What usually determines whether your customers are satisfied is whether you meet their expectations or not. The title of this training (Beyond Expectations) is trademarked by Carmine and was advertised as "Carmine Baffa's training from 17th-19th September 2004." Whilst I expected to experience around 15 hours of Carmine teaching on stage, he actually taught for about half that time.
In spite of that, the excellence of Carmine's teaching and the initial results of the model make me glad that I paid for and attended this training.
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Carmine's Teaching
The Beyond Expectations model
Carmine's Assistants
Something else that fell below my expectations was the organisers' time management. The first incident happened before the seminar even started. The organisers took over an hour to register all the attendees behind closed doors and without letting us know what was happening. Seeing as we only started at 7pm on Friday, I was then further exasperated by Carmine's Chicago contingent giving 2 hours of testimonials. While these were all lovely people, I fail to understand how this was a good use of training time. Pamela Harris, who was both presentable and competent, then introduced the first part of the model. Finishing at 1am, with instructions to return at 10am, I barely squeezed in 7 1/2 hours sleep...
We didn't start for another half hour and waited another half hour whilst one group finished an exercise. We were all gathered back to sit in the seminar room just to be told to go for lunch. When Carmine eventually turned up after lunch, he only taught for 3 1/2 hours and that was with a badly crackling microphone. I had recommended this training to many people, 2 of whom turned up. 2 years ago I had about 10 people lined up to go to the same training - that one was cancelled with only a month's notice. Since no-one from Carmine's organisation ever seemed to answer emails, it became a running joke in my practice group that Carmine was a figment of my imagination...
Pamela took over again and asked us to repeat the exact same hour long installation from the first day (and technically the third time we did it). Whilst a few may have benefitted, I found it fairly pointless and subsequently decided to express my concerns to Pamela's father, Colin, who I'd negotiated my attendance with.
It wasn't an easy decision for me. First of all, I was in an truly superb state of mind, which was the first part of the strategy that we built. I did my best to ignore all these problems and did my best to get as much out of the seminar as possible. Indeed, when I had better ways of doing the exercises, I was told to do it the same way everyone else was.
Secondly, Colin is a really nice guy and he took my many harsh criticisms quite well. He said that most of the decisions had been made by Carmine and asked me to reserve judgement until after the last day. He echoed Pamela's earlier assertion that the attendees had progressed faster than any previous group for the same seminar. He also said he wouldn't tell Carmine, but Carmine started the seminar at 10am the next morning and spent about 5 minutes reframing the not-doing-much-teaching issue whilst looking at me most of the time.
No amount of reframing was going to change the fact that who the advertising states is teaching usually does most of the teaching. However, Carmine did manage to convince me that his decision to limit his time spent teaching was probably good for his health.
I believe I got a lot more out of the 4 1/2 hours Carmine taught on the last day. He was funnier, more provocative and I have a better recollection of what he said. It may also be because he had got his microphone pretty much sorted out (with a huge amount of reverb added).
Unfortunately, he left having given us instructions to start practicing the last half of the Beyond Expectations strategy at a conscious level. Despite those earlier assertions, I think we were a long way from installing this strategy so that it works automatically. Given something this promising, the likelihood of people sabotaging themselves is huge.
Carmine had said he wanted to spend the last day making sure everyone had got it. I also didn't notice much testing going on to see whether all the attendees had the model in an embrionic form. Carmine probably connected the dots unconsciously and did get us to commit to practicing the model consciously but I doubted that many would get it.
I think it was because of this that Carmine seemed slightly angry when he started his last teaching segment. I don't consider this a loss of state as he utilised it very well to motivate the group to be more time-efficient in future. I hope the irony isn't lost here...
Most of these descriptions of Carmine are based on comparisons with my previous training with him 5 1/2 years ago. Two people I trust who've known Carmine well said that he spends a lot of time in unusual states of mind.
Needless to say, I had extremely high expectations about this training.
