NLP Coursers Podcast 17 transcript download pdf here: NLP Courses Podcast 16 transcipt

Or read below:

Hello and welcome to this week’s podcast. Wow! I just had a look and we have listeners from over 57 countries from around the world are downloading and listening to this podcast. I find that amazing and humbling. So everybody, thank you ever so much for making this podcast successful. What are we going to be covering in this podcast? Well I’m exploring the idea of can you make a living using your NLP skills? And I’m not talking about training NLP. There’s lots of NLP trainers out there, I get that! I’m talking about seeing clients on a one-to-one basis.

So this is for the entrepreneurs among you. The ones of you that are thinking that you would love to do this for a living. And I also think there’ll be a lot of value in this session for people who are employed and not thinking about setting up their own business. Because in this day and age, you may have one client which maybe your employer but you still need to market yourself and put your best foot forward for promotions, etc. But I’m letting you know upfront this is all about could you set up and run a profitable NLP practice?

Where you see people on one-to-one basis. Now up to per se five years ago I would have said no partly because NLP wasn’t as popular but at this point in the history of NLP that NLP has reached such a momentum now and is widely known, that I come across a lot of people seeking skilled and professional NLP practitioners to do one-to-one work with them. So yes! Now is the time that if you’re keen to set up an NLP practice, this will be the moment to do and you’ll be at the forefront of the wave of NLP practitioners that will start to make a living from this.

Now you also might be thinking, you know, “I’m a hypnotherapist. I’m a coach. I’m a personal trainer, golf coach, tennis coach” and you want to add the NLP skills to your practice already then that’ll be a wonderful thing to do. And already might start to find that people are asking you, “Do you do this thing called NLP? I think it will help me.” So there can be many applications to this session and we should go beyond setting up your own business but essentially the focus will be, “How could you set up your own practice?”

So there are five pillars to set up your own NLP practice. And this is partly because a little while ago I produced a report called ‘the five pillars of setting up a profitable NLP practice’ which you’ll be able to download in the resource section of the podcast.

Okay so what are the five pillars? Pillar one, training and accreditation. This is all about being professional and presenting the best foot forward. Pillar two, a value-based business and I mean that on two levels. What are your values? Aligning the business to your values and adding value to your potential clients. Pillar three, marketing and marketing in a way that is ethical and aligned with your values. Pillar four would be the client sections. How are they structured? And pillar five, I’m a big believer in investing back in yourself and your own company. Partly if you do want to help other people and you want to make a difference in the world and you would like an income then when you invest in yourself you can help more people.

Okay so there’s a lot to cover in this session. So let’s dive straight in! Pillar one: Training and accreditation. NLP is powerful. We often work in a deep unconscious level for profound personal change and transformation. Now would you like somebody working with your unconscious mind who’s only read a couple of books and has been interested in this stuff for a couple of years? Or would you prefer to have somebody who’s been trained and accredited? We’ll put it in a different way. If you’re going to have open heart surgery and your friend of yours said to you, “You know what? I’m kind of been interested in this stuff for a couple of years now. I’ve written books. I’ve got a couple of tools. Do you mind if I give it a go?”

Would you go through with the surgery? No of course you wouldn’t! So then I’m often asked, who would I recommend and I would recommend going to NLPcourses.com for professional accredited recognized training. But then again I am a little bit biased and I think you know that! Okay so pillar two which is a value-based business. Now if you’re trying to tell the world who you are and you don’t know who you are then you’re an idiot!

So starting with values, when you’re setting up your own business what informs your strategy? What informs where you’ll invest your time and energy into marketing? Or what are your values? What is important to you? What do you want to achieve? Now notice, I’ve said, if you understand your values around your own business and your own practice it informs your strategy. So, for example, if your values are things like building relationship, trust, making a difference, how would they inform your choice of action for marketing yourself for example? And you’re presented with two options. Option one, to place an advert in a shiny national magazine. The company will design it for you. All you need to do is write a few lines, include contact details and have a photo of you smiling dressed in your best outfit. Option two, write a report like the one I’ve given you in the resource section which can take you anywhere up to three weeks to prepare and ensure that you impart and teach something useful and demonstrate real value.

So based on those values, which one would you choose? No don’t tell me, you’ll choose option one and be lazy. Of course, those values would be option two to invest in somebody long before they invest in you. Now does that mean you’ll never put an advert in a magazine? Of course not! But it gives you a method for evaluating your decisions where to invest your time and money. Is there any evidence that running the business from your values truly make a difference? There is! A wonderful book called “Good to Great” by Jim Collins which if you haven’t read I highly recommend it. He’s looking out why some companies are great and some people are good. Because the danger is when you’re good you’re not going to be go great and one of the fundamental difference is the companies that become great live by their values. Now whether you agree to their values or not, they live by their values. And did it show on the bottom line? It did!

