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14th September 1997

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Mastering self with sizzle and steak

"All NLP does is give you a better edge in whatever you do. I see it as an add-on to whatever you’re doing to help you do it better. It helps you to look at what it is that you really want, delve into your own purpose, your mission, what you feel would be the best use of this time on earth. We’re all going through a human experience and we have to decide how to optimise that."

Omar Khan, is the man whose name is widely associated with NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming, a term that keeps surfacing constantly in Colombo these days. The chubby, eloquent, in fact silver tongued Oxford and Stanford law school graduate has a poetic streak, and a risque sense of humour that emerges not infrequently, but beneath the charm is a conviction that has impressed those who’ve followed his ‘mind power’ courses. The Chartered Institute of Marketing regularly organises these workshops for their members and SLANA (Sri Lanka Anti-Narcotics Association) has provided support services. So what’s the magic?

Khan is fond of saying that his brand of NLP has both the sizzle and the steak... "we have the flambe, but there isn’t just charred ashes beneath," he quips. When Khan first decided to come to Sri Lanka, he says, his friends scoffed at him. Three years later, after having introduced many Sri Lankans to NLP through his ‘Mastery of Self programmes’ he is so much at home here that he considers himself an ‘adopted Sri Lankan’.

The son of a Pakistani diplomat, Omar Khan spent his formative years living in many countries Germany, the United States, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands and attributes his wanderlust to this ever changing cultural canvas. He then went on to Oxford to study philosophy and psychology and while there helped run the student counselling centre ‘Nightline’, perhaps then acquiring something of his commitment to society. Family expectations, he says, took him to Stanford Law School but realisation dawned later that this was not his life’s work. It was at this point that grace or serendipity or fortunate circumstance led him to an NLP course. With his somewhat privileged background, he confesses that he was at the time inclined to be intellectually smug, and given to scepticism but the hype notwithstanding, he saw in the new philosophy something he personally could relate to.

"It was really a revolution in our way of understanding human problems, in terms of providing new levers for change, in dealing with the human psyche and certainly, a paradigm shift in terms of conventional ways of helping both people and organisations."

NLP, he explains, came about as a result of collaboration between a man called Richard Bandler, a mathematician and gestalt therapist and John Grinder, a linguistic expert.

"They felt that all the books told us was what to do to solve our problems but very few told us how to do it..... how to get ourselves out of inertia, build rapport with difficult people, effectively set goals, and stretch beyond past limits etc. They went to some of the most effective thinkers and therapists of the time and studied their methods and thinking. They watched to see what they did that we don’t. There must be something that these people do, perhaps intuitively that we don’t and finding many such successful interventions, they systematised this into a theory and tested if others could approximate, if not match their success in moving beyond their own problems or helping others with theirs.

This, they called NLP. "NLP simply means Neuro for brain and central nervous system, linguistic for language both verbal and non-verbal and programming meaning that these are a set of software packages for the hardware of the human brain. They are observations and suggestions, ways to convert theory into action."

"One of the NLP maxims is that all human beings have the same neurology, and since we all have the same neurology, anybody can produce a result and by studying their strategies, we should at least be able to approximate that result," he says choosing the example of tennis ace Pete Sampras.

If we try hard enough, even though we might never match his genius, we might far surpass our own expectations. "Success leaves clues, like failure leaves footprints in the sand."

Understanding NLP conceptually was fairly easy because of the background he had, says Khan. But he had reservations about the way it was being presented at the time, seeing it as too slick or too clinical and boring.

What he then tried to do, along with some others was to create a programme that had both the sizzle and the steak and that turned out to be the ‘Mastery of Self.’

The next five years were spent in the US, shuttling from California to Texas, New York to Seattle, Florida etc. after the new course became immensely popular. "But it became clear to me that the US was not short of NLP trainers or training resources, and there was precious little point given that I was initially drawn into this by the challenge of conveying this to different sets of people."

It was then he came to Asia, to Pakistan.-"There was no strategic reason. People said......look at all the fundamentalism, look at all the dogmatism, people will ride you out on rail, tarred and feathered, much less respond with enthusiasm. So we started very safely.....doing a course for teachers of dyslexic children. A lady asked me to do some counselling for a schizophrenic child.....the child’s father then wanted us to do some corporate work and an year later, we took a chance and decided to place an advertisement for a NLP course." To their astonishment, the response from Karachi folk was overwhelming. They attracted the Bishop of Karachi, Catholic missionaries, and veiled ladies. The success of that course he says "Gave us a new model of what was possible in this part of the world."

