Someone recently asked me if the NLP Master Prac course I teach is “high performance”. I thought I’d share my response with you and let you in on a secret in the process.

But first, let’s tackle the “high performance” issue. Forget “high performance”.

To me, the Master prac is about two things – mastery and excellence.

Don’t get me wrong though. I think we can all agree that high performance is good. It’s just that I believe high performance is far from the pinnacle of excellence. I’d better explain what I mean.

High performance is what you get when you refine a process to near maximum efficiency or greatest effect. I agree that’s a worthy goal. So far so good.

However, the top limit on that, the highest performance, is defined by the nature of the process itself.

For example, you can build and fine-tune the best manual typewriter ever so it performs at its highest efficiency. Yet an average word-processor will out-perform even the best typewriter. This is why I’m asking you to focus beyond high performance. It only makes sense.

And high performance is generally about doing the best you can within the existing system. That’s why I focus on mastery. The journey from basic learning to mastery is about moving from learning the rules, to knowing how to bend and break the rules and far beyond – knowing when the rules simply don’t exist.

The most apparent evidence for this is in entrepreneurial behaviour. Top entrepreneurs are rule breakers and rule re-definers. They don’t just break their toys – they create something radically better from the pieces. Something revolutionary.

To me, that is mastery.

The Master Prac is also about excellence – and excellence is a personal quality. so you must get the learning that you personally need. How?

I’m going to let you in on a secret about our NLP Master Prac that few people are aware of.

The Master Prac syllabus allows us greater flexibility to focus the course on the areas of application that are most important to each of you. Naturally, we do this within the scope of the skills, techniques and awareness-enhancing exercises that make our NLP Master Prac such a high-level training. So participants bring their wish-lists – and finish the course feeling completely satisfied.

We ask participants to bring their NLP wish-lists. What would be on yours?

Would you like to be able to say this afterwards?

“Absolutely awesome! My ‘wish list’ goals were attained within the first 3 days. As the fundamentals of NLP were covered we moved into the mastery of NLP and the group started to create new patterns. I really felt as if I was in a pioneering development group. All of the trainers and assistants are friendly, good-humoured, down-to-earth and highly skilled. This course went way beyond what I expected. Superb value.” – Colin G Smith, NLP Master Practitioner

Go here if you want more proof.

What would you prefer now : high performance or mastery?

There is a further step beyond that level of mastery too. Let me know what you think that is in your comments on this blog.