Jean Michel Jarre is one of the biggest musical bad-asses you probably don't know.

He has been one of my favorite musicians/artists since I discovered him at the age of 15. He's single-handedly responsible for me learning music theory, playing the keyboards (and then piano) and the guitar, and getting on stage to perform music.

Jarre has released 17 studio albums and 5 live albums, along with 8 compilation albums.  As of 2004, he had sold over 80 million albums and singles. Unfortunately, I can't find more updated figures.

Not too shabby...

Beyond his music, he's famous for huge outdoor shows which feature lights, projections, lasers and fireworks.

He holds four Guiness World Records for biggest concert audience: 

• Place De La Concorde - 1979: 1 million people
• Rendez-Vous Houston - 1986: 1.5 million people
• Paris La Defense - 1990: 2 million people
• Oxygen in Moscow - 1997: 3.5 million people

In 1995, he was awarded Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur from the French Government and since 1993 he's been a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. An asteroid, 4422 Jarre, has been named in his honor.

Guy's a bad-ass. If you enjoy electronic music (not just techno or house), look him up.

One of the keys to his success, in my view, was a key distinction he learned from one of his early mentors — founder of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer.

Schaeffer didn't view music as made of notes. He viewed it as made of sounds. From that perspective, he started sampling sounds from nature and synthesizing them into various frequencies he then used as the building blocks of his music.

Today, it may not sound like much. Every artist and their mother samples sounds from nature, the city, public transportation, and every other environment available.

At the time, though, it was a revolutionary idea.

In my opinion, the Grinder and Bandler Brothers Band brought a similar distinction to the table when they decomposed thought and behavior into encoded sensory sequences in our nervous system. It offered a whole new way of analyzing and designing behavior.

If you want to understand the evolution of NLP, don't study the evolution of techniques.

Study the evolution of the code. 

For a coach with a modicum of creativity and thoughtfulness, it opens the doors to unlimited new ways of adding value to your clients' experience.

(Former) dailyNLP subscriber sent me this beauty in the middle of the night:

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Martin, your daily emails are crap. You say I would be getting an NLP tip every day. But all you do is sell your newsletter and most of the time you don't talk about NLP at all.

I'm gone.

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Please close the door on your way out, Simba...

Every once in a while, I get an email like this one from a Curious Cat who managed to find his or her way onto my dailyNLP list.

The problem with those people is that they have a bone to pick with the world and think for some reason that I have something to do with that. All they're doing is projecting.

They also believe I care one iota that they hate my daily emails. I do, but not in the sense that they might think. They're a great opportunity to do a dress-down of their short-sightedness for the benefit of my Rockys.

Keyword in that misguided missive: "about"

Mr. Curious Cat accuses me of not talking "about" NLP at all in some of my emails.

Darn straight I don't.

But that's where this little fur ball misses the point.

I might not talk "about" NLP in some of my emails. But I talk NLP in every single one of them. If you're fixated on lingo in order to identify whether there's any NLP content, you'll get blind sighted every time.

As J.C. used to say, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

Yes, pay attention to the words. But open up your eyes to the white space between the lines. Open up your mind to the structure of the text.

Soak it in daily. 

Hello hello on this most auspicious cold yet very sunny day in Ottawa!

Have you had the chance to watch the new Chris Rock special on Netflix? I haven't yet, but my newsfeed this morning suggest it is SMO-KING — and right in time for the Oscars this weekend.

That whole debacle is a great example of what happens when you're short on resources and creativity to respond to a situation. In some cases, clearly, the brain goes: "Violence! There's the best response!"

Until page 2.

That's where Chris Rock mocks you relentlessly just when you start to think the story might go away.

And speaking of being short on resources...

Coaches often hire me for mentoring because they feel inadequately equipped to help their clients move forward.

This generally happens after they go through a sequence of unproductive sessions, or clients quitting on them before the purpose of their coaching engagement is fulfilled.

(This always leave you with a "what the heck???" feeling...)

Almost invariably, what we discover is that they're only addressing the client at a single level — clarifying outcomes — and then monitoring the client's focus on those outcomes.

