Much of my work over the last decade has focused on ‘excellence’ and exactly how people do things excellently.
Let’s begin by starting with a definition of ‘excellence’. It could be described as ‘consistent competence’: the ability to reproduce the same expected results time and again’.
EXCELLENCE (version 1) = consistently repeating expected results.
When you ask an Olympic champion sprinter how she runs so fast, she’ll probably reply, ‘I just do’, or ‘I don’t know’. This is because, even though she excels in her sport, she’s so familiar with doing it that she’s forgotten how she reproduces her excellence consistently – she feels like she just does it.
This is very often true of experts. For example, many great scientists make appalling science teachers because they just can’t understand how anyone could fail to grasp what they find so glaringly obvious. This perspective makes it very difficult for them to help others who are struggling to understand the basics of their subject, because it’s been so long since they went through that process themselves.
Who do you think would make a better science teacher: someone who struggled with science at school and then became an expert, or someone who seemed to be a natural-born science genius?
Probably the one who struggled and then became an expert. They are more likely to be able to remember the steps of how they got to understand their subject, and so are more likely to be able to assist a struggling student in their class to work through the steps they need in order to master a particular topic.
The training and development programme I have undergone over the last 20 years has made me skilled at asking the right questions to understand in enough detail how people do things. This allows me to work out how that Olympic athlete actually does get that extra ounce of speed. Technically, this is called ‘modelling’ and effective modelling is one of the important components of the Lightning Process.
Obviously, our Olympic athlete’s training regime, fitness levels, diet, etc., are extremely important, but most athletes deal with these issues and train in similar ways. In order to find out what makes the difference, what makes her excel, we need to understand other areas such as:
Unfortunately, if we just ask her these questions, she probably won’t know the answers as they are unlikely to be something that she has much conscious awareness of.
In soccer and rugby, there are moments of extreme tension when place/penalty kicks are taken. This is when play is stopped and one single player has the unenviable job of getting the ball through the goal posts, or in soccer, past the goalkeeper. There is huge pressure on these kickers in these moments. Some of them are consistently brilliant (these are the highest paid ones!); however, other kickers are much more variable in their performance.
If you were choosing a team you’d want to select the players who are able to perform, no matter what. The ones who are able to kick well, regardless of whether:
The people who can do that are the top performers.
I’ve worked with top performers in various fields such as sport, music and business, and although they are at the top of their field they are usually unaware of how they made their success happen. Often they will know some of the more obvious steps they took – the soccer or rugby player knows he has put in many hours of practice and understands how to place the ball and which leg to kick with – but they often don’t know how they knew which steps to take, how they stayed motivated and how they stayed focused, etc.
This is because, although they are experts in their field, they are not usually experts in modelling.
The Lightning Process uses modelling in order to understand, in enough detail, how experts do things. It means that I can take someone who wants to learn a particular set of skills and teach them how to emulate the success of top performers. On its own, modelling won’t instantly make anyone a top performer; they’ll still have to put in the hours of practice and preparation, and do the work necessary to achieve their goals. But now, they will know what work they need to do, and how to approach it like a champion. Lightning Process Practitioners and very well-trained advanced NLP practitioners are good at doing that, which means that we can help people develop in new areas and at rates often thought of as impossible.
A good example of this was when some NLP practitioners were invited to work with the US army20. The army trainers were, unsurprisingly, selected from the army’s top marksmen, the experts. When these experts trained new recruits to shoot, only 70 per cent passed the four-day pistol training. It had ‘always been this way’ and so people just believed that ‘you were either a good shot (70 per cent), or a poor shot (30 per cent)’.
The NLP team spent some time talking to the army’s best shots. They began to ‘model’ these sharp shooters. They looked at all of the components – how they thought about themselves, how they saw the target in their minds, how they held the pistol and so on – in order to understand how these marksmen shot so well.
They then took this model of how to shoot well and taught it to new recruits in a one-and-a-half-day course. So, rather than teaching them how to shoot, they taught them how to approach shooting like an expert. This time, even though the NLP trainers hadn’t been trained to shoot, 100 per cent of the recruits passed the course, and the quality of the marksmanship was so great that it produced three times as many ‘expert-level’ shooters than the normal four-day course.
