NLP UK Training Podcast

Don’t be too invested in the action. Treat it as an experiment.

Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.

Steve recalls listening to a recording about ‘the current recession’ and discovering that it was made years before the recession he was living through. Uncertainty keeps changing its shape, but it is hardly new. He also remembers his grandmother raising three sons in wartime Manchester, taking them to an air-raid shelter at the bottom of the garden.

Closer to home, Steve and Kali revisit the sudden closure of training venues during COVID and their decision to try delivering courses through Microsoft Teams. Thinking of the change as an experiment made it easier to act, learn and adapt. They also discuss using personal values as a compass when an opportunity looks profitable but doesn’t feel right.

If you’re waiting to feel certain before making your next move, consider one small experiment. You can use what matters to you to choose a direction, then adjust as you learn.

In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:

• Recognising the resilience you have already shown
• Taking small steps without needing a guaranteed outcome
• What moving their training online taught Steve and Kali
• Using your values to guide decisions in uncertain times

Why wait until it is so painful that you’ve got no choice?

Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.

Nothing is particularly wrong, but everything feels a little too familiar. Kali describes the ‘samey’ feeling that tells her she has stopped stretching herself, while Steve reflects on the growth that followed redundancy, losing customers and starting his own business.

Kali’s dance-teaching days provide a practical example: trying a different style put experienced teachers back in the shoes of a beginner. Then there’s the dog sitting on a nail, uncomfortable enough to whimper but not uncomfortable enough to move. It’s a memorable way of asking how long we wait before changing something.

If life is ticking along but the spark has gone, take a little space to see the bigger picture. What could you learn, try or do differently this week?

In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:

• Recognising when familiar routines are holding you back
• What becoming a beginner again can teach you
• The dog-on-a-nail story and the cost of waiting
• Stepping back, gaining perspective and taking a small new action

The more that you practice, the better you get.

Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.

When a company asks for three NLP courses, Steve and Kali’s first question is: why? Steve explains how finding out what a client actually wants to change can turn a request for training into a much more useful conversation. One organisation’s coaching programme began with a revealing problem: everyone was earning their bonus because their targets were set too low.

Kali remembers her first attempt at a coaching technique being ‘like a dog’s dinner’. Practice, feedback and putting the skills to work gradually changed that. Together they explore the difference between being seen as credible and feeling confident in your own ability.

If you’re building a coaching or training business and wondering when you’ll feel ready, this conversation gives you somewhere practical to start: ask better questions, keep practising and seek support from people with more experience.

In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:

• Building trust by understanding what a client really needs
• What experience, qualifications and results contribute to credibility
• Designing coaching around meaningful objectives and accountability
• Developing confidence through practice and action
• Finding mentors who can support your growth
• Steve’s forthcoming book and his experience of growing a training business

“Everything we do has a connection with what other people do, and everything we leave behind leaves a connection.”

Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.

In this episode, Steve and Kali offer an alternative to a question that stumps a lot of people. Simon Sinek’s “what’s your why?” works beautifully for some = a new nurse can answer it in a heartbeat – but for many of us it just draws a blank. Their reframe: forget your why, and think about your legacy instead. Steve opens with his friend, who helps wealthy families think two or three generations ahead, and a lovely story of a man whose grandfather sold a business decades earlier – quietly funding his grandson through acting school. He wasn’t the best actor in the room, and it didn’t matter: someone he’d never asked had already bought him the freedom to follow his heart’s desire.

The heart of the episode is Sarah, Kali’s sister-in-law – an ice skating coach who built her career working with the kids none of the other coaches wanted: autistic children, children with physical disabilities, anyone outside skating’s mainstream. She saw a spark of brilliance where others saw a limitation — the Pygmalion effect in action — and her teams now come back from world championships with gold, silver and bronze medals every time. But as Steve and Kali unpack, the medals are the smallest part of it. The confidence ripples into every other area of those skaters’ lives; the spectators watching a neurodiverse champion quietly revise what they believe people can do. And as Kali points out, Sarah has probably never once thought about any of this as “legacy.” She’s just doing what she does. (“She will when we tell her,” says Steve.)

