My experience with Transformational-NLP
Welcome Entrepreneurs, I'm so glad you're here. And a special welcome to those new subscribers who have joined us since last issue (a fun one, asking Why do you work? using Zumbach the Tailor).
After a year of intensive training, I'm excited to announce that this month I'll officially finish my Transformational NLP training (Master's Level) at NLP Marin. I haven't talked much about my work there to date, both because I wanted to wait until it was complete, and frankly also because for a while NLP seemed a bit too much like magic for my scientific brain to trust. But once I grokked the logical, neurological foundation of it all, well, let's just say I've been bubbling with the possibilities since.
So without further ado, a piece about my experience with Transformational NLP (neurolinguistic programming).
My journey with NLP
I logged into Zoom for my first session of Transformational NLP, skeptical because the recommendations I’d gotten from two of the top executive coaches in tech sounded too good to be true, and excited at the idea that they actually might be accurate.
“Big, significant shifts in a person’s way of being, the type of stuff that might take years of therapy, in two hours,” one coach had said.
“The most practically effective foundation for helping people change,” said another. “Change not at an intellectual level, but at a neurological level.”
I was early in my journey to becoming an executive coach, and I’d been exploring options for formal training. I’d learned that Transformational NLP (“T-NLP” for brevity in this article) – founded by Carl Buchheit at NLP Marin, and less about installing powerful brain programs a la Tony Robbins or Landmark style NLP, and more about helping people come into rapport with themselves so they can naturally live their best life. It was at the cutting edge of how the top executive coaches in the tech industry were helping their clients unlock their minds, but before investing in the yearlong certification process I’d decided I wanted to experience it for myself.
And because I’d seen no reason to fuck around, for this Zoom call I’d decided to lead with my most deep-seated belief: that at bottom, I was not and would never be good enough.
A sixty-something gentleman popped onto my Zoom screen wearing a blue sweater, huge headphones and a smile, and asked me what brought me there. I unloaded. I explained that I’d always felt unworthy. Not good enough. I explained that after working with that belief for a year, I’d developed the ability to spot it in real-time and choose different actions (I wrote about this process for Mindful magazine here), and that as a result I’d been much more present in my life. That presence had led to my becoming significantly more successful in the material sense as well, and overall I felt like I was making progress.
The only thing was, as competently as I was now working with the feeling of not being good enough, I still felt it. Intensely. It wasn’t true, I could see, and I no longer acted out of fear of it being true, but it still sucked to feel that way all the time. I remember giving him an out, saying I wasn’t sure that T-NLP could help with something that ingrained, and that we could pick something else if we needed to.
After asking a few clarifying questions, he said, “so it sounds like things are going ok for you, but you still feel not good enough. And what you’d like is to feel ok about things being ok. And maybe even, someday, feel good about things being good. Is that right?”
I hadn’t heard it put so succinctly. I nodded.
“Yep, we can work with that. It’s all adjustable,” he said. “So when things are going well, what stops you from feeling good about that?”
And in the next 30 minutes, the recommendations of my colleagues were proven right. This delightful grandpa with strong wizard vibes took me on a deep dive into the recesses of my mind, unearthing and exploring the specific incidents in my past that first programmed me to believe that I wasn’t good enough. Once he helped me access the first occurrence of the belief (although there were many incidents we covered, the primary was when I was four years old in the driveway of my parents house; a memory I didn’t even realize I had turned out to be the lynchpin of the whole thing), he helped me bring my present-day wisdom to help four-year-old Ryan understand just how valuable he was and just how much he would eventually accomplish. I relived these very specific memories – memories that I didn’t realize were as traumatically formative as they were – but in a way that for the first time they felt ok. It was a 30-minute whirlwind of emotions and breakthroughs, and I was completely drained when we closed the Zoom.
What the fuck had just happened? I had no idea. But the last thing he said stuck with me. “What should I do now?” I’d asked.
“Nothing. You don’t have to remember anything or do anything. Just pay attention to how things feel, and let’s talk again in a month.”
Change happens experientially, not intellectually
We tend to believe humans think in words, but actually that’s a learned ability that is built on top of our brain’s natural processing language: sensations.
A program or pattern in your brain is effectively a series of pictures, sounds, smells and tastes that collectively create a feeling inside you (all of that being, collectively, an experience). These feelings then cause us to take action in an anthropomorphic system of cause and effect. We then describe all this using language, but only after the fact.
