The Voilet That Was Waiting

The Voilet That Was Waiting

Welcome to Episode #164 of NLP Around You

 

📢 FREE LIVE WEBINAR

Outwardly Successful. Inwardly Stuck.

For the high performer who has the title, the income, and the résumé… and still feels something is missing.

👉 Save your seat here

 

Welcome to Episode #165 of NLP Around You.

 

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“You are not lacking a resource. You are probably using it on the wrong field.” — Dr Mehernosh J Randeria

For your daily dose of Thoughtful Thoughts, get your Thoughtful Calendar here.

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” — Carl Jung

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – The Presupposition of Resources

Most of us have been quietly trained to believe that the missing piece lives outside us.

A better job. A bigger title. One more certification. The right mentor. The right city. The right partner. The right book.

NLP starts from a different premise.

One of its core presuppositions is this. Every person already has all the resources they need to make the change they want. The resources are not absent. They are sitting in a different room.

Calm is in there. Courage is in there. Patience is in there. Discipline is in there. You have been all of these things at some point in your life. Maybe at work, but not at home. Maybe with a parent, but not with your child. Maybe at thirty, but not at fifty.

The work of change is not installation. It is redirection.

Explore this. Pick one thing you say you do not have. “I do not have the patience for this.” Now ask yourself, where in my life do I already have this in abundance? Who do I treat with that patience? In what setting does it show up effortlessly? That is the room it is sitting in. Your job is not to manufacture it. Your job is to bring it across the corridor.

You are not empty. You are misallocated.

Installation is exhausting.

Redirection is elegant.

If you want to learn how to do this redirection at a structural level, the next cohort of NLP Practitioner is the place to begin.

 

🔮 Meta Magic – The Violet Lady of Milwaukee

The Violet That Was Waiting

Somewhere in the late 1950s, in Milwaukee, a young doctor received an unusual request. His name was Milton Erickson.

The request came from a worried nephew. “My aunt is deeply depressed,” he said.

She lived alone in a large house. Rarely stepped out. Rarely met people. Rarely attended church anymore, though she had been a deeply devout member of the congregation.

The house, in many ways, had become her world.

And perhaps, her world had become the house.

So the nephew asked Erickson if he would visit her.

Erickson agreed.

When he entered the house, he saw what most of us might have seen.

Dim rooms.
Heavy curtains.
A piano whose lid had not been opened in a long time.
A Bible on the side table, clearly used, but perhaps now more as memory than practice.

It was the kind of house where silence does not merely exist.

It sits with you.

It occupies the chair opposite you.

It becomes the third person in the room.

And then, while walking through the house, Erickson turned a corner.

And there it was.

Sunlight.

A glass conservatory at the back of the house.

Filled with African violets.

Rows and rows of them.

Purple. White. Lavender. Pink.

Each one carefully grown.
Each one lovingly tended.
Each one carrying the quiet fingerprints of a woman who still knew how to care.

Now, pause here for a moment.

Most people would have focused on the depression.

Erickson noticed the violets.

Most people would have asked, “What is wrong with you?”

Erickson silently seemed to ask, “What is still alive in you?”

He did not make her sit for a long therapeutic conversation.

He did not analyse her sadness.

He did not interpret the curtains.

He did not ask why the piano was closed.

He simply asked her one question.

“Do you have a list of every birth, illness, wedding, and funeral in your congregation?”

She did.

Of course she did.

She was connected to the church, even if she had disconnected from the people.

Then Erickson gave her one simple instruction.

From now on, whenever there is a birth, send an African violet.
Whenever someone is ill, send an African violet.
Whenever there is a wedding, send an African violet.
Whenever there is a funeral, send an African violet.

Not a lecture.
Not a long prayer.
Not a motivational quote.

A violet.

Grown by her.
Wrapped by her.
Sent in her name.

That was it.

That was the intervention.

No grand technique.
No complicated framework.
No dramatic breakthrough moment.

Just a gentle redirection of something she was already growing.

Years later, when she passed away at a ripe old age, the local newspaper carried a headline that stayed with people.

Milwaukee mourns the Violet Lady. Beloved by thousands.

Think about that.

She was not lacking love.
She was not lacking purpose.
She was not lacking community.

She was growing all three.

Quietly.

In pots.

