The Master Always Makes The Same Choice. So Did I

How I Ran A Successful NLP Training Business For Three Decades

© Richard Bolstad

Richard speaks at NLP Global Conference

In 1990, at 34 years old, I attended my first NLP Practitioner Training. I was living in a very different world. At this point I had never been in business, had no business management training, and was employed at a New Zealand Polytechnic in the kind of “safe” government job that I had always imagined myself staying in until retirement. In 1991, there were exactly 1193 New Zealanders connected to the Internet, which was just 3 years old, and the kind of work I’ve been doing over the last year, mostly online training on Zoom, was inconceivable.

The next year I set up a training business that embodied my life mission, and sustained me continuously through all sorts of economic and social challenges, through unimaginable technological change, and even through unexpected personal bereavement, for the next thirty years. I met and befriended remarkable people including many whom I had admired for years, I experienced a vast range of cultures, landscapes and cuisines across the world, and did what I love to do, being in charge of my own finances and my own workload. I moved from being a parent with children at home to being single and then to being in a relationship again.

Over that time, I watched many people try to set up such a business and give up, either because they were overwhelmed by the business challenges or because they couldn’t manage the relationship challenges. This article is about what I think made the difference for me. Not about the details of how to set up one specific training now, or how to write a book (which I describe in detail in other places), but how to build a lifestyle that sustains itself over decades. How to be in love with the same business for the rest of your life. If you plan your current career to last just one or two years, don’t read this. If you want a lifelong career, this is how I did it.

Make Your Long-term Plan The Ultimate Test of Every Decision

Management consultants McKinsey & Company have been called the most admired and the most disliked management consultancy on earth. They have been there for four decades: their 1982 book “In Search of Excellence” propelled Tom Peters as the world’s top management guru, and their 2019 research study into CEO performance mined 25 years’ worth of data on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies across 70 countries and 24 industries. Perhaps ironically, considering McKinsey’s own involvement with the 2008 stock market collapse, one of the six key differences between successful CEOs and less successful ones was focus on the long-term “Why?” behind their whole business. It makes a good place for me to start talking about my own experience of long-term business.

In NLP terms, we can say that every decision involves a comparison between expected results of a choice on the one hand, and desired results on the other. The most successful CEO’s make their decisions by comparing expected results from today’s decision to desired results many decades in the future: to a long term vision of the way the world could be for them personally and for all of us. Importantly, they do not compare expected results to desired results this week, or to what results their competitors have gotten over the last ten years. And that is exactly what new business developers are at risk of doing. In my business of running self-development trainings, the most obvious example is the person who tells me “I want to be Tony Robbins.” Successful managers are not trying to be someone else, and the obsession with what everyone else is doing, or what everyone else is earning, just drains energy.

Any time someone asks “Why aren’t I earning as much as her?”, or “Why is he getting all the customers” I know that this is how they torture themselves out of achieving their best. The first year that my business began, I saw that others in my field had glamorous full page adverts in alternative health and business magazines. Compared to my little advert at the end of an article I had written, it looked impressive. But all is not as it seems. In this case, people don’t actually read magazines for adverts: they read them for articles, and it turned out that sometimes huge investments in marketing earn nothing. Those courses I was seeing advertised usually never actually ran. My envy of them was misplaced. There is a saying about this in addictions counselling: don’t compare your insides to everyone else’s outsides. Even stronger, don’t compare your results to other people’s.

To ask better questions, you need to start with a vision of what you have that is unique, and where you would like to see that contribution going over the next decades. That means that sometime people will offer you great short-term money-making deals that you need to walk away from. Sometimes you will make decisions that do not maximize success now, but that build long term relationships and strategically place your company. Focusing only on money will result inevitably in short term decisions; a strategic long term plan requires a bigger vision of the future you want.