Most traditional therapy (CBT, etc) works with language, and so is necessarily a layer of abstraction above your brain’s natural programming: sensations and experiences. Language can be really helpful in understanding intellectually why you are the way you are, but your brain typically only changes its patterns based on new experiences (think about the difference between your mom telling you not to touch a hot stove ten thousand times, versus one time of actually touching it).
Talking about your sensorial brain patterning in an attempt to change it is in some ways the equivalent of trying to fix a carburetor by pushing buttons on the dash. T-NLP, by contrast, just pops the damn hood.
Instead of talking about the fact that you freeze up in front of investors in an effort to understand why, a skilled T-NLP practitioner can isolate the specific day in third grade that, after flubbing a line in a school play, you decided that speaking in front of people is dangerous. The specific moment in your life when that troublesome pattern, the one currently causing your palms to sweat in front of investors, was first learned. Then, they can work with you to re-pattern that experience using all the feelings of confidence and safety you’ve earned in the 30-years since, completely changing how that experience feels to your nervous system. What was a traumatic memory being subconsciously triggered each time you step on stage, becomes a benign example of one time you were still learning how to talk in public.
By intentionally connecting a feeling of safety (for example) to that formative experience in third grade, that painful memory is then experienced with a feeling of safety from that point on (as neuropsychologist Donald Hebb has said, “neurons that fire together, wire together”). And once a traumatic memory no longer feels dangerous, all the coping mechanisms we’ve subconsciously developed to keep ourselves safe from it (like the automatic activation of our physiological warning systems – rapid heart rate, sweaty palms – when we stand up in front of investors) are no longer necessary.
So with nothing to defend against, those subconscious defense mechanisms just stop. And with dry hands, you go ahead and crush your investor presentation.
Changing the way formative experiences feel is just one example of how T-NLP can shift things. It’s a toolset that is used to amplify ACT therapy, mindfulness, the Enneagram and whatever other models folks find useful (there’s some especially cool T-NLP stuff involving IFS – internal family systems – with which I’ve been working recently as well).
Whatever the context, through T-NLP change doesn’t happen because we understand our issues better. Not because we try to be different, or discipline ourselves to do better. Change happens because we have intentionally shifted the sensory, experiential foundation on which our mental blocks rest, so the blocks that are causing issues become irrelevant. And once our mental blocks are gone, our real-world results take care of themselves.
If this section reads technical, that’s because it is. T-NLP is a modality that enables us to precisely target and shift the code in our minds that creates our experience. It’s called Neurolinguistic Programming for a reason.
What happened after
As weird as the experience was, I forgot about it for a couple days, caught up in the hustle of building a company. And then it dawned on me, as I was driving my kids to school, that I was driving at the speed limit, and had been doing so regularly for more than a few commutes. I’d a well worn habit of driving exactly 84-mph – which I’d decided was the absolute maximum someone could drive without getting pulled over – and now I was driving 70 on the nose. What’s more, I felt no real desire to speed up. Weird, I thought.
A week later, in a window between two meetings I found myself with the surprising idea to read a book. Those windows had always been precious opportunities to fire off emails or check boxes – quick hits of productivity dopamine – and Laura (and to some extent my employees) had learned the hard way not to try to interrupt them. And yet there I was, reading a sci-fi story. Wasn’t that novel? And then a few days later I decided on a whim to have breakfast with Laura before my 10am meeting.
For some readers this may seem rote. For me, this was revolutionary. It was entirely out of character, but in a wonderful, freeing kind of way. Reflecting on this a month later in preparation for my follow up meeting with the Wizard, it felt as if the volume on my existential angst had been reduced from a 10 to a 2. After one meeting, what had been a constant hum of anxiety driving me to either be productive or to think about how unproductive I was being (or, apparently, to speed on the highway), had become a sensation so distant I had to actively try to remember what it felt like.
I worked with the Wizard a few more times over the following months, each time dialing in the experience I wanted more exactly. Some sessions were lightning bolts like the first (a session on my resistance to money led to a significant increase in income, for example), and after some the results were much more nuanced. Nevertheless, over time, the impact was undeniable.
Life was good. And I felt good. In a way I hadn’t realized was even possible.