Again, the sharp-shooting experts who taught at the pistol range were great at shooting, but because they found it easy and were expert marksmen rather than experts at modelling, they didn’t actually know the basic steps of how they got to be so good. This meant that they found it difficult to teach others.
This leads us to expand on our basic definition of ‘excellence’. Initially we described it as: ‘consistent competence: the ability to reproduce the same expected results time and again’.
EXCELLENCE (version 1) = consistently repeating expected results.
Now it can be more completely stated as ‘consistent competence: the ability to reproduce the same expected results time and again, unconsciously and automatically’.
EXCELLENCE (version 2) = consistently repeating expected results, unconsciously and automatically.
The whole purpose of understanding excellence is to identify enough of the key components of that excellence so we can have a chance to teach someone how to effectively emulate the success of a star performer. There are many reasons why this very logical and useful process isn’t commonly practiced; key among these is that most people think those who are great at something are great at it because they just are – that it’s part of their fortune, their make-up, their ‘luck’.
As Thomas Jefferson said: ‘I am a great believer in luck. I find that the harder I work the more luck I seem to have.’
The following story stems from the incorrect belief that excellence is just a God-given gift, and that some things are just not able to be taught – you’re either born with it or not.
Many years ago, before it became the popular sport it is today, skiing was a skill found only in certain remote communities in parts of the world where there was high annual snowfall. During those times of the year the only effective form of transport was skiing.
By necessity, people from these remote villages had to become very adept at using skis to avoid being cut off during the snowy season. When strangers visited the villages and attempted to use this unfamiliar form of transport, they found that they just couldn’t make the skis work. This was partly due to a lack of experience, a lack of skilled teaching and sometimes an unwillingness by the community to educate the stranger in their very special skills.
The strangers discovered this bizarre form of transport was impossible to use and concluded that this must be due to the fact they just didn’t have the innate ability. As more and more people discovered that they were unable to learn to ski, while the villagers found it easy, they became convinced that it was just one of those things that the people in these villages had a genetic disposition for. If you hadn’t been born into that kind of village, or didn’t share that gene pool, then it was just one of those things you couldn’t do.
This belief was held for a long time because when anybody tried to learn and found they couldn’t, it provided more evidence to support it. It was many years before people started to have the time, exposure and inclination to be able to assess and understand exactly what went on when somebody successfully skied, and only then could people begin to emulate the success of these apparently naturally genetic skiers.
When we now look back at this scenario it seems ridiculous. How could people ever have believed that skiing was a genetically inherited talent? But history is littered with once universal and now discarded concepts. When new and radical ideas came along to challenge the old truth there were often many obstacles that prevented an easy discussion about which idea was the most accurate.
For example, in the sixteenth century, the established (Christian) church said that the Earth was the centre of the universe, based on their interpretation of the scriptures. To say otherwise was a heresy punishable by death. This didn’t encourage people to investigate whether it was true or not. Nicolaus Copernicus found that the idea that the Earth was the centre of the universe just didn’t fit with his observations of the movements of the planets and stars and suggested that the Earth revolved around the sun. There are a number of versions as to what happened next; some say he was forced to publicly disown his findings to avoid charges of heresy, others that he waited until the end of his life before publishing his major work, but his new ideas, although correct, certainly took quite a while to be accepted.
In our exploration of excellence, we have found all kinds of things that have often been thought of as innate abilities, or natural talents, but which can actually be taught. For instance, by studying excellent spellers, we can teach people who’ve had spelling dyslexia all their lives to spell consistently in about ten minutes. If that challenges your beliefs about spelling and spelling dyslexia, then you have a choice:
We’ve also looked at many other excellences. For example, studying fast readers means we can teach slow readers to read at high speed.
The Lightning Process has looked at success in many different fields and begun to discover a consistency among top performers: the way they approach life, the way they operate and the way they think. Once these patterns have been identified, they can be taught using the Lightning Process.
