuses” in NLP, this has become a fascinating are of interest and exploration.

It has also made me more conscious of my own skills in “Excuse Making.” (Well, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of making excuses for why I don’t make excuses!) Like any area of endeavor, our very interest makes us more conscious of its presence. It has alerted me to some of the really sneaking ways I excuse-make that I had not even recognized. And it’s funny catching myself looking around, as it were, for something that I can use to excuse me from some task, obligation, requirement, request, etc. The strange thing about excuse-making, the greater and more sophisticated our skills at reasoning, explaining, and intellectualizing, more subtle and invisible (to us) our powers of rationalization. We can come up with more and more sophisticated B.S. for getting away with things. It reinforces the old line that Ph.D. means “Piled Higher and Deeper.”

Excuse-making in our lives becomes political intrigue, courtroom analysis of strategies, and even high comedy (if we don’t take ourselves too seriously). Most of us got a kick out of President Clinton inventing reasons, explanations, and justifications for why he did not and could not have had “sex with that woman,” and then more to explain why he did but really didn’t mean it. My favorite was his retort, “It depends on what the meaning of is is.”

Level One of Excuse Making

The first level of excuse making involves simply finding or inventing a reason that explains why something is out of the question, inappropriate, not useful or binding, etc.

“But I’m too tired to exercise.”

“But I’m not the kind of person who goes to those kinds of events.”

“But I don’t know enough.”

“But I’m afraid.”

“But I’ve never done it that way before.”

“But the traffic was too heavy.”

“But I lost my watch.”

“But my wife would never let me…”

“But I’d get dirty and sweaty.”

Structurally, all of these “reasons” occur at a meta-level to the Primary State of some activity. To the primary experience and all the thoughts, feelings, physiologies that would be involved if we engaged in it, we have other thoughts and feelings, usually negative thoughts and feelings. We don’t want to be bothered. We dislike the experience. So excuses generally involve an unpleasant meta-state about some primary experience.

By way of contrast, consider times when you took on the activity. Or consider someone else is always seems turned on by that activity. In both instances, there was a different frame of mind about the activity. We or they did not see it as a bother, trouble, boring, challenging, or whatever. We or they had take a positive mental attitude (e.g., a meta-state) about the activity. This made “excuse-making” irrelevant. We just got right to it; took effective action and moved ourselves a little closer to fulfilling our goals.

An excuse is a frame about the proposed experience that induces us to feel put off or bothered in some way. We don’t feel up to it. We don’t see the value of it. So we attempt to excuse ourselves from the engagement by making up some “reason” that seems to allow us or another person to grant us excuse. For this reason, excuses generally operate as a form of persuasion. We essentially say (to ourselves or another),

“Please have me excused from X activity because of this or that reason…”

Excuses that occur in an inter-personal context involve relationships, expectations, hopes, agreements, and the like. The excuses we use with ourselves involve our intra-personal relationship to ourselves, and to our goals, outcomes, hopes, dreams, etc. We want to be fit and thin, but then (here comes the excuses) we’re tired, it takes time and trouble, it takes a lot of effort, is it really all that profitable, etc.

The Cognitive Content of an Excuse

As goes the quality of thinking and reasoning, so goes the quality of our excuses. This means that we can have legitimate and illegitimate excuses. In fact, we can analyze excuses as we do thinking, cognition, reasoning, etc. When we do, we can discern the quality and sophistication of an excuse in terms of:

• Legitimate and Illegitimate excuses
• Logical and illogical excuses
• Good and bad excuses
• Intelligent and stupid excuses
• Rational and irrational excuses

In the literature on persuasion, we know that to use the linguistic term, “because…” helps to sell an excuse and to positively influence others in our favor. Experimental research has played with people attempting to cut in line. Those who do try to so without an explanation are much less likely to get a positive response than those who provide a reason. Those who only made the simple request, “Would you let me cut in line?” were denied more often than not. But when they add the word because, it becomes nearly magical. And what’s even more surprisingly magical about it was that it really didn’t matter too much what the persons said after the word “because…” You’d think that only legitimate, intelligent, rational, meaningful, and acceptable would work. Not so. Just about any excuse tends to work regardless of the quality of the excuse.

“Would you let me cut in line because I’m late for an appointment?”

Because I’m pregnant…
Because my wife will be mad at me.
Because my kid is sick.
Because I can’t stand this heat.

The Positive Intentions & Payoffs in Inventing Reasons “Why”

Many people, perhaps most people, do not like to think that they are “just making excuses.” How does that phrase strike you? Do you experience it as a positive thing or as a negative thing? “Just making excuses.” Do you do that?

Nay! Not you. Not me.

We don’t “make excuses,” we only asked to be excused from a task or obligation if we have a legitimate reason. Ah, the beauty and music of that word– “reason.”

“I had my reasons for doing (or not doing) X.”

