I first started listening to Elvis Costello in the 1970s when along with many other people I bought the record “My Aim is True” This album was released on the wonderful Stiff Records label and Elvis was spotted by a Still A and R man busking outside the company’s office. I remember also have “Red Shoes” and “Alison” on vinyl 7 inch. Around 1976 I saw him play a gig in Portsmouth, supported by Richard Hell and the Voidoids and John Cooper Clarke.  This was the golden era of New Wave and Punk music and this was a fantastic gig with Elvis playing tracks from the first album and newly released “This Year’s Model” In the era of Thatcherism in the UK he wrote some really excellent political songs reflecting social concern as well as many wonderful classic 3 minute pop songs.

Elvis will I suspect be remembered as one of the great singer songwriters along with David Bowie and a few others from the golden era of 60s and 70s. He has written countless songs and has the skill to create memorable musical hooks with thought provoking lyrics. He also has a great sense of humour memorably appearing on “Frasier” as a busker and was host on the excellent Canadian Spectacle TV show which had all manner of great hosts including Bono, Richard Thompson and Bruce Springsteen among many others. His father was an experience jazz musician and Elvis clearly has a great love and knowledge of music. It’s easy to forget just how many excellent songs he has written over the decades. He has also had some excellent collaborations with other super writers and musicians including Alan Toussaint and Bert Bacharach.

Last night I saw him play in Manchester as part of “The Revolver Tour” show. He played for two and a half hours and a great number of the chosen songs were decided by audience members spinning the wheel of songs. This was much like old fashioned music hall entertainment and Elvis was clearly enjoying himself. I have seen many gigs over the decades and this was one of the best, a master class in entertainment and holding audience attention. In the ear of X Factor and such shows it’s great to see examples of singer songwriters maintaining audience interest for decades and still displaying great create skills in songwriting and performance.

I have always been amused by some people have decided that Facebook is the ultimate and only medium needed for marketing a business. I have also been amazed by how some folks use FB and the lack of awareness when making posts. It’s widely reported that some people post ill-advised comments about personal life, work situations and posts about others. Often these are done in a moment of enthusiasm but without any due consideration for the possible subsequent effects.

Facebook is a business
Facebook of course is a major player in social networking and a business. All businesses need income streams. Like many people I use FB for a number of different reasons. I am however acutely aware that the FB customer is the advertiser, NOT the end user. The advertisers generate income for the business. Today I read this BBC report online which I thought was very interesting and also pretty inevitable.

Facebook has started testing a system that lets users pay to highlight or promote posts. By paying a small fee users can ensure that information they post on the social network is more visible to friends, family and colleagues. The tests are being carried out among the social network's users in New Zealand. Facebook said the goal was to see if users were interested in paying to flag up their information. The tests of the "pay to promote" system were discovered by a Facebook user in Whangarei, reported New Zealand's news magazine Stuff. At first, said Stuff, the user thought the offer to pay to promote a post was a con trick.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to the BBC the offer was genuine.

"We're constantly testing new features across the site," said the spokesperson. "This particular test is simply to gauge people's interest in this method of sharing with their friends."
Different methods of highlighting posts were being tested, said the spokesperson. These would see a range of charges being levied to make posts more visible. Comments on the tests suggest the highest price being charged was £1.25 ($2) while others cost 25p or 50p.”

Hysterically many FB users are outraged when they discover FB decides to change its format. They forget FB is a business and a business that is about to float on Wall Street!

The Independent newspaper in the UK reported

The “highlight” option, which pops up beside the “Like” button, guarantees that a promoted post will appear higher in news feeds, stay visible for longer and appear to more friends.
Response to the “pay-for-popularity” offer, which comes days before Facebook's Wall Street flotation, expected to value the social network at up to $96 billion, was mixed.
Users feared that it could undermine the site’s news feed’s sorting algorithm, designed to spread posts from friends that have received genuine “likes” and “comments”. Promoted posts could result in a deluge of unwanted commercial spam messages.