Their issue? Their map of the client isn't rich enough. 

There are two other dimensions every coach ABSOLUTELY must keep in check in order to keep the client moving forward. You don't necessarily need to reveal them to your client, but you should always be monitoring them.

(Incidentally, not revealing the map to your client is what allows you to perform feats of coaching magic. Of course, you might reveal certain portions and not others, but that's a conversation for a different time...)

The day I started my NLP Practitioner training, I witnessed (and was subject to) one of the most mind-blowing display of trance work I have seen to this day.

Wizard Rex Sikes bent the rules of time and space and transformed our 10-day Practitioner program into a 100-day program.

Funny thing was, I only became aware of what happened on day 5. As far as I know, I was the only participant in that cohort who caught on to what was happening.

Rex never shared explicitly what he was doing. But because I picked up on the pattern at the midpoint of the program, I was able to model the pattern as it happened.

It was trancery at its best. He weaved different techniques seamlessly and elegantly to deliver as potent a communication as Steve Jobs's famous reality distortion field.

By the end of the program, participants felt like they had known one another for a lifetime. We also all had a gut feeling of competence and confidence when it came to applying the patterning we had learned.

In the past twenty years, I've used this pattern so many times with coaching clients, delivering keynote speeches, conducting workshops and even working with my kids.

Imagine what would happen if you could help your clients truly feel confident about applying what you teach immediately... How grateful do you think they would feel? How many people around them would notice? How inclined would they be to mention you to others?

It was the summer of 1987 and our family was on its way to Toronto for the weekend.

On the menu, an awesome day at Wonderland, our local Six Flags amusement park.

(I'm an absolute sucker for amusement parks. At 46, you'd think I'd have retired from such infantile pastimes Not a chance!)

My Dad was blazing down on highway 401 with me sitting on the passenger seat. I've been taller than my Mom since the age of 11, so she's always let me ride shotgun. We were just about to enter Toronto's metropolitan area when my father told me:

"Roll down your window and look to your right."

I didn't understand why he said it, but I did it anyway. Twenty seconds later, a black Porsche pulled up to our car with the driver window rolled down.

Behind the wheel? Ben Johnson, who at the time was the world record holder for the 100m dash, wearing aviators. One year later, he would fall from grace at the Seoul Olympics. But on that summer day, I was seeing one of my heroes.

He looked straight at me. I waved at him. He waved back. Then, he pressed the gas pedal and left us in the dust.

Much of our life we forget. But some of the stuff we remember. I'm not sure why I remember that experience so vividly more than 30 years later.

This is the stuff we get to leverage in protocols like the Resource Triangle, which wizard Rex Sikes taught me how to use more than twenty years ago. I've leveraged it in countless coaching sessions to engineer breakthroughs with the stuff that my clients remember.

There's no easier way to get clients than to get better reality. As Naval Ravikant says, "you only have to sell because you don't know how to market, and you only have to market because your product isn't good enough."

The wifey and I were watching Chef's Table last night. I'm addicted to that show. I'll watch it over and over again if there's nothing better available.

Some of my favorite episodes:

• Francis Mallmann
• Grant Achatz
• Alex Atala
• Vladimir Mukhin
• Rodney Scott

There's a common theme that runs across the life of many of these chefs, and I think it offers a great lesson to coaches and NLPers.

At one point in their career, many of them got fed up with conventional cooking, said "F. it!" and started infusing their cuisine with the edge of their personalities. 

Curiosity...

Anger...

Exploration and provocation...

All of them were reluctant to take that step at first. They worried about what customers would think or say. But all of them got to a breaking point where they couldn't spend another day making dishes the same old way. Something inside of them wanted to burst out.

Eventually, taking their cooking to the edge made them unique and famous.

I propose to you that the exact same applies to your leadership style and coaching.

Learn technique as a way to fully and unapologetically express who you are as a coach — but never as a substitute.

Too frequently, I come across coaches and NLPers who have parked away their true colors in favor of a "sanitized," "spiritualized," "sterilized," "euphemized" version of themselves. 