This is one of the many core applications of the Lightning Process, but the effects of such changes in the way your brain works don’t just impact your level of success, they fundamentally change the way your brain operates, too, which can have a startlingly positive impact on your health. Having read the section on placebos (chapter 3), this should come as no surprise to you. In the previous chapter, I outlined some of the mechanisms of how the body influences the brain function and how the brain influences the body. It’s worth considering at this point that, as our health is influenced by the way the brain operates and the way the brain works is influenced by our health, if we could learn how people with great health think, what might be possible for us?
When you’ve resolved whatever is stopping you from having a great life, what would you love to learn to do even better? Write this down.
Looking at the ideas about success above, what kinds of skills would you like to learn from people who are already successful in your chosen field? Write this down.
When people experience the Lightning Process they are often intrigued by the simple yet powerful way it provides tools for change. Often they ask me how I designed it, what inspired me and what did I build it from. The Lightning Process is new and different, but it stands on the shoulders of a variety of ideas, philosophies and skills from a number of related fields. The following is a brief description of some of the major areas that influenced its creation.
Dr Andrew Taylor Still, a doctor and pastor who lived in the southern states of the USA, originally designed osteopathy. He grew up in the 1830s, in relatively rural surroundings, so it was through necessity that he developed a strong interest in and aptitude for engineering and mechanics. It was these skills that were to be important in his development of osteopathy.
After the death of three of his children from spinal meningitis, which the medics of the time failed to cure, he concluded that the orthodox medical practices of his day were frequently ineffective and sometimes harmful. He therefore spent the next ten years of his life studying the human body, paying particular attention to anatomy, physiology, mechanics and psychology and constantly working towards finding better ways to treat disease. He said:
Osteopathy is a science which consists of such exact exhaustive and verifiable knowledge of the structure and functions of the human mechanism, anatomy, physiology and psychology... (that by using) resources within the body by scientific treatment peculiar to osteopathic practice… (the body) may recover from displacements, derangements, disorganizations and consequent diseases and regain its normal equilibrium of form and function in health and strength.
From his studies he introduced the concept of ‘the lesion’, which became one of the cornerstones of osteopathy. The basis was that, once the body had deviated from its original design or blueprint (i.e. was ‘in lesion’), it could no longer function as intended and some degree of dysfunction and illness was sure to follow. The osteopath’s job was, therefore, to discover this lesion, or deviation from the norm, and correct it. A simple way of thinking about ‘the lesion’ is to substitute it with the phrase ‘a bit out of place’. Still also put forward other key concepts, including:
Many people think that osteopathy is just a physical approach to manipulating bones and helping those suffering with back pain, but this is a modern distortion and dilution of what Still, and the other ground-breaking osteopaths who came after him, had in mind. Still’s idea of the lesion was expanded further by a leading light in the next generation of osteopaths, Dr John Martin Littlejohn, who had previously trained as a physiologist in the late nineteenth century. He encouraged osteopaths to consider whether a person was in lesion or at odds with their environment. This substantially widened the scope of osteopathic attention from solely considering the body as their domain to including more distant factors such as working environment, pollution and diet as possible causes of ill health, so he was really ahead of his time.
The ‘Dynamic Osteopath Approach’ (DOA) is my contribution to osteopathic thought, and I’ll introduce it briefly here as it forms part of the theory behind the Lightning Process. It uses the idea of the osteopathic lesion and develops it further so it can be applied to some of the commonest issues of the twenty-first century.
Instead of just considering the structure of the spine or body, and whether it is in good order or misaligned or if there is lack of healthy balance between the person and their environment, it asks different questions:
These things are equally important in terms of our health and wellbeing21, but fixing these kinds of ‘lesions’ clearly requires a different approach than just fixing ‘bones being out of place in the spine’.
Dynamic Osteopathic Technique is an approach to getting these kinds of lesions back into good order. It’s the application of ideas of the DOA, and is the part of the Lightning Process designed to help you fix these lesions. It provides physical and mental exercises so we can physically use our bodies, our neurology and mental processes to re-establish better overall function in the interlinked areas of physical, neurological and mental happiness, homeostasis (normal function) and balance. The next section describes some of the neurology that maintains these lesions, and explains why these physical, neurological and mental imbalances are so linked.
