Tom MacKay’s NLP Blog

What makes a master of a field?

Take a couple of minutes now and just write down what for you sums up a true master of something…

People will often make a list of things such as experience, skill and abilities.

However it’s a lot more than that.

Just being excellent at something doesn’t make a master. That’s not enough!

There are lots of people who are technically excellent, but it’s certainly not what you’d label as mastery.

Beyond skill are other important keys, such as:

• Commitment
• Dedication
• Focus
• Vision
• Passion
• Curiosity
• Desire to continually grow

These are not qualities that can be developed from a book, but come from the inside. At the same time they are qualities that everyone can develop because we have these resources and qualities within us.

If you want to become a true master it certainly involves being excellent in a field. Just being average will never make a master. But in developing excellence, it’s also a matter of the other qualities that make true mastery.

That’s something anyone can develop – so let’s explore some of these keys:

Commitment, focus and dedication – true masters have a real commitment and dedication. When you meet a true master, you can just sense their presence when you meet them. They have a total dedication that inspires other people.

That’s a real key in mastery. So you will want to take some time to think about what really drives you – why is it so important for you to do what you are doing? When you know what really drives you, that’s a real key to inspire others.

Vision – that’s all about having a really clear outcome – knowing what you want and that you can get it! Don’t just think about it – write it down, picture it, imagine what it would feel like to have it – even draw it! The more real you imagine it the more powerful your vision will be!

Passion – when you know your outcome and have made it desirable, you should already have incredible passion for it – if you don’t, that’s a sign you need to really review what’s most important to you.

Curiosity and the desire to continually grow – these are the things that let you develop. It’s never the case that a true master thinks they know everything about something – they are always open to learning and developing. People often think the master knows everything, and in comparison to the beginner, it’s often the case that it appears that way!

However the true master is constantly developing and learning. This starts with curiosity. Curiosity is like the drive to development – the emotional state that drives learning – we’re all born with it (just look at small kids), however unfortunately sometimes it gets driven out of us! Keep the spirit alive and the real desire to constantly improve.

It’s really the case that mastery is within our reach. These keys will help make it happen. NLP is one of the most powerful ways I know to bring it into reality. Join our regular NLP trainings in London, or if you’re already an NLP Practitioner, join our NLP Master Practitioner training in Scotland or London.

I was watching the protests in Thailand on the news at the end of last week. It was really upsetting to see the violence that is happening at the moment. Thailand is one of my favourite places in the world to visit. The people there are lovely, the food is great and the scenery is breathtaking.

When you get to the airport, you see posters saying ‘the land of smiles’ and in our experience that really is the truth. People are so friendly and lovely there.

The funny thing is that last year we were in Bangkok at about the same time of year when there were also protests and one morning we turned on the television and saw the military reaction to the ptotests, a bus on fire and other things that worried us.

However the really weird thing was what we saw on the television was happening just down the road from the hotel and we wondered whether it was safe to go out.

When we did go out, we didn’t see any problems anywhere. The media had clearly done a great job of focusing on things that were happening in a specific area and made it seem like it was happening everywhere.

This is one of the dangers of generalization. A lot of people do this when they watch the news. I remember years ago I was going on holiday to Florida and my mother phoned me and said ‘be careful in America, because tourists get shot in America!’. She sent me a cutting of someone of had got shot in America, and from one incident generalized to America being a dangerous place, when in fact London has its fair share of shootings, stabbings and other crimes!

It is really important to view things we read, watch and hear about from an objective viewpoint. When I first learned NLP I learned incredible ways to get a new perspective on things. Some steps that will help are:

1. Step back from the situation and imagine viewing it from a distance
2. Ask yourself, is this really true? Where specifically is this happening? What specifically is happening?
3. Ask yourself ‘Does this really affect me?’

Clearly there are some major problems in Thailand at the moment that are more intense than in previous years.

So how come in such a beautiful environment with beautiful people there could be such intense dispute?

It all comes down to values. Values are those things that are most important to us – those things that we are willing to invest our time, energy and resources into either having or avoiding.

To stay true to our core values and beliefs, people are willing to do pretty much anything – even go to war.

Everything you do has its motivation in your values – you only do things that are important to you – and some things are more important than others, which have greater impact on our lives.

I’ve just been running the 2^nd module of our Master Practitioner training where we explore values in depth.

