The other day after watching an incredible gymnastic display I heard someone say ‘I wish I could do that – it must be great to be born so talented!’.
I remember myself that when I was younger, I used to marvel at incredible performance and presumed it was due to ‘talent’ that people were born with.
Before I became an NLP Trainer and NLP Master Practitioner, I was a professional musician – I spent 4 years of hard training at the Royal Academy of Music, where I trained as a professional violinist. In fact, I never really wanted to be a musician, however my parents and teachers made such a big deal of my skill in music that I felt at the time I had no option but study music, because everyone said it would be a ‘waste’ of talent to not go there.
I wanted to be an actor – however I just felt I didn’t know how to do it, or that I lacked ‘talent’.
That was before I attended an NLP Training in London back in 1990. Suddenly a new world opened up to me. NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is about how to use the language of your mind to achieve the results you want to.
A really important element of this is in modelling, where we model examples of excellence to discover how they think, feel, move, what they believe, their values and other areas. When we do this, we can discover how to achieve a similar level of excellence more quickly. This model says that it is not that some of us are ‘lucky’ and born with innate talent, but you can discover HOW they do what they do so that you can replicate similar levels of success, in essence if someone else can do it, then you can too!
When I applied some of my learnings to my practicing my violin at music college, I saw lots of my colleagues practicing for 9 hours a day, where I managed to achieve similar results in just a few hours each day. The reason was that much of what we do is superfluous, and only a small part is what really gets results – like the 80:20 rule – we get 80% of our results from 20% of our effort – the secret is finding out what that 20% is.
That is where NLP training in modelling comes into its own – you model experts and compare them against people who achieve average results and discover what the pieces are that makes the expert so good at what they do – what are the pieces that differ between the expert and non-expert.
Those pieces of difference are the real ‘gold’ that will give amazing results. Whether in business, sport, personal development, music, acting or any other area – as soon as we forget the concept of ‘born talent’ and start to identify WHAT the experts do and HOW they do it, we can find excellence in our own behaviour. We all have massive untapped talent within ourselves that we can tap into to produce outstanding results.
Tom MacKay is a Master Trainer of NLP, psychologist and musician who runs NLP Trainings in North London and has been practicing NLP for 20 years. His training organisation is MacKay Solutions NLP Training.