JAMES TSAKALOS INTERVIEW – PART 1

I came across James Tsakalos when he was an active participant at the NLPConnections forum. He struck me as an open-minded and acute thinker about NLP, something that’s rare in the field – and no more something you’re likely to come across in a trainer than the trained.

Then, a couple of years back, I went to Australia for a month. I spent some of that time in Melbourne, where James is based, and we met up for…I was going to say coffee, but I think James was drinking soy chai latte at that point. We hooked up again, for gelato, and had a thoroughly pleasant time discussing a whole bunch of stuff.

The following year, I made sure to attend the Spiral Somatics training that James brought to London. It struck me then, and still does, that Spiral Somatics provides a great toolkit for interaction, an invaluable way of bringing social dynamics into a field that’s very much focused on the individual.

Anyway, I wanted to talk to James about a few things, and some of them feature in this, the first of a two part interview.

What do you pay attention to so that you can make things faster, easier, and more enjoyable, which seem to me to be things that interest you?

It’s all about simple. When I was a kid, I always wanted a sonic screwdriver like on Dr Who, because that one thing just did everything. I’m always looking for ways of doing things that involve the smallest number of moving parts. I hate fiddly bits. So I’m ruthless when it comes to that stuff. Some people like PCs. I like Macs.

So I’m constantly looking for simple unifying principles, ways of grouping things into intuitively logical ‘classes,’ and ways of killing two birds with one stone, as it were. And if something doesn’t make any sense to me and feels extraneous, I’ll just scrap it for a while as a test to see what happens. If nothing notable happens, it’s gone. The less time and energy you spend on pointless fiddly things, the more time and energy you can spend on things you enjoy and things that matter. When I grow up, I want to be Steve Jobs. Except without the pancreatic cancer.

What have you found most and least helpful in the NLP model?

Helpful? How about useful?

When it comes to useful, the first cab off the rank for me is modeling. Because when you can do it well, you can do all kinds of very cool stuff.

I’ve preached about this enough times in enough different places, so I’ll try to keep it brief here. Almost no trainers teach people how to model well (if at all) because they themselves never learned how to do it well (if at all). And then their students go on to become trainers, and the cycle perpetuates itself.

Of course, this doesn’t stop people from talking about modeling as if they have more than the fraction of a clue that they have, so it doesn’t end there. Misinformation runs wild, and a gobsmacking amount of people end up thinking that wearing the same brand of shoes as Richard Branson counts as modeling him, or some equally simplistic crap.

And it’s probably fairly obvious to a shrewd observer that doing stupid shit like that is not going to make you a billionaire.

So modeling – as it’s talked about by people who don’t know how to do it well – doesn’t always appear to be as unbelievably cool as it can be. But when you can do it well, you can do all kinds of very cool stuff.

But then I have a particular fascination with doing all kinds of very cool stuff, and not everyone gets turned on by that. So apart from modeling, the things from NLP that I’ve found most useful on a day to day basis would have to be rapport and calibration – in particular, calibrating congruence and incongruence in self and others.

Rapport, when done well, is just plain awesome. The whole world becomes more agreeable and accommodating. It’s very cool.

I used to fly between Melbourne and Sydney quite a bit. One year, I did about twenty of those flights, lugging a whole bunch of AV equipment with me. On each flight, I was taking roughly 60kg more than the baggage limit for domestic flights. So one time I was catching an 11pm flight after being up since 5am and training all day. I was utterly exhausted and slightly delirious. And that remains to this day the first and only time I have ever paid for excess baggage.

People are more responsive to your ideas and suggestions, you get better service wherever you go, and reaching consensus in a divided group becomes a lot easier. Life in general just becomes more pleasant. Rapport rocks.

Plus, as The Fabulous Donna McGeorge would say, “NLPers get free stuff.”

And while I have other ways of doing it these days, the principle for me is the same. It’s all about entering into a mutually shared trance with the person in front of you.

My other favourite nugget of ‘every day’ NLP gold is the ability to calibrate congruence and incongruence in yourself and others. When you can do that, you can explore different options or variations on a theme by poking around and asking lots of ‘what if’ kinds of questions. And doing that will give you a blueprint of exactly what to do in order to achieve your outcomes in the simplest and most direct way. Getting to the outcomes that you – or whoever you’re working with – wants, suddenly becomes staggeringly easy.

In my experience, this seems especially to be the case if you also have a good working knowledge of KE (knowledge engineering), which I do. I learned that stuff from Jonathan Altfeld, and now I teach the foundations of KE in my Master Prac trainings – because while it’s not ‘from NLP’ per se, it is nonetheless one of the more sensationally valuable things you can learn, in my opinion. And I’m far more interested in teaching and developing things that are innovative and high value than things that are little more than unchallenged NLP gospel.

The thing that I find least helpful in NLP is when people lock it in a box and seal it shut in the name of maintaining standards. There are major worldwide NLP associations that haven’t updated their NLP Practitioner syllabus in nearly twenty years. I saw a manual from another one the other day that outlined a timeline of all the significant developments in the field – and the timeline stopped at 1990. People get hung up on this idea that there are visual people, kinesthetic people etc – an idea that was put to bed with the publication of ‘NLP, volume 1’ over thirty years ago! It’s just crazy. Very few people are developing new, innovative and valuable stuff – and I think that’s a terrible shame.

Plus, when people do lock NLP in a box, it’s usually a box with someone’s name written on it. All of these big organisations and associations end up being somebody’s personal empire, and that’s when stupid exclusionary politics comes into play. Thanks, but no thanks.