I completed the communicator course of my NLP training in the autumn of 2005. The course is for people who want to acquire the skills required to communicate ideas to large and small groups of people. Just a few years before, it would have been surreal for me to take a course like this. Back then, I wouldn’t have been able to string together more than a couple words in front of a small gathering without getting totally confused and losing the thread. But as part of the NLP Master Practitioner training I did a modelling project with two other people on the course, “Communicating with a good own state of mind” The project represented a giant leap for us as communicators.
I now faced the next assessment. On Sunday 11th September 2005, I was to present a project concerning teaching and presentation. Of course, it was in my right foot to call my project: “A world of marathons,” with the subtitle: “Six years of marathons and travel on four continents.”
I had half an hour for my presentation and realised that there wasn’t much time and that I could easily spend twice as long. For others on the course, teachers and other people who had turned up, I chose to talk about the marathon as a concept, what it’s about, the history of the marathon and the distance and in particular about my experiences on the trips I had combined with marathons. It wasn’t just a matter of telling a story. The material also had to be vibrant and interesting, which could be achieved, among other things, by influencing the senses of the audience.
I had spent a lot of time in preparation. At one point during the lecture, and at the end, I played a well-known running song and had put together a short video with excerpts from my experiences. Before I started, I gave everybody a glass of power drink and a piece of energy bar to put them in the mood of a runner. I taught them a couple of words of Chinese: nihau for hello and gambei, for cheers when you have to empty the contents of your glass in one go.
Earlier that year, I had bought some small Chinese bowls at the Pearl Market in Beijing. I gave each of the participants one to take home, and each bowl contained a little tiger balsam, whose strong, characteristic smell also gave them something for their sense of smell. I could have used sweaty T-shirts or socks, of course, but that would probably have caused a riot! Anyone who wanted to try out the sport and feel the physical effects of running was given the opportunity, because I had brought along a training machine for use during the lecture.
There was plenty for the eyes to behold, too. A clothing store had lent me two mannequins, which I had dressed in running gear. One was dressed for summer, with shorts, shades, a peaked cap and a running number on its chest. The other wore winter clothing with a woolly hat and a reflective waistcoat. The biggest challenge was that the mannequins came without heads, but I made and painted heads of papier mâché. This job had taken rather longer than I envisaged! In addition, I also hung photos and posters from my marathons. I laid out my scrapbooks, running logs, water bottles, medals and running gear for all to see. There were brochures from Albatros Travel to take home, and I was, of course, wearing running shoes, T-shirt and jogging bottoms.
The lecture went just fine, but, just as I had thought, there wasn’t enough time. I was alone, however, in thinking that they had missed out on anything. During the lecture, I made a binding public commitment to run The Great Wall Marathon at least ten times in all. At that time, I had run it six times. So ahead of me I now had one long-time goal and three more short-term, but also much appreciated, intermediate ones.
I passed the assessment in teaching and presentation, and later on, other tests as well. So that year I became an NLP Master Communicator.
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