But in terms of what I experienced, Carmine now approaches Richard Bandler's electrifying level of presence onstage. I chose to DTI his non-verbal ability to maintain people's attention. Carmine has also become almost as uproariously funny as Richard, which incidentally tended to dislocate my memory of what he taught just before...
Not all of it was so jolly - Carmine also used fear & shame/horror as part of his story-telling installations, presumably as part of a propulsion system. As in the Amsterdam training, I found Carmine to be highly ethical and had no reason to doubt his intentions.
There were only a few things I didn't agree with Carmine on, including: If we don't let negative emotions out, they kill us.
Personally, I just rewire them, usually in under 3 secs. This is also a bit too close to a dangerous suggestion for my liking.
Another one started with: There is no conscious mind, we just have a momentary awareness -- I agree, though our culture teaches us to fixate this awareness around our internal dialogue. He then continued with: There is no higher self.
I improved my internal congruence a lot when I started believing in my Higher Self. It's part of what allows me to permanently delete negative emotions, or map out all the triggers for any behaviour, both in around 5 seconds.
The last one was: You have to get the client outside the problem state in order to help them. I'm more inclined to believe that you have to get the client into the problem state in order to rewire a neural pathway that's causing the bad feeling.
But 99% of what Carmine said seemed like a worthwhile belief to me.
The model is essentially a decision and motivation strategy that Carmine has been teaching and refining for 7+ years. I don't know anyone else who is teaching anything like this and the scope goes beyond anything else in the NLP field apart from Joseph Riggio's Mythoself model. The Beyond Expectations model has more than 10 separate elements, each of which is a powerful state designed to move you towards what would be most worthwhile for you to achieve in life. Most of the seminar involved working in threes to build and anchor these states.
One of Carmine's apprentices had taught me most of the model before. I never quite got it working properly except for the cross-contextual ecology check. This essentially highlights any flaws in your decisions and works a treat.
As for how well the rest of the strategy works, I'll tell you after I finish installing it (still haven't one month later).
Most of what Carmine teaches is via unconscious installation, which I'm a great fan of. The main drawback is not knowing what you've learnt. I know Carmine is a master of this and hence I want to help my unconscious develop what I've learnt as far as possible. I'll update this review with my findings.
On the second day, Carmine made a bizarre claim, that we could substitute daydreaming for sleep. Not only that, but he could daydream whilst writing emails, driving and even editing videos. I made a mental note and decided I needed to ask Carmine about it.
When I asked Shana at the end of the training if Carmine was coming back, she said no. So I asked her instead. Luckily, she had found some success with the above daydreaming technique. I tried to model the technique from her and she offered me a very useful technique for getting the most from Carmine's teaching.
Before the seminar, I had spent some time meditating, to improve my concentration & hyperesthesia skills. Carmine also included lots of suggestions for paying attention when he first started. Having maintained a powerful awareness throughout Carmine's teaching, Shana suggested that I could use what my brain had recorded to go back and review Carmine's non-verbals at the time he made the claim. As he and many other NLP trainers consistently demonstrate what they're teaching, I could pick up the skill that way.
Shana also gave me her email address and promised to answer any questions I had, which I found very generous of her. Unfortunately, she hasn't responded to me after 3 weeks.
What Shana couldn't tell me was how to actually do this kind of day-dreaming. I found the same thing with Alan Allard, who organises Carmine's Chicago trainings. He explained that Carmine had simply installed all Alan's new talents outside Alan's awareness. I did find Alan to be an excellent presenter during his 90 mins on stage, and both helpful and personable off stage.
Of the 30+ attendees, more than half had trained with Carmine before. Most of this latter group had flown over from the US, including about 7 people from Chicago. Around 10 people were designated as experienced but we were never told who was officially in charge of what. When the air conditioning in the seminar room was still set too cold after my first request, I must have mentioned this every hour to the next person most likely to do something about it before giving up. It was finally fixed at the start of the last day.