You have now reached the stage where you need to implement your strategy in order to achieve your outcome. This is where you need to gather around you the people who are going to be responsible for doing.

You need to communicate to them clearly what each member of the team needs to do in order to solve the crisis. Remember that amongst your team members there will be those whose learning style is visual, those who are feeling and those who are auditory. Take care to ensure that you have catered to each type of learning style and that they have all clearly understood what is required of them.

As you make your presentation check continually that everyone understands their role by asking them for feedback. Ask them to tell you what they need to do.

The other essential ingredient of your briefing is that it must motivate, energise and enthuse your team. You need to put a lot of energy into your briefing in order to ensure that they “catch” your enthusiasm for the project.

The most effective way to do this is covered in detail on our Effective Manager one-day training.

Now that you have broken state, analysed the situation, set a well-formed objective and developed a strategy for solving your problem, what’s next? Feedback.

This is a good time to check whether you are about to set off in the right direction. Does it not make sense to check with your mentor or your business coach whether they have ever encountered a similar situation and, if so, whether they consider your objective and strategy are sound?

It is well said that “feedback is the breakfast of champions”. Feedback is often the only way that you can get a third party opinion about what you are proposing to do. It can save you from making hideous mistakes. It is also often a quick way to check out your thinking so that you set off down your chosen path with the confidence of knowing that you have a supporter.

Feedback is one of the major NLP techniques that is regarded as an important way to check that communication and thinking are effective.

So now you have broken state, analysed the situation carefully and thoroughly and created a well-formed outcome. The next step is to devise the route by which you will reach your objective.

The question to ask yourself is: “how are we going to get there?”

At this stage it is often a good idea to call in your main lieutenants. You may need to call upon multiple skills, abilities and experiences to create your strategy.

As you listen to the input of your colleagues you should start to write your strategy. Begin each bullet point by writing the word “By”. If you cannot do this it is unlikely to be a good strategy point. You might want to mind map your strategy on a white board or flip chart so that everyone in the strategy session can keep focussed on where you have been and where you are going.

This might be a good time to call upon some of your NLP techniques like modelling.

You have now finished your situation analysis and you know what the issues are. The next step is to decide what outcome will solve the crisis and allow your team to move on in a constructive way.

This is where your intuition can be of great help. Sometimes it will just take a giant leap and show you exactly where you should end up. But it does not always work, particularly if you have not trusted it in the past. If your intuition won’t come to your rescue you need to work on the answer to this question: “What will this situation look like when it is solved, no longer a crisis?”

Now here’s the trick to producing a well-formed outcome. You have to bear in mind that some of the people in your team will have thinking patterns that are visual, others will be feeling and still others will be auditory. Therefore, in order to communicate your outcome to all of them in a way that is meaningful to them you need to accommodate all their thinking patterns within your description of your desired outcome.

If our oil rig photographer was an NLP Practitioner he would probably come up with a well-formed outcome like this: “I see myself lying in an underground shelter feeling safe and secure even though my heart is pounding to the sound of the tornado passing overhead.”

OK, so you have now broken state and you are ready to get to grips with the crisis. The first thing you need to do is to make sure that you fully and clearly understand exactly what is going on.

The oil rig worker who stepped out into the night to take a photograph thought that he was going out to take a snap of some dramatic lightening. It was only when the lightening lit up the sky that he became aware of the much more imminent danger posed by the tornado.

Developing a clear understanding of the situation that you are about to have to manage is an essential step in managing any crisis. Watch a fire engine arriving at the scene of a fire. As the crew tumble out of the vehicle and start to prepare the hoses the leader of the crew immediately goes in search of information. He needs to know where the heat is most intense, are there any people in the building, how long the fire has been raging etc.

Every experienced and well qualified NLP Practitioner will advise you – don’t start to do anything until you are clear about what it is that you are managing.

