“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
– Arthur C. Clarke
Fragment from a consultation
This was part of a deep dive consult I did for a physician who was training people in an innovative way to treat intractable neurological problems.
His challenge was that even though his material was first rate, he was losing students, losing momentum, and not growing.
The changes he need to make were relatively simple, but he could not see the problems without help.
Update: He now gives regular, fully booked trainings in five different countries.
The 10 Commandments of P-DTR trainings
#1. Thou shalt start and end all sessions on time
#2. Thou shalt be certain that class time is clearly ON (focused instruction) or clearly OFF (break time), no middle ground. (If things get too loose, call a break)
#3. Thou shall not devote class time to teaching advanced topics during Foundations classes
#4. Thou shalt have at least one massage table for every four students
#5. Thou shalt begin every session with an overview of objectives and end every session with a review of principles
#6. Thou shalt encourage, help and even praise, students who are attempting public demonstrations and not let them flounder nor make sport of their confusion
#7. Thou shalt define every key word thoroughly and add it to the course glossary
#8. Thou shall not disparage the work of other modalities (even if they deserve it)
#9. Thou shall not tell “locker room” jokes in classes in America. Americans descended from the Puritans. In public settings, always keep this fact in mind.
#10. Always keep looking for ways to improve
* Books only help the wise
If books were knowledge we could pack them on the backs of donkeys and turn the donkeys into professors!
* The remedy for thieves
I don’t think there is ever any danger of someone teaching himself your material and getting your results without your guidance.
In this way, your material is an ideal “product.”
Can idiots take superficial things and make claims of greatness?
Yes. It happens all the time in every field. It happens to me in my business too.
The only remedy is to have a great training program that produces a lot of great students. (Or more accurately, processes lots of students so the law-of-large numbers delivers you some great students.)
That’s why you must have the best web site, the best videos, the trainings, the course materials.
If books were knowledge we could pack them on the backs of donkeys and turn the donkeys into professors!
* Who gets the credit?
I’m reading a new book called “The Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons”
Very helpful for me to learn a few things about the brain.
From a business point view, this passage jumped out at me.
It’s about the mapping of the visual cortex and who got credit for the work and why.
“Unfortunately, for Inouye, other scientists got credit for his discoveries.
During WW I two English doctors, ignorant of his work, duplicated his experiments on the visual cortex with their own brain damaged troops.
They obtained the same results but these doctors had the cultural advantage of being European. What’s more in his major paper on vision, Inouye used a convoluted Cartesian graph between the eyes and the primary visual cortex.
It was precise, but it left readers cross-eyed themselves.
The Englishmen meanwhile used a simple map, something scientists can grasp at a glance. When this intuitive diagram was published in textbooks worldwide, Inouye slipped into obscurity. “
Here’s the lesson I get from this story…
Whoever succeeds in getting credit for a concept, (discovery or invention) out clearly to the largest number of people gets the credit
* The path of the innovator
I made a friendly invitation to doctor for a social lunch in DC.
He was not interested and it became clear that in fact he has received all my previous e-mails about P-DTR and simply ignored them.
I was flabbergasted, but was very polite about it.
I don’t know what is in his mind and I didn’t ask him, but I would eliminate him as a possibility. “Water the flowers, not the weeds.”
The way to deal with this is to:
* build the Oakland class so strong so that…
* people from NYC start hearing about it
* then some of them will come to see for themselves
* then someone will emerge who can raise a class in NYC
NYC is a very harsh, competitive, “dog eat dog” environment. People with businesses to look after generally don’t reach out to explore things if they think it’s going to disrupt their
business in any way.
If this were Silicon Valley and your product were software, they would call it “disruptive” – and they mean that in a very favorable way.
You are turning the practice of medicine upside down. Therefore many with huge investments in the old ways of doing things are not going to like it.
There is a man who I communicate with casually who is a top venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Coincidentally today – on another topic – he said this:
“Amazing how much in tech actually follows the “first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win” pattern.”
– Balaji S. Srinivasan ?
Do you know this saying?
I have studied the the path that innovation takes and have participated in developing many major innovations (the banner ad, pay-per-click ads, video on the Internet) and it’s always the same pattern.
The ignore us – then ridicule us – then fight us…and then we win.
* ON and OFF and “show biz
One of the key principles of “show biz” is ON/OFF.
It needs to be very clear when the “show” is ON and very clear when it is OFF.
I didn’t see this so much in the Mexico classes, but in Oakland there were somewhat lengthy periods where the class seemed to break into several uncoordinated groups with many people not knowing what was going on.
The related “show biz” principle: Start on time. End on time.
When people go to the movies or a concert they want to know “When does the show start?” and “How long is it?”
