Getting Unstuck - Training Transcript

Getting Unstuck Training Transcript

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Tom: Hello everyone, good evening. This is Tom from NLP Times and welcome to this evening's event, Getting Unstuck, Powerful Strategies for Overcoming Everyday Problems. Tonight we've got master trainer Michael Breen on the line and Michael is going to share with us, cool strategies and heuristics around getting over everyday problems. The context, whether you are looking to startup a business or you are somebody who has a dream or goal and you've found you haven't made as much progress that you'd want and perhaps you have become stuck. Well this program and this training tonight which will run about 90 minutes is going to help with all of that. We are going to work with overcoming distraction activities, dealing with inertia, deal with momentum and making sure you are quick to identify the real problem and figure out what the next step is. So Michael, good evening. Michael: Good evening Tom and good evening everyone. Tom: How are you this evening? Michael: I'm really good thank you. I'll be telling everybody on another occasion about some really cool projects that have come up. But tonight's topic, when you said would you do something on getting unstuck, I went, "Getting unstuck? Do you mean like if you get your head stuck in a door? What on earth could Tom mean by unstuck?" And I know you took requests and then talked with people. So I started asking around and talking with people about the situations that they get into when they feel stuck. The reason why is because I usually don't get stuck. I'm a big chap, but I don't get stuck that easily.



But I've also organized my internal world so that I can keep moving pretty much under whatever circumstances need to be created. And so as I went around and I started talking with people about whether they were stuck and how they were stuck, it reminded me that there are only a handful of problems, there really are. Despite the great variety in human experience, there are only a handful of problems in the world. For us as individuals, we either have things that we don't want or want things that we don't have. And in terms of the relationship to the problems, we have to deal with either one of those or both at the same time. When people were talking with me about places where they were stuck and places where they felt that they couldn't move -- again we are using these very physical metaphors of movement and then inertia stuckness etc., that come up under very specific circumstances. So tonight what I want to do, because we have an audience mainly made up of the Platinum Audio News Club, and then we'll have some people who are newer through the process and people that have been around a bit longer. I want to tie what we are going to talk about back into the fundamental material that makes up NLP and the tool-sets that we work with. The reason why is because the trick to getting unstuck is to use the tools that you've got. And there is a lot in the material that we've got where if you learn how to apply what you've learned and do it consistently for yourself, you find that your own problems will start to become smaller and smaller. That doesn't mean you won't have to do things that you don't want to do -- put your hands up if you want to pay tax? Who here wants to pay more tax? Nobody wants to do that.



But if we don't pay or we don't make arrangements, and we try to push it away and pretend that it isn't happening, there are consequences to that. In that sense it doesn't matter if you feel good, feel bad, feel motivated or unmotivated. The consequence will occur if the correct action doesn't. That's the kind of universe we got. We have a consequences universe and all behaviors have both benefits and they have consequences. And we are talking about the tax man, there are always consequences. So when we talk about these situations where, for example, you were working on a project and you thought everything was going good and you set it aside for a little while. And you just forgot about it. It was a nice project and you wanted to get going with it but you just can't seem to get going again. Or you keep going around in a circle, there is some behavior that you want to change. Something that is causing you problems but you keep going round and round in circles with it. Or even worse, when it feels like the universe or God hates you and had organized things exclusively for your own torture. I call them heavy gravity days. The ones where nothing seems to work and you just can't get going. And no matter what you try and do, you just can't seem to get purchased on the rocks you are trying to scramble over. That feeling of stuckness. The feeling of inertia comes from very specific kinds of strategies. So as you recall when we are talking about NLP, we talk about strategies in a couple of contexts. One, in the specific, we have the change in the sequence of representational systems which leads to a particular specific kind of behavior.



The second way we talk about strategies is the more overall sequence of action and sequences of actions that lead to some bigger result. And it's within those strategies at both levels that we can find the answer to getting stuck and also getting unstuck. But the first thing to note is that right there in the request, right there in the topic that we are talking about, is that feeling of inertia. Because it's a response, that feeling is a response to what's arising and not the inertia comes first.. it descends on you like a cloud from nowhere. And then you don't do anything. It's the other way around. So what I want to start with tonight is to just talk about a few symptoms. And we'll go through why they might be there. And then I want to cover something about what we call neurological truth. And it has to do with what has to happen, what are the requisites in order for a specific behavior to happen. Then we can start talking about how to unstick once you've got yourself stuffed in there. How does that sound? Tom: Excellent. That sounds really good. And actually it was the direction that I was intended to take, so rock on. Michael: Alright, so these are the kind of things, people start deferring or avoiding decisions. Constantly going, "Yeah I am going to think about that or I'm going to sort it out tomorrow. I don't want to deal with that right now, I'm going to deal with it later." So this concept of the vague and abstract later -- avoiding, avoiding, avoiding.



Anxiety, fear or beating yourself up in place of taking simple action. That's another classic kind of loop to get yourself stuck. The vague statements of aspiration -- "Yeah I'm going to get started on the project soon. I'm going to start sometime next week. I've got to wait for the arrival of this, and then that's going to happen." It's all in place of clear, specific commitments to deliver results, you get this kind of aspirational talk. I have one client who absolutely never gets stuck. This chap is the King of tracking. And all he does is he tracks everything that he does. That's his magic trick. On the other hand, I have a couple of friends who are perpetually falling into states of stuckness of one kind or another and they absolutely refuse to keep track, in other words, aware of their own behavior in what they are doing. So they never manage to find the connection. It's always a case of, something happens, they feel bad and they don't do anything, and then they carry on. That in itself is the definition of how the loop is maintained. Like one of those little symptomatic warning signs that we look for. When, you either are talking to yourself or talking to other people and it's a clich -- boiler plate stuff, management speak. The kind of crap that comes in those really fluffy personal development books. Again, the aspirational talk that is at a very high level rather than the specifics of what you want to do and what your commitment is to do it. Refusal to setup rhythms and routines -- of grasping hold of a principle, of an attitude of some kind of a pose. "I want to be free to do what I want to do." And then ending up doing nothing.



It's always one of those red flag things when somebody says, "Yeah I don't want to do any planning or look at what I'm doing because I want to be free to do what I want to do." And they don't do anything. So what they want to do is just hang out which is cool by the way, I have nothing against hanging out as a lifestyle or as a whole lifetime if that's what you want. But as I said, there are benefits and there are consequences to all of it. The other one that comes up around stuckness is when people say that they want something but there is little evidence of progress. In Texas, they call it big hat but not cattle. Now you can have big projects and small ones, but are you making progress and what kind of progress are you making? The final one which is the really big one is busyness that doesn't lead anything. This is the distraction activity. This is the, "Oh I a doing some web research. Oh I'm just checking my Facebook. Oh I'm just.." And then the essential stuff is left undone or incomplete. All of these things in this long list of stuff that I've gone through.. You might imagine it requires deep diving therapy into the nether regions of the unconscious in order to address them. But it's really simple. They all have to do with how a person is running their own life through the strategies that they have in pursuit of specific ends. And the thing is, most of the time, if something is developed into a stuckness, the specific ends that they are seeking with the behavior that maintains the stuckness is from somewhere else, some other time. Very, very odd things.