In the 1950s, osteopathic researchers22 began to use the term ‘facilitation’ to describe how and why osteopathy worked. Facilitation is a state of affairs where a part of the body has become so ‘in lesion’ (or wonky) that it starts to send signals to the nervous system about how everything is going wrong with it. So, for example, an achy back will send signals of pain through the nerves, into the spinal cord and towards the brain. The nervous system responds as best as it can to the signals it’s receiving from the lesioned part and, in this example, possibly asks the muscles to relax a bit. If the lesioned area can receive and act on these messages appropriately then normal service (homeostasis) can be resumed and everything calms down again.
However, sometimes the lesioned area is so messed up that it just can’t interpret the signals correctly and hears the message wrongly. It’s like a child who’s desperately upset trying to explain what’s wrong by yelling, stamping and crying. The combination of this confused information with the lesion’s state of irritability may mean it sends a further signal out requesting the opposite to what is actually needed (like a child shouting ‘GO AWAY!’ when they really want a hug). This sets up what is called a ‘positive feedback cycle’, where the problem (the lesion) now creates a response (from the nervous system) that worsens the problem (the lesion). In this facilitated state, anything that happens near or around the lesioned area creates a larger-than-necessary and unhealthy response, which further sets off the destructive positive feedback cycle.
To use another family analogy, it’s rather like a couple stuck in a bad marriage. Every time the husband looks at the wife, she sees it as ‘him looking at me in that way again’, and she challenges, or verbally attacks him, feeling wronged. He, in turn, feels set upon ‘again’ and responds even more emotively, and the cycle of aggression and hurt continues. Very soon, the destructive atmosphere is all-pervading – although the original problem can barely be remembered – and the marriage finally breaks down over an argument about who left the cap off the toothpaste, as now even the tiniest event causes a dramatic ‘facilitated’ response.
Because of the design of the spinal cord, where different neurological circuits are very close together, researchers noticed that ‘cross talk’ began between the irritated circuits and their neighbours. So, for example, if the pain was coming from muscles about halfway down the spine (D6 for those anatomists reading), it could affect any nerve circuits or synapses (those nerve junctions we covered earlier) in the same region. And in the case of the ‘achy back’ I mentioned earlier, these would be the nerves controlling the stomach and duodenum. The original problem could cause lesions in those neighbouring systems and then, because of the linkages up and down the spinal cord, the problems could spread to distant areas.
So, similar to the marital argument, until that positive feedback loop which spreads and feeds itself is broken, ill heath and poor function will prevail across the body.
The Lightning Process is purpose-built to intervene in this damaging state of affairs, and restore order and calm to areas of facilitation, whether it be just on a small-scale ‘sore back’ level, a ‘getting stressed, gut spasms and sweating at the thought of meeting new people’ or a ‘whole body in a state of chaos’, as can be found in many cases of CFS/ME.
A final word on Dr Still. He was a visionary in medicine who promoted, about a century before orthodox medicine, the idea of preventive medicine and endorsed the philosophy that physicians should treat the entire patient, rather than just the disease. In many ways, the Lightning Process, which I named in the late 1990s, would never have been designed if it weren’t for his ideas, together with my training and lecturing experience as an osteopath. As I wrote this book, I came across a reference to something I’d learned long ago as an undergraduate but had forgotten until now; one of his earliest descriptions of himself and his work was as a ‘lightning bone setter’ – it’s funny how things can work sometimes!
NLP is an offshoot of hypnotherapy and psychotherapy and was developed by doctors Bandler and Grinder in the 1970s after they had studied the major proponents of therapy (Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson et al). It is a system for finding out in detail how individuals achieve excellence, using the modelling process. The modelling process is complete when enough detail has been discovered to teach that excellence to a novice and help them to achieve excellence in that field.
