HOW WE TRAIN TRAINERS IN NEURO-SEMANTICS

You know that doctors have to go through both general training and then specialized training in order to become a medical doctor. So do lawyers, consultants, therapists, accountants, mediators, professors, and many, many others. It’s one of the distinguishing experiences that anyone who wants to enter into a profession has to go through. In the field of Coaching this process is now developing as Universities and various Coach Trainer programs are working out what knowledge and core competencies are required to be a professional coach. In Neuro-Semantics, we have more than 15 years of experience in coach training and a full curriculum of the content for being a Licensed Meta- Coach.

Similarly, during the almost twenty years that we have been training trainers we have similarly developed the required content knowledge and core competencies. In fact, we still have the only NLP training program that’s based on specific behavioral presentation benchmarks by which we can determine a person’s skill level as a presenter and trainer.

Recently several have asked me about how specifically do we go about training a person to become a skilled trainer. As I explained the process and more questions arose, I realized that I had not written that information out as I have with the coaching process. So here goes.

Core Communication Skills The most obvious competency of a trainer is that of being able to communicate clearly and precisely. That means two things. First, the trainer needs to know the content of his subject matter. She needs to know her stuff! And given that we’re first and foremost training NLP Trainers, that means knowing the essential and foundational NLP Communication Model. While there’s lots of people who still don’t know what NLP is (an amazing admission of confusion if there ever was one!), it isn’t rocket science to know that at its essence it is a communication model.

Further, while there are lots of books on NLP, Bob and I took time in the mid-1990s to put the content of NLP practitioner training and Master Practitioner training down in written form. You can find those in User’s Manual of the Brain, Vol, I & II. And there’s more. There is Sourcebook of Magic, Vol. I, The Spirit of NLP, NLP Going Meta (modeling), Sub-Modalities Going Meta, Mind- Lines (reframing), Figuring Out People (Meta-Programs), Adventures in Time (Time-Lines), MovieMind (representation systems), etc. To test one’s knowledge of NLP, we have a 22-page exam that we send to every applicant and ask them to fill it out before they arrive.

After content, there is the ability to communicate it. And again, using the NLP model itself, this means engaging an audience, creating rapport with them, setting frames about the message, framing the message in terms of why, what, how, and what if (the 4-mat template), inducing state in the

audience, and effectively using one’s voice and semantic space when on stage. These essential presentation skills which govern effective public speaking are the very skills that we have benchmarked.

Experiential Presentation Skills There are many different kinds of presentations. There is the speech or lecture wherein a person prepares and delivers a presentation. That’s what the short 18-minute TED talks are— talks. A keynote presentation is essentially a talk. The speaker does all of the speaking with maybe some icebreakers to engage the audience. While a lecture presentation is generally direct and serious, the keynote is partially entertainment.

Then there is the seminar—typically a speech that focuses on understanding a focused subject (e.g., selling, self-esteem, parenting, etc.). It may last from one hour to three days. In the seminar the speaker does all of the speaking with little bits of limited interaction with the audience. The seminar speaker will often use various energizers, ice-breakers, or focused questions with the audience which gets the audience involved to some extent.

The training presentation differs from the speech (keynote) and the seminar in that it intimately involves the audience. In fact, in a training we do not think of the people as “an audience,” but as participants—that’s because in a training those attending are expected to be active learners as they participate in the process.

In terms of size, a speech, keynote or even a seminar may involve hundreds, even thousands of people. Trainings seldom involve hundreds. Because a training is designed to enable people to get hands-on-experience and supervision in learning a new skill, trainings tend to involve a dozen to 50 or 60 people. Above a dozen people, the trainer will need others to help him or her with the hands- on learning— hence an assist team. Generally speaking, a trainer can handle 30 or so people, but above that number really needs a co-trainer and a team that can intimately engage the participants.

Core Engagement Skills Training is also unique in that a trainer has to truly love and care about people. Those who love making speeches, doing keynote presentations, and holding a seminar can (and often do) love the limelight. They love being on stage and being “the man” or “the woman.” This can lead to the dark side of the “guru” phenomenon when the person thinks that it’s about him or her rather than the people and the value that people get from the experience.

