ARE YOU AS PRODUCTIVE AS YOU COULD BE?

Two years ago, Andrei Pligin, NLP Trainer in Moscow and founder of the Moscow NLP Center, asked me if I could put together a training on productivity. He looked over the list of 50+ trainings that we have available in Neuro-Semantics and didn’t see “Productivity” listed. My explanation is that we get to productivity through Achieving Peak Performance. “That may be true,” he said but those words will not appeal to people in Russia. What we’re interested in is “Productivity.”

So I began studying things from the perspective of Productivity. And sure enough, I came right back to performance. To be productive, you have to perform. Duh! Yet that’s not enough. To be highly productive in a way that increases the quality of your life and that brings out your best— there’s much more to it than just performance. Performance, without the other things, can lead to stress, performance anxiety, overload, unhappiness, running around not knowing where you are and lots of other unpleasant states. And that’s not what anyone wants.

In view of that, I returned to one of the central themes in Neuro-Semantics— The quality of your life is the quality of your states. So it’s about your states! And if it is about your meanings, then it is also about your intentions also. When we put all of that together, it is about your ability to get into a highly focused state of flow that we call your “genius” state. There’s a lot to productivity!

Further study revealed that even that is not enough. You could get into the right state of flow and engagement (genius) with high quality meanings and intentions, feel the inspiration, and even transfer what you know to what you do (mind-to-muscle) and still not be productive. That’s because what if there’s a set back? What if the production takes a lot longer than you anticipated? So we need to add persistence, dedication, discipline, and resilience.

About the same time that Andrei was asking about a training on Productivity, a magazine in Brazil in the process of introducing the Meta-Coaching system and Neuro-Semantics, described me as “the master of productivity” quoting the number of books I had written. Some of my friends in Brazil sent the clip to me. Personally I found it surprising because I don’t think of myself in that way or in those terms. When I said as much, one of my friends asked, “Then how do you explain all of the materials you’ve been able to produce?”

“Well, it is just the accumulation over many years of an inspiration that keeps animating my life.” That’s when my friend asked, “Is that the secret of productivity? You get an inspiration, you believe in it, you stay with it through the ups and downs, you refuse to let it go, you keep refreshing the inspiration, and focusing on the process rather than the end product?”

That last line was it! That was the missing piece I needed to complete the training program for Productivity and what I realized was that it presents a paradox. The paradox is that to be highly productive a person, you have to focus on the process, and get your eyes off of the end-product. For most of us, this feels counter-intuitive. We think, “I need to keep my eye on the end-product!” But to do that distracts us from the productive process, the performance of the success factors that leads to that final product. Now I had the program for “Unleashing Productivity.”

If you’re interested then in May I will run the prototype of this training in two places, first in Oslo Norway and then in Moscow Russia. Later many other Neuro-Semantic trainers will be training it.

Oslo Norway — May 2-4. Contact Lene Fjellheim: [email protected] Moscow Russia — May 6-8. Contact Andrei Pligin: [email protected]

Here is a description of it from the Executive Summary in the Training Manual:

Productivity— The Vision of becoming a Highly Productive Person: One thing that you can count on from highly effective people—they are productive. They are highly effective in their life’s work, their relationships, their home, their career, their hobbies because they have an effective strategy for getting things done and producing results. As a result, their productivity level is much higher than most people. This enables them to enjoy the fruits of their productivity in terms of money, recognition, influence, joy, having fun, and making a difference in the world. This is true of experts and this is true of people who make a mark for themselves in the areas that they are interested in.

How is your productivity? Are you ready to discover how you can turn up your productivity? Are you ready to discover the secrets of high level productivity so you can unleash it in your life?

What makes people highly effective and productive? How are they able to regularly and consistently produce as they do? What makes them prolific, efficient, persistent, and resilient in their work without burning-out or succumbing to stress? How can you unleash your processes of productivity while still having lots of fun? How can you become productive in a healthy way without more work and stress?

Productivity: What is it?

Productivity: Being able to produce goods, services, and information that you desire at a level that allows you to succeed in reaching your goals. Producing— getting results, achieving the objectives that you set. But not all “productivity” is healthy or ecological. There are many kinds of productivity which may not be, in the long run, productive! There’s fire-fighting productivity; there’s stressful productivity, there’s forced productivity. These involve working harder and longer and are more stressful. Getting busy and being busier is not necessarily healthy productivity. Productivity is not pushing harder or beating yourself up. Self-Actualizing Productivity: the kind of productivity where work becomes play, where you actualize yourself, your best potentials, and operate from a state of flow. In the “genius” state in are in the zone and much more productive because all of your resources are available. When a person is not productive— he is unproductive or may be doing counter-productive

things which undermine his productivity.

There are answers to the questions about the mystery of productivity. These answers reveal that there’s a strategy and process for being productive. You can become twice as productive as you currently are. What if you became four times more productive? You can also have a much more enjoyable experience as you simultaneously become more productive. This does not inherently mean more stress or “work,” it can mean less!

The Design of Productivity Training: Using the modeling processes of NLP and of Neuro-Semantics, you will discover — How to examine and enrich your current strategy of productivity. When you discover where and how the current strategy is not working as well as it could, you can then enrich it so it is more robust, powerful, and effective. Identify all of the mental-emotional states that you need in order to take your productivity to a high level. To make your strategy work effectively, you have to be able to access— in the moment you need it— the right state. Run a checklist on the requires skills for high productivity. Do you know the skills that you need for high productivity? Do you know how to develop those skills? Do you know the four components of every skill? Do you know how to deliberately practice your skills until you can “turn them on” at will? Discover the near-magical frames of mind that enable you to think like a highly productive person. Such persons typically think in ways that distinguish them and differentiate them from most people. Do you know these unique thinking patterns? Do you know what and how they think that differs from you? Would you like to? Identify the complementary set of skills that you need. In every area of expertise, productivity in that area will be distinguished also by unique complementary skills. Which ones govern your area of interest? These are not the core skills. Yet these are the contributing factors that can make all the difference in the world.

If you’re interested in it now, contact the sponsors mentioned above. And look for the training of Unleashing Productivity as Module V in our Self-Actualization series. There will be many other Neuro-Semantic Trainers presenting this training in the months and years to come.