Even if God and all his angels are performing, the audience doesn’t care. They want to know about the ON/OFF part.
If people are late, kindly inform them they will have to make up the material by asking their fellow classmates. It is NOT the teacher’s problem to deal with the problems that late people cause themselves.
* Teasing and praise
From an article about a famous US chef who went to Vietnam to learn how to cook Vietnamese food:
“The lessons were very hands-on, and I got just the right amounts of teasing and praise.”
The balance is something very important to consider when students are being asked to try things for the first time.
A litte gentle teasing paradoxically makes students feel accepted, but too much is poison for all but the toughest minded and teasing with no praise is like feeding people salt for dinner. Salt is meant to season a meal.
* One of the best students I ever had…
One of the best students I ever had I almost told not to take the course.
She appeared to be so unlikely to succeed, I was prepared to refund her money.
In the end, she surprised me. She worked hard and steadily and when it was time for the exam, she scored as high on it as anyone ever did.
I learned not to pre-judge my students. How they look is not important. It’s what they do between their ears in class and at home that matters- and this woman clearly knew how how to use her brain.
* How “show biz” is different from medicine
This is the big difference between medicine and “show biz”
When someone walks in in pain and walks out without it, complaints are very unlikely
But in show biz, as the old saying goes, “everybody’s a critic.”
* Every student is a miracle
You never know when a slow student will have a contact that can bring you 100 students or otherwise change you fortunes massively…
The most interesting and true thing I’ve heard in a long time:
“There are three people you will meet in your life who will change your destiny for the better – and you’ll have no way to recognized who they are when you first meet them.”
The number “three” is irrelevant. The point is you never know who someone knows – and you certainly can’t predict who that person knows.
A less-than-stellar student may have a father who is a multimillionaire who decides your research should have unlimited funding. Who knows?
It’s good to design things to keep as many people engaged as possible. You can always differentiate as the student body grows.
IMPORTANT POINT:
The education business is not like medicine. There are no throngs of people actively looking for it with the same strong motivation as people look for relief when they are in pain or disability.
Proof: There are no “education emergency rooms”
Every student who shows up and with a desire to learn, regardless of their aptitude, is a small miracle.
* Remember who pays the bills
Fact of life: The vast majority are the “bill payers” who cover the overhead and make it possible for you to find the outstanding students.
Doing what it takes to retain them for as long as possible and turn them into unpaid salesmen and promoters of the seminars is the most pressing matter from a seminar business point of view.
No seminar product can thrive in the marketplace if it does not have internal growth (students returning and new ones being recruited naturally by older ones.)
So we must cater to them for as long as it takes to fill the classes with top people only (and let the top people provide basic training to the majority.)
My favorite saying for this:
“The mine is bigger than the gem”
* How to deal with a wide range of intellectual capacity among students
Improved clarity – meticulous definition of terms, well-defined learning objectives etc. – can help standard students learn more.
And people at the higher end of the spectrum will never complain when these things are provided.
Also, providing these aids will increase the likelihood that standard and even below standard students will return for more training.
I always had students who I knew were not “getting” it, but they liked the classes and the sense they were learning interesting new things.
As you point out, the folks in these categories will always be the majority of the students in the room so they have to be dealt with and I believe the best way to do that is with “show biz” as defined below.
* Occupying time in an agreeable way
Teaching is show biz, but not in the “razzle dazzle” sense or even the entertainment sense.
But it does follow my definition of show biz which is to “occupy time in an agreeable way.”
How is time occupied in “an agreeable way” for people who are in a classroom?
Just like with a show, there is a clear beginning, a clear middle and a clear end – with no down time anywhere in the sequence.
When I was in the radio business we called down time “dead air.” It was like death. Since then I always made sure in every “show” I put on there was never “dead air.”
In a classroom setting the “curtain rising” is the teacher giving the students an overview of what will be covered in the segment.
The middle is covering the material.
The “curtain closing” is the end of segment where the teacher goes over the main points
covered.
It’s more work to teach this way, but the impact is very powerful.
I like to say, teach less and repeat more.
This is not to deny people information but to make sure they clearly understand the material and recognize what’s important in what they just learned.
In two days, you have an AM and PM session and I imagine that each session has two segments – for a total of 8 “shows”
If each one has a clear beginning, middle and end, it will be a very agreeable experience for the students indeed. They will understand more, retain more and have more confidence in their ability to “win” with the material.
Eight shows:
1. Sat AM 1
2. Sat AM 2
3. Sat PM 1
4. Sat PM 2
BONUS session – evening (has it’s own rules)
5. Sun AM 1
6. Sun AM 2
7. Sun PM 1
8. Sun PM 2
BONUS session – evening (has it’s own rules)
* The process of training superior performers
In my book there is a chapter on “improvisation” and I talk about jazz and business
I think that P-DTR besides being the “brain surgery” of therapies is also the “jazz” of therapies.
