I started off blogging my Experience Cookbook merely as a way of opening loops and advance marketing.  As events have progressed I realize that the whole experience of book writing is worth chronicling in greater depth.

Story so far: over Christmas and New Year I created The Experience Cookbook, with over 50 NLP exercises (recipes), plus lots of information about how to create them yourself, based on new thinking about exercise design.  Out of the 50, three I’ve borrowed with permission from other trainers, the rest I’ve devised myself, either from models I’ve also created or drawn from other sources.

Feeling very pleased with myself, I offered the early drafts to folks for comment and proofing, and was gratifyingly affirmed by the positive feedback I was receiving.  I also sent further tweaked copies to my mentors and anxiously awaited feedback from them.

We had a fabulous weekend where about 50 friends connected with the School came to test the exercises and give feedback on each of them.  Again a very positive response.

So I thought all that was left to do was to tidy up some of the rough edges, wait for the endorsements from the mentors and send the whole package to the publisher, almost as a fait accomplit.

Bill O’Hanlon, author of nearly 30 books, knows a thing or two about writing. He is insistent that you put forward your proposal, then get an agent/publisher, then write the book.  Not the other way round.  I had blithely disregarded his advice, with the Isadora Duncan mindset “If I could tell you I wouldn’t have to dance it”. I had set off fondly thinking I was producing the finished product to illustrate my intentions.

Pride and falls now enter the scene.  Wind out of sails etc.

One of my mentors came back and bless him to the last fibre of his cotton socks, gave some preliminary and highly detailed feedback on the Oeuvre, not quite suggesting a rewrite, but suggesting a mega rethink.  Knocked me back for a day, I can tell you!  As my lower lip ceased jutting, I was able to consider his comments, and inconvenient as it may be, his observations were spot on. Here was a perspective that was fully informed, courageous, respectful and loving.  I realised what I hadn’t done, and what I could usefully do instead. Thank God only half the world had seen it!

As I was going through this process, the emotions felt very very familiar.  This is exactly the emotional experience a modeler can go through in the process of creating a new model.  The ‘back to the drawing board’ experience is sooo inevitable, an integral part of the process.

It dawned on me that writing a book is a form of modelling:  Who is your reader?/Who is the End User?  What do you want them to do with it when they’ve finished reading it?/What behaviour do you want to replicate?  And then how are you going to select from all you know, and package this into a simple useful and accessible format?  Same old, same old!    First versions/drafts are just the first attempt at constructing the model.

With this frame in mind, I am actually now as interested in observing the meta process, as the writing itself!  I know I have more conversations to have, more testing of my thinking, more focus, more weeding out of intrusive vanity, and more rewriting.  I am in the midst of the reductionist stage in model creation.

I also know that that ‘settled’ feeling will arrive, which will tell me that my model is complete.  Then I will approach the publishers.   Watch this space.

Onwards and forwards.

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