I have a client who was the CEO of an organization in the last post that he's had. And I've coached him from a management position to a directorship and then CEO in another organization. He decided he wanted to go out and do his own thing. We had one meeting and in that meeting, we talked about exactly what he wanted, what his criteria was, what he wanted from me and all the rest of this. And there were a handful of factors, but the most important one is that despite having more money than most people, he doesn't want to touch the capital that he has built up. So in building his new businesses, he has a coaching product and a consultancy product, but he doesn't want to touch his capital. Great, great work. So one of the things that he wanted from me was help in formulating strategies for fast revenue generation. That sounds like something that everyone would want, isn't it? Let's get some strategies for fast revenue generation, fantastic. So the next steps for him were to pull together his service offering and to test it out and have a few goes with it. And three weeks later, he's in the UK on a visit and we had a quick meeting. So we checked in to find out where he was. So, "How are you doing on the strategy for the service offering?" He said, "I've decided that I really want to get the business cards, the logo sorted out. And we are working on the website and the Facebook page should be sorted out sometime near the end of December or Early January." Now what does that have to do with fast revenue generation? Not a lot. What it has a lot to do with is easy wins, easy and quick wins -- things that seem to be tangible, seem to be necessary. And if you talk to yourself in just the right way, you can convince yourself that the critical path that you have to walk is first, I



need a business logo, then I have to have a business card. Then I have to create the website. Then I have to have a Facebook site. So what he did in his mind was he changed from the thing where he didn't have a lot of information -- he hadn't formed up his service offering yet. He hadn't done a lot of deep thinking into it. He didn't have a price point in mind and he wasn't ready to do any research. So in other words, there were a lot of unknowns. And he traded doing the thinking about what I am offering people for the satisfaction of doing things that were tangible and where he could see an immediate result. Unfortunately what he had put together and the strategy that he had pulled together was not going to lead to rapid revenue. It was going to lead to revenue sometime next year. Now this guy was the chief executive, he was smart like you wouldn't believe. But he is human like everyone else. He is used to telling people what to do, calling the shot on the big thing, but not on having to do the small things himself. So before he could outsource dealing with the unknowns, have someone else do it now.. the ball is back in his hands so he has to do something. So here is what we did. I listened for a couple of minutes to the story about what he did and I said, "OK so you are planning on revenue sometime next year?" And he smiled and said yeah. I said, "What happened to fast revenue? Are you going to start eating into your capital?" He says, "I am a little bit." And I said, "Do you still want rapid revenue? Do you want it quickly? I'm not going to force you to have clients. I'm not going to force you to make money." And he says, "Let's do this, I want the clients quickly." I said, "Great, let's work out one of your service offerings. Let's just write a draft, what is it that you offer? Give me a top line, give me a paragraph, give me how it works and we'll stick a number on it." He says, "You mean now?" I said, "Right now!"



So we sat there, we were in a hotel in central London and he's got his notebook and he is being made to work which is also something that he is not used to. So he types out this thing, it takes about 5 minutes, I read it and it's a very rough draft. So I say, "Who do you think is available right now who would be able to look at this? Why don't you open your address book?" And he goes, "Now?" I said, "Yeah, now." So he opens his address book and he says, "This person would probably be available." I say, "If you have your phone, call them." "Now?" "Yes, now." So he calls this person and says, do you have two minutes to look at something that I've just written as I need your input on it. I'd appreciate the good and the bad about this service offering. So he emails it out, the person calls back in 5 minutes and says this and this is really good, and that and that really sucks and has to be redrafted. So basically 20 minutes in, this thing has been redrafted several times. And then I say, "OK who else's feedback do you want on this? Either someone who is a prospective client or someone you have worked with before. Somebody who knows the area. Or somebody who has a really good prospective on this that we could bring in?" So he write up 6 emails and asked for specific feedback from them. He said, "I am working on this, would you have a look at this and let me know what you think. Here is what we are looking for." Great, off it goes. From that point, I then helped him to get the strategy together for what he had to do in order to get the clients in. He will continue to do the 'getting the logo correct, getting the website together, getting Facebook up etc.' But most importantly he sent out those 6 emails during the session. I got a text



from him the following morning and from those 6 letters that went out, he had an offer from the industry magazine to write a series of articles on the topic that he was offering as his service. He had 2 booked appointments to sell consultancy. And he had 2 referrals to sell coaching to. Do you understand, he was going to carry on in doing the things that would produce results over time, to push away the possibility of him making the revenue that he wanted. Why? Because he was doing what every other person does. When there are unknowns and we don't know what to do, we'll reach for what seems to be close and seems to be more tangible. That sort of thing done once, done twice, done three times, done four times, becomes a habit. And those habits eventually then turn into the symptoms and the stuff that we call stuck. In most instances, it's not the world that is stopping us, it's how we are thinking and responding. And then either insisting on things being one way or refusing to deal with the next thing that comes up. Our reaction then is to formulate some kind of distraction or alternative interpretation. But something that allows us to avoid the bad feeling that is connected with the not knowing. Michael: Any questions at this point? Tom: You covered a lot there Michael. Let me just quickly recap. A couple of big take-aways that I've gotten, one is this sort of thing about how you are representing that. Essentially whatever area that any of us right now, we



think, amazed to have where we start ourselves with stuck. A huge part of that is going to be the representations that we have created and are creating, act participants if you will in terms of the mental pictures and what not in the mind. And on top of that, the strategies that we are pursuing and using oftentimes without realizing it aren't effective to produce the outcome. Or simply never had a chance to begin with because we hadn't kind of done our homework on what was needed to produce exactly though. Michael: Exactly, and this is the thing. I was able with this chap to get in early, that was kind of an early business, early life intervention. Because the message behind it is, if there are direct paths in order for you to move forward with your goals, and then there are paths that although they will be necessary at some point, may not be the most critical action to take in order to move you towards the goal. But because it's tangible or because it is simple or because you already know a process, that you choose that over the unknown. Over the path not taken as it were. And it is that, and in recognizing that the larger part of creating something new, creating a new business, a new enterprise, doing something different in your life requires you to go where you haven't been before. Now here is a really important point and it has to do with what I call neurological truth. There are some basic principles around how the brain works and around what gets attention and what turns into behavior. Our habits are the largest signal paths in the brain, taking the stimulus that comes in from the outside, the signals always follow the largest available channel before they go to the smaller ones. So when a signal is traveling down the acts on the body, it always goes down the broadest path. Those paths are formed by repetition. And using the analogy of



muscle growth, the neuronal pathways grow bigger and the more traffic that goes down them. Bottom line, the more that they are used, the bigger they grow. This is a design feature. Or one of these kind of natural acts of evolutionary design that's very efficient. So the strongest, most often used, most practiced channel carries the message. So any new or novel idea or behavior has to somehow conquer these already established, well rehearsed paths. What I'm talking about, the habitual path is the path of least resistance. So because it has been established by repetition, if you hope to gain this primacy that can take control of it, there are really 3 main possibilities to how this can be done. At its simplest level, when you've got an infant and the infant is crying for some reason and you are trying to figure out why they are crying, sometimes you can distract the kid -- you shake the toy and the child stops crying and turns to the toy. So distracting, providing a stronger signal outside and literally getting in the way of completing whatever that habit or behavior is -- whatever has been triggered - is one way. We use that most commonly when we are trying to calm ourselves down, it's self calming behavior. So when we talk about distraction behaviors and distraction rituals, that's what