The Bishop brings us to another question....where does religion fit in? Omar Khan is quite definite. "Religion might give us some excellent guidelines as to how we should live but it is quite mute as to how we are to get ourselves to do so. Lots of people struggling to live according to their religious beliefs find that the course actually gives them the tools they need.

It also gives them the tools to challenge a simple minded interpretation of their faith. So I think they emerge more spiritual but less ritualistic. Everybody leaves questioning their own certitudes....the truth is not afraid of being questioned."

The Sri Lankan experience began in similar fashion. He came to Colombo initially for a corporate course......liked the country, brought wife Leslie, herself an NLP facilitator for a second honeymoon and then just two weeks after the general elections, decided to hold the first NLP course, from which it all just snowballed, with the help of some very enthusiastic Lankan friends. He now divides his time between Sri Lanka, Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the U.K where he has a partnership with a consultancy firm there.

Khan has programmes for children focusing on enriching their self esteem and though this uses a lot of NLP, it also uses what he calls wisdom literature of the ages. "Children don’t say no to drugs they say no to people," he explains, by way of example. Most problems like drug abuse, he feels stem from children, initially not being able to cope with their smaller problems, due to lack of patient, non- judgemental hearings from grown-ups. These small problems then grow, becoming in the child’s eye, insurmountable till there is no refuge but drugs and other forms of delinquency. He thus believes that counselling facilities should be available to every child at a certain age, so that even dark emotions can be navigated through. "If there were the mechanism whereby children feel that making the mistake is not a sin and we earn their trust by letting them come and tell us even the most shameful deed could be confessed and they will not feel the need to seek out other avenues to cope with their guilt. Children should be taught topics like communication, to appreciate other cultures, conflict resolution at school," he believes.

The educational front remains a sore point at present for Omar Khan for he sees an acute need for helping children in this country, yet finds his plans still unable to get off the ground.

"The future lies in the young if we don’t make them realise that they are a gift and they have to give that gift to the world, all the investment programmes will come to nothing. The Sri Lankan educational system is producing a lot of frightened, self-doubting, ill at ease young people...their academic achievements are nullified because they don’t have the will, the energy or the drive to go ahead. Those who do, leave the country. We need to articulate a realistic vision for the country, and then make sure that education is a real plank of that vision, with some strategic thinking and resources to help, and make this the national priority," he says. This is why he says the Japanese and the Singaporeans place such a premium on education, and stresses that it’s not just the quantity of education and how many credits you accumulate but the nature of that education. He would like to bring in a US based organisation called SuperCamp to do programmes that deal with accelerated learning and improving children’s self-esteem, but concedes that funding needs to be looked at.

"We run a profit organisation, we are not a charity... and yes, we will give a discount, we will do programmes for free but there’s more that’s needed. "So national resources would have to be brought to bear, he feels. "There’s a value attached. If children aren’t worth it, nothing else is."

Khan also does a lot of corporate quality work, business management, reengineering putting a human face on them "processes don’t re-engineer themselves, people re-engineer them. Group quality is not maintained by a policy manual, it’s maintained by a group of people who own the processes, care about what they’re doing and by a organisation that becomes customer focused than bureaucracy-driven," he says.

"I saw NLP as a springboard, not as the answer to life........here are a set of tools that are distinctive enough and different enough and if you add those tools to a lot of things that are very good like TQM (Total Quality Management) and BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) then you have a chance to take conventional wisdom and produce unconventional results.......that’s what captivated me. We’ve blended NLP with a lot of mainstream consultancy and training work.

His work with companies has been varied from leadership sessions to corporate transformation. There’s also long-term commitments, standing alongside companies as they change their organisational chart, their human resources structure, their reward and recognition structures, in short sort out their vision and mission. "We work with companies not only because there’s a lot of demand but because there’s an opportunity to change mindsets. Our work is helping companies eliminate hidden waste, tighten up their processes but there should also be some commitment to community, which is, after all, an intelligent investment," he adds.

"Put a group of Sri Lankans together and you’ll find they’re witty, relaxed, full of energy, but the same group in a corporate environment will be stodgy and withdrawn. We’ve got to find a way of channelling that energy, not just into cricket enthusiasm, which, after all, is just living vicariously. Instead the world champs should be role models to help each Sri Lankan aim higher."

Khan often says that he has been in Sri Lanka through bomb blasts, refinery fires and gas strikes, nothing daunted. His parting words are that he hopes to live to see the day the country will fulfill even a fraction of what he feels is its remarkable potential and take its rightful place in Asia.


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