WHO WANTS TO BE AN EXPERT?

“If we are to achieve results never before accomplished, we must expect to employ methods never before attempted.” Francis Bacon

Do you remember the TV show, “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” It was a game sow in which participants played to see who could win a millionaire dollars. Similarly, I want to ask the question, Who wants to become an Expert? Now obviously, no one has the time, energy, talent, or resources to become an expert in everything. Even two things would be really, really pushing it. But what about an expert in one thing?

Now in most things I’m perfectly content to perform at a mediocre level. Cooking, driving, dressing, eating, doing math, handling my tax returns, mowing the yard, tasting wine, and a hundred other things—I have no desire to develop my knowledge and skills. I want to be a safe and responsible driver and that’s it. No dreams about driving a Formula 1 car around a race track.

Now if I understand the writings and psychology of Abraham Maslow, there is within every person a passion for excellence. Excellence is one of the being-values and one of the dominant ways that people often choose to actualize their “highest meanings and best performances.” What about you? Is there one thing in your life that you would love to be excellent at? Is there one area that resonates with you, that calls to you, and in which you would like to become as good as you can be?

For me that one area is modeling, and especially modeling subjective experiences of expertise. That’s what I discover in NLP that completely turned me around and gave me a new lease on life. Professionally I had moved into counseling and then into doing therapy. And while I enjoyed seeing people overcome their personal challenges and grow and become more of who they could become. But, then, after a number of years of working with people who were struggling with “the common cold” of therapeutic issues (i.e., anxiety, depression, grief, addiction, etc.), I wanted something more, something different.

That came in my first NLP trainings—the idea of capturing the structure of the best of experiences. I had already been moving into various forms of psychotherapy that also focused on that—strength-based therapy, narrative, brief psychotherapy, solution-focus therapy, etc. So finding NLP was a heavenly gift—here was a field devoted not so much

to remedial change but to generative change. The focus was on changing things to enable people to find their form of excellence— their expertise.

Much later I dived into Abraham Maslow’s work on self-actualization. And while I had read Maslow back in the late 1970s, apparently I was not ready to hear what he had to say. I suppose I was living at the lower needs levels and not ready for the higher needs levels. Nor did I have any idea at the time that Maslow was at the foundation of NLP. I discovered that by accident. As it turned out, Maslow and Rogers were the thought leaders of the Human Potential Movement through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. They planted the original ideas about generative change and generative psychology. Then out of the late 1960s and 1970s second generation leaders arose—Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Gregory Bateson. Then also the new Kresgie College (1972) emerged to embody the values and thinking of Carl Rogers’.

Now what is called self-actualization took on a whole new meaning—it is a human being fully alive/ fully human. Rogers said “fully functioning.” Maslow said fulfilling the highest values—the meta-values (being-values).

Study your own top performers. That’s what Disney, Southwest Airlines, GE, and Ritz-Carlton did. They learned from their best. Studying internal best practices is the regimen that makes the difference. 159. It takes years to become the world’s best. Great managers use excellence as their frame of reference when assessing performance. Tough love, they do not compromise on this standard. Not what level of performance is unacceptable. Any level that hovers around average with no trend upward.

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