we are trying to do. You know, when you don't know something or something seems threatening, suddenly the urge to have a cup of coffee or tea comes up. You suddenly remember that you need to do something. Or, "I think I'll do some research right now on the internet." So the distraction is an attempt to prevent that signal from getting through. The second possibility is you engage the brain's possibility generator. In other words, you build up representations or you look at the representations of things that either entice, are desirable or repulse. So these are those motivating thoughts, the gains, the desirable gains or the undesirable losses. By building up a detailed and emotionally impactful enough fantasy -- because that's what it is. Anytime you are talking about things that aren't right now, talking about things in the future or the past, it's a form of fantasy. So building up a detailed enough representation that calls out either a desirable state of attraction or state of repulsion and fear of loss, and the brain will switch into pursue or avoid mode in-spite of whatever the habituated behavior is. This is the principle behind many approaches to goal setting. This is also in the NLP world, the reason why when you are looking to create a change, you need to create representations that are bold, bright and very impactful. Because they need to generate sufficient emotional arousal for the brain to go, hang on a minute, there is something that has a stronger signal strength so I'm going to focus on that. So the third of the possibilities is if you want to do something and it isn't happening or if you tried something and it hasn't worked, rather than trying to do the same thing over and over again, you stop and you break down the



desirable outcome that you want into smaller levels of effort. So in other words what you are doing is reducing, by breaking it down further, reducing the amount of arousal required or reducing the level of perceived stress or pain. The brain will then allow you to go ahead because you have a desirable goal and an easier pathway. So the action requiring less effort for higher return than what has been habituated means that action can be taken but with a much lower level of emotional arousal. This is one of the challenges that we have with the culture in society today. There is so much trying to call our attention, there are so many decisions that we have to make that actually aren't necessary. There are so many things calling for our attention, and then we have our reactions to them -- our hopes, our dreams, our wishes. Plus whatever craziness we've acquired as we've gone along the road. That the reduction in arousal can often seem like a very difficult thing to do because there is so much noise going on in the environment. One of the rules of thumb and one of the tricks, and this is something that we talk about in the Platinum Audio News Club, is that by breaking things down sufficiently and turning that arousal down, what you build is a habit of taking action. We call it the JDI or JFDI. Some people have got a weird idea about just do it, that it's a hard guy approach. It's actually not. It's not a hard case approach in the slightest. What we are looking to do is create a situation where in order to do the things that need to be done or that we want to do, that we require a lower level of



arousal. So over time what you habituate to with that is when something needs to be done or a decision to be made, you take the decision rather than go through the avoidance behavior. Why? Because it's easier to get the decision out of the way because it's easier to address it immediately than when the consequences are built up, or when you've had time to think about it. In other words, build up more and more pictures which generate more stress and arousal which leads to the distracting behavior, the putting things off, and all of those symptomatic things that I talked about earlier. Now that's a really big chunk. Any questions on that? Tom: Fantastic and very insightful. So just focusing on for example this third one here, breaking down the desirable outcome into smaller levels of efforts to oppress the pain. Can you extend on that. Michael: This is really funny. One of the things about when you are looking for models of behavior, you tend to look for people who have skill in the area. So you don't go to somebody who is bankrupt in order to get investment advice unless their bankruptcy came about through something not connected to that advice. I'm the last guy on the planet that you should ask for advice about weight loss. Why? Because I don't do it.



There is one friend of mine who has been involved in Weight Watchers with intense dedication. Intense dedication to a little bit of this or a little bit of that. Kind of like taking an a la carte approach to a whole program. And one of the things that I encouraged her to do was to create a chart to track what you are doing, track the results. And when you look at the chart overtime, what you see is "One pound down, half pound up. Half a pound down. Pound and a half up." So in terms of the angle that the loss occurs, she has probably gained as much weight as she has lost in pursuit of it. And what this came from was a pattern of thinking that she could decide in the moment what she was going to do with regard to her choices. Now when you look at the system that she had adopted which was the Weight Watchers system, that's not how the system works. It's quite a worked out program. You have a certain number of this, and a certain number of that, and you have to plan things in advance. And if you do the system, then the results tend to follow. But the pattern of stuckness that she had got into was that she kept going, "How do I feel right now?" And if she wanted something that wasn't part of the program, she would then figure out a reason -- "Well I walked an extra half mile." Now that's not self sabotage, that is just plain dumb -- of not looking at the consequences of what you are doing. So as soon as she started to see the pattern on the chart of the up and the down and the up and the down, the question became, how much more do you have to learn from this pattern of gaining and losing weight? How many more times do



you have to go through it? There is nothing more to be learned from it. Alright, so let's think about the goal. Let's think about what you really want. Let's think about how to get there. You have the system already, now we can think about what leads you to think that in the moment you can decide what's going to happen and what you can have without reference to the rest of the system. So she said, "Well I don't think about the system and it is what I want in that moment." Well there you are, there is your answer. She is trading the smooth pattern of success for what she wants in the moment. In other words, the goal state wasn't strong enough to motivate. The strategy, such as it is within that system wasn't fully enough represented in her mind so that she could refer to it and use it. And then she was thinking that she could think in the moment and have what she wanted and still get the other result. It just wasn't going to work. So what we did was I had her create her plans and put them where she always has to look at them, right next to her computer. So whenever the question comes up, what am I doing today? What am I doing this morning? What am I doing this week? All she has to do is look and she is reminded of what the strategy is and where she is going. The repetition of reminding herself where she is going made it possible for her to say, "Actually I'm going there rather than what I want at the moment." Understand? The strategy for getting the result was clear. The reason why she wasn't getting the result was because she wasn't using the strategy. It's that simple. It doesn't require deep psychoanalysis.



Does the person has the strategy? If they have the strategy, are they doing the strategy or are they doing something else? The really curious thing about the state is stuck, if it persists for any length of time then there has to be a commitment to the behaviors that are other than the desirable goals and outcomes that the person says that they want. There has to be a level of cross motivation going on. You'll recall from the Platinum Audio New Club that we talk about how human behavior is either purposive or adaptive -- we are either adapting to circumstances and things going on or pursuing particular directions. The thing is, we can build up habits around what we pursue and then forget what those purposes are run on auto pilot. So referring back to earlier when I was talking about the client that we got in early with, he was starting to demonstrate the aversion to working out something that he didn't know and wasn't clear about the process. Choosing instead things that seemed clearer and that the path was more obvious to him. Because without that, if you keep pursuing the thing that seems to be obvious but isn't directly connected with golden state that you want, you'll develop stuckness. This woman that I was just talking about, she didn't have a strong enough representation of where she was going or what the process was in order for her to be able to follow it. When there is the stuckness and it has been persisting for a while, we have the two levels. We have what they say they want, the conscious intent, the conscious purpose. And then we have the benefit of what they are getting in the moment.