They censor any feelings of anger. They get "disturbed" instead.

They don't want to get annoyed with pet peeves. They have to "honor" people's unique character traits.

They would never cut anyone out of their life. They want to feel "at one with everything."

I sometimes wonder if these people ever feel horny. Don't think so... They probably feel "tantrically stimulated."

I'm not speaking from judgment here. I used to be that way when I started in this journey. So I'm really laughing at myself and, in the process, giving you permission to dump all of that if they're your aspiration and embrace your nature as a coach.

Don't try to be light if you're intense.

Don't try to be intellectualized if you're raw.

Don't try to be cold if you swim in emotions.

The best thing you can do for your clients is to be you. If they don't resonate with it, fine. It's likely you won't do good work together anyway. There's a better coach for them out there.

The ones that do, though, will transform their lives through their relationship with you. You'll become a trustworthy partner and, in the process, you'll also free them to become themselves.

If coaching is cooking, and you're the chef, NLP is your knife. Learn to use it well so you can serve what you have to offer in all its glory.

It's 1985.

The world of NLP is on fire, because the Grinder and Bandler Brothers Band has just published their book "Reframing."

The book begins with this story:

"A very old Chinese Taoist story describes a farmer in a poor country village. His neighbors considered him very well-to-do. He owned a horse which he used for plowing and for transportation. One day his horse ran away. All his neighbors exclaimed how terrible this was, but the farmer simply said: 

"Maybe." 

A few days later the horse returned and brought two wild horses with it. The neighbors all rejoiced at his good fortune, but the farmer just said: 

"Maybe." 

The next day the farmer's son tried to ride one of the wild horses. The horse threw him and the son broke his leg. The neighbors all offered their sympathy for his misfortune, but the farmer again said: 

"Maybe." 

The next week conscription officers came to the village to take young men for the army. They rejected the farmer's son because of his broken leg. When the neighbors told him how lucky he was, the farmer replied:

"Maybe."

Is the farmer a flake?

Maybe.

But perhaps the story serves to illustrate how a change in context radically alters the meaning of the events — even retroactively. In NLP, the operative word we use for context is "frame," and one of the master skills we want to learn to use as a coach is controlling the frame. When we shape the frame of the communication and the interaction, we influence the meaning derived from it.

I first learned about framing from my NLP master teacher, Rex Sikes. Not so much in the content he presented during Prac Certification training, but the way he went about teaching that demonstrated in practice how to do it.

If you're interested in getting trained in NLP, and you want to see a master in action, definitely check out Rex.

The only reason I don't run my own Practitioner program is because I don't need to. Rex is the one I recommend to all my subscribers who want to nail down their NLP basics.

Gabriele Amorth was born on May 1, 1925, in Modena, Italy. 

He was raised in a devout Catholic family and attended seminary school in Rome, where he studied philosophy and theology. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1954 and began serving in various parishes throughout Italy.

Now comes the interesting part...

In 1986, Amorth was appointed chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome, a position he held for over three decades until his death in 2016. 

During his time as an exorcist, he claimed to have performed tens of thousands of exorcisms, and he was known for his rigorous approach to the practice. He believed that possession by demons was a real and present danger, and he often criticized the Catholic Church for what he saw as a lack of support for exorcists.

Amorth also published several books on exorcism, in which he shared his experiences as an exorcist and offered his thoughts on the nature of evil and the spiritual world.

He was a controversial figure in the Catholic Church, and his methods and beliefs on exorcism were often at odds with official Church doctrine. He believed that exorcism was a powerful tool in the fight against evil, and he advocated for a more aggressive approach to the practice than many other Catholic priests. He was also critical of the Vatican for what he saw as a lack of support for exorcists and their work.

I first found out about this enigmatic fellow last week, while I browsed my YouTube feed in search of a quick curiosity bite as I waited for my lovely bride at the bank.

YT offered me the trailer of Russell Crowe's brand new movie "The Pope's Exorcist," in which he plays the lead character based on Gabriele Amorth.

