308 Part V: Integrating Your Learning
When Kate wrote her book Live Life. Love Work she was curious about the
lessons to be gained from numerous professionals about times when they
achieved a flow state of contentment with their lives. When she first began the
modelling, she built a framework to focus her attention and questioning on
some core principles about how professionals steer a course in their lives,
and worked with an acronym that she thought would be memorable for her
readers. As she began writing up the research, and using the approach within
her own coaching practice, she realised that if she kept to her precious model,
it would be contrived. So she simplified the model to one that more usefully
encompassed what she heard in her interviews. This one became a clearer,
more valuable framework for her readers to follow.
Testing the prototype
When you have your model, be willing to test and continuously improve upon
it. The NLP TOTE model encourages you to Test, Operate, Test, Exit to test
your prototype (see Chapter 12 for more info). The way to test is to teach the
model to others and see how it works. Do they get the same results?
As NLP-trained coaches, Kate and her colleague Rob were invited into a
global IT corporation to model Robin, an internal professional development
manager at work and observe how he guided his large team of consultants to
take ownership of their careers. Robin was interested in NLP and knew that he
was extremely successful at what he did, recognising aspects of his work, and
yet he found that fully documenting what he did and how was difficult.
As a result of modelling Robin at work, Kate and Rob were able to capture the
essence of Robin’s approach. Together, the trio converted Robin’s work into
a career coaching model and taught his approach to other senior managers
in the organisation. Kate and Rob made Robin’s original model more robust
by incorporating fundamental NLP concepts such as using rapport building
to improve business relationships, perceptual positions to enhance personal
brand development, and time lines and logical levels in order to capture
information about the career journey. In this way, the modeller supported
the exemplar to become even more capable, as often happens.
As the training programme became popular, those attending realised that
they now had a simple lifelong methodology to manage their own careers as
well as those of the people who worked for them. What was particularly
powerful about Robin’s approach was his use of metaphor and stories to get
the message across to fellow managers in a way that was creative and
inspirational. However, other people didn’t have to tell the same stories;
room was left for them to tell their own. Each of the managers attending the
training took the essential structure of the model and applied it in their own
way. The key proof of the model was that they all got results.