So if the stuckness has persisted for any length of time, you have to start asking, first of all what am I doing this instead of? And what am I getting by doing this particular series of activities? Most of the time, on most occasions it's a form of self calming. Most of the time it is a form of.. kind of trying to reduce the amount of arousal. People don't like not knowing. They don't like being afraid of what it is what they don't know. The sailors with their maps of the world, in any part of the world where people hadn't been before, they would write things like "There be monsters." Or as a six year old once told me, I had been pulled in for monster removal -- there was a dinner party and the host's daughter had a monster under the bed and they hadn't been able to get rid of it. So I went and checked out under the bed which is the first thing you do because there might be a monster under there. And when I looked under the bed, there was no monster there. So I said, "There is no monster there." And she says, "Ahh but there is. It's just that you can't see it when you are looking. When you are not looking, it's there!" That's what the mind can do. It can create a monster where there is nothing and then react. To put it in the words of W. C. Fields, the American movie actor, he said "I always carry an alcoholic stimulant with me in the event that I see a snake which I also keep with me." In other words, quite often we are reacting against what we setup in our imagination as the fearful the event, the unpleasant experience, the whatever it is. And then we are ready with whatever the distracting activity is to calm ourselves



and to go in a different direction. In sorting out the self calming activity from the purposeful pursuit of goals, you can then turn the calming activity into rewards and into benefits and into preparing your state. Rather than into something that you do instead of productive, forward moving goals and work. Tom: Very interesting Michael. Again that's a major chunk that you delivered there. One thing for people that are listening in that is always really insightful is the way you were pointing out the person who was working with the chair that you had them setup. And they began to realize that they were going up and down etc. Two big pieces that came out of that. One was that you said it is not self sabotage, it's just being dumb. Michael: Sometimes I'd put it this way. In London, there is a #12 bus. And the #12 bus goes from the west end near Trafalgar Square down into the south east. If I stand somewhere in north western London, It doesn't matter how long I stand there, the #12 bus is not going to come and pick me up. But we can get into the habit of doing things that don't produce a result as long as we aren't checking. And this is the principle of the external check with a tote -- the test operate, test exit loop. The second test, am I there yet? Have I reached the goal? Requires us to look at the results that we are creating. Are we creating the results that we want? If the answer is yes, you carry on. If the answer is no, you do something else.



And when it comes to attitudes and stances in the world, some of the world views.. and even maps of the world, whole maps of the world, if they stop working for you they can be changed as well. The questions and the reason why we spend so much time in learning how to create the totes and work to them is because without the tote, you are pretty much taking it as a blind flyer as to what kind of result you are creating. Whereas when you are checking, making that second test on a regular basis.. Once again, to refer back to the Platinum Audio News Club, you either do it on a timed basis -- every period of time, every hour or whatever it is. Or at an inflection point within a larger process. Alright, where are we now? What are we aiming for? What was I aiming for? Where am I now? It's not congenital brokenness. And it's not being an idiot in a bad way. It's that if we don't think and we don't check, then we are going to suffer. This woman I was telling you about is not incompetent. She is not a bad person. What she was doing was running and running on auto pilot without checking. It has consequences. Tom: I want to really highlight this point Michael, this bit about the whole world view. In the personal development arena for people who have been around for a while, one of the big things that they are going to come across is this idea of attraction. I've heard it many times, it's particularly popular amongst some coaches -- if you are pursuing something and you aren't leading the way, therefore you're not growing the ways, you aren't attracting it enough or somehow you're exposed to blame specifically and that can be problematic. And of course then people get caught up in this thing, I mustn't want it enough,



there must be something inside of me that is stopping me from throwing this love you know, this weight of love or whatever. And they get totally disconnected from the whole action and activity circle that you've been highlighting here in terms of foundations and fundamentals. Michael: So that is an example of the blind leading the blind. The reason why is because.. Don't you ever question why these things like the law of attraction arising at a particular time? Imagine a universe where all you have to do is want something enough and believe you are going to get it, and it will be delivered to you. It's the Father Christmas universe. It's the Santa Clause universe. At what point in the history does that arise? It arising in the midst of one of the most grossly commercial cultures that has ever existed. That was not the world view of the ancients. It was not the secret, it's just bull sh*t. It's just sales material. The notion that the universe gives only to those who are greedy enough and whose hearts are desirous enough, and how believe intensely enough that they already have it. What do we call that? That is the economics and politics of entitlement. It's how the whole economic crisis occurred. There were people who believed that they are entitled to anything. But it is not how things are built. It's not how goals are achieved. And it certainly isn't a universal principle and here is why. The law of attraction and all of this arise within an intensely commercial middle class milieu, an environment. But most of the rest of humanity are not going to have access to this. Are you saying that in India right now, there are over 500,000,000 who don't



have electricity. Who don't have running water. And who go to bed hungry most days. So what is wrong with these people? Aren't they imagining food intensively enough? Is it that they don't want it enough? Or that they don't imagine that the universe is going to provide for them and all they have to do is wish harder. That's not it. That's not going to happen. That's not how it works. In order for somebody to get out of that situation, they have to change what they are doing and they have to move and find another context or weight. But the universe does not magically put the dinner in front of them. This is the point in terms of these kind of world views. There are so many powerful counter-examples that don't require anything more than a feel moments consideration to blow holes in the world view. It's not a universal. Now who knows? Let's flip it around. What if the universe is organized in such a way that those who are most greedy and most desirous, the universe responds to? Then what about those who don't have those kind of desires? Then they just don't get? Is that the way it works? Is that what happens? Are you saying then that the usual go be ambitious, go be competitive, that that's actually correct and the God given way that things should occur? If you look around the world and if you see enough examples.. See this is the thing, I've been lucky in that I've been able to see many examples at all different levels. And most of the time the people who have the stuff that other people covet -- the homes, the money etc. -- more than half the time, they



attribute their success to being in the right place at the right time. So through luck, that there was a component of luck to it. One of the most common things amongst clients in that wealthy bracket, if they've worked for it and not received the money, at a certain point in their career they will say that they feel like a fraud, they feel like a charlatan. They feel like they didn't have to do anything, it all just sort of happened for them. They didn't especially focus on it, they didn't especially want it. The world view that just by imagining, you can have, is one that fits hand and glove into late 20th century consumer economics. But it doesn't work in practice for many people. And by taking the tools away from people, which actually produce results and always have produced results. When people come and they have been trying their law of attraction and visualizing success and the rest of that and not getting there because they haven't done anything.. There are times when it's almost heart breaking because these people have been wasting their time, their money, their energy following something which was never going to produce a result. Action, progressive, slow over time always gives you a better opportunity of moving forward. There are no guarantees in this universe. That's another one, people want guaranteed success or guaranteed this or that. That's just infantile. It doesn't exist in this place. When you talk enough with people who have been successful who didn't go through the personal success route and aren't selling it, what you discover is that the principles are very easy to understand. Things like getting clear of what you want and where you want to go. Coming up with a plan, working the plan, until you fail and finding out what you didn't know.



And from what you didn't know, reformulate it. And having another go. It's that persistence of effort over time is what produces results. By the way, up to 2008, that was also an investment strategy -- small investment over time through compound interest. You used to build money up predictably. But in terms of effort, the best bet and the best bang for your buck is to take that learning route. Take something that you've thought through, that you've done your research on, you've done your due diligence on. Find out what it is, what out what it constitutes. And if it sounds good and you like it, then try it. But you aren't trying it in order to succeed immediately. You are trying in order to find out what it is going to take. In most cases, you won't know everything up front. In most cases, there is going to be considerable trial and error. You can use a great strategy from somewhere else. But as you apply it in your own circumstance, you are going to discover that some things you can get to work and some things you can't. Again, the culture has encouraged people to think in ridiculous terms and exaggerated terms about the way the world works and what is possible. We have lengthy conversations with one of the distinguished people who have been in PANC and they had some questions about modeling about investment. So they wanted to know, why don't we just model Warren Buffett who is the single greatest value investor in the history of the stock market. So why don't we just come up with his strategy, follow his strategy and we can all be rich. And the answer is, it doesn't matter what you know about what's going on in his head. Because Warren Buffett's success comes about from the context. He is able to mobilize vast amounts of cash.