I had to learn how to do this. So I began training to become a practitioner.
Now a year later, certified as a T-NLP Practitioner by NLP Marin and a month away from certifying as a Master Practitioner, what was at first a strange, obtuse voodoo that somehow moved immovable personality patterns has become a proficiency in my work with leaders.
The power of Neurolinguistic Programing and how T-NLP supports my work as an executive coach
In my practice, I don’t consider it my responsibility to transform my clients (although it does happen). I think of my primary responsibility as helping clients develop the capacity to transform themselves, consciously and on demand, as much as circumstances require. I’m a fishing coach, not a fish salesman.
Accordingly, when working with clients, my primary goal is to help them develop those capacities, which typically means time and a lot of practice. There are no shortcuts to developing your metacognition skills, somatic awareness, or emotional intelligence, for example. You have to earn them.
However, often along the path to becoming self-generating, a client will run into a doozy. A limiting belief or a patterned reaction that is causing so much pain that it actually gets in the way of not only their work and what they want out of their life, but also their development process in our capacity-building work together. It’s in those cases that I find myself using T-NLP most often, to change the way something really big feels for a client, removing the obstacle to their growth and allowing them to continue developing quickly and naturally in the way they want to.
That said, I’m still figuring out the balance. There’s value to having the way you think changed, but in my view there’s more value in learning how to change the way you think whenever you want, and I’m still calibrating how to provide both without giving up either. Like so much of my life and my work, and like so much of the experience of being a human being, there is no rulebook. I’m sure my T-NLP training will continue to integrate with my work with leaders in new and beautiful ways as time moves forward. And starting next month, I’m excited to begin augmenting my T-NLP chops with a deep dive into Presence Based Coaching, further deepening the results I can provide for founders.
Either way, helping someone change into the person they want to be, and develop the capacity to continue consciously changing on their own, is the most worthwhile work I can imagine doing. And I’m really glad I did the deep dive on myself, jumping full into the deep end of the T-NLP pool, to enable me to support leaders with the most effective tools possible. Supporting change at an experiential & neurological level, not just an intellectual level.
Speaking of which, things have been going great these days. And I feel pretty great about that.
Things I read this week
One: How fear drives ineffective work (Mindful Magazine)
I referenced my previous experience working with my feelings of "not good enough" in the article above. Here's the article I first published about this, in Mindful Magazine.
LINK >>
Two: How to change your mind (I-O)
As valuable as T-NLP can be for adjusting specific experiences, I've found there's nothing more important to a leader's capacity for self-generation than developing the capacity to consciously change her mind in any context. Here's my how-to guide on that process.
LINK >>
Three: How to meditate (I-O)
Complement your reading on various modalities of change with this guidebook: How to Meditate. Of the thousands of different types of meditation practiced in the world, I've found Shikantaza to be the most applicable to leadership. Here's how you do it.
LINK >>
Four: Study finds physical activity halves anxiety (PubMed.gov)
Science validating what you may already know: A study of almost 200,000 cross-country skiers found that being physically active halves the risk of developing clinical anxiety over time. Not a skier? Less intense activities may provide some of the same benefits.
LINK >>
Five: Working for Workers Act, 2021 (Ontario Government)
"The Ontario government is introducing legislative changes today that would, if passed, make the province the best place for people to work, live and raise a family."
At first I thought, no way this would work in the US. But, at least in tech, talent is so competitive that many of these things are already happening. So, far fetched for the States, but maybe not that much?
LINK >>
Want to dive deeper?
If you liked this, check out this list of my top posts, read and shared by thousands of entrepreneurs.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Executive Coaching for Entrepreneurs
There’s a reason every elite athlete in the world works with a coach. You need more than one perspective to see your best work.
I’m an executive coach and the founder of Inside-Out Leadership, a boutique leadership development agency supporting founders to rapidly scale themselves as leaders, so they can thrive professionally and personally as their company changes the world. Leveraging 15-years as a founder/CEO, a decade of meditation & mindfulness training, and deep training in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), I have helped leaders from companies across the world, funded by some of the world’s top venture funds, to design a more conscious life and make key changes to improve their performance and satisfaction.
I coach entrepreneurs how I want to be coached:
Focused on the person, not the role.
Focused on results, without the fluff.
To learn more about working with me, click here.