“If you only understood why I did that (or failed to do that), then you’d appreciate…”

“They don’t understand, I had to do X because of …”

Notice how soothing, comforting, securing, and “right” these phrases feel. What is there about us that we need and want “reasons,” “whys,” and “becauses?” Come up with some reasons to explain that! Ah, it’s everywhere. It’s built into our need to make sense of things and to live in an intelligent world that we can figure out.

And this need or drive seems to begin very early.

“Why did you make that mess?”
“Because…”
“Because why?”
“Just because. That’s why!”

Our need for structure, order, an intelligent world– meaning and meaningful structures moves us to become very skilled at finding, inventing, and creating explanations, understandings, reasons, etc. And from this drive, we create models of the world, theories, postulates, etc. This gives birth to science. With an “explanation” about how something works, what leads to solution, what causes something else, etc., we develop scientific theories and hypothesis, test them, refine them, and so develop our knowledge base.

I knew there was a positive intention and payoff for the use of human reason!

Then We Become Devious

Of course, when you have such an incredible power as human reason that can invent new things, expand knowledge, create civilizations, etc., you know it is liable to abuse.

Enter, “The Excuse.”

This has been known for a long time. Socrates was the philosopher who quipped that “man is not a rational creature, he is a rationalizing creature.”

All you need is a little motivation. Add a little dislike, unpleasant task, frustration, sense of being bothered, etc., and you have the perfect context wherein “excuses” will be generated. It’s predictable. Most people (well, most Americans in the late 20th century and beginning 21stcentury) seem to operate from frames of comfort and ease (“Is it easy? Will it be fun?), the path of least resistance (“But this is hard?), and overload (“I have enough to do”). In the context of those frames, it easy to grow a whole crop of excuses in no time!

We get devious about the way we try to excuse ourselves from doing the things necessary, essential, and even critical to achieving our goals. The gestalt that emerges from this mixture is “self-sabotage.” We sabotage our own best interests. Talk about irrational. Why would we do that? What would get us to undermine our own success, fitness, health, relationships, etc.?

There must be something else going on here.
And yes, there is.

Meta-stating the Meta-State of “Excuse Making”

If “excuses” do not exist at the primary level, but as the meta-state level of a “reason” that we feed our minds, and try to feed the minds of others, about why we should be excused from doing something, then what’s your meta-level thought or feeling about that? How have you meta-stated the experience of excuse making?

Do you like the awareness that you’re “just making an excuse?”
Does that awareness make you feel anxious, uncomfortable?
Do you fear it?
Do you reject it and refuse to know that about any particular “reason?”

These questions begin the exploration of how have you framed the subjective experience of excuse making. To turn “negative” thoughts and feelings against our own selves and our own experiences banishes awareness and so reduces the level of our own interpersonal mindfulness. And that makes us more unconscious about what we’re doing and how we’re living, which reduces our freedom of actual choices, which reduces our power to run our own brain. And, if continued, it can create a Dragon State.

Not a pretty picture.

The solution? Accepting that we are excuse makers and develop an open willingness to not only recognize our propensity for excuse-making, but to reality test the excuses, and hold ourselves to a higher standard.

Our Default Meta-Stating of our Responsibilities and Tasks

In making excuses, there’s lots of things going on, but not only at the same level of the primary event or the first meta-level of our excuse making. The more crucial things are happening at even higher levels. To discover what’s really going on we have to go higher to the frames about our excuse-making. We have to move up to yet another level, and usually several other levels. Only then can we flush out and discover the higher frames that are actually driving the show.

Discover these higher levels for yourself.

1) Identify a desired outcome.

Think about some activity that, at some level, you want to do, know that you should do, and know that it would benefit you if you did do it. For example, perhaps you think these kinds of thoughts about eating right and exercising, or devoting more quality time to family and loved ones. Think about doing those things that awaken the best in you: reading, listening, dialoguing, investing yourself in new discoveries, etc.

Got it? Good. Vividly represent and then step into that representation so that you can sense that goal, outcome, desire… And just feel it.

2) Let your excuses emerge.

Now think about the range of ways that you excuse yourself from taking effective action in fulfilling your goals.

What stops you?
What do you let get in your way?
What ideas, reasons, explanations do you give to let yourself off the hook?

3) Observe your excuse system.

Now step back, in your mind, from the desired activity and the excuses so that you can observe the whole dynamic structure of your thoughts-and-feelings and just notice what comes to mind and heart as you do.

How do you feel about your skills in excuse making?
How do you feel about yourself excusing yourself from being more fully engaged in life?
What thoughts bounce around the edge of your consciousness as you think about this?

You may get things like:

“I don’t know…” is the most common answer I get from these questions.
“I don’t know… I know I don’t like it.”
“I feel bad that I don’t push myself.”

The Meta-State Frame of Disliking Excuse-Making

These responses indicate some of the first default responses that you generate to your excuses. And this is common to all of us. Welcome to the club! We commonly do not even want to look at or face the fact that we let ourselves down, don’t go for the gusto, excuse ourselves, etc. All of this is part of the human experience.