His ability as an investor comes from being able to structure the deals. Warren Buffett doesn't do a deal unless he dictates every single element within it. He knows exactly when he's getting in, exactly when he's getting out and exactly how much he is going to make. And quite often when he is working a deal out, he will have made his profit before the deal is complete. The resource set that goes along with his strategies are the keys to the implementation. For most of us, we aren't going to be able to immediately have access to that kind of resource set. And this leads back to some of the other issues around being stuck. For some people, if they don't get what they want immediately, they just go, "Ahh f*ck it, I can't be bothered if I can't have it now." And they won't put the work in. Whereas the most valuable things, the most beneficial things tend to be those things that take time to develop -- relationships, content and context specific knowledge. These things take time. This is why they say in some circumstances, find out what you love and then figure out a way to make money from it. Because you are going to be there for a long time. The persistence and tenaciousness comes from becoming either very interested, super curious about the content and context of the area that you are working in. Or some kind of a passionate desire for a particular goal or particular outcome to happen. It's over time that those big wins are aggregated. For the most part, most of us for the bigger goals, have to develop the resource sets in order to do that.



Let me give you an example. I was quite lucky that I figured out early on what I wasn't capable of as well as what I was capable of. There were certain kinds of life styles and work choices that I simply wasn't going to be able to do even if I had an ability there. One of the things that was just a characteristic is I like working on lots of stuff. I like to have different things going on and to go from project to project. I don't like sitting an doing the same thing over and over again for years and years. I like being able to work on something, master it and then move on. So consequently in getting this kind of portfolio arrangement of projects on, there are some projects, even big projects, that we can start and work on straight away. There is no obstacle or inhibitor. Time and money, they aren't actually obstacles. They are just conditions. You have to work the conditions. And sometimes it takes time, sometimes it takes reconfiguring your goal in order to make it so that the resource set is different. Or that the time that the resources have to be brought into play can change. But even big projects you can do right away. Other times, smaller projects or cooler projects which look like they are workable, the resource sets are very tricky to bring together. I actually have two that have been hanging out for a while. One has been going for three years, the other has been going for eighteen months. The one that has been going on for eighteen months is to create a certain type of video, it's going to be a pro bono piece of work for a charity. It's on behalf of a different country and different culture, and their decision making is just a completely different way of not making decisions.



So eighteen months of preparation. Eighteen months of coming up with plans and preparing proposals and writing plans for how things were going to work and being rebuffed. But because I want to do this, I've kept it going. And only last weekend, after eighteen months, did I get all the right people in place at the right time and get it so that I am now one step away from getting the permission to do what I want to do. Now I have to tell you, in that eighteen months, I didn't just put the thing on the shelf and put it away. I was going back to the plans, looking at them, revising, doing more pricing -- getting the resource requirements really carefully specified. Now the hard work is all done. And I'm going to get to see what I want realized. Now the other project, the one that has been going on for three years, it's much closer to my heart. And it's a much bigger project. It has a money component to it and it has a personnel component to it. And then it has content and all kind of other stuff. The money wasn't a problem, then it was a problem. Then the people started to be a problem. It's been this on going kind of.. it's like holding a handful of goo.. The people have changed, we've gone through key players. I haven't been able to get the resources together into the same place. It's been three years. I can't tell you how annoying it is. But with that, every time.. And I look at the plans and work on them, and work on the budgets again usually every three or four weeks. And it's a matter of, the universe simply doesn't understand yet this is going to happen. This project is going to be realized. It's just not possible to realize it in the time-scale that I wanted to.



I have to tell you, it's annoying. If I rearranged everything in my life, I could buy the people and get the money etc. But despite how much I want it, I don't want to trade off everything else in my life for it. And that's the key. No matter how big or how small the goal is, no matter what the resource requirements are -- whether it's money, time, input or permission etc. There will always be the trades that you are going to have to make in order to keep the thing going. So with the 18 month project, because it wasn't a huge investment that was required -- it was just getting the people in the room at the right time, and I had to wait and wait because of some cultural challenges, but I kept the thing going and kept it alive. That was relatively straight forward. On this three year one, I really have to think through exactly how and exactly when I want to do this. Why? Because there is one more resource component to it. I'm going to have to train for it, train like I've never trained for anything in my life. So there is a huge personal commitment that is going to come with that. But getting this thing together, it's not stuck even though it's not happening. I pull the thing out, I'm talking with people about it. And I'm looking to bring the rest of the resource sets together. At a certain moment, I may decide that now is the time to rearrange everything and throw all my resources behind it. But it is kept alive by frequent checking in and refinement on it. It doesn't matter what the goals are. They can be big ones or they can be small



ones. In terms of change, this is the other cool thing, if you think you are stuck because of conditions around change, the first question, is what you want to do physically possible to do? As long as it is physically possible to do, then everything else is about arrangement of resources and getting the right level of arousal over back to the earlier part of the conversation. You either increase the amount of desire that you have or increase the amount of fear of loss or consequence. Or break the thing down. Technically the task is called task decomposition -- breaking it down further into smaller chunks so that you can take forward movement on it. It's getting back into this desire to build, and desire to create rather than just the sheer desire to consume as an experiencer. But it's the coolest thing you can do when you choose to be proactive. When you choose to apply what you know. And choose to create what it is that you want. Big chunk there Tom. Tom: Big chunk Michael, lots of different ideas. Tom: So before we dove further in terms of things that people can do around it -- listening on the call, there are probably people who are in one of three likely camps. One is people who may have a chronic habit of being stuck. And now have become aware for example through the conversation that we've had and what you've highlighted tonight about becoming aware what is being said and what



the benefits are of that. So that's one class of people. The second would be people who have got the momentum going with the project and kind of hit stuckness but they are generally in action with regard to it. And the third are people who are well on the way to it but may not have seen the rate of result that they want to occur. So taking the first group, the people who essentially have a state of chronic stuckness in some area of their life, what can they do once they've realized what they've been up to instead of their behaviors? How they might get out of it, what do you recommend? Michael: This is the fun one. Quite often when there has been a persistent stuckness, there has also been a story that has developed. A kind of narrative. If someone has been persisting in the behaviors that lead to what we are going to call stuckness -- remember stuckness is the feeling rather than the actual physical state of affairs. Unless someone has come in and super glued your shoes to the floor, then you are stuck. The metaphor is painting yourself into a corner -- yes indeed, that's a physical stuck. You are either going to have to walk across that floor or wait until the floor dries. But if we are talking about something that is persistent and that keeps coming back, the life stance or the pose, that narrative that you've crafted around these events to make your life cohere into a meaningful whole. This is what we do as human beings, we make narratives. We make stories. And most importantly, we make stories to tell ourselves about where we are, about what's going on, and who we are and where we fit in the world.



