HOW CAN I BECOME

TRULY COMPETENT?

 

Competence is everything!  Well, almost everything.  It is certainly why, in Neuro-Semantics, we train, coach, consult, write, run practice groups, hold conferences, etc.  We do so in order to enable ourselves and others to become competent at a whole variety of activities.  From self-management to parenting, to wealth creation, to leadership, to health and wellness, to eating right, to sleeping soundly, etc., competence is our objective.  We want people to become self-determining and have the self-efficacy to be competent in the things that they value.

 

When I say that competence is everything, I’m thinking about the following applications.  Competence is the foundation of confidence.  To be competent is to be confident and just about everybody wants that—who doesn’t want to feel confident in what you do and how you live?  Consider the opposite: Confidence without competence means you are fooling yourself and trying to con others into thinking you have skills and you can do what you cannot do.  The only way to feel truly and fully confident is to become competent.  But that’s actually a lot harder and more complicated than most people image.

 

Competence is the foundation for expertise.  Let’s say that you want to become an expert.  What’s required for that?  Basically, first develop your basic competence, then add 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of deliberate practice, and then you will develop expertise.  This is the finding of Anders Ericcson in his longitudinal studies on expertise.  This also highlights that competence is much more than merely having some skills.  Yes, competence requires skills and is built upon skill development.  Yet, as noted in the first article, you could have some skills and still not be competent.

 

Competence is the foundation for self-trust.  Once you develop a skill, any skill, does not mean that you will always be able to demonstrate that skill.  Skill competence comes and goes.  They depend on how you’re feeling, the sleep you got the night before, how things are going in your life, etc.  Competence is a wavy line—up and down, on and off, good days and bad days.  But once you take the skill to the level of competence, you develop a basic consistency that gives you much more control over the skill.

 

Competence is the foundation for self-efficacy, which is the foundation for entrepreneurship, and just about everything else, wealth creation, risk taking, leadership, management, resilience, and the list goes on and on.  I hope the point is made— because competency is just about everything in our lives, go for it!  Aim to become competent.  Don’t be satisfied with being mediocre or just getting by.

 

Now for the How

Because the skills which are required for competence have to be developed one by one, you are going to need a lot of patience.  That means giving up your impatience.  The impatient who want to become competent over-night or in a weekend course are those who will never become competent.  Your skills will inevitably be on and off as you go through the learning process.  It is the nature of the beast.  Why?  Because you are moving your conceptual knowledge into your neurology.  And that integration process takes time.

 

Along with patience, you are going to need a powerful robust attitude toward mistakes and error messages.  That’s because you accelerate your learning process via the feedback process.  In other words, you have to be open to the error feedback messages.  If you make the fatal mistake of confusing your self (your ego, your worth as a person) with what you do, your behavior, you will not learn very well and it will take you a lot longer to become competent.  So, release your ego!  Separate person from behavior.  Stop making that fatal error.  What you are doing is just that— doing, behavior.

 

Next, practice one piece at a time.  Stop trying to do the whole competency or even the whole skill— set your sights on the sub-skills.  Deliberately focus your practice on each one so that your cells fire together and you create a neural pattern in your neurology.  Once you do that, you will develop a consistency that you can trust.  This is the pathway to competency.  Every manual that we have in Neuro-Semantics has been developed specifically for this.  For whatever competency you want, open up your manual, find the sub-skills and practice them over and over and over.  That’s the key.

 

Keep yourself inspired and therefore motivated by setting your intention on developing the competency.  Give yourself a great big why and then meta-detail everything you do in your deliberate practice with the big why.  Refresh your why everyday you do your practice.  As you do, forget the results.  That’s right!  Forget the results, they will follow if you do the process.  So focus entirely and exclusively on the process.  And what is the process?  Deliberately practicing the sub-skills!

 

 

META-COACH NEWS

·       The special book deal continues, most Neuro-Semantic books for $10, Postal Box holds 10, shipping $100 for the box.  In the USA, the shipping only $15.  Write to me at meta@acsol.net.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall@acsol.net

 

 

 NLP PATTERNS:

MODELS FOR THINKING

 

While I had studied numerous psychologies for many years, it was not until I
learned NLP that I was exposed to the idea of patterns and running patterns.
Nor was it that other psychotherapies didn't have specific processes to use
and to follow.  They did.  It was more the case that those processes were
looser in form, more general in approach, entailing a larger overview of
this process.  NLP patterns were different. They offer a protocol for how to
achieve a specific goal.