Yet because we have a default awareness that we should not “make excuses” and because we feel bad about doing so, we do not seek awareness of doing so. We try to not know this about ourselves. Why? Typically because “making excuses” has been anchored with negative feelings (shame, guilt, being bad, being a slacker, etc.), so now we are well trained and conditioned to avoid that awareness.

And??

And so this leads us to do something that just makes the problem even worse, although on the surface, we think it will make the problem go away. What do we do? We set non-awareness (unawareness) as our basic frame about this facet of our journey through life. By not wanting to know our weakness, fallibility, etc. in excuse making, we frame things so that we become mindless. Then, we begin to fall into habits (unthinking ways of acting) so that we don’t maintain awareness of what we’re doing.

And why not? Because it’s too painful. As we have tabooed and rejected awareness of our excuse making (did you notice that there are three meta-levels of frames in that statement?), we now operate from that frame as our map. It creates the Frame Game of “Hey, don’t ask me; I don’t know. It’s just my Mind!” Frame Game.

Of course, this creates psychic danger in our person.

When Un-Awareness Becomes our Meta-Frame Game

When we taboo awareness of excuse making and refuse to know it, because we judge it and hate it (the level above the unawareness), we set up an Executive Frame that values “not knowing.” Then, out of that comes the gestalt commonly known as “Denial.” This isn’t conscious denial, but unconscious denial. We’re denying and don’t even know that we’re denying. We deny that we’re denying! In fact, the whole structure of these dynamic frames embedded in frames generates a general sense of being unconscious of our higher motivations and desires.

This leaves us living at the lower frames only aware of what we conscious know that we want– our goals and outcomes.

I want to be fit and thin.
I want to make lots of money and become financially successful.
I want to expand my career.
I want to have a loving and close family.

Yet, above these immediate and conscious goals, we have another set of goals that we have lost awareness of:

I want the easy path.
I want a hassle free life.
I don’t ant to have to work too hard or struggle too much.
I don’t want to do unpleasant and boring things.
I want to do only stimulating and exciting things. Etc.

At the conscious level, I really do think that I want the goals that I talk about, plan for, etc., and yet at another level (a higher level), I have programmed in another whole set of goals. And because these goals are “higher” in terms of logical levels, they operate as what we might call my real goals. After all, the higher frames govern and determine our actual reality.

These higher (or more operational) goals are not only different from, but opposed to and contradictory to my conscious goals. These higher unconscious goals arise from my higher frames. Yet because I have forbidden awareness of them, I can’t own them. I can’t accept them.

Welcome to the meta-muddles that occur when we do not handle the higher levels of our mind well.

To complicate matters at this point, every little clue of insight that I might experience about my higher “real” frames, only sends me into anxiety, fear, and stress. This is the self-organizing nature of the “not willing to know” frame. Result? I push awareness away even further and harder. Of course, due to the paradoxical nature of logical levels, this increases the strength of the higher frames.

From the Meta-States perceptive, “refusing to know…” locks me more into a position of blindness about my own thinking and feeling. And that operates from a “fear of discovering my true thoughts.” Eventually this leads to a self-alienation, a lack of psychological awareness of oneself, and a self-hatred or contempt. And so the problem gets worse and worse with this “attempted solution.’

How can we solve this?

The solution lies in the opposite direction. The solution lies in a direction that at first seems paradoxical. Namely, full acceptance of our “excuse making,” stupid explanations, skill at being devious, etc. Solution lies in the direction of refusing to identify myself with my thoughts and feelings, and realizing that this is just the way mind operates and welcome my excuses into awareness. When I do that, then I can discern between valid and invalid excuses and refuse the stupid ones.

4) Welcome your awareness of your skill in Excuse-Making.

Access the state of acceptance and even appreciation and set these thoughts and feelings about your excuse making. It’s just the use of your powers of “reason.” That’s all. Just notice the tremendous skill you have at lying to yourself, trying to get out of things, inventing preposterous excuses, misusing your rational mind, etc. No judgment.

5) Honestly evaluate the quality and sophistication of your Excuse-Making.

From acceptance and appreciation, you can now honestly evaluate, run an ecology check, reality test, and quality control the frames that you’re setting via your “reasons.” This higher level honesty is your friend and your power.

Summary: How you Relate to Your Excuse-Making

If you want to create the personal structuring for self-sabotaging in your children, attach psychic pain to “making excuses” by calling them bad, lazy, selfish, etc. This will motivate your kids to feel bad about making excuses and using their creative imagination for inventing reasons. As they taboo and reject excuses, they will eventually lose awareness of the excuses they event and truly believe that they have true reasons. This will begin the self-alienation.

If you want to allow them to own and accept this power, then play with their “excuses” by validating them as the use of reason and help them reality test them. This will enable them to recognize the difference between good and bad reasoning. It will teach them the beginning of critical thinking. It will also help them to avoid developing fears about themselves, the fallibility of their thinking, etc.

Welcoming our excuses allows us to then sort through the valid and invalid ones. Then we can clearly decide, “No!” I don’t need that stupid excuse, and “Yes!” that’s an appropriate one that I’ll keep.