A couple of times people (once at a Polytechnic, once at a University) offered to simply take over my business and employ me as a trainer. That would limit my choices to their business outcomes, and I knew that in a couple of years, when their market had maxed out on my product, I would be on the street again. The easiest way to earn money would have been to agree, but I had a longer term vision of my career. Another example: I train internationally, and every time I enter a new market, students tell me how amazing my training is, and how I am underselling myself. Organizers start to see a glorious future as they imagine that interest in my trainings will simply continue to grow. They ask me why I am wasting my time in the small league when I could be doing so much better. In fact, results in each new market tend to taper off unless they work at building the business at least as hard as I work at delivering the trainings. They see the immediate results, and wonder why I don’t charge more. I look for the long term results and wonder how to build a business that will deliver longer term sustainable success.

One of the sayings that my Chinese chi kung teachers taught me encapsulates this: “The master always makes the same choice.” The master is not swept away by every new fad, by every new possible way of representing their business, by every new product or money-making opportunity. They know what they want and keep aiming for it. A new coach, or a new trainer, will need to work really hard for the first few years to get known as being a valid choice in their field, and they will objectively get better over that time …. If they keep making the same choice. If you are going into business, you need to have a backup funding plan to see you through that first couple of years, so you can afford to make the same choice through the tough times. Malcolm Gladwell claimed in the book “Outliers” that people as diverse as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, golfer Tiger Woods and musical group the Beatles had put in almost exactly 10,000 hours to get to the top of their field (That is five years of working 40 hours a week at it). The claim has been debunked as a “magic number”, but 10,000 hours remains useful as an average. You do not get to be the best in the field overnight, and thinking you already are there is not always a good sign.

Create an Ecosystem of Success

This means that the difference between “marketing” your services and “delivering” your services needs to disappear. Every delivery is a marketing process, that builds or does not build the long term success of your mission. If it does not build success in itself, it gives you valuable feedback about what to do next: it is never “wasted time”. Let’s take the example of writing a book. I don’t only write a book because I just want to write a book. That’s part of it, sure: I have a message I want to get across. But also, I write a book because books are a cheap way for people to check out my ideas, I write a book because it helps me plan the structure of a training on the subject, I write a book to be a text for that training, I write a book so that the trainers I train will eventually use that book to deliver their own trainings, making me more successful in my mission as they create their own mission, I write a book to answer all the questions about “where do I get more information” which people are going to ask me.

Another example is short “sampler” training events. For decades, I have run “free talks” and almost free training sampler days. I design these experiences so that they are easily available to large numbers of people. One time an office manager at our company expressed frustration at the low pricing of these. “We have 5-10 times as many people at these trainings as at any other trainings.” She argued “Why don’t you charge even half your normal entrance rate, and run more of these – they would be your biggest money earner. And why do you let your students market their services at your training, competing with you?” But the answer is that these events are not designed to earn the biggest amount of money possible: they are designed to market to a wider group of people who are just “checking out” the training, they are designed to help people who have trained with me to also find more clients by attending, they are designed to increase our prestige by showing the high level of interest in our trainings, they are designed for me to video and create introductory products for advertising. People are convinced to spend large amounts of money on our main trainings by seeing how our trainings have enabled others to be successful. If they see that I am always the only trainer I recommend, then they learn that becoming successful is not my aim for our students.

A third example. I attend international conferences where I am not even paid, and again, my aims are many there. I get to meet other trainers who may eventually become organizers or co-trainers or, even better, friends, I get to build my prestige in the international community of trainers, I get to again offer sampler experiences to students who would not have been ready to buy a full training from me, I get to learn from the other trainers, I get to practice with a larger audience, I get to clarify what is unique about my own approaches.

Every training and every product I design is intended to support the general ecology of my business. That way, I don’t have to do hard selling. Some trainers spend 1/3 of their time on an introductory weekend harassing students into attending their much more expensive week-long trainings, some trainers keep phoning and emailing each new contact several times a week, until the person either enrolls or demands they stop. I don’t do that. I do however think about how my course design can do that by itself; put another way, marketing is part of product design. And in offering certifications with my own and other international organizations, I am always thinking how this might benefit my students because, when my students succeed, I succeed. I believe that students are not attracted to our trainings by just one thing, by one finely crafted “marketing funnel” to use the jargon, but by the collage of books, articles, trainings, conferences, free talks, videos, YouTube adverts, Facebook posts etc. that create a sense of expertise, continuity and trustworthiness.

