THE PROBLEM-SOLVING LIFE

How much of your life is involved in problem-solving? Would you say 50% of your life? 10%, 70%, what percentage would you give it? I think it is probably closer to 100% and here’s why. First, life is full of problems—challenges for us to address and solve. And you never know when a new problem will arise. Additionally, every time you set a new goal—you thereby create a new problem for yourself. You have just created a gap between your present state and your desired state! And that gap exists because of your thinking—you want something more than or different from what you have. And that’s a ‘problem.’

Next comes solving. You learn and figure out what you need to know, understand, believe, etc. and then you develop a course of action to actualize that new understanding so you close the gap and reach your goal. This solution now becomes your way of life—how you live your life, your lifestyle. And so it is continuous and not a one-off solution. As you repeat it and it becomes your automatic way of operating, it becomes your automatic and unconscious way of thinking. And if it keeps working, great. If life changes, you change, others change—then you may have a new problem and need a new solution. Either way, as you live the solution, it is pretty much something you do 100% of the time.

In modeling problem-solving and in developing an effective process for solving problems, I wrote the book, The 5 Minute Manager. I titled that because I focused first on managers (and anyone managing other people, which is all of us) and organizations because that’s what managers do all day—identify and solve problems. And because we can streamline the process so we can get to “the heart of the matter,” problem-solving can be quicker and more efficiently. If I can titled the book Problem-Solving, it would look like this image that my friend Hernan created.

The 5 Minute Manager book (and training) is exclusively about problem-solving. It is about the how to. How to detect and define the real problem, how to create a tight, precise, and specific problem-definition. How to probe with a person to get to ‘the heart of the matter.’ How to then provide a change of thought which solves the problem and how to translate that new thinking into a course of action that you can execute to solve the problem.

With this article I’m promoting the book. What follows is the Preface in the book and the Table of contents. After that, a description of how to purchase the book and/or to buy extra copies to give as gifts (even early Christmas gifts) to friends and loved ones.

PREFACE

Can you solve a problem in a five-minute conversation? On the surface it seems like an audacious proposal. Five minutes!? Impossible! And yet what if you could? What if you could learn to listen so intently that you could discern a person’s words and thinking patterns so precisely that you could immediately recognize “the heart of the matter” which generates the problem for a person? What if you could then formulate an insightfully critical question which by answering the question would instantaneously enlighten the person? This is the vision of the power and wonder of the five-minute conversation.

I began thinking that this kind of highly focused problem-solving conversation was possible after my coaching sessions began to become shorter and shorter. Whether with executives or students, I found that using the insights I learned from linguistics and cognitive psychology, and the models in the field of Neuro-Semantics, I was more quickly able to infer where the conversation was going and what to do. Then developing a sense of the critical concept or belief that was informing the person, I could cut through all of the irrelevancies, and ask a few questions to expose the real issue. Eventually that led to many conversations being as short as five minutes.

The Long Journey to the 5-Minute Conversation

Here’s a little history regarding how the idea of The 5-Minute Manager program came about and why I think it is possible for anyone to learn without having to repeat my 40-year history. So, yes, it took that long, but it doesn’t need to take that long for you when you now know the structure.

Now a long, long time ago, in another century, when I began my first decade as a therapeutic counselor, I focused on “the dark side” of psychology, namely, pathology. Why? Because that’s how I had been taught. Eventually I discovered that pathology can be quite depressing and so I began to think about how to transcend it.