That’s the real distinction they land on: your why has to be excavated, but your legacy is already happening – you just can’t always see it. Steve talks about delegates returning years later to say one sentence on day two changed everything, and the course material’s beautiful chain of connection: nobody could have the brain of a concert pianist before 1700, because someone good with wood had to build the first piano – no Madonna, no Lady Gaga; no wheel and no trunk, no wheeled suitcase, even if it took a few thousand years for someone to put those two together. Everything you do well hands someone else a starting point you’ll probably never witness. So reflect on it, share the episode with someone it might help – and, as Steve signs off, help them spread their legacy.

In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:

• Why “what’s your legacy?” unlocks people that “what’s your why?” leaves stuck
• The grandfather’s sold business that sent his grandson to acting school
• Sarah’s inclusive skating: coaching the kids nobody else would take on
• The Pygmalion effect - how believing in someone changes what they become
• The ripple effect: from one skating lesson to world championships and beyond
• Pianos, Madonna and wheeled suitcases: how every contribution enables the next

“You only see what you believe.”

Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.

In this episode, Steve and Kali ask a question that reframes the whole conversation about personal finance: what if you’re not bad with money – what if you’re just running an outdated program about it? They call it your script: the model of the world you absorbed long before you had any say in it, built from overheard kitchen-table conversations and offhand remarks from people who loved you.

Steve opens with a story that lands hard: a delegate on a Leeds practitioner course who’d co-written a number one hit – earning several times an average annual salary in one go – and never wrote another. Later that week he mentioned, almost in passing, a core belief that money was a bad thing, inherited from his grandmother. Steve has wondered ever since whether that quiet sentence was what stood between him and a second hit. Kali’s version is closer to home: an eleven-year-old overhearing her mum worry about the electricity bill, and grandparents born in the early 1900s for whom scarcity wasn’t a mindset — it was two world wars, the Depression and rationing. The belief was accurate, once. It just kept travelling down the generations after the conditions changed.

Then it gets practical: why new coaches price themselves at bargain-basement rates out of imagined scarcity (and the networking meetings full of coaches discussing the lack of demand – a room of people who by definition aren’t busy). Kali shares the reframe that got her onto Master Practitioner when the price made her wince: swap “can I afford it?” for “how can I afford it – and what will it cost me if I don’t?” £500 of coaching work a month later, the course paid for itself. And they close with the habit that keeps recurring on this show: when someone else does well, say good for them – and mean it. Your unconscious mind is always listening, and every put-down teaches it that money is bad.

In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:

• The songwriter with a number one hit and an inherited belief that money was bad
• Where money scripts come from – and why your grandparents’ scarcity was real
• Why new coaches underprice themselves, and what to do instead
• The reframe: “how can I afford it – and what will it cost me if I don’t?”
• Paul McKenna’s rule on praising other people’s success (it’s really for you)
• Michael Neill on quoting from scarcity, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad on spending with purpose

“You’re respecting my model of the world by talking back in my language.”

Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.

In this episode, Steve and Kali share one of the most immediately useful ideas in NLP: we all take in the world through our senses, but we don’t weigh them equally. Some people are predominantly visual (show me), some auditory (talk it through with me), some kinesthetic (let me get a feel for it), and some auditory-digital (give me the data, the criteria, the deal). Most of us are a blend with one or two dominant – and once you can spot which one someone’s running, you can speak their language and the message actually lands. The tell is in the words people use: look and see; I hear you and that rings a bell; it just felt right; it makes sense and meets my criteria.

The standout story is the salesperson at Ricoh who realised mid-training that he was deeply kinesthetic and had been selling photocopiers the only way he knew how: let the customer have a go, have a play. Which worked brilliantly – on the other kinesthetics. He’d been quietly missing every visual buyer who wanted to see the print quality, and every auditory-digital buyer who wanted the price, the monthly payments and the network specs. As he put it himself, he’d been missing out on a big chunk of his potential customers without ever knowing why.

Kali brings it home with her kitchen renovation – functionality and storage criteria first (that’s her AD), then hands run over every worktop and door in the showroom, handles ruled out entirely because of how they feel (pure kinesthetic), while visual Matt picked the colours and style. The upshot for anything you’re communicating, from a sales pitch to a website: build in enough of all four channels, and let people connect with the one that speaks to them.