The trailer is hair-raising. Horrifying, actually. I don't know what it is about exorcism, but I find it a lot more terrifying than gory horror movies like Friday the 13 or Nightmare on Elm Street.

Still the NLPer in me can't help but take over...

"Possession"... Hmmm, that's a nominalization...

"If everything is a state, then it's just a change of state..."

"What happens if you make a radical change in the person's physiology?"

It's one thing to watch scenes from the bench. I bet it's another entirely to be in front of someone in that state.

And that's where the modeler in me kicks in.

When you look past the veil of words (exorcism) and the emotions they evoke (what comes to mind and how do you feel when you think of the word "exorcism"?), it's all process.

And if indeed there is such a process labeled "exorcism" that leads a subject from a before "possessed" state to an after "freed" state, it can be modeled.

(Provided, of course, the modeler is able to manage his or her state.)

No matter what the process is, if there is a pattern and if there is consistency, the process can be modeled.

I'm pretty sure it's much easier (and way more profitable) to model business and communication skills than exorcism when it comes to engineering breakthroughs for your clients.

Carlos Castaneda was an American author and anthropologist who wrote a series of books about his experiences studying shamanism with the Yaqui Indian sorcerer, Don Juan Matus. 

One of his most famous stories involves a lesson he learned about "stopping the world." Here's how the story goes:

One day, Castaneda was walking with Don Juan when he suddenly noticed that the world around him seemed to be melting and shifting. Don Juan told him that he had "stopped the world," meaning that he had shifted his perception so that everything appeared different.

Don Juan explained that stopping the world was a technique used by sorcerers to break free from their habitual ways of perceiving the world. By doing so, they could access deeper levels of awareness and perception that would allow them to see and understand things that were normally hidden.

To demonstrate this, Don Juan had Castaneda look at a patch of ground in front of them. At first, Castaneda saw only dirt and rocks. But as he continued to look, he began to notice tiny plants and insects that he had never seen before. He realized that his usual way of perceiving the world had blinded him to these things.

Don Juan then told Castaneda that stopping the world was not just a temporary shift in perception, but a way of life. He encouraged him to continue practicing the technique until he could access deeper levels of awareness on a regular basis.

This story has become one of Castaneda's most famous and is often cited as an example of the power of shamanic practices to transform our perception of the world around us.

Just like "stopping the world," modeling is a practice that transforms our perception of the world around us.

We start to notice tiny behaviors that we had never seen before. And then we realize that our usual way of perceiving the world had blinded us to these things.

Plus, it's the simplest and easiest way of moving clients from a mentality of victimhood to one of taking full responsibility and "protagonizing" their life.

My daughter immigrated to Quebec in 2019.

When she arrived, she had zero command and very little exposure to the French language.

So how did she manage, in less than three years, to make it to the top of her French class, beating even native speakers in her mastery of the language?

Quite simple.

I designed a modeling project for her in 2020. She followed it to the T, and in less than 4 months, she had taken her proficiency from complete beginner to fluent speaker and writer.

Now, she'll debate me on the right and wrong way to say something in French.

As a modeler, I can affirm you with certainty that more than 90% of the language-learning programs out there make it MORE DIFFICULT to learn a foreign language than it should be. By applying rudimentary modeling principles, any foreign language student could accelerate his or her progress.

What would happen if you were a language coach that offered a dramatically different method of learning a foreign language? One that would be more fun, easier, simpler and less stressful to go through? One that made you feel smart and capable rather than frustrated and incapable?

The biggest breakthroughs for our clients often come when we back up from content and help them adopt constructive practices as fast as possible.

And so it goes with a lot of the material inside the upcoming inaugural March edition of NP Insiders. It's not so much focused on stuffing you with loads of content, but on pointing you in new directions so you can inject your creativity, individuality and expertise into your coaching practice and innovate where all your competitors offer stale old sessions. And it includes insights which have been the most powerful and profitable (especially the one I share on page 2) things I've put into practice in my career and in my coaching over the past 23 years.

The Curious Cats who chase new ideas like mice but don't put them into practice might not get much value from it.

The Rockys who grab the bull by the horns and commit to innovating on their practice likely will.