That led to an increasing interest in the healthy side of human nature. Eventually I studied several strength-based psychologies (cognitive psychology, Brief psychotherapy, NLP, etc.). In the process I became fascinated by a new and very different kind of psychology, one that Abraham Maslow called “the bright side of psychology.” Instead of starting from the assumption that people lacked what they needed, were broken, and needed to be fixed, these newer psychologies assumed the opposite. Namely, people have all the internal resources they need—they only need to be guided to how to access, develop, and use these inner sources of power.1

Soon thereafter I got interested in modeling self-reflexive consciousness, the unique kind of consciousness of humans. As one of our executive functions in our most highly developed part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, this ability to think about our thinking enables a higher level awareness whereby we can manage our mind, emotions, speech, and behaviors. It offers a way to take charge of ourselves. With it, you can be your own executive. Eventually I developed the Meta-States Model to fully describe this powerful capacity and put it to practical use. That was 1994.2

An example. Once you access and experience a state of mind and emotion, say fear or anger or joy or love, you can then think and feel more thoughts about that first experience. When you do, you experience a meta-state. That second state then sets the frame of reference for the first state. So if you have fear and then experience calmness, you can create something brand new—calm fear. If you are angry, and you then access respect, you create respectful anger, a very different state from the primary state of anger.

This process of stepping back from your first state, of creating a second state, and then applying it to your first state is the meta-stating process. It’s a nature process that we all do, mostly without awareness of doing it. Yet now we can meta-state consciously. To do that, think about a time when you were thinking and feeling angry and your anger felt out-of-control. Do you like the quality of that anger? Of course not. Then if you imagined accessing a state of calmness and of respect, take a moment to feel that now. Good. Now feel that calmness and respect about your anger and notice how it changes your anger upgrading its quality.

Meta-Thinking Makes an Entrance

From this meta-thinking arises an explicit insight and a skill. The insight is this: You think on multiple levels. Your self-reflexive conscious actually enables you to think and feel at multiple levels simultaneously. That is how you can know so much in “the back of your mind” as your background knowledge without needing to keep that information constantly in the front of your mind. Yet most of your thinking-feeling in the back of your mind is outside-of-your conscious awareness. It is there, and you are processing that information, but you are not aware of doing so. And sometimes, well actually a lot of the time, you have limiting beliefs, understandings, decisions, memories, assumptions, etc. in the back of your mind which have not been updated. These ideas create so many of our problems.

Now for the skill. Imagine being able to quickly access that information? What if you could get to the background knowledge which creates the limitations and update it? That’s what the five-minute conversation is designed to do. It takes you from the bottom floor of everyday life, where you may be frustrated in trying to solve a problem, to the top floor—the penthouse—of your mind where the problem is actually sourced. When you correct that old assumption, as the executive of your life, you can turn things around and get a new lease on life. Now imagine developing your skill to detect what is in “the back of your mind” and bringing it into the conversation. If you could do that—you could get to the heart of things very quickly.

Next Came Meta-Coaching

I worked with the meta-levels of the mind for many years updating and remodeling NLP’s meta-models. That included the neuro-linguistics model regarding how words work (the Meta-Model), the model about neurological thinking patterns (Meta-Programs), and the model of how we edit the pictures and movies of our mind (Sub-Modalities). These models enable us to map out the higher (meta) ideas in the back of the mind—giving us access to the meanings that create both our problems as well as our solutions.3

In 2002, I modeled three expert coaches and created the Meta-Coaching System. As a coaching system, Meta-Coaching trains and certifies people to become professional coaches. It uniquely uses the meta-levels of NLP and Neuro-Semantics to coach a person to access his resources and achieve his goals. Based on the bright-side of human nature, Meta-Coaching focuses on unleashing the hidden potentials and capacities within a person. For years I led and trained the certification program (ACMC) of Meta-Coaching, mentored new Meta-Coach Trainers, developed Group and Team Meta-Coaching (GTMC), Executive Coaching, Advanced Coaching (PCMC), Internal Coaching, Managerial Coaching, etc.4

By the time of the pandemic (2020) I realized that my coaching sessions had become shorter and shorter. For the purpose of demonstration, I could extend a session to 45 minutes, but normally it would be 15 to 20 minutes, sometimes shorter (five minutes). That is when I began entertaining the crazy idea—“Could I do this consistently in five minutes?” I tested myself and there were times in which I could, but not always. Then an even crazier idea, “Could I teach others to do this in five minutes?”

Almost immediately I dismissed the idea. After all, I had 40 years of experience to get to this place, how could someone learn it without all of that experience? So the idea went on a back shelf to gather dust.