Make Your Life Story Your Business

Whoever you are, you cannot be and do everything. The other side of making every task simultaneously a marketing venture, a training tool, a resource for students/clients, and a learning experience for me myself … is that I am choosing specific things and not trying to do everything that I think is cool. Each year I have people who approach me with great new ideas about what I could do for their project, which always seems to them to be eminently aligned with my own purpose. The reality is that I am already busy with my own definition of my mission. For the same reason, like most business managers, I don’t just “get together for a chat” with random people. There are lots of random people who would love to meet with you, and the fact that they have no specific plan about what you will do at that meeting suggests that this is the way they run their life, and that if you invest energy meeting with them repeatedly, this is the way your life will also end up.

Instead, I draw my inspiration from my own life experiences. No-one in the world is as good at being “you” as you are. And every experience you have had has helped shape that uniqueness, whether you liked it or not. I know that the advice in marketing frequently emphasizes specialization. With some redefinitions, which I will mention, that seems sensible to me. By trying to be everything to everyone, you fade into the background. You don’t have to attract every person: just enough people to make your mission succeed. When someone has a car window break, they don’t search the internet for “people who can manage any repairs for cars, buses, tanks and airplanes”. They type “car window replacement”. Sometimes they may even feel safer searching for the specific make of car that they have a challenge with.

In the NLP and self-development field, I have more than one focus, but I do, in my own mind, have five foci that have emerged from my work. For me these are:

  • Major social trauma recovery after war/tsunami/pandemic etc.
  • Cooperative relationship skills
  • Secular spirituality
  • Integrating personal development and neuroscience
  • Integrative models of coaching and training (like this one you are reading)

In 2017, I won an international NLP award for the first of these specialisms. The judges said “Richard’s nomination stood out to us as we could really see the difference he has made being an international NLP trainer in many parts of the world. He delivers with integrity and precision and has offered some invaluable help to people traumatised in the aftermath of earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan. He has also provided help in the aftermath of war in Eastern European countries. He has been described as “modest and very personable” and reading about the difference his NLP work has made, especially in response to a crisis, is pretty amazing.” You can see that they couldn’t really say “He’s an all-round, deal-with-anything, trainer who helps anyone, anywhere.”

But to create this “specialization”, I don’t artificially limit myself, I look at what I am already becoming familiar with and skilled at, and enhance that. Historically, this includes synthesizing fields that I have experience in from my previous life – I have been a single parent, I have trained as a nurse, as a teacher and as a psychotherapist, I had a fairly violent upbringing as a child. In terms of changing historical events that we are living through now (the Covid-19 pandemic, the aftermath of the 2008 stock market collapse etc.) these too become opportunities for me to specialize, rather than obstructions to my path. During the pandemic, I quickly learned how to run my trainings online and even became an “expert” at doing so in the NLP community. I figured that whatever challenges I was having in this current situation would help me understand others in the same situation.

The truth is that this naturalistic approach to specialization (as opposed to forcing yourself into a certain subcategory that you “think” would be your best specialization) applies even to your personality, which has also been shaped by your unique life experiences. I am an introvert, so of course I found it easier to adapt to the increased isolation of the pandemic. How I adapted does not have to be how you adapt. I am very “procedural” so of course I enjoy designing overviews of what I do, that have lists of seven steps, and instructions for identifying each step and responding to it. You may not enjoy that – in fact it is a big advantage that not everyone enjoys this; it means that some people would prefer to simply use my prepackaged procedure as an optional way of understanding what they do.

So, finally, this means that you will probably want to adapt what I say in this article, or even completely rewrite it, to make sense for your personality. After all, that is all I have done – explained what I do in a way that makes sense to me. But then, the very fact that this is an article about how to work in the same career for thirty years is, by definition, an expression of my priorities, and may have little use to some people, while being perfectly on track for others.

What’s in it For You?

Being in business means continuously contracting with other people. It is a common idea that the best solution in this situation can be got by asking yourself a question such as “How can I make the most money from working with this person?” On rare occasions I get the sense that others approach me with that goal in their mind, and I can assure you that, whether my mind read is correct or not, it does not feel nice to be on the receiving end of that. The person is constantly thinking how they can get more out of our work together, by giving me less. They repeatedly ask me if I can do more work, without pay, because that will make our arrangement go better (for them). They expect me to honour all my commitments, even when doing so will not earn me any money, but they don’t seem to be staying with commitments of their own, or they don’t even make any.