In a sunlit glass room at the back of a silent house.

Waiting for someone to notice.

Waiting for someone to redirect it.

That, to me, is the beauty of Erickson’s work.

He did not give her a new life.

He helped her see the life that was still blooming inside her old one.

And perhaps that is where so many of us miss the point.

We keep looking for what needs to be fixed. What needs to be added. What needs to be installed. What new habit, new belief, new routine, new affirmation, new system, new identity must be brought in from outside.

As if we are empty rooms waiting to be furnished.

But often, transformation does not begin by adding something new.

Sometimes, it begins by noticing what is already alive.

NLP, at its best, does this.

It does not treat a person as broken.

It looks for the resource.

The pattern.
The strength.
The memory.
The value.
The forgotten ability.
The quiet violet growing somewhere in the background.

And then it asks a different question.

Not, “What is missing?”

But, “Where can this be used?”

Because sometimes your gift has not disappeared. It has only become inward-facing.

Sometimes your love has not died. It has only lost direction.

Sometimes your purpose is not absent. It is simply sitting in a glass room, waiting to be sent into the world.

So let me ask you this.

What is your violet?

What is that one thing you have been quietly growing, perhaps for years, without realising its value?

And who, somewhere in the world, is waiting to receive it?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” — Mary Oliver, Upstream

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Tumhare paas talent hai, par tum usse waste kar rahe ho.”

Translated: “You have the talent, you are just wasting it.”

This line from Wake Up Sid reminds us that the problem is rarely absence. The problem is usually the angle at which we are aiming what we already have.

 

🏆 Popular Post of the Week

The Psychology of Persuasion – in numbers

 

📢 Announcement of the Week

If something in this episode sat down inside you and refused to leave, that is the signal.

Join me live for the free webinar Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck. It is built for the high performer who has built the outer life beautifully and is now ready to name the inner thing nobody at work asks about.

👉 Save your seat here

 

Missed the past issues of NLP Around You? Find them all here: https://w3coach.com/nlparoundyou/

Thoughtfully Yours,

Mehernosh Randeria

Your W3 Coach

When Stillness Feels Like Falling Behind

When Stillness Feels Like Falling Behind

Welcome to Episode #164 of NLP Around You

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

Strip away your doing, and meet whoever is left. That person is the one running your life.

— Dr Mehernosh J Randeria

For your daily dose of Thoughtful Thoughts, get your Thoughtful Calendar here.

 

💬 NLP Quote Corner

“Your behaviour does not define you. Your identity does. Change one, and the other follows.”

— Robert Dilts

 

⏳ One Minute NLP – Identity vs Behaviour

Most people try to change their lives at the level of behaviour.

Wake up earlier. Eat cleaner. Reply faster. Speak less in meetings. Spend more time with family. Read more books.

And almost all of it slips back within weeks.

Not because the behaviour was wrong. Because the identity underneath the behaviour did not change.

In NLP, we work with what Robert Dilts called the Logical Levels. Behaviour is a surface. Identity is the bedrock. If you try to install a new behaviour into an old identity, the old identity quietly dismantles it overnight, like a body rejecting a transplant.

A man who believes “I am a hustler” cannot rest, no matter how many wellness apps he downloads. A woman who believes “I am the strong one” cannot ask for help, no matter how exhausted she is. The behaviour they want is not the problem. The story they hold about themselves is.

Explore this today. Take one behaviour you keep failing to change. Then ask, gently, what kind of person would I have to become for this new behaviour to feel natural? That answer is the work.

Behaviour is what you do.

Identity is who you are when no one is watching.

 

🔮 Meta Magic – Coaching Chronicles

The CFO Who Couldn’t Sit Still

He walked into the session in a charcoal grey suit, sleeves crisp, watch heavy on his wrist.

Senior finance leader. Mid-fifties. Two grown children. A career résumé that takes a full minute to read out loud.

“I want more meaning in my role,” he said, settling into the chair. “The numbers are good. The team is good. But something is off.”

We talked for twenty minutes. He was articulate. Self-aware. Already half-coached, the way senior people often arrive these days.

Then I asked him to do something simple.

“Sit with me in silence for sixty seconds. No phone. Eyes open or closed, your choice. Just sit.”

He smiled. The kind of smile a senior leader gives when he assumes this is a warm-up to something more interesting.