Even a bad story, even a story that seems to make you feel bad is OK as long as you are right about the interpretation. You see, one of the things that goes along with the not knowing is this tremendous fear of getting it wrong. And so we tell the story where evil we are no good at this, we are no good at the other.. It never works, I always fail. So these sort of narratives plus all the other lovely things that people say to themselves before they come up a smile, are largely about choosing the familiarity and comfort of being right over the uncertainty and likelihood of being wrong. And this is most unfortunate and here is why. Most success in the world is not based on being right. The successes that occur in the world come about by being wrong in progressively more effective ways. In other ways, discovering what doesn't work and then not doing it. Making more creative mistakes, that's called jazz. It's by learning to be wrong, making that into a resource, rather than into another item or another element to go into the story -- another repetition. Collectively, the stories go into your world view and they make up the map. When you try and do something different, particularly if you've tried before and you've got the.. "Oh it will never work, I can't do it..." Even though you have an idea for something new or you'd like to try something that might be interesting or appealing or laudable, we have this filter of habit of what you've already decided or suspected or.. and this is the important bit now.. what you think that you know about reality and about your life. Here is the game. When you catch yourself in the act of sticking -- so in other words, in the act of making a narrative about a world that doesn't work, that's a very good thing. It's really one of the first steps if you are working on yourself -- recognizing that you are doing this.



Even if it's a response to something, catching yourself in the act of doing it is a very good thing. At that point in terms of the strategy, you have a moment. And in that moment, if you can ride it and if you can pick it up, you stand a chance of creating change. And the moment is instead of going back to try and justify why you made that decision, instead say what do I want instead? Where am I going? Immediately upon recognizing that you are heading in the wrong direction. And then figuring out the plan and taking the next step , going into movement. Remember we are talking about breaking it down so that the actions are small enough that you can just do it, small enough that you can just do it. Then you can start to make more purposive and decisive actions. At that stage when you catch yourself in the process, the worst direction that you can take is to try and redesign your entire life -- "Well I am no good at this, I'm stuck in this position here. OK, I'm going to try and re-design my whole life." Not from a state like that. The states that people come up with when they are in those states of life doesn't work, the universe is bad, I'm bad and all the rest of it, are reactive goals. They are the reaction against the feeling that they are having now and not necessarily what they really want. And that's where you get into that whole chasing of methods where people go looking for a method for a method for a method that gets them to change the bad feeling, but they aren't willing to give up the generation of the bad feeling. The bad feeling itself is the behavior. In the moment you catch yourself making a story that doesn't work, take a deep breath in and just say, "No, what do I want instead?"



It can be something simple. I saw this the other day and it was very funny. This person for whatever reason was looking for organic grass fed butter. And they had been to two shops and couldn't find organic, grass fed butter. And they chose me to tell the tale of how impossible it is to find it -- "It's impossible to find organic grass fed butter in London." I said, "Well how many places have you looked?" They said, "I've been to two places, it's just impossible." In that moment, apply the skills that you have and particularly around the metamodel and laugh. The reason why? Because that little narrative that they are repeating, which they no doubt repeated before while they were looking around, is bull sh*t. That grand narrative of universal impossibilities is just simply not so. One counter-example and it's ruined. "How much do you want this butter is the question?" They said, "I want this butter a lot!" I said, "OK, how many other shops are there around here? We can look here and where else?" Basically it turned out that they had to get onto the internet. And in 15 minutes they found a source for it. The thing is, if they keep thinking it is impossible, they generate their own frustration and they create the narrative of not being able to get what they want. They start parlaying that into other areas. If that's what they do in order to deal with the frustration of not achieving the goal, it's going to generalize into something that's not particularly useful. First catch yourself in the act of making things up. Of making up the exaggerated circumstance, the universal workability or unworkability of you as a human



being. And use the meta model on yourself. But most importantly you ask, what do you want? The typical problem, people talk about being stuck and not being able to be productive and follow through. And most of the time what you get is that if they don't think through what they want to achieve, don't create a list or don't create some way of indexing what they want to do, then pretty much anything will distract them. So the question is, what are you getting from the distraction? And it's an easy life. It's not having to make decisions. It's not having to risk being wrong. It's not having to risk failing. It's not having to risk somebody else pointing at you. That's the real problem. The fear, it's not about being stuck in any particular.. It's about a fear, imagining consequences, negative consequences for events. And not understanding the nature of how success is created. One of the best things that people can do, I recommend it pretty much to anyone -- it's great for kids, teenagers -- I send executives on clowning courses. Why? I don't particularly like clowns. But one of the things about clowns that is true is that their humor, such as it is, comes from what is called assuming low status. Most of what clowns do for humor is fall over. Bad stuff happens and it's funny. And they learn how to fall. So through clowning, you discover that falling down, being laughed at, the humor that comes from the low status doesn't affect you, it doesn't hurt you. What does hurt you is turning away from what it is that you don't know.



You know these TV shows where they show the people who live in houses that are packed with rubbish from the floor to ceiling? The obsessive hoarder? This guy as a client, his mind was kind of packed at that level full of stories, full of stuff. And mostly full of fear of doing anything other than what he had done before because it might not turn out properly, the way that he wanted it to. When I finally got him to tell me what he really wanted to have happen, his goals were not grandiose. The goals were not exaggerated or ridiculous or over the top, they were pretty ordinary. But what he did was he traded this certainty of not getting his goals because the behaviors that he was engaging in, not being productive and living in a mind full of pain, suffering and fear of things going wrong, that the certainty and familiarity of that was preferable to the uncertainty of not knowing how things would turn out and when. So in other words, rather than going for what he wanted, he chose to guarantee that he wouldn't get what he wanted. But at least he could sure of it. That's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about wrong. What this chap had done was he had made his full very unpleasant by choosing to be right rather than choosing to discover. So in this first instance, that state of being stuck, is to realize that you probably got it wrong. You are looking at it the wrong way. You are thinking about it in a way that is not going to produce activity particularly if you've been doing it for a long time. If you want to start a business and you can't get it going, there is something either missing from your thinking or you are doing something, putting stuff in there, that is not going to lead to the discovery action that will get you on the



road. The first step is recognizing, no it's wrong, I'm doing it wrong and it's not working. I don't like doing this. A brilliant state around stuck is bored. They get thoroughly bored with it. When you get thoroughly bored with it, you get to that point where you just go, that's it, no more. And then take the action. The funniest thing is, most of the actions that people want to take, most of the things that they want to move forward with are not grandiose. Most of the things are pretty calm, pretty conducive to a happy life and a life where you move towards the things that you want. Another thing with the stuckness is it's most likely that the narrative that has been built up is over-egged -- it's too big. Break down what you want into the smaller chunks. So for example, if it's a productivity question, the first thing you have to do is figure out how you are going to capture what you want or need to do. If you put anything aside for too long, the list is going to be pretty long. But then the first step in it is to get the list somewhere -- get it on one sheet of paper. It's the equivalent of sticking things into a box or putting things into a cupboard. Get it all on one list. On another occasion I'll tell you about an artist in New York City who was a referral from his brother who is a big knob in the city in management. And this



chap had practically a phobia of all the incompletes that he had in his life. The first move was to get all of the stuff down on paper. Why? Because once it's down on paper, once it's captured somewhere, the paper will hold it. It doesn't have to run around in the back of your mind anymore. Once you get stuff on paper, it will stay there. And then you can start working with and interrogating that list. Re-chunking it. Moving things around. Turning what you've got into things that are goals, things that are desirable and things that you want to move towards. Things that are activities, meeting up or farming activity that have to be accomplished. Some things are just, get this at the right time. Other things are, get rid of, don't do this anymore and remove. But it's in that beginning to once you've got it in one place and outside, you are disassociated from it, then you can interrogate and processes with it. It's basically, the bottom line with this first group is that the stuckness is a state. And we have to break the state and put it back into movement in a way that is rational in principles, and that will get you moving forward. It won't solve all of your life's problems, the first thing we have to do is get it so that rather than preferring to not do, or preferring to pursue strategies that don't lead in the direction that you want them to.. To get it so that you can break the state and put into some other purposive activity. Michael: Does that make sense? Tom: It does indeed. And that actually leads into this concept about getting the simple stuff right and the rest once it can take care of itself, which is something