 

Learning NLP, in fact, is to a great extent, learning patterns.  It is
learning the precise steps of the pattern, the purpose of each pattern, the
elicitation question for each given pattern, the processes of the pattern,
and how to think about a pattern.  When you learn NLP, you learn the Circle
of Excellence, the Swish pattern, Six-Step Reframing, Setting Anchors,
Collapsing Anchors, and on and on.  Each pattern has a specific set of steps
similar to a recipe.

 

Further, each pattern is generally a strategy for how to do a specific thing
and sometimes the name of the pattern names that specific thing- Decision
Destroyer, Change Personal History, Movie Rewind.  And most of the patterns
arose from getting the strategy for doing a particular thing from one or
more persons who were already skillfully competent.

 

Ten years after I learned NLP, I had the audacity to gather all of the NLP
patterns that I could find in all of the books and manuals which I had read.
I then put 77 of them into a single source, The Sourcebook of Magic, Volume
I (1997).  That was the first book of its kind.  In doing so, I separated
out the most basic NLP patterns like getting rapport, anchoring, state
accessing, ecology check, etc. since these processes are used inside of
every pattern.

 

What are these patterns?  They are essentially thinking patterns.  If you
follow the strategy steps in a pattern you will essentially learn to think
in a specific way to achieve a specific outcome.  You will think in a way
that will create a specific resource or solve a specific problem.  I didn't
know it at the time, but each pattern gave me a new or different way to
thinking about a given subject or experience.  That's actually pretty
amazing!  In learning NLP, you learn to think more precisely and accurately.

 

Consider what happens when you learn the sensory representation systems.
You learn that you think visually, auditorially, and kinesthetically, and
also using your sense of smell and taste.  For the majority of people, this
is both obvious and a moment of self-discovery.  It was for me.  I knew I
thought visually, but had no idea that my primary rep. system was
kinesthetic.  For me, that explained a lot.  Later, when I discovered that I
actually could think auditorially-and that opened up a whole new world for
me.  Previously (well, 16 years earlier) a music teacher told me I was tone
deaf; as it turned out, I was not.  It was the case that I had not learned
to use my auditory system.  That's all.

Consider what happens when you follow the steps of the Movie Rewind pattern.
If you follow the steps, you learn to use your thinking potentials and
skills in such a way that you recode the way you think.  Now your old
thinking code no longer forces you to re-experience a traumatic experience.
You learn to think objectively-and just witnesses fact without your old
interpretations inducing a re-traumatization.  In this way, you take the
emotional charge out of the way you remember things.  Now that's quite a
learning!  And all you have to do is to follow the steps of the pattern.  Do
it enough times until this new way of thinking starts to habituate giving
you another choice.

 

Perceived in this way, NLP is most essentially a thinking and a re-thinking
model.  It works its "magic" psychologically by recoding your thinking.
This is especially obvious with the Meta-Model.  Here you learn to recognize
a linguistic cue (a word or phrase) that is ill-formed and immediately
transforms it into a well-formed one.  If a word or statement programs you
to feel miserable, you catch it before it performs that kind of an
induction.  You transform it at the linguistic level.

 

Yes NLP is a Communication Model.  That's how we have thought about it from
the beginning -a model about how communication works.  Within NLP is the
"Meta-Model of Language in Therapy."  That's what it was originally called.
Also within it is the Milton Model of Hypnotic Language.  And yes, deeper
still to communication is thinking.  Thinking that communicates with
precision and specificity as well as thinking that induces trance states for
all sorts of personal resources.

 

Now you know why we in Neuro-Semantics have been deepening the essential
core of NLP, the core that is within and behind all of the models, all of
the patterns, and all of the transformational tools.  You know why we have
established all three of The Brain Camps.

           Brain Camp I: Thinking for Humans.