To me jazz is not party music even if it can be fun. And it’s not random fooling around even though the musicians make it look easy.
It is music played at a very high level.
Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Leopold Godowsky, and David Oistrakh are all on the record stating their admiration for the skills of certain high level jazz pianists.
Classical musicians admire admire two about jazz musicians:
1. Their obvious skill
2. Their ability to improvise and create new beautiful music on the spot.
This second thing is something that even the greatest classical musicians never develop.
It occurs to me that one of the things you are working towards is to teach your students the ability to improvise…
In other words to see what needs to be done and “invent” a solution that is specific to the case in front of them – and NOT to follow a simple-minded cookbook.
This is the highest form of medicine, or music, or consulting.
What process do we follow to get students to this point?
If we look at jazz, we see the following:
1. Classical musicians study how to play specific pieces
2. Jazz musicians study the theory of music (harmony, chord progressions etc.) in MUCH greater depth than classical musicians
3. Jazz musicians not only learn the theory on an intellectual level, they also train themselves to have this theory ready at their finger tips to use instantaneously when it is needed.
4. Because they know the structure of music and they have that understanding in their hands, you can present a skilled jazz musician with any musical situation and they will approach it fluently instantly.
YOU are that kind of person too in medicine.
You have internalized anatomy, neurology, movement, kinesiology, and many other disciplines.
You bring so much to a case that other doctors see “magic” when they watch you work, not technology because they don’t have the background knowledge to understand what they are observing
They are like the man from the jungle who sees his first airplane. (Remember the quote from Arthur C. Clarke from yesterday. Advanced technology looks like magic.)
To figure out how to bring your students to this level, we can profit from asking this question: How are great jazz musicians made?
How do they get to the point where they can look at a few scribbles on a piece of paper or hear a tune they have never heard before and instantly start making great music from it?
Jazz musicians get three things in their training:
1. The foundations – scales, chord progressions, harmonic theory – are drilled into them over and over again.
For example, one thing that you must learn to be a jazz musician is all 12 scales, in major and minor modes, so that you can instantly and without thinking jump from one to another.
There is no easy way to absorb this info. Young musicians have to drill and get it in their heads and fingers.
2. Jazz peopke are given opportunities when they are first earning to play lots of SIMPLE music so that they can develop their technique.
Most great jazz musicians started their training in their school band and spent years playing very simple music and getting comfortable with the mechanics of their instrument.
3. Thorough theoretical knowledge + ease with the mechanics of their instrument = the foundation for improvisation training.
Improvisation training has three phases:
a. The closed door mode where the students “break the ice” and make tentative (and tender) attempts to create their own music from what they’ve learned.
b. The local audience mode where friends and families come out and applaud even when the improvisations are full of mistakes and maybe not very good.
c. The professional mode…This is where things get harsh. In a professional setting there is
appreciation of excellent playing, but there is also intolerance of bad play.
====
OK, what is the point of all this?
#1 There bodies of knowledge that are fundamental to P-DTR – terminology, basic anatomy, etc. – that need to be defined and elucidated up front as clearly as possible.
#2 Training techniques need to be developed to make sure that students focus on and work towards mastery of these fundamentals from the very beginning.
#3 Practicums should be treated as having three modes:
– Closed door mode where student is given lots and lots of help including review of any fundamentals that are relevant to the case they are working on.
– Local mode where students stand more on their own two feet, but get vocal support for their efforts regardless of how bad they may be – and are given help as needed and when they ask for it.
– Professional mode, where the student is held to a strict standard and “graded” on their ability to manifest their learning and practice.
Professional mode would be appropriate for someone who is at the very highest current level of student.
Otherwise, closed door mode and local mode (depending on the student) are better approaches.
When someone comes to learn something new, they are very much like children.
They’re not sure of themselves, they’re afraid of getting it wrong, they’re afraid of looking foolish, etc.
They are very sensitive to any hint of ridicule or embarrassment and are highly vulnerable to becoming discouraged and concluding that they cannot learn a particular subject.
At the closed door and local audience level…
When asked to demonstrate something they’ve learned, what is really being tested is “has the concept been conveyed successfully by the training to THIS student.”
If not, then it’s a great opportunity not only to clarify the issues for the student doing the demonstration but also to reinforce key concepts for the other students.
“Repetition is the mother of learning”
So, to summarize:
1. Let’s indentify the fundamentals that beginning students of P-DTR MUST know in order to advance efficiently
2. Let’s create tools and techniques to make sure these fundamentals are learned quickly and thoroughly
3. Let’s manage practicum scenarios in such a way that the level of support a student gets is calibrated to his level of understanding, development,and confidence.
Show biz and education – Part One
In this case, by show biz I’m not referring to “razzle dazzle” or even entertainment, I’m talking about the fundamental core of all successful show business:
“Fill a given time slot with an agreeable experience.”
What follows may seem very obvious, but it goes to the core of successful instructional design:
Every satisfying show has:
1) a clear beginning
2) a unified narrative
3) a clear ending
No exceptions.
Understanding the deep motivations and drives of students
This is some good background info on what motivates students to do the hard work of learning something new.
The big lesson is how strong the urge people have to develop mastery is.
When students feel they are developing mastery, they are very, very happy.
When they are frustrated in this, the frustration goes to the depth of their being.
Instructional design (video)
Instructional design principles
It is an excellent thing to build review sessions into each segment. Yes, it is boring for the teacher(s) but students love it.
The formula for group presentations is:
1. This is what I’m going to say in this session
2. Say it
3. This is what I said
In essence, you cover less material this way, but the material that is covered is absorbed much more thoroughly.
Related: When you have an agenda for the day and follow it, students always feel that they know what’s going on. If they miss something, they know what blanks to they have to fill in.
Without an agenda, small gaps in understanding feel huge and when they start to accumulate frustration sets in.
“When you proceed deliberately, mistakes don’t cascade, they instruct.” Stewart Brand
Gaps in understanding will always occur. Thus we are always paying attention to detect them as the occur so we can correct them and include the improved material in the course outline the next time it’s taught.
The key is to design the structure of the training in such away so that gaps in understanding do not cascade.
That is when the train goes off the track.
Managing the petty (not pretty) details of time
When teaching in the US one must be strict and consistent about time.
“We start promptly at 9 AM. Here is when we take breaks.”
Class should never be held up or material taught twice because of one late person.
If so, late people are controlling the class.
Let later people be uncomfortable and scramble around later to get the material they missed.
If someone is late once, they will learn the lesson.
Of course, for a system like this to work the professor consistently must be on time too.
Very British.
This concept goes beyond starting sessions on time.
US students want to know the schedule for the day.
The agenda: What will be covered when and in what order etc.
Yes, it is like being in Alcatraz – and they like it that way.
Time and teaching: Difference between Mexicans, Russians, and Americans
Mexicans work hard and have a lot of ingenuity – and are flexible about time.
Russians work hard and have a lot of ingenuity – and are flexible about time.
Americans (and Brits) work hard and have a lot of ingenuity – but they want the train to run on time and become agitated and disoriented when it does not.
If a training is going to succeed *commercially* in the US, “the train must run on time.” This is a core concept with many different applications to instructional design.
Americans have infinite choices and limited time
The US is the big beautiful market
I never realized how lucky I was until I started doing business in other countries.
300+ million people all speaking the same language in one country and with lots of money!
But here’s the catch…
Americans have nearly infinite choice.
If something is not the way they want it, they can always find something else to do – and will choose convenience over quality because of the time shortage they face.
(Look at how Americans eat. McDonalds and microwave food is the national cuisine even for people with money. It says everything.)
Yes, it is absurd that when presenting material at this level we have to consider the “convenience factor”, but this is the seminar business and business has its own rules.
To win a game, you must play the rules of the game.
Silver bullets vs lead ones
The best thing I’ve heard about business in a long time.
“There are no “silver bullets” for solving problems. You just need lots and lots of lead ones.”
That’s the situation I see here. Everything is fixable and the seminar can be put on a clear growth path in the US, but it’s going to take a lot of lead bullets, no magic ones.
The historical model
I’ve been studying my history
1964 – “George gathers Goodheart Study Group Leaders, called the “Dirty Dozen” after a popular film of the time, to develop and the teach the work of Applied Kinesiology”
You don’t need help developing the science, but you will succeed much faster and grow this much bigger if you collaborate with your early students on the best ways to introduce the science to new people.
Once new people have a foundation, then teaching details become less important, but if the early trainings are not devoted to meticulously laying a clear foundation, confusion and frustration sets in and that kills motivation and confidence for most people.
I can solicit the suggestions of your early students of how to improve the introductory sessions, compile these suggestions and help you develop a system to execute the suggestions you agree with.
Your work is such a gem. Now the details of the presentation of it have to rise to equal it.
– Ken McCarthy
P.S. For over 25 years I’ve been sharing the simple but powerful things that matter in business with my clients.
If you’d like direction for your business that will work today, tomorrow and twenty years from now, visit us at the System Club.
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