Yesterday I mentioned the two commandments of NLP.
(Yeah, there are just two. Can you believe that?)
Today, I want to illustrate the second one so you're clear on what it means. Let's review it for a second.
*cue the trumpets*
Commandment II: Thou shalt build useful descriptions.
Let me illlustrate this with a quick story.
One of my clients had been working with a marketing coach for several months before coming across my stuff on dailyNLP. He'd hit a wall in his coaching because the coach now kept on insisting that he had to keep posting on social media even though he wasn't getting satisfactory results. Week after week, his coach would just hit him with "you have to be persistent!"
Clearly, the coach was not offering him a description he could understand and use to move forward.
Here's a summary of our conversation.
Me: "What result are you trying to produce?"
Client: "Grow my Facebook audience to 30,000 followers from about 2,500."
Me: "How are you going about accomplishing that?"
Client: "I'm posting every day on my page, sometimes images and sometimes videos."
Me: "How long have you been doing that for?"
Client: "Every day for three months."
Me: "How's that working for you?"
Client: "I'm sometimes able to get one or two followers on a day's post, but more days than not I fail to get any."
Me: "Is that the rate at which you'd like to be making progress?"
Client: "No, I'd like to go much faster."
Me: "OK. So what you're saying is that you're moving in the right direction, but not at the speed you want. Do I understand this correctly?"
Client: "Yeah."
Me: "Got it. In short, you're not getting what you want. What would be just one different approach you could take to growing your Facebook audience?"
Client: "I could host a Facebook live with a colleague of mine and ask him to invite his contact list."
Me: "Have you tried that already?"
Client: "I've thought about it, but I haven't tried it yet."
Me: "What would happen if that worked?"
Client: "I might be able to grow my audience by twenty or thirty followers in one shot."
Me: "If that happened, would you be satisfied with your growth rate?"
Client: "Yes."
Me: "When would now be a good time to try that?"
Once he was excited, I offered him the abstract recipe.
- First, be clear on what you want to accomplish.
- Figure out an approach to accomplishing it.
- Execute on it.
- Notice the results you get. Does the approach yield the result you want? Or does it fail to yield the result you want?
- If it fails to yield the result you want, identify a different approach and go back to step 3.
- Keep cycling steps 3, 4 and 5 until you accomplish what you want.
I then checked with him if it made sense to him. He said it did. I then said: "That's persistence."
I watched him with satisfaction on the Zoom call. His eyes rolled around as his neurology got rewired.
What enabled him to break through his frustration?
A description he found useful. He could take that and run with it.
Second commandment fulfilled.