that you and I have talked about. In relation to the second and third group -- the second group have already begun to make some movement but they had a representation or something that they were pursuing and they've now run into a stuck state but it's a temporary situation. While the third group was those who were making good progress but they are feeling it's not happening as fast as they want so they feel so much though. Michael: OK, so in the second group, what we are talking about is this concept of momentum. We are back to the neurological truth of how the behaviors are created. 24-7, your brain is going through optimizing activity 24-7. It's a use it or lose it situation. So the first neurological truth is that the biggest signal, the biggest metaphorical cable in the brain is the place where stimulus goes down first. The second principle is the brain is constantly editing and constantly removing things from the network of places that the signals will flow down, of stuff that is used. In other words, when you don't do things, when you don't engage them, they stop. On the other hand, in the same way, the fundamental business of skill building is of connecting up only the necessary and requisite behaviors in a line one after the other. So in other words, it doesn't do to think about what you want and get it to a really motivated state, and then talk to yourself for a while about what you used



to do when you were a kid. The talking about or the interruption, what you put into the middle there, is what is being patterned on. But it doesn't create the connected up strategy. It doesn't create the connected up habit. Understand? So what will happen is that sometimes if people disconnect from the pursuit of the goal, the activity that they are performing at any particular time, or any particular period, what happens is they act as if all the other things that are going on are not going to be patterned by the brain. So in other words you can do things that will move you towards the goal, but if you constantly break and constantly interrupt and not connect onto the next step from where you are to the next step, your brain isn't going to generate it by itself. Tom: So if I'm talking in a literal term, a skill like chopping wood, and I'm picking up the axe and the wood is right there in front of me -- I go to raise the axe and somebody comes over and they interrupt me or my attention gets drawn away and put the axe down. I come back a second later to pick it up, I go to make a movement and something like a squirrel runs across to distracts me, essentially that's a certain pattern on the brain. Is that what you are saying? Michael: Yeah, that is what is patterning. And you have to regenerate the entire sequence. This is, in terms of working on a connected serious of goals or behavior, you have got to intentionally bridge between the stages. So before you finish any particular stage in the process, part of it is moving onto the next step. So you are literally telling your brain where it is going to go. And generating, literally, the arousal or desire or fear that is necessary in order to



take the next step. When we say put one foot in front of the other, that's what is happening. You use the experience and the knowledge and literally the physical force from the movements that have already been taken in order to get you to the next step. If you drop it each time, or if you are interrupted each time, then you have to regenerate an equal amount of force to what it took before. Like the lady I was telling you about earlier -- lose weight, gain weight, lose weight, gain weight over and over again. That was the pattern that we had to break with her which was thinking that there was something in thinking that you could do whatever the fu*k you wanted. There is a system to it, there is a pattern to it. And if you use the pattern, you get the results. And if you don't, you won't. So it is that intentionality and connecting every stage in the process to the next one. There are no breaks. There are no real stoppages except what you do with your mind. As I was telling you about the project for three years, the project is alive. There is not a lot of outside movement that is noticeable with it. But I'm having conversations with people. We need to replace two people, we are looking for replacements for those. We are looking for other sources for money etc. The project still lives. It's going at a different pace than it had gone previously. I'm the one who keeps it alive. And I know what the next steps are. I'm keeping that final outcome alive because I want it and because the universe has to understand that this is going to happen.



When we are talking about beliefs and attitudes, of course you can't tell the universe exactly what is going to happen and then it will appear. Well in the storybooks, in the fables and some of the religious scriptures that are there.. Well in ordinary life I don't tend to see it happening, I tend to see things developing and evolving step by step through processes through time. But when I think about stomping my foot and putting my foot down and announcing this project is going to occur, it is going to manifest, I would prefer to do it while I am young enough. If I have to, I'll do it when I'm very old. The attitude there keeps the energy going, it keeps the focus going. It keeps that project in the project rotation and I've got a very large project board. This is for the people who need to develop more connection or more momentum. There is always ups and always downs. There are always going to be times when stuff gets in your way or cuts across. In Britain, we have weird tax laws where you pay in advance of earnings. If you run your own company, you pay in advance. And that creates all kinds of mathematical and predictive problems where if one year you earn more money, the next money you have to advance all this money to the tax man. So all that kind of crap makes for a heavy gravity day if you let it. That kind of thing is going to occur. Part of the game is developing sufficient resilience in knowing that no matter what occurs, you know what you want, you know where you are heading. And through the commitment to it, you then resolve to each time you fall, you pick yourself back up again. There is a wonderful metaphor in Japanese culture, it's a little doll, it's called the daruma doll, budi dharma. It's supposed to be the chap who brought Buddhism



from India to China and then to Japan. So it's an egg shaped character. He has a red robe and you can just kind of see his face in a kind of rectangular window. And there is space for his two eyes, and usually bushy eyebrows and whatever else. Here is the thing, at the beginning of a project, you paint in one of the eyes. So he has one eye. And then you put this thing where you can see it, in your office or someplace where you are going to look at it frequently. And at the beginning of the day, you go over to this egg shaped thing -- they make them little and big -- basically inside the bottom of this papier mache egg is a lead weight. So when you push this paper mache egg over and let it go, it immediately bounces back up. The doll is called seven times fall, eight times rise --daruma. And you do that every day with regard to your goals. It's a way to strengthen the resolve by reminding you that this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm committed to do. Tom: Exactly. And that brings up this point that you talked about in PANC that we are always practicing. So the attitude of keeping it going is practicing equally.. Someone submitted here that they start off on a particular venture and then they tend to get overwhelmed without because they think about what they are doing. They go through a honeymoon period and then after that they tend to get distracted, come back and then they are focusing on all the things that are yet to be done. Michael: Do they do that habitually? Have they done that more than once? Tom: Yes, more than once.



Michael: OK, that is a due diligence problem. That's a common thing. There is so much to do, so much you can try. There are so many things in the world. There is so much advertising that we can look at all different kinds of things and go, "Yeah I'd like to try that. Yeah I'd like to do that. Yes I'd like to give that a try." But unless you do sufficient research before you get going.. In other words, not just looking at the end goal of what you want, but also then looking at the resource sets that are required in order to do it. So in the startup coach trainer consultant package, we talk about what's called the business of the business. So typically there is a difference between the service or offering that you make and then how that is delivered, the business of the business. Just as in most disciplines, you'll be spending more time in the back office running the business than actually delivering the service. The business of the business is something that you need to understand and research before you get going. So most people don't know that coaching consultancy and training for the most part is a networking and communications business. You spend a lot of time using your own networks and talking with people. It's a communication intensive business; it's not a mass marketing thing. It's not a mass internet thing. It's heavy duty, a lot of communications and a lot of creating messages and revising them and testing them etc. In other words you spend a lot of time talking with people and not always getting a result right away.



