After getting bored with drills intended to train me like they might train a 3-year-old, who will take an average of 1200 hours of formal practice to achieve Grade 5 (according to Sloboda’s Leverhulme Project), I decided to just learn how to play a piece of music. I chose to play one of my favourites, Gymnopedie. It looked easy enough.

It wasn’t easy. To start with, it was hard. Very hard. And it was hard in very specific ways.

And it has already highlighted two key aspects of learning for me: One conscious, one unconscious. I’ll get to those.

• It was not hard because of the timing of the notes. I knew how long to hold the individual notes because I know the piece very well. Despite this, the teacher harped on holding the individual notes for the ‘right’ length of time. Indeed, she still was at our last lesson yesterday
• It was not hard because of the biomechanics – with the exception of a four-note chord right at the end, it was pretty easy for my fingers to move to move.
• Even the note order wasn’t really that difficult. While being a rich piece of music, it isn’t too fast and doesn’t involve wide variations in the note locations.
• What was difficult for me was figuring out where to put my fingers! And for me that was really hard. My teacher would throw terms at me like “B” and “D” and “Fa” and “Do” – that might well have a meaning related to the keys for her other students, but for me they meant nothing. But when she physically showed me which key to press next, I was right to go for the next part. And, after a while, I started to put these parts together, so that now it almost sounds like a real piece of music.

A strange experience was discovering that I could play several relatively complex parts – with some of those weird black keys! Looking at the notes on the page, I couldn’t follow the notes, but if I just followed my fingers, I realized that I had ‘absorbed’ the sequence by watching and copying my teacher’s fingers. And what was most strange was that these were some of the easiest to play – where I made fewer mistakes, while concentrating less. When I was learning these, I had very much ‘surrendered’ to my teacher’s demonstration rather than trying to consciously understand what was going on: What we might call an “NLP Modelling” state.

Here are two things that I want to highlight from this:

1. What is your Learning Rate Determining Step? What has stopped you from learning quickly and easily is as unique as you are – being able to identify those obstacles and tackle them is a profound skill that is remarkably effectively ignored by most of us. When you are learning something, whether it is a status skill, a professional skill, or an intellectual pursuit, you can focus on finding the constraints, the bottlenecks in your learning, the “Learning Rate Determining Step” in the process. Once you’ve found it, find a way to overcome that LRDS (like putting notes on the keys) and align the way you’re doing things to overcome the LRDS.
2. You can absorb and learn unconsciously. We can absorb information presented to us quickly and easily if we can access an appropriate state. To do this, we can just let go of our need to feel like we know what we’re doing, and become like a child again – curious, open and willing to make mistakes.

I’m curious as to the extent that I can stop trying to learn consciously and deliberately so much, and focus more on that unconscious assimilation style… it sure is more fun!

(Of course, I’d love to have educators who focused more on removing the constraints to my learning rate than they did on how to design a powerpoint presentation… though let’s start with small steps.)

In the past two weeks, I watched my four-month-old son learn to blow raspberries. Inspired by reading that this would be good for his language development (seriously!), and knowing that his mother can’t blow raspberries, I made the sacrifice and regularly blew raspberries at him. He was surprised at the start, then he started laughing. Then he started trying it out for himself. It took a while, and he ‘fell over’ a bunch of times. Even now, his raspberries are particularly sloppy. But he watched me and he did it – today, he can reliably exit a room and blow me a raspberry!

Interesting skills are usually the most difficult to transfer. We can learn Newton’s Laws, but it’s another story entirely to learn to think as Newton thought. Those tacit and almost invisible skills that sometimes leave behind traces of brilliance are the ones where we lack the language to teach the skills. Often we lack the explicit knowledge as to what is being done at all. Yet an infant can learn without language. They just look out at the world with eyes wide open and a willingness to explore, experiment and experience.

In NLP terms, we could call this modeling. Modeling is how Dr John Grinder learned to do Gestalt Therapy from Richard Bandler and Frank Pucelik, the process yielding what we now know as the “Meta Model”. Modeling was then applied by them, and the original study circle, to learn from Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson, Frank Farrelly and others, thereby creating the original foundations of NLP.

NLP Modeling (or NLP^Modeling) is more than just Strategies, and seems mostly taught explicitly and comprehensively as part of New Code NLP trainings.

Jeff has given me the lead on this event that will be the first of it’s kind in Asia where you will be able to learn not just more advanced NLP techniques, but NLP Modeling. We’ll cover more advanced NLP techniques of course. Though more than just a collection of techniques, what most attracted me to NLP in the first place is how NLP provides a mechanism to get access to genius by absorbing their skills.

If you’ve looked at an infant – like our son Alexander – you’ll notice how they can have their eyes wide open as they look out at the world, absorbing whatever lies before them. They don’t ‘analyse’ or ‘think through’ what they are doing; instead they just absorb the behaviours of those around them. At the dawn of NLP, Grinder modeled Bandler to as they developed the Meta Model, and they did it together to develop the Milton Model and so much else. Learning to model deliberately helps us take NLP to an entirely new level.

We are looking to run this over four weekends, currently:

• March 26-28,
• April 24-25,
• May 8-9, then
• May 28-30.

So, all up, 8-10 days of training where you can learn to:

• Identify, apply and use advanced language patterns to influence and persuade,
• Connect with that state where you are at your very best whenever you want,
• Learn to apply NLP Modeling (those skills that Bandler and Grinder applied when they founded NLP) to learn whatever you want to learn,
• Get more clear about what is most important to you than ever before,
• Build rapport and understanding from those around you,
• Connect with the metaphors, questions and beliefs that drive your life,

More generally, you can walk away enjoying experiencing more excellence, more often.

For more information, on how to become a Master Practitioner of Neuro-linguistic Programming with Dan Smith, click here.