Ten seconds in, his right hand started tapping his knee.

Twenty seconds in, his thumb went looking for his phone.

Thirty seconds in, he opened his eyes and laughed.

“Let’s just keep talking, doctor. I think better when I’m talking.”

I let the moment land. Not as an accusation. Just as information.

“You came in saying something is off,” I said. “I think we just met it.”

He frowned.

“For thirty years,” I said, “your nervous system has learned that stillness equals falling behind. Pausing means losing. Silence means something is wrong. Your body cannot tell the difference between rest and risk anymore.”

He went quiet.

A different kind of quiet this time.

Not performance. Recognition.

“So what do I do?”

“Nothing yet. First, notice. The man who walked in here wants more meaning. But the man who lives inside that suit cannot tolerate sixty seconds of meaninglessness. Those are two different men. Until they meet, no strategy will work.”

He nodded slowly. Then said something I will not forget.

“If I am not producing, I do not know who I am.”

That sentence, said out loud, is the entire problem and the entire doorway, both at once.

In NLP, we say identity drives behaviour. Strategy without identity-level work is decoration. You can teach a CFO mindfulness, journaling, breath work, every tool in the wellness catalogue. None of it sticks if his core identity is “I am what I produce”. Because the moment he stops producing, even for a minute, his body reads it as danger.

The work, then, is not to add a new habit.

It is to widen the definition of who he is.

Until “I am at rest” becomes a sentence he can say without flinching, every productivity hack will quietly fail him. And so will every promise of meaning.

So let me ask you…

When the doing stops, who do you become?

 

📖 Hook from the Book

“It is not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”

— Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

 

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Kabhi kabhi lagta hai apun hi bhagwan hai.”

Translated: “Sometimes I feel I am God myself.”

This iconic line from Sacred Games captures the trap of identity built on doing. When everything you have ever achieved feels like you, you cannot afford to stop. Because the moment you do, the version of you on the throne starts to disappear.

 

🏆 Popular Post of the Week

Last week, the Dhurandhar Arc concluded on Lights! Camera! NLP!. Ten days, ten chapters, one spy thriller read through an NLP lens. The complete arc is now compiled as a free e-book, ten chapters in one PDF.

→Download the free e-book here.

 

Missed the past issues of NLP Around You? Find them all here: https://w3coach.com/nlparoundyou/

 

Thoughtfully Yours,

Mehernosh Randeria

Your W3 Coach

What Cannot Be Burnt: NLP Insights from Dhurandhar (Chapter 10)

What Cannot Be Burnt: NLP Insights from Dhurandhar (Chapter 10)

Lights! Camera! NLP! · The Dhurandhar Arc, Chapter 10 of 10. The finale.

Previously, we discovered that the longest cover in the film had been running for forty-five years. Today, we close the arc. Yalina. The cost. The consequence. The collateral.

(For the full arc, visit Lights! Camera! NLP!.)


Let’s go back to the second photograph.

Yalina’s face. A son. A Karachi home that had become, somewhere along the years, actually home.

Jaskirat burns it.

We have looked at this scene once before, under the lens of Values. Look at it again now, with softer eyes.

Because the photograph burns. The feeling does not.

 

The Ecology Check

In NLP, this is a test called the Ecology Check.

Before you commit to a well-formed outcome, you ask: does this outcome fit with the rest of my life? With my relationships? With the person I want to be five years from now? What will this cost, not just in time and money, but in the parts of me I will have to leave on the table?

Most ambitions fail the ecology check, and we proceed anyway, because the outcome is loud and the ecology is quiet.

Operation Dhurandhar was almost certainly ecological at the mission level. The country gained. The intelligence flowed. The strategic door opened.

But there was always a line of ecology the mission could not clear.

Yalina.

A love that began as cover and grew into something the heart could not distinguish from the real.

The mission could bring Jaskirat home. The mission could not bring him back whole.

A founder I worked with for a few years was building toward an IPO that everyone in his world considered the destination. Bigger raise. Bigger valuation. Bigger story. We were three weeks from filing.

He came in for a session and sat down quietly. Then said, slowly, “I have got everything I planned for. Why does it feel hollow?”

I asked him to do an Ecology Check. To list what this win was costing.

He took a long time.

