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I was recently asked to write an article for a training magazine. As is so often the case the title was suggested to me. I usually welcome this offer as it gives me a frame within which to work. But this time it was the title itself that offered the challenge. 'Looking at the Millennium' which is what I suspect many businesses are doing. One of my clients has a 'millennium' clock in reception ticking down the seconds to 'M' day. I get an interesting sense of pressure waiting there!

So 'At' or 'through'? They are only words after all and what difference does a word make?

A modern poet tells how once the doer of an heroic deed was unable to tell it to his fellow-tribesman for lack of words. Whereupon there arose a man "afflicted with the necessary magic of words," and he told the story in terms so vivid and so moving that "the words became alive and walked up and down in the hearts of his hearers."

William Barclay

No surprise then that a third of NLP, the L in Neuro Linguistic Programming is to do with Language. We have moved from a business culture dependent on our ability to manufacture goods to one that centres on our ability to offer services and to meet customer needs. To do this requires a skill with words and behaviour. It requires an ability to manage ourselves in a way that we never have needed before.

The only work of which we are absolute masters and over which we have sovereign power, the only one that we can dominate, encompass in a glance, and organise, concerns our own heart.

Francois Mauriac

One of the participants on our Personal Mastery Course had always secretly held the goal of being a part of an expedition that journeyed to the North Pole. He was also the Managing Director of a building firm so it wasn't as if he had lots of time to create this possibility. What he discovered during his personal development was that the goal as he had thought about it to date was outside of his control; what he could control was his ability to make himself eligible and desirable to be selected to join an expedition. And he was. And he got there. And he used all the skills and thinking he had learnt to manage himself in the process. He returned so inspired by his experience that he set up a project to give this same confidence and motivation to achieve the seemingly impossible to schoolchildren of all ages. He tells though of others on the expedition with him who have been so depressed since their return from the North Pole that they are spending their days in bed for lack of motivation to do anything else now that their life's goal has been achieved. Their goals stopped at the point at which they reached the North Pole. His thinking included reaching the North Pole but went way beyond it. His thinking was 'through' and not 'at'. Oh and what of his business, you might ask, while all of this is going on? Well his business has surpassed all targets and he is spending less time directly involved and more time leading and coaching.

Just a word? What words are you using to think about the Millennium? What goals have you set yourself and your business? What trends do you foresee that will carry you into the future that you really want? Sales is becoming managing relationships, behavioural and competency based training are making way for values and spirituality, learning organisations are abstract concepts which only live when we look at how we organise ourselves within to learn in our minds and in our hearts. Two years ago I recall a member of the Board of a leading international company saying of a change programme that they were considering at the time "and we don't want any of that personal development to be a part of this." And yet another, a financial director of a multi cultural bank "I have done personal development in my performance appraisal." I would challenge them to say that not only through the millennium but now and show me how they are 'walking up and down in the hearts of their people'!

.. our future success will hinge on our ability to think differently

The HR Director of a well known, previously thriving company said of all the models that they had applied in the past - "they have had their place in our growth but we have reached the limit now of what we can do and how many hours we can work. I truly believe that our future success will hinge on our ability to think differently." I believe that too. And I think that NLP offers many of the answers as to how to do that in a way that is unique for each of us.

So what words are in your vocabulary as you think about the future. If personal development, systemic thinking, values, personal mastery, team learning, high performance coaching, modelling and spirituality are not, then my advice is to think again.

Adapted from an article in Training Buyer and published with their permission.