In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:

• The four representational systems – visual, auditory, kinesthetic and auditory-digital
• How to spot someone’s preference from the words they use (and their eye movements)
• The Ricoh salesperson unknowingly selling to only a quarter of his market
• Kali’s kitchen: criteria plus touch, a blend in action
• Why good websites deliberately serve all four channels
• Steve’s book on eye movements and language patterns – on the website and Amazon

“I’m not going to do anything. I’m just going to let it settle.”

Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.

In this episode, Steve and Kali take on the modern default state: a mind that never stops. Busy at work, busy at home, and busiest of all in your own head. Their central image is the snow globe – shake it and everything swirls, obscuring the figures inside. Put it down and it settles on its own. No effort required. Steve pairs it with the puddle in your wellies: stomp through and the sediment clouds everything; wait, and it clears itself. Both point at the same truth – the mind is a self-correcting system, and the problem is usually that we keep interrupting the self-correction.

The practical heart of the episode is what each of them actually does about it. Steve shares the windscreen-wiper technique he absorbed from a Master Practitioner delegate’s modelling project – a coach who, on the drive to every session, imagined his wipers sweeping his mind clear – which now runs automatically whenever he needs to simply sit and listen. Kali’s version comes from her partner Matt, an IT security manager whose answer to every technical problem is “have you switched it off and on again?” – and it turns out it works on people too. Stuck writing a training programme? Ten minutes of watering the plants, and the way forward is suddenly obvious.

There’s a sharper edge too: a busy mind makes real listening impossible – you’re not hearing the other person, you’re waiting for your turn with the question you’ve already lined up. And from the Three Principles angle, the snow-globe state is the ego trying to manage everything, while the quiet state is where insight actually arrives. If your head has been loud lately, this is a short, warm reminder that you don’t have to do anything to fix it. Pause. Stop shaking. Let it settle.

In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:

• The snow globe and the puddle: two metaphors for a mind in overdrive
• Steve’s windscreen wiper technique, borrowed from a modelled coach
• Kali’s “switch it off and on again” approach to creative blocks
• Why a busy mind means you’re listening to interrupt, not to understand
• The Three Principles view: ego shakes the globe, quiet delivers the insight
• The case for caring less about the small stuff (mismatched ridge tiles included)

“He’s not in enough pain yet. It doesn’t hurt enough.”

Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com - a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.

In this episode, Steve and Kali keep it short and let a single story do the heavy lifting. It’s a metaphor Steve picked up from Connor, a colleague in the NLP field: a man walks up his friend’s driveway and hears the dog whimpering on the porch. Not distressed - just grumbling, shifting, uncomfortable. He asks what’s wrong. The friend, entirely unbothered, says: “Dog’s fine. He’s just lying on a nail.” And why doesn’t the dog simply get up and move? “He’s not in enough pain yet.”

Kali shares how the story landed for her personally - a decision she’d been circling for a while about stepping away from a big part of what they used to do. Then Steve told her the nail story and it tipped her over: “Right, that’s it. I’m done. The nail’s prodding too much now.” They pair it with Julia Donaldson’s The Snail and the Whale - the snail on the safe, boring rock who gets an itchy foot - and land on the same truth from two directions: most of us aren’t stuck because things are unbearable. We’re stuck because things are tolerable. Comfort is a very effective anaesthetic.

So the question worth sitting with this week: what nails are you lying on right now - and how much longer are you willing to lie there?

In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:

• Connor’s story of the dog on the nail - and why the dog doesn’t move
• The trap of “tolerable but not good”: comfort as anaesthetic
• Kali’s real decision - how one metaphor pushed her over the line
• The Snail and the Whale and the itchy foot that starts everything

“Eight hours of my time last week. What else could I be doing with that?”

Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.

In this episode, Steve and Kali pick up where the last one left off and turn the spotlight from connection back to the question we’d rather not answer: how much time is your phone actually taking from you? It starts with their podcast recordist Carl showing Kali the screen time setting on her iPhone that morning. Kali confidently guessed a couple of hours a week. The real number? Eight hours. In a single week. Steve, smugly, had his screen time tracking switched off – so he gets a free pass for now, but admits he probably wouldn’t fare much better.

