When it came for the field of NLP to start modeling in a mindful and conscious way, they took the TOTE model from Miller’s The Plan and Structure of Behavior (1960) and created the NLP Strategy Model. That gave them a way to map the step-by-step process description for how an expert does what he or she does. That structure gave us the foundational steps regarding how to achieve a specific performance. As a linear strategy it established the essential steps and stages of the expertise - the bare-bones understanding of how the expert achieves peak performance. And while it is essential, it is also usually insufficient.

We need more. We need to detail more about what’s happening in...

The recent CIPD Annual Learning and Talent Development survey highlighted coaching as one of the top five talent management activities.  Of the companies that took part in the survey, 51% offered coaching to managers.

When I saw that, I couldn’t help wondering how varied that ‘coaching’ might be and how much value it added to the managers and the businesses.

‘Coaching ‘is one of those words that means different things to different people.  It’s often confused with Mentoring and sometimes means little more than giving feedback. But, what is the role of a coach?

Here’s my take on what it means and why it’s useful…

One of my earliest experiences of coaching was with the late Sir John Whitm...

One of the most important assumptions of NLP states, “the map is not the territory.” This sentence is part of an original paper by Alford Korzybski who wrote in 1931 and then in 1933, “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” (Farrow, B., 07/03/13)

The use of this assumption at the core of the NLP practice, helps to understand that every individual has a unique “map” which is useful for “finding your way around.” Some maps are better than others, but none of them is exactly “the truth”, as they are only representations that depend on the accuracy of many different perceptions.  These pe...

“The art of negotiation is to get others to do what you want because they want to.”  In order to increase your influence in the workplace you need to identify the motivations and aspirations of others and manage your own emotions and behaviours in a way that gets them to support your goals.

Emotional intelligence is the ability of an individual to understand her/ his own emotions, to be able to recognise the emotions of others, and to appreciate the impact those emotions have on what is happening around them.

NLP provides practitioners with a suite of knowledge, skills, and techniques that enable them to be better able to understand and influence their own, and others, emotions and be...

We all have difficult situations where we need to persuade someone to do something but they just won’t do what we want. Some of these situations are extreme – does anyone here have teenagers?!

Hostage negotiators – world class persuaders

But are your situations as tough as those that hostage negotiators find themselves in? These really are extreme. Life and death situations, emotions running at 11 out of 10 and polar-opposite desired outcomes – one demands a million dollars and a flight to Cuba and the other says, “Er, no and can you put your gun down and come out with your hands above your head?”

And yet, their results are exceptionally good. In the early days, there was no negotiatio...

In this age of rapid technology growth and digital advances, more and more events are becoming available virtually. Whilst this is wonderful and offers a range of great benefits, there continues to be thriving face to face conferences across a range of industries. Why?

Now, we don’t have the answer per se, yet what we do know is why hundreds of NLP professionals flock from all corners of the world to attend the NLP International Conference each year.

Through feedback gathered it has become clear that there are some distinct themes as to why NLP trained individuals attend and what tangible outcomes they get as a result of doing so.

Why others attend

The top spot goes to those seeking pra...

Helping change to stick!

If you have ever been involved in organisational change, cultural change or working with communities to encourage the adoption of a new initiative, one of the laments you may have heard is around ownership of the change and people see change as being imposed upon them.

My background is in cultural change and transformational change management within organisations and I have heard this many times throughout my corporate career from business, programme and project managers.  A lack of ‘buy in’ is normally coupled with people either resisting the new idea or maybe only partially taking part, which can mean that there is limited success.

So, what is the answer? How...

What is “unconscious bias” and is it a problem?

Have you heard of the Baby James/Baby Jane experiment? Dress a baby in blue and call ‘him’ James. Let someone look after ‘him’ and they tend to encourage activity in the baby, playing with noisier ‘boy’s toys’.

Dress the same baby in pink and call ‘her’ Jane… the carer tends to encourage quieter play with the ‘girl’s toys’. In the carer’s role, most of us (without some training/awareness) would do the same.

Let’s start with a definition or two. “Bias” from a psychological perspective is a learnt unconscious ‘behaviour’ which is linked to our values, beliefs and opinions. We develop our bias either directly through experience or indirectly...

Planning the programme is one of our favourite parts of the overall conference planning. As it is, according to feedback received, the main reason individuals in the NLP community flock from all corners of the globe to come and experience.

We’re currently onto the second stage of programme creation and this part is all about gathering more information, asking questions and exploring possibilities!

We don’t steer or influence what we think you as a part of the NLP community might like to see and hear; instead we allow it to be an organic process whereby we are informed by the field as to what will best serve it. After all, we’re not the experts in what might be useful to the field, you...

Creating the conference programme is an iterative and continually evolving process. We continue to hold space, as the programme continues to take shape… It is like building a massive jigsaw puzzle, when all we know at the beginning is that the finished puzzle fits into a specific framework and there are a maximum number of pieces it could contain.