It seems highly likely that the oil rig worker who stepped out into the night to take a photo of the lightening was stunned to find it lighting up a fast-approaching tornado.

Even in such a moment of panic the first step of a good manager should be to “break state”. This is one of the essential NLP Techniques for managing a crisis.

Breaking state allows you a short time to adjust from what you are doing before you start to do something else.

When you change gear in a car or on a motorbike you go through neutral before engaging a new gear. It pays to do the same thing when managing a crisis.

If you try to change your system from one state to another without pause you create confusion which often results in overheating of your system.

Can you recall instances when you have been quietly working away only to be suddenly interrupted by someone informing you of a crisis? If they were excited did they transmit their aggravation to you? Did you remain calm? Could you have managed the situation better if you had allowed yourself a moment to “break state” before you developed your strategy for managing the crisis?

Sometimes you may wake up in the morning feeling a bit down or depressed. This seems to happen to most people at some time in their life. But just because you wake up feeling that way it doesn’t mean to say that you have to feel that way all day long.

There may be occasions when you receive a reprimand and it makes you feel bad. This can be especially true if the reprimand is unjust. The feeling of injustice can stay with you all day, if you let it.

A friend of mine gets very frustrated when people won’t do what she asks them to do. She describes her state as, “I want to tare my hair out.” When she gets into a real state like this it can last all day.

Another friend frequently gets really angry and upset when he is driving his car. It is as if he feels that he owns the road and anyone preventing him from going exactly where he wishes, at the speed he wishes to travel, incurs his wrath. He will often go on “chuntering” for as long as half an hour after an incident.

The problem with all of these states is that they consume a lot of our time and energy.

You don’t have to let such upsets rule your life. When something happens to take you into a bad space, all you have to do is use the NLP technique for “breaking state” which I describe in my swish pattern article.

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Your attitudes reveal a lot about what motivates you. These attitudes are revealed by the metaphors you use or, in other words, the things you say.

If you repeatedly say, “this computer is rubbish.” Guess what? You will make sure that the computer performs in an unsatisfactory way. It may be a very good computer, but if you have determined to make sure that it underperforms it will be unsatisfactory as long as you are the one operating it.

On the other hand if you’re in a positive frame of mind and say something like, “I’m feeling on top of the world!” You are likely to find yourself running joyfully up the stairs to your office.

One of the most valuable NLP techniques is the use of language and body language metaphors. What we tell ourselves and others about ourselves programmes us to make the message a reality. This is because metaphors work at an unconscious level.

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In the old days every craftsman learned his craft as an apprentice. He became a Master by watching a Master and modeling his ways. And when he became a Master he took on apprentices of his own and taught them everything he knew.

It is a great shame that the modern way has forgotten the value of learning by watching and doing. We believe that we can teach people in classrooms. But that is not a natural way for people to learn. Children learn by watching and copying their parents. That is the natural way.

It is also the way that Richard Bandler and John Grinder learned from the master communicators whose excellent behaviour they modeled in the early days when they were developing NLP techniques.

To achieve a high standard in any area of our lives we have to observe the best in action and then we have to practice. It is true that practice makes perfect. But this is only true if we practice excellent behaviour, not if we practice poor behaviour.

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There is only one sure way to achieve success in any aspect of your life and that is to become excellent in that area.

Of course excellence alone is not enough, you must be excellent in areas that matter and you must advertise your excellence with humility.

One of the original and still the best of NLP techniques is modeling, the coding and reproduction of the excellent behaviour of those who are the best. The important point to understand about modeling is that no single human being is excellent in all areas of their life. Some are exceptional at one ability and others are excellent at another.

For you to achieve excellence by modeling your behaviour on that of others you will almost certainly need to find more than one role model.

Start by knowing the precise skill or ability at which you want to achieve excellence. Then find the person who is excellent and start to study exactly what it is they do. Pay special attention to the language they use, to their mannerisms, to their thinking patterns, how they present themselves and how they organise their lives.