I’ve spend a lot of years working in the space of transformation, yet about ten years ago I made this the headline of my website …
Transformation is NOT Mastery
Even as I was “selling” transformation as my primary product.
I became big on “transformation” in 1987 when I attended Landmark Education’s “The Forum” developed by Werner Erhard to replace his EST Seminars. The program was transformational in terms of establishing a new position of thinking, and to some extent a perspective to experience the world through. The emphasis as I recall it was on the concept of the being in time (very Heidegger-ian) and the story that emerges to replace reality. The idea being that we are living within a model of reality shaped by language (again, very Heidegger-ian, i.e., “Language is the house of being.” - Martin Heidegger). If we are able to take control of the language we use we can then control the story we’re living, and as a perk see through the stories surrounding us as well.
That was a powerful experience for me, something that I immediately grokked, and understood intuitively before I fully grasped it intellectually. It was also for me the laying down of a path I would follow for the next three plus decades, taking me to where I’m writing this today. I wanted more, so I did Landmark’s Advanced Course, which I also found to powerful, but missing something essential … it too was living in the language and NOT the “house of being.” I wanted to penetrate reality, and I still bought into the idea that language was going to give me the keys to unlock the secrets hidden from view.
That led me to studying NLP, a journey that included seven years of direct, intense apprenticeship with Royé Fraser and becoming an NLP trainer and a trainer of his own model the Generative Imprint. Those seven years took me through to 1996, and by that time I was running elite corporate training and working one-to-one with senior executives in billon-dollar multinational corporations around the world. I was flying first-class and staying in five-star hotels and resorts leading five-day programs to teach sales and leadership, and running a seven-figure consulting business. But the nagging idea, even after getting rave reviews, rehires, and referrals was that something essential was missing from what I was doing.
I had not only including body-based learning in my models, grounding them in embodiment and embodied consciousness, by that time I had also trained hundreds of senior executives to preference non-verbal communication over verbal language in making the significant decisions they were responsible for with others. The programs I ran created massive transformational shifts … and still something essential was missing. I was becoming masterful at creating transformation with my clients, but they were still missing the mastery I was aiming to help them develop.
That’s about the time I began feeling the itch that lead to …
Transformation is NOT Mastery.