This begins with the simplest kind of business arrangement of all: “Can you do some free training/coaching for me? It will be a marketing boost for you.” Of course people don’t say it like that. They say “Will you do an interview with me for my podcast?” or “I’m going to be free next Saturday, and I like what you do. Can we meet up?” Let me be clear that I do occasionally do free podcasts for people (they have almost zero marketing value to me unless the person and I actually have a plan as to how specifically I could sell trainings or products as a result), and I do meet up with people sometimes (but almost always when we have a specific contract as to what mutually beneficial plans we are intending to discuss by meeting up, because actually I don’t just have “free time” to chat, and anyone who thinks I do is not likely to be helping my business any time soon). Knowing this, if I have a proposal like this for someone else, I think what I can offer in return and explain that to them.

Successful business arrangements come from having good “second position” in NLP terms: being able to think about what this will be like for the other person and how they will benefit from it. When someone suggests we make a business arrangement, I am checking, “How well will this work for me and for this other person?” If their idea seems to be based on unrealistic assessment of the market, I decline, because neither of us will benefit. It has to work for them too, otherwise they will not be motivated to follow through. The principle is espoused by Tony Robbins in his article “:Five Steps for getting Anything You Want”. He points out “Don’t ask and just expect what you want. Figure out how to make the transaction mutually beneficial so the other party is incentivized to participate.”

Embody Your Vision in Plans and Policies

And finally, bearing in mind the cautions I just mentioned about plans and procedures not being everyone’s thing, I do a lot more planning than most people expect. Partially, this vast array of plans that support my business are the result of repeated professional trainings. In training as a teacher, I learned that teachers create lesson plans with measurable objectives, and curricula with logical sequencing, and valid and reliable assessments. I learned that teachers have clear ethical limits to their relationships and responsibilities with their students, that they don’t just refuse to pass people because they have a bad feeling about those people, that they need to have clear statements of all assessment criteria and make these known to students. I was kind of shocked, because I came from being employed as a certified teacher in degree program in a government institution, and all these standards were being routinely violated by untrained “teachers” in the personal development field. In the personal development field, there seemed at times to be no understanding of even the legal requirements around all these activities. As soon as you charge people money for a service, that service is governed by laws such as Privacy Laws, Taxation Laws, and Health and Safety laws.

Ironically, considering that they are teaching goalsetting, many personal development trainers and coaches seem to have sparse evidence of their own use of planning, goalsetting, project management, measurement of objectives and so on. I actually have written long term projects such as a plan of production of books, and plans for what courses I will deliver in 5 years time. This doesn’t mean I am trapped by this, merely that I am not just randomly making up ideas and forgetting them. I review these plans, especially annually, and set goals for what I hope to achieve each year. The process helps me think about what is happening from a meta-position, to “self-coach”, to understand the bigger picture, to create a stronger sense of achievement, to get clearer about where to put my energy and what to let go of, and even to reassure myself in difficult times. In short, it helps me to achieve all the things I was writing about so philosophically above. Even this article emerged partially out of a project of writing my life story in book form, which I did as a methodology for learning from my own experiences rather than as a public gossip project.

For some years, my private training business was a registered training provider with the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA), and their annual quality audit ensured that I had all these procedures documented, and pushed me to get clearer about all these things, just as their economic audit pushed me to keep better track of my income and expenditure. A core part of the “quality systems” NZQA audited, was understanding the roles and responsibilities of each person with whom I was interacting in my business, and creating guidelines for how they interact. Perhaps even more important than the plan of your curriculum and your assessments, is your plan for dealing with all the other “stakeholders”: your students, your ex-students, your applicants, your assistants, your office managers, your organizers, and your family.

