Yesterday evening, I ran a Subtraction Method training for neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Ness Labs community.

Towards the end of the training, I was asked this question:

(paraphrased)

“Does the Subtraction Method apply to learning something practical, like public speaking?”

It’s a great question.

Mostly, I talk about how the Subtraction Method helps our inner worlds. So for public speaking, that means calmness, confidence and flow.

But it can absolutely help you learn skills and get good at stuff in the outside world too.

My answer yesterday used the skill of public speaking as an example.

But here are two other short stories which contrast nicely with each other yet which get right to the nub of why the Subtraction Method is so effective when it comes to getting good at stuff too.

Short story #1 goes like this:

In 2018, I emailed an underground legend in the London card magic scene to ask If I could start taking lessons. 

And start taking lessons I did. 

We’d meet in a Starbucks near my office every week. For a couple of years, this cardsharp would bend my ear with tales from when he studied under Ed Marlo (one of the most brilliant magicians who ever picked up a deck of cards) while teaching me all manner of shuffles, cuts, sleights, tricks and routines.

I had a blast.

We’d drill moves over and over again, me fumbling with my finger placements, dropping cards, revealing angles which should be kept secret, everything very clunky and unnatural. Until maybe a move clicked once, then a couple of weeks later it clicked again, and then slowly it started to feel more natural as my muscle and finger memories took over, until a move or sleight got “baked” into my subconscious.

That’s how it worked for most of the lessons anyway.

But there was one move called the Bottom Deal where try as I might, I could never get it to work.

As it turned out, I’d had a go learning this move a couple of years prior from one of my many magic books.

And when I started taking lessons and showed my teacher my pitiful attempt at a Bottom Deal, he looked at me like I’d just pulled a rabbit out of a blender.

Turns out I’d learnt the move all wrong.

In fact, not only had I learnt the Bottom Deal the wrong way, but my muscle and finger memory had learnt it the wrong way too. And the move had been so locked into my nervous system that every time my teacher would talk me through how to do it differently, I had to fight against my own hardwiring.

It literally took months to undo all this hardwiring and re-learn the move right way.

Keep that in mind as I tell you short story #2:

The first leg of my 7 month coaching certification training with American “supercoach” Michael Neill took place just down the road from my old Casa Grundy pad in a quiet street near Chancery Lane.

I remember walking into the conference room on Day 1, keeping my head down and slipping into a seat on the back row, one chair from the left.

Just as the training started, a lady sat down next to me. 

45 minutes later, Michael announced our first exercise and asked everyone to find a partner.

I turned to the lady next to me and smiled.

“Hi, I’m Tom” I said.

“I’m Claire” she said.

During the exercise we got chatting about our lives, our coaching experience and why we were at the training.

That’s when I found out that Claire had previously been Michael’s Apprentice. She’d spent months being taken under his wing and training with Michael one on one.

Being an Apprentice of Michael Neill's is as “inner circle” as you can go. On his website he makes the point that, family aside, there’s no-one he spends more time with than his apprentices.

So Claire certainly knew her coaching onions.

I, on the hand, was a coaching novice. That training was the starting point for me. I was the newbie in the room and part of me was even wondering if I’d made the right decision to take the training at all.

Maybe Claire sensed that.

Because as we finished the exercise, she said this:

“Tom, count your lucky stars you’ve found this form of coaching now, at the start of your coaching career. I know so many coaches who train in some other form of coaching then come to this five or ten years later. But by this point, they’ve learnt so much and got so many unhelpful ideas that it’s like trying to remove sugar from a cup of coffee”.

I wasn’t really sure what Claire meant.

But as I chatted with other participants over the next couple of days, I started to get it. 

Lots of my fellow course attendees knew NLP coaching inside-out or values-based coaching back to front, yet they all told me the same thing:

They felt like something was missing from their coaching. 

That's why they were on the training.

Ironically enough, Michael's coaching training itself was rooted in the same principles that underpin the Subtraction Method. 

But I don’t want to get too “meta” here.

Let’s just say that today I absolutely count my lucky stars that I found the Subtraction Method at the spritely age of 37 and spared myself the coaching equivalent of my Bottom Deal fiasco.

Two takeaways from these stories as I see it.

First:

It pays to get super clear on what you choose to learn.

The learning cycle of unconscious incompetence → conscious incompetence → conscious competence → unconscious competence is nothing new.

But what no-one tells you is that by the time a skill has made it into your unconscious competence, you damn well better have learnt the right skill.

Otherwise you’ll be spending months or even years trying to unlearn something which is now so well embedded into your body’s circuitry that you might not even realise you’ve mastered a mistake in the first place.

Second:

If you do happen to find yourself needing to subtract something you’ve learnt, it can be helpful to have a guide. A guide who can hold up a mirror, point things out, cajole you and notice the patterns you’re too close to see for yourself.

That’s not just the case for learning new skills by the way.

I’d argue this is even more relevant for the unhelpful beliefs, ideas, stories and thoughts that get so baked into our subconscious that they simply look like the way life is and always will be.

If life isn’t flowing quite the way you wish it would, this is where I’d look.

If you’d like a guide in your corner as you subtract the noise that keeps you stuck, I can help.

More info here:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com