You can find out about our NLP trainings with this link…

In an recent article about NLP in sport, I talked about the incredible power of visualisation. To recap briefly the main principle – your body will follow the last clear set of instructions your mind has given it.

To give you an example of this that you can try out, you first need to find a pendulum (not the a large one like in a grandfather clock! ). If you can’t lay your hands on a pendulum, them get hold of a plumbline and put a thread through it. This is an amazing exercise I use regularly when I am running my NLP training in North London and it really can shock people!

Now, hold the chain or thread gently between your thumb and index finger, relax your arm and imagine drawing a circle with your hand holding the pendulum or plumbline. Don’t move your hand – just imagine drawing the circle in your mind.

Now for most people, what you will find is that as you imagine drawing the circle in your mind, the pendulum starts to move in a circle also. In case you are thinking it is due to random movement in your arms, now imagine drawing the circle the other direction and be surprised when the pendulum starts moving in the other direction!

Let me reassure you, it is not some spirit moving the pendulum! Through imagining drawing the circle in your mind, you are sending communication through your neural pathways to your muscles in your arm you are imagining using to draw the circle. You cannot see your arm moving, however the micro-muscle movements (a great bit of jargon that basically means tiny movements in the muscle!) are amplified by means of the pendulum and you therefore see the pendulum moving in a circle.

The same thing would happen if you imagine doing any behaviour. For example, if you imagine doing a high jump perfectly and run through in your mind what you would hear, see and feel whilst you do it, you will actually be stimulating the neural pathways and muscles involved in the activity.

Just in case you are thinking ‘hey does that mean I don’t need to go to the gym any more?!’, I’m afraid its not going to build muscle of make you lose weight simply by your imagination, however it will make performing the activity easier the next time you do it – because you’re going to train your neurology in the movement.

I often coach athletes using NLP in sport and also hypnotherapy to help enhance performance and take athletes through powerful visualisation techniques to help them improve their performance and they achieve outstanding results.

The key is really that you need to imagine doing perfect performance. If you run through in your mind incorrect technique, then you’ll basically be perfecting the neural pathways for incorrect performance. There’s an old myth – ‘practice makes perfect’. It should really be written – perfect practice makes perfect!

So the tip for this article is don’t just do physical practice, make sure you regularly do mental practice. Visualise how you want your performance to be and keep doing it until you get it just right! It doesn’t matter whether it is in sport, public speaking or even improving your social techniques, this is going to help you.

If you want to know some of the most powerful methods for doing this rehearsal, learn some NLP or hypnotherapy – we run regular trainings at a very competitive rate to keep it accessible to everyone.

In the last NLP blog we talked about phobias – a little diversion today (then in the next NLP blog I’ll go back to phobias)…..

It seems to be everywhere now – attend a free NLP course! It reminds me of a story.

Have you ever read the story of Hansel and Gretel. They get enticed into a Gingerbread House with the offer of free sweets and food. After enjoying the delights of the free food, they suddenly find out they are being fattened up to be eaten by a wicked witch!

Most people know that nothing really is free – particularly with NLP. However the offer seems to be more and more enticing for people. Of course, people aren’t going to be eaten by a witch! However, they may easily be enticed into a training which may not be the best quality.

Trainings cost a lot of money to put on, and a day or 2 day course is also costly to put on. They also work very well at unconscious levels of influence. The law of reciprocity says that if you do something for someone else they will want to do something for you. Give them some free training and they are likely to sign up. But not necessarily for the best course for them. I don’t know any of the most established and quality NLP organizations that offer NLP trainings, so my advice is to be cautious. Only in January, I had 5 people contact me to retrain with me after a bad experience with other organizations. They had attended a ‘free’ training, and felt motivated to take the course after it. The thing with NLP is that the techniques can be so effective, that if someone has never experienced NLP, even attending a poor quality training can seem like a revelation. It is only when they attend an outstanding training they realize what they have missed.

So my advice is be a little cautious with free courses – if an organisation needs to put on free trainings of any length to put people on their courses, are they really established, or offering the quality of training that will really benefit?

It is a real challenge out there finding a good NLP course – there seem to be so many trainings, but only a few offer excellence. I little while ago I wrote a guide to selecting trainings, which you can find by following this link.

As I mentioned at the beginning, in the next NLP / personal development blog, we’ll go back to how to work with phobias.

In the meantime, if you are looking for the highest quality NLP training or hypnotherapy training, join us in March in London…

We also now have a range of hypnosis downloads – follow this link for details.