For example, in the book Jim Collins quotes this, “If you invested one dollar in an average company in 1926, return on that one dollar would be worth $415 today.”

Now here we’re only saying that invest that investing that same one dollar in a good company, not an average company, a good company, would yield return of $920 over that same period So there’s a jump up from being average to being good. However, if you invested that one dollar in a company that lives by its values -we’re talking about companies like 3M, Coca-Cola, McDonalds- like I said whether you agree to their values or not is a different matter, the return on that one dollar would be $6356. Wow! I think making business decisions consistently on your personal values is not only good for the soul, it’s good for the bank account also which neatly moves us on to pillar three: marketing.

Now already we can see that understanding your values as a person and how you wish to run your business will inform what you’re going to be marketing on. It also informs what you say to somebody so a way to think about marketing is about building relationships with people who has the same values as you. In NLP, we call that building a rapport.

So how do you track the right people? Clearly you don’t want everybody so based on your personal values, how do you build rapport? So, for example, if it makes any difference, how would that affect our marketing? In this sense you demonstrate how would you make a difference by sharing your knowledge or expertise? So let’s explore three ways of marketing yourself and you tell me which one would fit in with the value of making a difference. One, I’ll tell you how good I am. You’ll recognize people doing this when they say, “I’m the leader in the field. I can walk on water.”

Sounds like a hype? Because it is! Most people tune out to this and they consequently don’t even remember hearing the message of any kind. Two, which is a lot stronger than the first one is use of testimonials. People talk about you. They say things like, “I saw him walk on water. He’s amazing.”

Now when you have other people talk about you, it just gives you far greater credibility than talking about yourself. Because most of us will believe and accept these independent points of view to be honest because their reputations are at a stake. So two will probably be a lot stronger way of marketing. Now three, you demonstrate value through teaching and sharing your knowledge. That this is the preferred method as you could probably guess. If you provide answers to people and solve the immediate problems, what do you think they’d likely do in return when they have an even bigger problem? They’re more likely to come and ask you to help and solve that problem for a fee. Now it’s guaranteed but it’s highly likely. So you could choose to share our people tell him how great you are or provide and demonstrate a much more pleasant, sophisticated method by investing in them. So when they’re ready to invest in themselves you are the first person they think of. Now in marketing that’s called top-of-mind awareness.

So when they have the need that you’re offering, do they think of you first? Because the first person they think of will win the work. So how then do you do that? How do you create this relationship? Well there’s many ways and I would suggest start and build a database, i.e., collect people’s emails and names and start to communicate with them on a regular basis. But there’s many ways to start to build that relationship. Now your own website will be key to this. Then you have things like newsletters, podcasts, PDF download, maybe even create a PowerPoint presentation and put up for people downloads and of course there is the social media.

Now my suggestion is not to build a platform only on social media but to use it and direct people to your website. Then there’s webinars there. If you don’t know what webinars are, it’s an online classroom and Google Plus Hangouts is an excellent free example of doing that. YouTube videos, YouTube is incredible. It’s the second largest search engine in the world. Speaking out in public, emails, letters! Many ways to connect with people! And the more time people spend consuming your content, the more they resonate with you and they will then connect to your values and that means they’ve learned to trust you. “Trust” is an old Norse word, “trusta,” meaning strength. Apparently it also get to root word to the word true. So when somebody starts to trust you, they are seeing true strength in you.

Does that sound like a lot of work? Yes, it is! And will this be successful overnight? No! Will it take some time? Yes! Because that’s how you build a relationship with people over a period of time.

That then leads us to pillar four: the client sessions. Now as soon as you’ve built this relationship with your audience and they trust you, they’ll want to know the answer to two questions before they part with any money. How much would it cost? Prices has a great many variable which includes things how long have you been practicing? Your reputation and your market section! So at the moment I will charge anywhere from 500 to 1500 per session but I said I’ve been doing this a long time and I have a large international following with a history of achieving results. So perhaps you start off at let’s say a 100 pounds per session that lasts an hour.

You work hard and you put a lot of effort into your marketing and soon you have ten clients that you see each week. That then becomes a 1000 pound per week for ten hours work. What you choose to charge will be very different from what I charge and here’s a little tip about thinking about what you would charge. Work out how many hours of the week you’d like to work. Work out how many weeks of the year you’d like to work. Also how much you’d like to earn in that year and then divide that over that period of time and that will give you your hourly rate.

