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'Can you give your business away?' I wished he hadn't asked the question and yet I knew it was the question that was going to make an extraordinary difference to my life. It was Gene Early who was on the phone to me from the US. He could have been nose to nose with me given the impact of the question. I had been talking to him about my desire to be to my own business what I was to other clients - a consultant able to build close relationships. I realised that over time I was getting frustrated and resorting to controlling and checking several of the associates who had worked with me. And there are others with whom I have now worked for years and yet whom I felt I had not honoured in a way that was appropriate to what they constantly gave. I had felt in my heart that it was time for me to shift levels in what I was doing and in the way that I was working but I had hoped naively that the answer to how to do this would be simple and comfortable. It doesn't matter how many years I have coached and consulted others I still make the most fundamental of mistakes when coaching myself at times. How often have I been through the conditions for a well-formed outcome and emphasised that to achieve what we really want there is a price to pay. I have also emphasised that the price is commensurate with the desired goal. The bigger the goal the bigger the price.

There was a time in my NLP learning that I (again naively) believed that the learning would plateau and that I would reach a state of blissful peace. The opposite has been true. My learning seems to increasingly accelerate and although I do have a deep sense of peace - I often feel tossed about as if in a storm by the effects of the learning in the moment. So often a specific question, condition or presupposition that I had previously taken for granted and treated as straightforward suddenly takes on new meaning and seems to have a depth that I had never before even suspected. 'Am I willing to pay the price?' in the form of 'can I give my business away?' now took on this enormity. I respected Gene so much as my mentor that this was not a question that I could put back to him or refuse to consider - we have this pact and trust between that we know that if we give the other feedback or advice or even a question - that we give it because we have thought it through at such a level and with such a knowledge of each others patterns over time that we trust that this is the right thing for us to do almost without question.

Well a lot has happened since I first gasped at the sound of those words back in May. I believed that to give my business to my associates would be a gift and that they would view it as such. Far from it - although some did indeed see it as having that potential, others were very angry with me and I am only just discovering what that was about. I neglected to consider just how daunting the leadership of a business could be for someone who has not run one before. I also discovered the values of people with whom I had worked for years just what their values really were. I am still discovering that just as I am discovering my own. As the round the world yachtsman - Pete Goss said in a talk of his that I attended recently - 'When you are stripped naked all you have left is your values - and the only way to know these is when you are at the bottom of the barrel'. And I have been at the bottom of the barrel or closer to it than is the norm for me at points in this process. The blood drained from my husband's face when I told him what I wanted to do and I realised that I needed to find what would be a WIN/WIN for he and I before I did anything else. Then I discovered that you cannot just give a business away - a business has a value and if given away then the giver becomes liable for capital gains tax. I discovered that the leaders are the ones who can stay the course and ride the waves of the process and that if the question that you are facing is a good one (and my God it is) then it prompts a process that is self selecting. NLP is, in part about finding the point of leverage that has the maximum effect and I still cannot imagine a question that could have had more leverage than this one. I discovered that having found the capacity to give away the business (whether or not that is what I eventually do) I had this structure to give to others. One of my clients who had been struggling with what they experienced as being an insulting offer from one of their clients found the capacity within themselves to give their services on a specific project away with a sincere generosity and subsequently were awarded more business with this same client than they had ever had before.

And the process continues. But beware if you have any discoveries that you think are obvious or any learnings that you think you have mastered only know that you have not tapped the depths of what is there - yet. I offer you this advice however - the bigger the price that you are willing to pay, the greater the learning - but don't expect to be in control of all that the learning will be. For me NLP has been a source of resources to deal and live with and learn from the unexpected. And what of the business - The Sue Knight Partnership? Watch this space!