ACHIEVING EXCELLENCE

In this new year are you planning to achieve excellence in anything? If so, what? What would you like to excel in this year? What dream do you have now or would you like to create for yourself that would constitute a dream of excellence?

Excellence, as a nominalization, goes back to the verb to excel and that term goes back to Latin, to rise out of (ex- + cellere—to rise, project). And from this meta-idea of rising out of something comes the ideas of surpassing, out-doing, being eminently good, first-class. So with these core ideas in the word, let me re-phrase the opening questions.

• What do you want to rise out of this year and move on to the next level of development?

• What dream do you have for surpassing your actions and achievements last year?

• What do you want to be first-class in?

• In what area of life do you want to be eminently good— in your parenting, friendship, communications, etc.?

All of these questions are meta-level questions in that they invite you to a higher level of experience and because they presuppose that you are concerned about transcending where you are now. They are questions of vision and drive and intention. And they are the core questions that comprise the essential vision of NLP and Neuro-Semantics which began with a vision of excellence.

The historical background of NLP and Neuro-Semantics goes back to the days of Abraham Maslow who began the whole modern emphasis on positive psychology. Maslow caught that vision as a psychologist as he finished his first book on Abnormal Psychology (1938). While working on that massive tome he began asking the paradigm shifting question, “If this is what happens when human beings become ill and psychologically sick, what about the other side, what happens when they become healthy?” And forty years later he wrote his books, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature and Toward a Psychology of Being in which he explored what I’ve designated as “the bright-side of human nature.”

And that new emphasis led to the first Human Potential Movement that was formalized by Richard Price and Michael Murphy when they bought the property of Esalen (1962) and characterized by some of the second generation leaders— Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, and Gregory Bateson who actually moved there and lived there (1963-1975). And out of that came the NLP vision of excellence about those leaders as men and women who excelled in communication. So NLP was developed, using linguistic tools, by which they were able to model that excellence.

Now in those two paragraphs I have summarized the history of the pursuit of excellence from the founding of humanistic psychology through NLP and in the next paragraph I will carry it on to Neuro-Semantics. This is a history that I have detailed in several chapters in Self-Actualization Psychology (2009). So what? All of this raises NLP beyond merely being a model of “how to run your own brain” or a model of how to manipulate (which is what those who misuse NLP do and which has given it a bad reputation). At its heart, NLP, as a communication model, essentially uses the variables of “communication” (representation systems, the Meta-Model, strategies model) for how a model an experience. And while we can certainly model pathological states, the focus has always been more on modeling excellence.

That’s what got me so interested in NLP originally. I was absolutely fascinated by modeling “communication” itself and “states” as I was conducting “communication” workshops (1984- 1988) and when I found NLP I incorporated it in my book, Speak Up, Speak Clear, Speak Kind (1987). What I didn’t know at the time was that it would set in motion a transformation that would completely change my life. Then in my Master Practitioner course in 1989, Bandler challenged us to take up a “modeling project.” Eventually I chose Resilience. And of course, out of that research came the Meta-States Model (1994).

Meta-States arose from seeking to create a model for the human excellence of being able to be resilient within one’s minds and emotions even in the face of set-back and loss. The research questions that drove me forward from 1990 to 1994 was— “How is it that there are human beings who can bounce-back from any set-back? What enables some people to face even the darkest and cruelest of human experiences and not get traumatized but maintain a spirit of hope, determination, love, etc.?”

Now if it was in the context of excellence that Maslow began his studies of self-actualizing people, and Bandler and Grinder studied the magic of therapeutic communication in Fritz and Virginia, and that I studied Viktor Frankl and others who were so resilient that they were un- traumatizable— I wonder what other contexts of excellence will give birth to the next models and patterns? I wonder what new developments will emerge that will facilitate the unleashing of potentials and possibilities that we are barely able to dream about today.

One year ago the Leadership Team of Neuro-Semantics created the by-line that we now use in our logo, websites, and in all of our communications— identifying Neuro-Semantics as Actualizing Excellence. So no wonder that when we will hold our very first International Conference of Neuro-Semantics this year, the theme is none other than — Actualizing Excellence.

What will you find at the Actualizing Excellence Conference? We have scheduled three pathways of workshops that focus on the areas of—Coaching, Business, and Personal Development. And in the 22 workshops we have leading trainers and writers coming to present a wide range of topics— all highlighting some excellence. We also have three keynote presentations, one from myself, then one from Colin Cox, Master Trainer, and Mandy Chai. The list of workshop (excluding two) are as follows:

Business Track Lene’ Fjellheim — Selling Yourself & Your Company Joseph Scott — Coaching Leaders Tessie Lim — Book Yourself Solid Femke Stuut — Daring to be an Entrepreneur with Neuro-Semantics Bob Bodenhamer — The Neuro-Semantic Foundations of Stuttering M Marzuki Mohamed — Edutrainment Alan Fayter — A Systematic Approach to Business

Personal Development Track David Murphy — The Neuro-Semantics of Self-Esteem Cheryl Lucas & Carey Jooste — Vitality Workshop: The Neuro-Semantics of Health Rich Liotta, Ph.D. — How to Get Meta-States to Stick! Lena Gray — Presence of Mind Under Pressure Colin Cox/ Lena Gray — Psychology of Self Defense Tim Goodenough — Raising Talent: Neuro-Semantics of Developing Talent

Coaching Track L. Michael Hall — Neuro-Semantics: The New Human Potential Movement Susie Linder-Pelz and Irena O’Brien — Evidence based Coaching Germaine Rediger — Coaching Women in Leadership Joe Brodnicki — Actualizing Team Excellence through Process Consultation Omar Salom — Executive Coaching Practice Tim Goodenough — In the Zone