“A daughter who no longer recognises my voice. A wife who has built a life that does not include me being there. A health I cannot remember the rules for. A childhood friendship I did not show up for when it mattered. A parent’s last few months I outsourced to nurses while I closed the round.”

We sat in silence for a while.

This was the line item. The price was not the work. The price was these.

Have you paid the right price for the right mission, with your eyes open?

That is the only question worth asking. The answer, when it lands, can either crack a man, or finish making him.

 

Two Parts. Both True.

NLP calls this Parts Integration.

Inside Jaskirat, two parts are alive at the same time.

The operator-part, whose duty is the mission. Who burns photographs. Who crosses borders. Who comes home under another name.

The husband-part, whose duty is Yalina. Who remembers the morning she laughed at his accent. Who felt the weight of her head on his shoulder in the fourth year. Who watched his son walk for the first time.

Both parts are real. Neither part is fake.

If only one part were real, the story would be simple. A pure operative does his job and walks away. A pure husband refuses the mission.

Jaskirat is both. And both parts got everything they asked for, including everything they could not then give up.

This is what Parts Integration looks like when it goes right. Not choosing one part. Honouring both. Accepting that both have a claim. Letting both grieve, when grief is what the work has produced.

Men who suppress the husband-part in the name of the operator-part tend to shatter later. Sometimes quietly, over years. Sometimes all at once, on an ordinary Tuesday, in a kitchen, for no reason anyone around them can understand.

The dhurandhar, held whole, is the man who lets both parts stay alive. Even when the mission is over.

 

The Body Does Not Un-Learn

Here is the hardest line of NLP to teach.

Anchoring works.

We know it from the blessings side. A perfume. A song. A handshake. A specific light on a specific morning. Each tied to a feeling we can still summon years later.

Anchoring works on the other side too.

Four years of waking up next to Yalina is an anchor the body will not easily un-learn. The smell of a certain chai. The cadence of Urdu in the house. A child’s voice calling out a word that was never meant to reach Jaskirat’s real name.

The mission ends. The anchors do not.

This is why deep-cover operatives, when they finally come home, can spend years not quite sleeping, not quite tasting, not quite loving the way they used to.

Their nervous system did not get the memo that the mission was only a job.

Because for the body, it was never only a job.

 

The Irony Only the Film Can Hold

And here is the quietest knife in the whole story.

Yalina was Jameel’s daughter.

The handler in Delhi. The wife in Karachi. The father-in-law in Karachi.

The three deepest relationships in Jaskirat’s entire life, each one, in some sense, mission-shaped.

Sanyal. Yalina. Jameel.

When you finally hold this triangle in your head, the film stops being about revenge and starts being about belonging.

 

The Price of the Mission

Every honest outcome has a line item in the ecology column.

For Jaskirat, Yalina is that line item.

The question NLP hands you is not, “how do I make the cost zero?” That is the amateur’s question. The cost is never zero.

The question is, “Am I paying the right cost, with my eyes open, for the right mission?”

Jaskirat cannot say that Yalina was a mistake without disrespecting her. He cannot say she was simply cover without disrespecting himself.

He can only say this. She was the price. And he knew her. And she was real.

This is what separates the dhurandhar from the machine.

The machine executes.

The dhurandhar executes, and then sits at night with what the execution cost, and does not look away.

 

Three Questions

1. Which part of yourself have you been treating as cover, when in fact it grew into something real?

2. What anchors from a previous chapter of your life are you still carrying, even though the mission that built them has long since ended?

And the hardest one:

3. Have you paid the right price for the right mission, with your eyes open, and without looking away from what it cost?

Take your time to process these questions.

Deeper processing with awareness and reflection is where the dhurandhar’s craft gets completed.

The dhurandhar’s craft is not only to take the mission.

It is to carry, with dignity, what the mission took.


The Closing Credits Roll

“Picture nahi dekha to kya seekha…”

[If you don’t watch movies, what have you really learned?]

That line, from a college professor long ago, comes back sharper now than it did in any classroom.

Because this picture, read through the NLP lens, has taught us more than any textbook on NLP ever could.

Two films. Ten chapters.

Catch up on any chapter from the Lights! Camera! NLP! page.