           Brain Camp II: Learning Excellence

           Brain Camp III: Wise Executive Decisions

 

You also now know why I have been writing numerous books about thinking:

           Executive Thinking (2018)

           Thinking as a Modeler (2018)

           Executive Learning (2018)

           Executive Learning (2019)

           Humorous Thinking (2021)

           Metaphorical Thinking (2022)

           Executive Decisions (2022)

           Executive Wisdom (2022)

           Predictive Thinking (2022)

 

Amazingly, the entire field of Critical Thinking does not know that NLP is a
thinking model let alone the best critical thinking tool anywhere.  That's
why I wrote Executive Thinking (2018)-to introduce the Meta-Model as the
best tool for critical thinking.  But there's more.  NLP is so much more-
which will be the subject of the next Neurons article.

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

 REALITY FACING SECURITY

 

The phrase “secure enough to face reality” refers to the ability to know within yourself that you are okay as a person and that you are capable of handling the challenges of life.  Are you that secure?  If you have these two personal and internal resources, then you will be able to face reality without falling apart or getting into a highly reactive state.  That’s what happens when a person does not have sufficient ego-strength to face reality.  With this inner security, then the external challenges will not question you as a person (your worth or dignity) or overwhelm your ability to cope with life. 

 

Knowing your unconditional value and having developed coping abilities—now you can face reality for what it is and take effective actions to deal with things.  Now you can accept life’s challenges.  Acceptance is what indicates that there is sufficient internal security to face reality.  Conversely, rejection of life and its challenges actually makes it impossible to deal with life.  When you reject what is, you are fighting reality itself and as long as you are in a fight with reality, you are expending your energy, thought, creativity, problem-solving skills, etc,. in a realm that is self-defeating.  Why?  Because reality is what it is.  No matter how much you dislike it, hate it, wish it would be different, it is what it is.

 

If a loved one has died, then a person you have loved has passed on and is no longer alive.  If your house was destroyed in a hurricane, then the house is gone.  If you get a diagnosis of cancer, that is what you now have to deal with.  And this is where the magic of acceptance enables you to cope and move forward in life.  You don’t have to like the situation to accept it.  You only have to acknowledge it.  This “acceptance” is not the same as resignation—that is completely different. Nor does it even suggest condoning the situation.  Acceptance is an acknowledgment of what is.  And that makes it the beginning place for healing and resilience.

 

All of the previous stages of grief that Kubler-Ross identified in her classic study on grief —denial, anger, bargaining, and depression are actually unnecessary for grief resolution.  You will only experience these to the degree that you don’t accept life and its challenges for what they are.  When you accept, you don’t have to deny, rage, bargain, or depress.  Yet with acceptance, these become unnecessary. [They also become a waste of your time and energy.]

 

What does it take to face reality?  I’d recommend that you begin with unconditional self-esteem and a set of coping skills.  After that, you will need a healthy dose of acceptance.  But even without the first two, you could start with acceptance.  Acceptance can be the starting point for facing reality.  That’s because when you accept yourself, your skills, your powers, your situation, etc., your acceptance ends the fight.  It ends the inward fight against yourself, your history, things from your childhood, etc.

 

Acceptance is powerful for many reasons.  As a change principle: You can’t change what you don’t accept.  So acceptance begins the change process.  Also, you can’t face what you don’t accept.

 

What drives the pre-grief stages of a loss (e.g., denial, anger, bargaining, and depression) are cognitive distortions.  These arise when a person exaggerates a loss, personalizes it, emotionalizes, awfulizes, develops a tunnel vision about it, etc.   To experience security inside—out, begin by welcoming and embracing reality as that which is.  Acknowledge it.  The paradox is that when you begin with this kind of acceptance, all of the internal fighting against what’s real ends, and you can focus on coping.  Now you’re ready to do some high quality problem-solving.

 

 

META-COACHING NEWS

·       With this blog, we welcome another 20 or so new Meta-Coaches who have just graduated from ACMC in Kaula Lumpur.  The team in Malaysia were very gracious hosts and worked overtime to deal with the challenges that arose with the hotel.  This was the first ACMC in some 10 years in Malaysia so it was as if beginning for the first time.  Our hope is that the new Meta-Coaches will become the Community there and do such quality coaching that it will spread the word.  Then the trainers will keep busy training NLP as well as Modules I and II.

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

(970) 523-7877