On an Island Deep in the Indian Ocean

Two Meta-Coaches and colleagues who live in Mauritius asked if we could put a bunch of managers through the Meta-Coaching system so that as managers they could ‘coach’ when it became necessary or useful. Bruneau Woomed and Joyce Clever were working with middle managers and senior managers who wanted the coaching skills, but did not want to become professional coaches. I thought it was potentially a good idea and one we should test, “Why not?” We could run the 8-day as a pilot experiment and see what happens. When we did that, we encountered several problems—first, the managers were overwhelmed with far too much about coaching. Second, they were not getting what they really wanted—how to quickly coach an employee to solve an immediate problem.

A few months earlier, I was preparing for that experimental training I began to anticipate that this approach could be overwhelming for managers. As I did, I experimented with the idea of taking out 80% of the coaching material and focusing on how to get to the heart of a problem. So on the sixth day of the training when frustrations were high due to the lack of seeing the immediate application of the skills, I devoted three hours to the idea of a five-minute conversation was apprehensive about presenting this new approach. I assumed that the complexity of the process would continue to overwhelm. My thinking was that if that happened, at least it would quickly convince the managers about the wisdom of following the long route to the five-minute conversation. But that did not happen. Instead they loved it and they wanted more. Stunned by that response, we then spent six hours again during the next two days on the problem-solving conversation. And with that, the 5-minute manager was given birth.

The Birth of the 5-Minute Conversation

For that experiment in Mauritius, several Meta-Coach Trainers flew in from around the world to be a part of it and help formulate it. That included Mandy Chai from Hong Kong and China and Mohamed Tarek from Egypt. It also included Mariani Ng (Indonesia), Adrian Estrada (Mexico), and my wife, Geraldine Hall (Colorado). Previously brainstormed with about it with two other Meta-Coach trainers, David Murphy and Ivan Robles (Mexico). Finally, there was the team in Mauritius who led the original ACPF and the introduction hours of the five-minute conversation.

All of these highly trained Meta-Coaches and Neuro-Semantic trainers had extensive experience working in corporate organizations for many years. They immediately saw the value of training the focused problem-solving conversation which could potentially enable one to get to the heart of the matter—a person’s hidden and unconscious meanings and to do it fairly quickly. My next step was to put together a trial training which we did in Hong Kong in December 2025. And now it’s time to write the book.

End of the Chapter Notes

1\. See Self-Actualization Psychology (2008), also Abraham Maslow’s works, especially Toward a Psychology of Being (1968) and Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1972).

2\. See Communication Magic (2002), Figuring Out People (2005), Sub-Modalities Going Meta (2005).

3\. See Meta-Coaching on the website: [www.neurosemantics.com](http://www.neurosemantics.com/).

THE FIVE-MINUTE MANAGER

Table of Contents

Preface 4

1. What is a Five-minute 9

Manager?

The One Min Manager

Managers solve problems

The Problem-Solver

Critical Question Designer

Journey to the Top Floor

Managers R We

* Test Anxiety Conversation

2\. Getting to the Heart of the 17

Things

Your Inner World of Meaning

How Get to the Heart of Things?

The Mind — Thinks

Adventure: Getting to Heart

How to Journey Inside

* Criticism by Team Conversat.

3\. Managing Two Worlds 25

There are two Worlds

World of Action & Meaning

Outside World Problems

Managing the Inside World

Mind as a Meta Place

* Anger/ Sarcasm Conversat.

4\. The Journey Inside 35

Uncomfortable / Unusual

Art of Going Inside

First stop: State

Second: Representing

Third: Beliefs

Questioning– Art of Discovery

Discoveries of Inner Journey

* Stress; Getting Behind Conver.

5. Problem-Solving Facts and Questions 44

7 facets of a problem

1\) External Difficulty

2\) Symptoms

3\) Consequences

4\) Contexts

5\) Contributing factors

6\) Meta-Thinking

6\) Assumptions

7 Problem-Probing Questions

1\) Problem?