Not so with training. Training requires high intensity personal interaction. Now there is, in trainings, a speech part as you introduce your subject, engage the minds of those present with the value of it and the reason why they should learn a particular skill. There is also a bit of being “on stage” when you demonstrate what you can do to show the skill so people can see it live and up- close. Yet mostly in training there is a lot of back-and-forth communication. This shows up in the question and answer times and in the practice time when participants get to try their own hand at the skill to see how well they can pull it off.

For these activities, answering questions and setting up exercises for a hands-on experience (a live

human laboratory), the trainer has to authentic, personal, available, and open to participants. Here the arrogance of thinking you are a Somebody because you are in the role of “trainer,” will trip you up. It’s not so much a show that the people want as it is an experience. They want an experience that will enable them to learn a new skill or enhance a competency.

In training, much more than in lectures and seminars, it is entirely about the participant— and specifically the participants’ learning and developing. Those who are not ready to “get their hands dirty,” that is, get involved and do what’s required to learn, are really not the best persons for a training. First let them be inspired by a lecture or seminar. Then when they are ready to learn— to take an active and responsible role in their learning— then let them come to the training.

Training for Training Here’s what we do at NSTT. We divide the entire group into groups of 6 participants. This gives them a “home base” with a trainer as their team leader. Then each person in the group picks one of ten patterns that occur in the APG training. That becomes their pattern for the next 15 days. Over that time that will develop it, design it, and then present it over and over and over. Twelve times they will be on their feet in front of their team presenting sections of their pattern in 7 minute segments. After the first presentation, they will receive 7 minutes of feedback to the core competencies, and then they will do Take Two. They will present it again integrating the feedback about their framing, voice, semantic space, group rapport, framing, state induction, and content.

At first they will present the opening of their presentation. Next they will present the first minutes when they present the ‘what’ and the ‘why.’ After that they will present the ‘how’ and after that they will present a demonstration, next they will do a question and answer presentation, and finally they will present the closing. All of these repeated presentation is designed to do several things. First, enable the presenter to become thoroughly acquainted with one pattern. Second, learn how to keep him or herself fresh. For some this is a real challenge. They tend to get bored. “I’ve said that before.”

Ah, yes! Now we’re about to see how skilled you truly are as a trainer— can you keep yourself as fresh the 50th time or the 100th time as the first time? A good trainer can. And for a great trainer, his or her own curiosity, passion, and commitment to people make the challenge of staying fresh no problem at all.

Next, are the drills. From the first day, we have all of the trainers up on their feet presenting— mostly presenting whatever they just heard (which makes for a good way to review and test what people are hearing and learning). Yet that’s not the focus. The focus is on drilling some aspect of training— perhaps controlling nervous movement of their hands or their feet. Perhaps it is to use their voice in very strange and weird ways. Perhaps it is to present under very, very distracting conditions. Anyway, we have 4 or 5 drills every day, drills that are designed to expand one’s repertoire and to create great flexibility. This flexibility is then designed so that the presenters can maintain “presence of mind” under pressure.

Pushing the Training of Trainers Even Further Not satisfied with this, we also have designed several other exercises and laboratory experiences for

our trainers. Knowing that they will be going into Board Rooms to present, sell, and negotiate their training services, we have a presentation designed to train those skills. Knowing that trainers will sometimes need to “speak from the heart,” we have experiences to facilitate that. We have an evening in which we focus on “Your Worst Nightmare as a Trainer” preparing trainers to be able to handle situations that otherwise might distress them. We have an evening introducing how to prepare and deliver a keynote presentation.

Training is not just making a speech. It is so much more and as with any profession, for the highly skilled trainer, there are a multitude of skills to learn and practice. For example, there are the business skills. For that we do some one-hour Interviews with experienced trainers and do that for several days.

Now you know a lot about how we go about training trainers in Neuro-Semantics. And if you are interested, contact us.

2018 NSTT will be in Grand Junction Colorado July 1– 15, 2018 at Travelodge, 715 Horizon Drive, GJ. (970) 243-5080. For more information, contact: Dr. Michael Hall — [email protected]