NLP has modelled many excellences such as spelling, speed-reading and sharp shooting (discussed earlier) and is ideally suited to helping re-create peak performance in any field. It also looks at what makes a great therapeutic intervention, asking such questions as:
This has resulted in a therapeutic use for NLP, which achieves extraordinarily deep and fast results for people with even the most complex issues.
I designed the Lightning Process when I found that these tried-and-tested skills, which were usually successful, didn’t produce the results I expected. Although it incorporates some elements of NLP, the Lightning Process is not ‘just another version of NLP’. One of the reasons we know this, is because we have seen a number of expert NLP practitioners take the Lightning Process. Before seeing us, they have tried all their NLP skills, with the help of their most competent colleagues, to get change and have failed. And then, when they take the seminar, they find they get the result that has eluded them for years. They are very clear that the Lightning Process is quite different from NLP, and they should know!
Life coaching is an approach to help others get the most out of themselves and to achieve their true capabilities. A key part of its philosophy is that the coach’s role is not to give advice. Instead, it is to help the person being coached to discover the questions they need to ask themselves to uncover the resources and solutions inside them. This self-empowering philosophy underpins the training and usage of the Lightning Process. A core part of the Lightning Process is for the participant to discover where they are out of balance in their life, health and physiology and then to work out what the solutions are for them. I have always fundamentally believed that no one is better placed to make those decisions than ourselves. After all, who knows you, what you want and what makes you happy better than you do?
I quite often get asked the interesting question, ‘Is hypnosis part of the Lightning Process?’ The simple answer is ‘No’.
Many people’s concerns about ‘hypnosis’ are about someone potentially taking control of them. I think this is something we should rightly be very concerned about. Having said that, I should point out that although this idea of ‘being under someone else’s control’ is one of the commonly held myths about hypnosis, it isn’t actually true, and is based more on the questionable values and skills of ‘stage hypnotism shows’ and Hollywood movies rather than modern clinical hypnotherapy.
I would always recommend that you should avoid letting anyone take control of your life or choices. The Lightning Process, in fact, focuses a great deal on how you can start to make better choices in your life, helping you to discover what’s important for you and finding ways to move your life forward by using your own innate abilities.
So you can rest assured that if you don’t want to engage in any programme which tells you what to do or takes control of you, then the Lightning Process is something that will suit you very well.
Another often-raised concern is whether the training will conflict with anyone’s religious beliefs. I have seen people from most of the world’s main religions take the training, including those following the paths of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity (spanning a broad range including Evangelical, Catholic, Church of England, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.), Judaism and Buddhism. The Lightning Process did not conflict with their religious beliefs and practices, and some found that the basic universal human concepts of the training gave them a deeper insight into their faith. I’ve often heard comments about how useful it was in helping people to understand how to put the kindness inherent in their faiths into practical action, both towards themselves and others.
Equally, those who are atheists, or have no spiritual beliefs, also find that the concepts of the Lightning Process fit with their world-view. This is because there is nothing ‘to believe’ about the Lightning Process. Instead, it’s a very logical and rational conversation that doesn’t cover, propagate or require anyone to take on any beliefs or concepts that don’t fit with their own perspective. It simply looks at how we can be more influential in our lives, happiness and health in a positive way.
So far we’ve discovered that the Lightning Process is a training programme that teaches tools so you can change the way your mind, brain and body work together. We’ve explored the idea that to get value from a training you’ll need to be ready to put in the appropriate work, and be ready to leave any number of restricting self-beliefs behind. And we’ve looked into some of the foundations of the Lightning Process and delved into some of the physiology that drives the mind–brain–body connection.
In the next few chapters, we’ll be focusing on a few of the conditions that people have successfully used the Lightning Process to resolve, and we will be introducing some of its different elements. These chapters will explain how the Lightning Process works in these areas and give you a chance to read about the direct experiences of others who have taken the Lightning Process training and used it to revolutionize their lives and health. As you read these accounts, I’d once again suggest that you take the next step of the Lightning Process and ask yourself, ‘If others can make such changes using these tools, then what could I do with them?’