NLP Course Lesson 1: Your Starting Point (Money & Business History)

Free NLP Course for Business Owners · Lesson 1 of 11

About 5 minutes to read · 30-minute notebook exercise

Before you can change direction, you need an honest map of where you are and how you got here. In this lesson you build that map: the events and decisions that shaped how you think about money and work, plus the numbers that describe your business today.

The big idea: you are steering with an old map

Every business decision you make passes through a map in your head: what you believe about money, selling, customers, risk and yourself. Most of that map was drawn years ago by experiences you may barely remember. A parent who said money doesn't grow on trees. A first job where speaking up got you in trouble. A launch that flopped. A customer who made you feel silly for your price.

Each of those experiences taught you something, and at the time the lesson probably made sense. The problem is that the map keeps steering long after the territory has changed. In my own coaching plan, this step got more time than any other: three of the eighteen hours.

Step 1: Your money and business timeline

1. Open your notebook to the timeline you drew in the Start Here lesson (or draw one now: birth on the left, today in the middle, three years ahead on the right).
2. Mark 8 to 12 events that shaped how you think about money, work, selling, confidence or risk. Include good ones and bad ones: your first paycheck, a family money crisis, the first thing you ever sold, getting fired, a big win, a partner who let you down, the day you started your business.
3. For each event, write four short notes:
   • What happened: just the facts, the way a camera would have recorded them.
   • What I decided: the conclusion you took from it, such as "asking for money is embarrassing" or "if I work hard enough I can fix anything."
   • Where it shows up today: in your prices, your follow-ups, your hiring, your hours, your marketing.
   • Keep or update? Is this decision still helping you?

Step 2: Your business baseline

A breakthrough you can't measure is just a nice feeling. Write down where your business stands today, so that in three months you can see what changed:

• Average monthly sales over the last three months and, if you know it, profit.
• Hours you work per week.
• Customers per month, and how many of them are repeat customers.
• Your best sales channel (where most of the money comes from) and your weakest one.
• Your average order or job size.
• A score from 1 to 10 for three things: how confident you feel when selling, how stressed you are, and how much you enjoy the work.

Don't judge the numbers. They are your "before" photo.

Step 3: Find your patterns

Read back over your timeline notes and look for decisions that repeat. Then write two short lists:

• My 3 helpful patterns (keep them and use them more). Example: "I keep going when things get hard."
• My 3 expensive patterns (they cost me money, time or peace). Example: "I wait for customers to come back instead of asking them."

You will use these lists in almost every lesson that follows. Lesson 5 works on the feelings attached to old events, and Lesson 6 works on the decisions themselves.

Why this works

Looking at your history as a series of events and decisions, instead of as "who I am," is the first NLP move: separating the map from the territory. It turns "I'm bad with money" into "I decided something about money when I was fifteen, and I can decide again."