If you don't know what that's like, if you don't know how that runs, if you haven't seen a successful solo or small practice consultant, you don't know what you are getting yourself into. So if somebody sits there in their job which they hate, or that they are tired of because they see consultants being brought in from the outside and being paid to them what is a ridiculous amount of money for doing something that they could do. Then they imagine, "I could do that! I could do pretty much the job I am doing now but do it for a contract." But without looking into exactly what running that business would be. And in making sure they had the right details, the right knowledge, the right kind of capital, the right kind of preparations done than many people who sail out, give up their day job and sail out either becoming a consultant, trainer or coach. And they get into trouble at some point down the road. Why? Because they didn't actually find out what has to be done. They don't actually know what strategies are necessary, so they get in trouble. Basically the due diligence, it's a legal term, and what it means is you are expected to do your homework. You are expected to do your research to know what things are, to know what the legal expectations are. And to know how to run your business. If you don't know, you either have a lot of money so that you can outsource or purchase what you need. Or you have to be willing to reduce your expectations around lifestyle. Bottom line, if the due diligence isn't done, you can end up pursuing things that look good or that sound good initially because they make you feel good from the little bit that is presented.



But then you end up picking things up, putting it down, picking things up, putting it down. The way to start with that, and this is for the person that you mentioned.. I'll tell you what, let's make this list night. Make a list of all the things you'd like to do, all the things you'd like to have and experience and try. For most of my life I've had a guitar or somewhere ukelele , but for the past few years I haven't touched it. "I have to play the ukelele some more, and play the guitar some more. That would be cool. I want to do this and I want to do that." And take a look from the point of view of the framing tool. Take a look at what it is that you are hoping to get from it -- if I played more guitar, what would that be? It's a very relaxing thing to do. It's very enjoyable. You are always learning when you are playing a musical instrument. So being forced into learning mode is very cool. I like guitars. If I had tons of money, I would buy up a huge collection of them. So it appeals at certain levels. But now I know what it is that I'm looking for from that. "I've got guitars at my place in Australia, I don't want to bring them back.. Tell you what, even though it's a nice idea, I'm not going to pursue that." Thinking through using the framing tool, what does this do for you, get for you or give you? What are the hopes for it? If you pick it up, what are the benefits likely to be? Also what are the consequences? If you do it, what do you get? If you do it, what do you lose? If you don't do it, what do you lose? If you don't do it, what don't you get? So you start to explore using the framing tool, the different items on your list.



And what you discover is there are some things that sound really cool but you are really using them as a hobby or for a distraction from something else and they don't really connect up with who you are now. If you have dreams that have been hanging out for a long time, a certain kind of guy if they didn't have a guitar as a teenager, they either get a motorbike or a guitar. I think every guy should pick up a guitar and learn how to play Johnny Be Good or something like that. But if you are carrying dreams from long ago that haven't been realized, all of that kind of stuff takes up space in the brain. It takes up space in the imagination. It takes up space in the heart. The best thing you can do if you have stuff on your list that has been hanging out for a long time, is find a way to honor the intention and find out what is behind the dream. What it is that you are seeking with it, what it is that you really want. Find a way to honor that intention. Or give that dream a decent burial. In other words, say, "I'm not going to do that, not in this lifetime." And cross it off. It's very liberating. And if you've had stuff that has been hanging out for a longtime, it really does free up the creative space and allows you to keep moving. So make a list of all the things that you want to do and if something appeals, particularly if it's around a business, you need to do more research. You need to find people who already do it. You need to find people who do it and are making money at it. This is another thing. Through surveys that we've done through Coaching Cloud and also through some of the stuff from NLP Times, we've discovered that less than 20% of people who self identify as coaches are making a living at it. And there are a lot of reasons for that, and we'll go into this in the future a lot more.



But for somebody who wants to become a coach or somebody who wants to take on a new business, you have to make sure that you are getting your information from people who are making their money doing it. And not from people who are writing books about it or who are selling the system to do it. The stuff you need is you need education and you need information in how to work your own way forward, and not just stuffing somebody else's life that they're trying to sell. It's a key, key item. On Coaching Cloud, one of the things that has come up is worrying. The expectations that most people have when they come into coaching is that they are going to spend most of their time face to face with their clients. And anybody who works as a coach, an executive coach, or one who makes their living at it, knows that you actually don't spend most of your time with clients. You spend most of your time marketing and figuring out how to connect in order to get referrals and how to generate more clients. So it's a whole different kind of enterprise. The bottom line is you need to do more due diligence on your dreams. Tom: Great response Michael. We have an interesting question that has come in from Randy as well. He says, "I have been studying hypnosis and NLP for a year, but that's my problem. I've only studied every piece of material on both. And when it comes to practicing, I get stuck. I make up an excuse up in my mind and I continue to study. I don't quite know why. I'm sure I'd be competent performing it, I just keep making excuses not to practice. I'm looking for some insight as this isn't common for me. I always pause through with what I know."



Michael: OK. Because NLP and hypnosis are communication based. There is a certain allure and a certain sparkly magic around them. They carry an extra charge with them. Bottom line, unless you commit to finding a place to practice, you might as well put the toys away. The reason why is because the only way these tools come to life is by using them. On one of the workshops that we did over here, we had a woman come who had did her training in physical therapy. Tom remind me, how many case studies did she have to do? Tom: I think something like 30 case studies that she needed to have in order to pass her course and do the required case studies. Michael: And the unfortunate thing was she had been waiting and waiting and putting it off. And then she come on a course and basically I provided the motivational suggestions which was basically, you are going to do it right now. You are going to find the context, you are going to find the people right now. And she went and did that. And how long did it take her to collect her 30? Tom: Within two weeks she had them booked up. And then within another four weeks in the course, she had gone and met with the people that she working on. And she was writing up the cases. Michael: Right. So the bottom line with this is what you have to do is you are going to have to create a context for practice. And here are some ways to do it. Number one, it's a little tricky in the early days to find somebody who is reliable



to practice with and to create a practice partnership. But if you create a task break down on the kinds of things you want to work on and develop so that the things that you are practicing are very tightly specified. You can find, first of all a practice partner. No matter what kind of trainings you go on, whether it's NLP or coaching or consultancy outside of the NLP world, you never get enough practice time in. So consequently in the first stage, you've got to find people that you can work with either locally or you travel to find them. Or you work with them online. But where you are going to work on and contract with them to practice very specific skills. The way you succeed with this in the early days is by contracting and working on very specific things so that you aren't wandering all over the place and you aren't trying to do everything at once. Typically people try to do everything before they know how to do something. But there is a sequence to learning and working with these skills. So you find people that you can buddy up with and trade off basically being subjects for each other, and you work on very tightly specified things. If you are interested in practicing hypnosis, the first things you've got to do is you've got to get your presentation together in terms of your voice. And in terms of the introduction -- how you are going to talk with someone and the things you are going to describe. We call it the setup, how you are going to setup the experience that is going to happen, the kinds of presuppositions that you use with it etc. So in finding people to work with on this, a very tight thing which is developing your setup for a trance, you can work with and try this out with 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10 people as you work and refine it. And if they are working on something that is



either the same or at a similar level, you can both provide value for each other and not get into some really difficult situation where neither of you can really support the other person. It comes down to you and to how much you want these skills to become a part of your repertoire. I'm not too keen anymore on the practice groups. I've only seen 1 or 2 that really did it. I'm very keen on you finding people who are interested in this kind of thing. Or even if you can't find people around who a

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Getting Unstuck - Training Transcript