Anything you say can be taken down and used against you…

FB like Twitter is a medium which is very popular in recent years. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been reported as saying that the focus for FB as a business is to focus on mobile communication use of FB. In this era of 3G, IPhones and Galaxy phones it’s clear that mobile communications are big business. Often people will be texting, taking photos and posting to FB, without a second (or maybe first?) thought. This can create all manner of ill-considered posts. I remember talking to a colleague about one “NLP Master Trainer” who was endlessly posting about her fraught love life on FB.

Other examples of ill-considered posts are when a group of people become very excited online and post a series of comments that can look totally bizarre. Now I personally have no problems with eccentric views, BUT often some groups post comments which are totally incongruent with what they are trying to present either personally or as a business and they can unintentionally create a really odd image for themselves.

Group thought, no thought?

FB and many similar online forums can encourage a group type mentality where people forget to use individual discrimination. This is evident in lots of forums where people actually become quite delusional in their behaviours. I have previously blogged about the new breed of marketing gurus, but there are many other examples of group thinking where people engage in behaviours that ultimately create big problems for themselves and others. Once again the nature of this new medium of “instant communication” can result in acting in haste, but repenting at leisure…

I have often blogged about the hype associated with NLP and personal development trainings and services. Courses and products are often sold as “get rich quick” schemes and increasingly trainings which are mostly “entertainment” are sold as courses and “certifications” are seen as “qualifications” The reality of course is that even many well-known and established trainers are not as wealthy as one might imagine. This of course does not mean that it’s possible to make a good living from being an NLP trainer, practitioner or hypnotherapist, but like any business it takes time an application. Also let me make it clear that financial wealth is only one way of describing “wealth”, but for the purpose of this blog I am going to focus specifically on income generation. These are my observations from working in the personal development sector since 1980.

Robert Anton Wilson, Amazon and product income from products
The last decade has seen the passing of a number of notable figures in the world of personal change. This included Robert Anton Wilson among others. Robert Anton Wilson is a very established author and has co presented with Richard Bandler. In his last few months there was a public appeal for donations to help him as he was apparently in financial dire straits. I was happy to contribute as I had enjoyed his material, but it did make me wonder about how such an established figure could be apparently so financially disadvantaged.
Years ago I had lunch with a respected writer who had two published books. During the conversation he told me about the total income for the writing which I thought was the royalties for each quarter. I was quite shocked when he told me that this was for a five year period! My point is that authors as well as presenters often don’t make the kind of income many of us might imagine. Paul McKenna has written some bestselling books, but he is the exception to the rule and of course he had an extensive career prior to being involved in the world of NLP. Others who have tried to emulate his style almost to the point of blatant plagiarism have not had such success in the marketplace.
Online major stores like Amazon will frequently carry literally just a couple of copies of a DVD or CD from a trainer or practitioner. This is far less than many people might imagine. In 2007 I told a well-known USA NLP trainer that to date I had sold over 2000 copies of my “Adventures of Well Being Now” CD and he was amazed by this sales figure. That particular CD was a good income generator sold at full price at £18, but of course the trade figure is far less. I ran an initial pressing of 1000 glass mastered CDs of this title which at that time cost me around one pound sterling per CD. Of course this kind of volume pressing is always a gamble. Some titles just don’t sell in the anticipated quantities and I know of one NLPer who had an attic full of his “instant confidence products” that he couldn’t shift. Even though he couldn’t sell them he actually then thought he could set up an affiliate sales programme for others to sell this product! Needless to say there were no takers for his offer! Of course if you produce products of real quality that people want then the margin even to trade can be great and products sell well at events. I know of one training where they sold £70,000 worth of products in just a few days…

Building a private practice
I regularly get asked about how to build a private therapy practice. NLP and personal development training courses don’t in my experience teach the business skills needed for this. Some people have noticed this gap and have set up businesses offering “business and marketing coaching” The problem with many such offerings is that these self-proclaimed “gurus” have very little or no experience themselves. Often the subsequent boot camps and super conferences don’t equip the practitioner with the necessary skills to build and generate a client base to provide regular income. It takes time to build any kind of holistic or therapeutic practice. It’s also important to build a reputation that consistently generates client interest. A great deal of building a successful business is being aware of customer needs and paying attention to potential opportunities. It’s also important to have multiple sources of income and the most successful people I know who see private clients, also have products and/or run trainings. They also don’t over promise what they can deliver and behave ethically in business when working with others.