Yes, I consider your family and friends to also be people that you need a plan for relating to. One of the true challenges of our business is the remarkable synthesis of personal and business relationships that occurs. A Trainer who I meet as a friend at a conference in one country may end up inviting me to train in another country two years later. An organizer who heard about me online quickly becomes my friend after several shared meals and time planning training together. The same general principles apply of course: this person does not know my mission, and has their own priorities. However open they are about our interaction at first, most organizers eventually hope to restrict my participation in trainings organized by other trainers in their own country. For me there is a balance: sure, it’s true that in the short term absolutely limiting me to training with them ensures people only have one choice to attend my training. It also helps them to commit themselves to promoting me longer term, knowing that it will benefit them and not their competitors. On the other hand, also thinking longer term, if I am seen only as this one organizer’s product, then my prestige in that country is gradually eroded and I don’t get the chance to build my image by working with other organizations who do not want to pay for the first organizer as a middle-person.

Without a doubt, one of the delights of my lifestyle is being able to travel and co-teach with my wife Julia. AND … anyone who has worked in a business with their life partner knows that the fact that we are still friends after doing this for sixteen years is also an impressive achievement. The guidelines for making a successful personal relationship and the guidelines for maintaining a successful business relationship are different. Having this dual role requires being crystal clear where one domain ends and the other begins. That includes the home office door. When you are in your home office space, you are working on your business, and need to be as free of personal interruptions as any employee at their office. This physical respect for space needs to extend to financial decisions and times to plan business or to “sound off” about the frustrations of the business day. I believe that getting this clear is essential to the survival of both your business and your relationship.

There are boundaries in my other “workplaces” too. A training is a system that has rules about who is present (such as entry requirements) and rules about what they do when they are there. This means that there are no undefined “visitors”. People often ask me if they could just “visit” the training to see what it is like. The very question indicates that they have no idea what it is like, and need to know stuff before they enter the room. Otherwise, friends will “pop in” to your training and say critical things about it to your students, or demonstrate processes in ways that contradict what you have just taught, or try to do exercises that they do not understand the prerequisites of. The training room door needs to be a boundary between your relationship as a friend and your relationship as a co-trainer, an assistant trainer, a student, or whatever other, legitimate role is agreed on there. On Zoom, this is also crucial to explain to students, who are at home, and need to set up similar boundaries there, or you will have ten year old children interrupting your trance demonstrations with questions about “What is trance”.

Policies ensure an efficient use of your time by effective planning, and by creating interpersonal boundaries and role clarity. This ultimately gives you, your students, and your colleagues more satisfaction, and more success with your long term goals.

Conclusions

In a sense, the daily activities of being a trainer, a coach, and a self-development business manager involve a continuous series of decisions made from a uniquely long term perspective. My aim in this article is to alert people to the choices that they are making, and to explain how I make these choices in ways that sustain a long-term business. So, what were the full six elements that McKinsey’s research identified as distinguishing successful managers?

  1. Focus on beating the odds (Get clear what success means to you, and pursue it actively)
  2. Manage performance and health (What I called paying attention to the ecology of what you do)
  3. Put dynamics ahead of mechanics (Get an objective, bigger picture view and align with it)
  4. Help directors help the business (Think ahead and consider the whole organization)
  5. Centre on the long-term “Why” (Genuinely pursue your mission and become resilient)
  6. Do only what you can do (Act authentically as “you” and manage your energy well)

The six elements almost sound too philosophical to make a difference, but when I look at my own life, I can see that a related list of philosophical principles has been guiding me too. The sections of this article here, based on my own personal case study, are very similar to the McKinsey list, and I have attempted to relate them to the very practical day to day career that I have enjoyed over the last thirty years. My goal wasn’t to create a world-leading multi-million dollar corporation, but merely to create a life I am pleased with. The principles are almost the same.

  • Make Your Long-term Plan The Ultimate Test of Every Decision
  • Create an Ecosystem of Success
  • Make Your Life Story Your Business
  • Aim to benefit others as much as yourself
  • Embody Your Vision in Plans and Policies

Here’s another way to say that. Integrate your choices in the moment now with your future life, integrate marketing, delivering and assessment into one process, integrate your life and your business, integrate your needs and other’s needs … and then create enough clear boundaries and measurable criteria so all this integration doesn’t mess stuff up.

References: