Every week I get emails from readers asking great questions. The questions vary, but the one question behind most of the questions is:

“How do masters of NLP think differently vs. regular students?"

It’s a great question I’ve written about previously.

Today I want to focus on the 5 disciplines that separate masters of NLP from regular students.

Each of these disciplines are in themselves transformational. Combine all 5 and they catapult you into a very elite group of highly resourceful, effective, and exceptionally capable leader.

Discipline #1: Listen for Connections Not Content

When masters listen, they don’t just hear the words, they hear the causal patterns behind the words. The connections that keep a person’s ‘reality’ in place. They hear the connections that bind reality. See a brilliant example of how useful that is here.

Discipline #2: Distinguish Structure from Content

Being able to listen really well is important. It gives you a bunch of data, but what does the data mean? And how can you turn that data into an intelligence to guide your questions, actions, and interventions?

That’s what discipline 2 helps you do.

Whenever masters hear a problem or challenge (aka content), they know there is always a structure behind it. Most people can't hear or see it - it's hidden to them. Masters don't fixate on the content, they put a spotlight on the structure behind the content.

This reveals clues about where to intervene…

Discipline #3: Think Really Well (Not Just Good)

The first two disciplines have to do with how masters collect information. The 3rd discipline is really focused on how masters chunk and arrange the information people tell them to make connections and see solutions others can’t see.

In essence, this style of thinking is all about thinking GLOBALLY, not locally.

Thinking locally is going ‘hand to hand’ helping someone change a ‘belief’. Thinking globally is seeing how the entire system functions so you can identify where you can make the smallest change that has the biggest impact.

As you’ve seen in the video above, when you can listen like a master, distinguish the underlying structure of people’s problems, and think really well - you can make contributions that mark you out as someone who is operating at a whole other level. Pretty sweet.

Discipline #4: Make Your Mind Move Fluidly

It can seem like masters are whip smart (and in many ways they are) but really, their superpower is able to make their minds move faster and more fluidly than those around them.

Using advanced knowledge about how NLP truly works, they can jump 3, 4, 5 moves ahead.

Discipline #5: Communicate With Impact

Finally, having a great insight, suggestion or recommendation is useless IF you lack the ability to communicate that suggestion, idea or intervention in such a way that it creates an impact.

That moves your client, boss, or colleague to action.

Thankfully, when you make these 5 disciplines your own, you get tagged very quickly by others as someone who is whip smart, who can generate penetrating insights, solve complex problems quickly and create extraordinary value for others.

It all begins by learning how to make your mind move like a master, which you can learn how to do here.

Share this article: