David Fraser

"Oh, you mean communication," people often say when I tell them I work on our ability to excel in professional relationships. How to put this best?

Why? Because professional relationship skills are about the one thing you can depend on in a rapidly changing world and the ability to relate to other people is the most critical capability you can ever have.

We need the skills some refer to as NLP. They're ours after all, and they belong in the mainstream. They're as much part of us as our DNA. We need the skills because of the challenges we face. We need the learning they can give us. Unfortunately, we may have been put off by either the way NLP is used by some individuals for their own ends (let's call them the "manipulators"), or the arcane way the subject is sometimes discussed by the over-zealous (the "geeks").

Do you even want to collaborate? In challenging times, when our belief in an abundant world falters, a fear of scarcity can take over. We avoid being vulnerable; we avoid sharing our knowledge and resources; we hold on to what we have.

Or putting it another way, what's the structure of effectiveness in relating to other people? What's that set of skills which, once learned, can be used many times, or even everywhere? It's often said that relationships are complicated, in both a professional and a personal context. But are they?

It's a challenge for many if not all professional people: How to influence others in their own organization and in other organizations. They need to do this for their professional input to be heard and acted upon, and for them to achieve their objectives.