From that one number, the conversation opens up into something bigger. How often do we tell ourselves we “haven’t got time” to learn something new, look for a different job, paint the spare room, do a course, get coaching – while a quiet eight hours a week disappears into scrolling we barely remember?

Steve and Kali run the maths (kind of) and the point lands: eight hours a week, every week, for a year, is not a small chunk of life. What could you write, walk, learn, finish, or simply enjoy with that time back?

The second half gets into the NLP of it. Because we are, as Kali puts it, a bunch of habits – strategies running on autopilot, including the morning grab-the-phone reflex that eats ten minutes before you’ve even stood up. NLP can’t fix that on its own. As Steve puts it, it’s like learning a musical instrument: there’s no point knowing the technique if you never pick it up and play.

They introduce the idea of a pattern interrupt – deliberately replacing one habit with another – and share a lovely tip Kali picked up somewhere: look at some sunshine before you look at your phone in the morning. Open the curtains, step outside, get the natural dopamine hit before the digital one. Steve, fairly, points out this is harder in Manchester in winter.

The point still stands: small interrupts, repeated, quietly change everything. If you’ve been telling yourself you don’t have time for the thing you actually want – check your screen time, and then decide what to do with what you find.

In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:

• Carl’s iPhone screen time suggestion – and Kali’s eight-hour shock
• Why “I haven’t got time” usually isn’t true
• The maths nobody wants to do: eight hours a week, multiplied across a year
• Why NLP only works if you actually apply it (the musical instrument analogy)
• The “pattern interrupt” – a simple NLP tool for breaking habits
• A morning experiment: sunshine before scrolling
• Why we are, fundamentally, a collection of habits – and the ones we choose

“I’m not in the concert. I’m recording it. Why am I recording it?”

Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.

In this episode, Steve and Kali tackle a quiet epidemic of modern life: the slow erosion of real connection in a world built for scrolling. It kicks off with a perfect moment – Kali introducing the topic while Steve is happily filming something on his phone next to her, oblivious. That’s the whole conversation in miniature, and from there they dig into what it actually costs us when our attention is always somewhere else.

Kali opens up with her own confession – sitting on the sofa after a long day of training, scrolling Instagram reels, until her partner Matt tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to put her phone down because she hadn’t heard a word he’d said. She follows it with a beautiful contrast: a recent Italian dinner where she watched a family of four spend £120-plus on a meal while Dad scrolled, the kids were on their phones, and Mum tried gamely to hold the conversation together. On her own anniversary dinner a few weeks later, she and Matt made a deliberate pact – phones in handbag and back pocket, not touched all night – and ended up watching the young couple at the next table, where the girl scrolled almost the entire evening while a clearly smitten boy tried his best to impress her. The moment dessert arrived and her phone went down, the connection finally appeared. But it had taken the whole meal to get there.

Steve weighs in with two stories that land hard. He once paid £150 to see an artist he loved, and spent the gig watching the band through his phone screen, recording it, missing the guitarist, the drummer, the whole atmosphere – until he caught himself and asked the question that gives this episode its hook. He follows it with the football fan at Stamford Bridge, phone up, recording a free kick – and missing whether the ball actually went in. They round out with the harder edge of the conversation: how apps are deliberately designed for dopamine hits, why human wellbeing is genuinely predicted by the number and quality of our connections, and how disconnection – not just emotionally but physically – quite literally makes us sick. The takeaway isn’t anti-tech or anti-phone. It’s a simple invitation: next time you go out for a meal, leave the phone in your bag, and see what happens when you actually look up.

In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:

• Kali’s story: the sofa, the scroll, and the tap on the shoulder
• Two restaurant tales – the family of four and the young couple’s “phone-down” turning point
• Steve’s £150 concert – and the moment he asked himself “why am I recording this?”
• How apps are designed to keep you scrolling (and what to do about it)
• Why disconnection isn’t just a vibe – it has measurable effects on physical and mental health
• A simple challenge: leave the phone in your bag the next time you eat out