Then the next questions that your clients will ask you is how many sessions will I need? That NLP lenses have to fast and long-lasting change or to a steady growth and transformation and both work really well. So sometimes I see a client for a one-hour session when the goal is fast and long-lasting change. In the other circumstances I will see clients over a period of sessions. For example, I think seven sessions are very useful and they would kind of break down like this: In the first session we’re establishing the ground rules, determining whether they are the right client for you and are you the right NLP practitioner for them. You explain the process. You set up the expectations both for them and what they expect from you. Cover implications like missing a session. Take details of their medical history and any related personal history and you agree upon the goals. Now once you’ve completed that session, that moves into the next sessions which could be the NLP techniques where you use your NLP language patterns and that would last for maybe two possibly three sessions. So that means when we’re on session 4 or 5, we’re about midway through and I like to do a review. Where are we at? What do we need to still accomplish? Then we move into using out more NLP techniques and language patterns until we get to the end of the seven sessions and we review and celebrate. I’ve got a diagram that illustrates that so I’m going to put that in the resource section which you can either download or view.

Now pillar five which I’m a big believer in is to invest back in yourself and in your company. Now do you really want to help others? Are you ready to help them change and grow? Then why would you not invest in yourself and release your own true potential? Because without pursuing your own personal development and professional development, the danger is you come across as “insincere.” You think they need to invest in themselves but you don’t need to invest yourself.

It’s odd you know but when you invest time and money in yourself and your business, people seem to be more willing to give you their money. There is a confidence that you get that investment in self. You probably know people who only sign up for free courses. They only download free training material and worst still they may even steal other people’s work plagiarizing pass it off as their own, make pirated copies. And then these people are often surprised when people won’t invest in them and just take their work. This comes back to where we started with our pillars of values. Are you running a value-based business? Now have you noticed how often we attract people like ourselves? Please do understand me, I think there’s a lot of great free webinars, seminars, podcasts and PDF files out there but if you refuse to invest in yourself, why should other people invest in you? Now this is where it will possibly get a little bit mystical.

What you send out to your universe is what you get back. So in terms of my own personal investment let me tell you what worked for me. I read at least one book each week and occasionally two or three. I listen to at least ten hours of audio and have been known to consume up to twenty hours. Usually this is a mix of seminars and lectures and audio books and I’ll often travel around the world to attend trainings and get feedback and to be mented and I think it’s time well spent. And in one of the observations I’ve noticed that pretty much almost every successful person in all walks of life will invest in themselves in some way.

Wow! Are you aware of just how much we’ve covered yet again in this session? So a quick recap may be useful. So we’ve been thinking about could we run a business, a practice where we see people on a one-to-one basis using our NLP skills? We noticed that you might already be running a practice as a hypnotherapist, coach, personal trainer, maybe a sports coach and that this is hopefully giving you an overview of what your discipline and the NLP discipline meshed together? But also think if you’re employed and you intend to stay employed to somebody and you’re really enjoying that process that the thing behind that we’ve covered would apply to those areas too. It just happens that your biggest client is the person who’s employing you at the moment. So hope that’s all been useful. We covered the five pillars of building your own NLP practice and we summarized those as pillar one, training and accreditation, recognized training and accreditation goes a long way; pillay two, value-based business, Working from a place of value which informs your decisions and resonates who you are through everything that you invest your time and energy into which lead us nearly on to pillar three, marketing, how do we build a relationship, i.e., rapport building and when we think of marketing as rapport building it takes a lot of mysticism out of it. I think once we build that relationship and our clients trust us and they want to invest in us that led us to the client sessions and we noted that your client will then have two questions. A) How much do you charge and also how long will it take? And we explored that concept and then we touched upon the idea of pillar five which is to invest back in your company and in yourself.

I also offered you some resources and those resources included a PDF that went into more in-depth knowledge about this subject. Also give you a diagram of how the client sessions would look like and I recommended a book to read, which is, Jim Collin’s “Good to Great” which I’ll put a link in the resource section. So if you got any questions, can I serve you in anyway? Please do let us know! Leave a comment below and I’ll look forward to catching up with you soon. Have a fabulous week and don’t forget to be a little bit outrageous.

Take your NLP training to the next level

Click here for the NLP Practitioner

Click here for the NLP Master Practitioner

Click here for the NLP Train the Trainer