2\) Goal?

3\) Subject or Conversation?

4\) Symptoms?

5\) Troubled Thinking

6\) Question?

7\) Assumptions?

Getting to the heart of the matter

6. Conversations that Solve 50

Problems

The Relationship is the Convers.

1\) Clarity

2\) Decision

3\) Planning

4\) Resourcing

5\) Change

6\) Mediation

7\) Confrontation

8\) Feedback

9\) Responsibility

10\) Trust

11\) Influence

12\) Resilience

13\) Attitude

14\) Motivation

Initiation the Conversation

How Determine the Conversat.?

* Incompetence Conversation

7. The Art of Problem Solving 62

The Problem with ‘problem’

Odds Things about Problems

Strangeness about Problems

Clarify the Real Problem

Get Ready for the Conversation

Well-Formed Problem Conv.

Post Script

* Work-Life Balance Convers.

8. Cutting Through the Noise 72

The Noise the Deafens

Learning Art - Cutting Through

1\) Establish the subject

2\) Challenge the relevance

3\) Clean up the words

4\) Ask distinction Questions

5\) Challenge Cog. Distortions

6\) Challenge the Thinking

* Indecision Convers.

9. Making the Conversation Real

Conversation has to be Real 78

Art of Making Conv Real

Willingness to be Yourself

Collaborative Trust-Building

Willingness to Speak Directly

Willingness to Challenge

Willingness to Speak Truth

Let the Conversation Begin

Conversation Factors

* Over-Controlling Conv.

10. Words: Inner World

Windows 85

Thinking clearly in words

Language Reveals Thinking

Cognitive Distortions Words

What Cognitive Bias Reveal

* Fear of Conflict Conv.

11. Thinking: the Hidden 94

Dynamic

As You Think, So You Are

Meta-Programs Thinking

12 Key Thinking Patterns

Thinking Landmarks Model

Meta Place

* Incompetence Convers.

12. Invisible Meaning 104

Constructs

Say Hello to Meaning

Are of Constructing Meaning

Meaning Detection Questions

7 Questions

Ask Meta-Questions

What’s the Interpretation?

What’s the Context?

Meanings that Create Problems

Inferring Meaning

Three Kinds of Problems

Any Problems Outside of Mind?

The Meta Probe

Art of the Meta Probe

* Competition Conv.

13. Developing the Critical 115

Question

Critical Q: Key to the Heart

Developing the Critical Question

1\) Identify hidden Meaning

2\) Formulate Mean. \> Sentence

3\) Identify Limitation of Mean.

4\) Rephrase as Question

5\) Create first Version

6\) Test the Question

Beyond Critical Q \>Torpedo Q.

Practice Delivering Critical Q.

7 Problem-Probing Questions

14. Thinking as a Five-Minute

Manager 126

Problem-Focused Thinking

Compassionate Thinking

Thinking Strategically

Meta-Detailing Thinking

Meaning-Probing Thinking

Explorative Thinking

Respectfully Direct Thinking

Humorous Thinking

15. Uniting Meaning & 132

Performance

2 Axes: Meaning/ Performance

4 Quadrants of Development

Looking Deeper \> Thinking

Problem-Solving & Quadrants

* Lack of Praise Convers.

16. Managerial Problems 138

Problems revealed according

to the 5-min. structure

Appendix 149

5-Min. Landscape Chart

Meta-Programs Charts

Well-Formed Outcome Questions

Meta-Model Precision Question

Cognitive Biases

Bibliography 156

Author 158

Ready to Buy?

The book sells at \$25, if you buy 3 the price drops to \$17 per book, \$51. INSIDE the USA, the shipping is \$6 so a total of \$57. If OUTSIDE OF THE USA, the post office charges \$40 per package, so \$91, but since I want to sell outside the US, the price drops to \$15 per book (\$45) so a total of \$85.

Inside the US: 3 for \$57

Outside the US: 3 for \$85

When will the PDF of the book be available? November 1.