Association & Dissociation - NLP Techniques Article

"Jonathan Altfeld is a highly skilled communicator and trainer whom it is an absolute pleasure to watch at work. He cultivates a learning environment which nurtures and develops the skills and abilities of everyone within the group, and created epic transformations."

I hired Jonathan for weekly 1-on-1 executive coaching, as well as invited him to spend two days with my team of scientists and managers, for a customized presentation followed up with individual employee coaching sessions.

Jonathan was tremendously helpful in coaching me through some very difficult situations. We focussed primarily on "emotional state management" which he quickly diagnosed was where I needed the most help. Maintaining the proper emotional equilibrium while going through stressful situations to a large extend comes natural to me. Nonetheless, there was a lot of room for improvement, and Jonathan definitely helped me reach a higher level of performance. Working with Jonathan was an absolute delight because he would quickly assess the situation I would describe to him and give me clear, specific pointers on how to adjust my perceptions and options to create a more positive emotional state regarding the situation. From there we would seamlessly transition to specific training exercises to prepare for future situations. I use many of these techniques now without thinking about them; they've become part of my repertoire and toolset.

Not only was Jonathan able to help me improve my performance, he worked with my entire team to help them improve their internal communication. By appropriately confronting them with the need to take responsibility for the outcome of their individual attempts at communication, he was able to help many of them move towards a greater awareness of their own specific communication needs and approaches and to make adjustments to improve the outcome. One team member told me what an amazing resource he was. I was very pleased with the changes in the team's approach to communicating with each other. While communication is still of course not yet perfect among them, it has improved considerably, and this allowed the team to achieve an amazing result. We set goals for the end of the year that we thought were aggressive. In fact we ended up beating the date by 2 months. No doubt we got lucky of course in terms of not encountering major technical obstacles we could not easily overcome. Nonetheless I credit a significant part of our success to Jonathan's work in enabling better team communication. Just the knowledge that in fact there were specific, attainable ways to make communication better encouraged the team and gave them the confidence to work through tense or difficult situations more smoothly than before.

Jonathan is indeed a tremendous resource for those who want to improve their communications (in the broadest sense of that word). Ultimately all human achievement is based on our proficiency to interact with others in a way that makes it more likely we will achieve a mutually beneficial, mutually desired outcome. Jonathan is able to work with any team or individual motivated enough to seek help in doing better, and helping them improve. What I appreciate the most about Jonathan is that he does not try to create an unnatural dependence. On the contrary, he happily shares his techniques and uses exercises and training to help you internalize them. Like any good coach, he helps you get better and acquire new skills that you can use on your own to achieve amazing results.

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