Training scenarios and feeling like a penguin
Some people think that running trainings is a great way to become wealthy. One NLP student from Sheffield decided that he was going to become an NLP trainer after doing his practitioner and master practitioner courses. He was financially stretched but thought he could put the whole cost of the training (around 4.5k with travel and accommodation) on his visa card. I strongly suggested he wait until he was in a more financially secure position and that IMO the market was changing with a decline in interest. He went ahead and travelled to the USA to get his certificate, but never ran a single course. Often when people attend courses they see a room full of delegates and think “Wow, I could earn a great living doing this.” What they don’t always appreciate is that there can be a big marketing cost to generating an audience and there are many hidden costs in putting on an event. To quote a famous line from Blackadder “I feel like a penguin, everywhere I look there’s a bill in front of me!” Some promoters of events can be wildly optimistic in their business expectations and many in NLP will know that in recent years one of the biggest London based companies went into liquidation. The company was quickly phoenixed and is still running events with new terms and conditions, which I always advise people to read before booking. When I ran NLP courses a reasonable hotel would typically cost £500 a day and then of course there were marketing costs, refreshments and of course in the case of some NLP events, the certificate cost of $200 per delegate. This is no small sum as a percentage of the overall seminar price. Many trainers realise that if they worked out the actual costs the hourly rate they were paying themselves would be quite a shock.

It’s all about timing…
Many who attend large NLP training events don’t realise that in many cases assistants are only paid lunch expenses. This is a great way to gain experience of NLP, but some individuals spend literally months assisting on other’s courses and find themselves financially in a pretty vulnerable state. There are only certain times of year in the UK which works for running events and if you are helping out on other’s events you can’t run your own events at the same time. I have talked about this before and of course if someone becomes known primarily as “an assistant” to other trainers then they are essentially always “the magician’s assistant, never the magician” When I ran trainings in Leeds I often brought in some established trainers including Frank Farrelly, Doug O Brien, Andrew T Austin and John LaValle (Richard Bandler’s co trainer) This meant a big financial commitment and to my surprise many NLP assistants in London would not be able to afford attending some of these events even at a heavily discounted rate. All of this shows that there is a big difference between the myth of what is presented online and in many trainings and the reality of what mostly occurs. Of course there are exceptions and those who make a reasonable living from personal development and/or NLP tend to see private clients as well as running trainings. The successful ones value their time and focus on building their own reputation rather than simply become solely affiliate salespeople for other trainers. Making this transition is all about timing…

All you need is Facebook, Facebook is all you need? Eh, no it's not!
Some in the world of NLP have become champions for Facebook and market relentlessly online on Facebook. Yes FB is a great social medium, BUT it’s not the sole solution for marketing a business and of course the customers for FB are the advertisers, NOT the users. Also let’s remember that the content posted is then owned by FB, even if you close the account. It seems that many in the world of personal development are constantly looking for a quick fix and every month I receive endless e-mails about boot camps, 6 figure income courses and the dreadful “free reports” which are used to build lists of clients. The problem is that in many cases the courses and products are the same material recycled over and over and often not done in a very good way. Some NLPers have endless FB pages blasting out the same message and the ad copy gets ever more desperate and exaggerated. The reality is that social networks like FB and Twitter are useful, BUT building a business requires work and application.

Advertising, academic associations and other matters
Just as with every business the people with the original creative ideas coupled with successful marketing are the ones that do best. The “tribute bands” are imitations of the real thing and when the market is flooded with these then the potential customer base is massively reduced. Also in many instances if a person does not invest in good quality training venues, materials and brand image, customers will stay away. I have often blogged about this lazy attitude to business and in these times such folks are finding that the public vote with their feet. Many established NLP presenters still draw attendees to events, but from what I can see the demand is not what it once was. The biggest numbers in the UK for NLP events were when Paul McKenna was presenting in London and it’s hard to know how many came to those events for “NLP” and how many came for “the nice guy off the TV” I remember talking to one very well know NLP author in recent times who commented that in the 1980s she had to “drag people along to seminars” as many were not really that interested! Speakers like Tony Robbins have done well, and continue to be held in high regard by followers. Years ago I stayed with a couple in Silicon Valley who had spent tens of thousands on such seminars, but were themselves financially broke and unable to make their business profitable. They could repeat inspirational quotes, get into “peak states” BUT couldn’t generate income or customers.
A recent TV programme on money came to the same conclusion. Many people regularly attend motivational events with the hope that just like buying a lottery ticket they will end up transforming their financial situation, but few achieve making this happen in real life. Of course in the world of NLP and personal development people will pay all kinds of prices for events and products. When a group of people each pay £12,000 or more for a 3 -4 day event then that’s great income for a trainer. When workshops are framed as “educational” and “academic”, they create the impression of being learning opportunities in an academic sense. Here’s an example of advertising copy – “The mastery university is two weeks of total immersion to create life experienced on your terms.” Certificates are inevitably presented as “qualifications” and sometimes described in the following way – “This is an internationally recognised certificate for the advanced use of NLP” Of course the actual “recognition” is by the issuing body! Of course good luck to those who can get such income. It’s not what I would choose to do but people spend money on all manner of pursuits. Sometimes these big ticket prices backfire and I heard of one trainer who was sued for a six figure sum having “guaranteed coaching success”, ouch!

Final thoughts
The world of NLP and personal development is no different to other businesses. Having a great product or idea is not enough; you have to have a delivery mechanism to create a customer base. The secret is to then maintain and build this base. My observations are that in these tougher economic times customers are looking for more for their money and are more discriminating in their purchases. Business owners who have not built a clear and recognizable identity will my view have a hard time surviving. Even though some trainings and products may not always be to my personal taste, I salute anyone who has creative ideas, professional standards and a good work ethic.

I have now had a chance to reflect on the two days of presenting my PCW work at the Valencia NLP Conference. This was the first time I had come to Spain and Valencia is a fascinating city. On the first morning I had the chance to visit the old city which had some fascinating street art. Spain currently has a real problem with unemployment reaching 25% which of course is a disaster for the economy. Despite these tougher economic times Mayca Pérez, the AEPNL president managed to attract 200+ people to the conference and every one of them attended my Provocative Change Works events. This was a larger group than usual and I was very fortunate to have Patrick an excellent translator from Barcelona who is originally from Texas. When running events overseas with a non-English audience, a good translator is essential. Presenting to 200+ people is very different to presenting to a group of fifty. The lighting and PA system were so good that the video camera I set up at the back of the room captured some excellent footage.

Michael Grinder sat in on my first session and this sparked a few wonderful animated conversations over the next 48 hours. Michael (brother of John Grinder) has an extensive background of working in both the educational and corporate sectors. His observations and feedback were so useful that I audio recorded our second conversation! Michael has literally decades of training and teaching experience and it’s rare for me to enjoy discussions as much as I did. I’m always on the lookout for specialists in communication and very often the most casual of conversations can spark a whole new way of thinking.

I really enjoyed meeting Mayca and Eduardo and everyone who attended the conference. On the second evening the organizers hired a bus and transported 60 people to a hotel dinner. In Spain eating times can be very different to the UK and we didn’t begin eating until almost 11pm! By 12.30 am the group was on the dance floor, but I had to retire to bed knowing that I had a breakfast meeting with Michael and a plane to catch soon after. I would love to return to Spain to run some longer more in depth PCW events.

Today I am presenting the second part of the workshop on Provocative Change Works to a larger group than usual. I usually cap numbers at around 50 for these kind of workshops, so it's fascinating to be presenting to 200+ people. This requires a different way of working and constructing some new exercises so everybody is involved. I'm enjoying being here in Valencia and meeting all kinds of people including Michael Grinder who we had lunch with yesterday. A good PA, lighting and excellent translator are essential for such events and I'm delighted that I have all three in place here!

 Today I'm going to do a series of exercises I have never done before, so we'll see what happens...