We have walked with Jaskirat, Hamza, Sanyal, Jameel, Yalina and the rest. We have watched values collide, missions take form, pain turn into endhan, sacrifice become dharam, covers become real, and one man become another before coming slowly home.

All of it, hiding in a spy thriller.

All of it, the curriculum we already carry, whether we are running a company, a home, a classroom, or a calendar.

 

The Dhurandhar Is Not a Character

The dhurandhar is not a man in a uniform.

The dhurandhar is anyone who has decided to hold their Mission/Purpose one level higher than the noise around them, and to build the below-the-waterline layers with the patience of years.

Your mission may not involve a border.

Your cover may be a boardroom, a hospital corridor, a school PTM, a dinner table, a gym. Your anchors, your nazar, your sabr, your values hierarchy, your ecology column, your perceptual positions, your utilisation, your rapport, your parts.

All of it is already inside you. What the film did was give you a vocabulary. NLP gives you the same vocabulary in a slightly different accent.

Mutthi Bandh

And one final line.

“Muh todne ke liye mutthi bandh karna zaroori hai.”

[To break the jaw, the fist must first close.]

Read it slowly. It is a whole teaching, in one line.

Before the strike, the gather.

Before the big move, the quiet consolidation.

Before the visible result, the invisible preparation.

NLP teaches you nothing more than how to close your mutthi. How to gather your state. How to align your levels. How to read the room. How to calibrate your strategy. How to integrate your parts.

Muh todna is the outcome. Mutthi bandh karna is the craft.

The difference that makes the difference, always, lives in the quality of the gather.

 

The Difference That Makes The Difference

That last line is not the close of this arc.

It is what you take home from the theatre.

And for the walk home, the whole arc fits in one place.

I have compiled all ten chapters into a single e-book. Yours, free. The complete Dhurandhar Arc, ready to be re-read in your me-time, or shared with someone who needs it.

→ Download the free e-book here 

And one more invitation… Once you subscribe, you will be the first to hear about an exciting complimentary online session on NLP. Details will follow in your email inbox.


“Picture dekh liya. Kuch seekh bhi liya.”

[Watched the movie. And also learned something.]

Lights! Camera! NLP! continues. New films. New lenses. New chapters.

Because cinema, read this way, is a classroom that does not close.

Till the time we meet next, stay cinematic, and keep the curiosity alive.

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Forty-Five Years: NLP Insights from Dhurandhar (Chapter 9)

Forty-Five Years: NLP Insights from Dhurandhar (Chapter 9)

Lights! Camera! NLP! · The Dhurandhar Arc, Chapter 9 of 10.

Previously, we sat at Sanyal’s table and watched a handler play in several frames at once. Today, we step into the longest cover of the entire film. Forty-five years is a long time to hold anything.

(For the full arc, visit Lights! Camera! NLP!.)


Right at the end of the film, after the Israeli deal has played out, the real twist lands.

Jameel Jamali. The politician who stayed in easy rapport with everyone. The host. The voice of reason. The father-in-law who welcomed Jaskirat-as-Hamza into his home without a flicker of suspicion.

He is the one running the whole thing.

For forty-five years.

An Indian spy working closely with Sanyal, co-ordinating the whole craft from inside the enemy’s own political structure.

Pause on that number. Forty-five years.

Jaskirat’s deep cover runs for a mission. Jameel’s deep cover runs for a lifetime.

If Jaskirat is the dhurandhar with the blade, Jameel is the quietest dhurandhar in the room. The one who never needed a blade at all.

What does NLP have to say about a craft this long, and this deep?

 

Rapport With Everyone, Loyal to One

In NLP, Rapport is the first and often most underestimated skill.

Most people think of rapport as warmth. It is not.

Rapport is the precise matching of another person’s map, at enough levels, long enough, that they begin to treat you as one of their own. Body. Voice. Vocabulary. Values. Worldview. You meet them where they are, without announcing that you have met them there.

Jameel has rapport with everyone.

With Rehman, he is the politician who understands power.

With Aslam, he is the well-placed friend who understands survival.

With Iqbal, he is the institutional ally who understands the flag.

With Yalina, he is a father.

With Hamza, he is a father-in-law.

Every one of those relationships is real at the surface. Every one of them is also, simultaneously, a move on a board no one else can see.

This is the NLP presupposition in action. The meaning of your communication is the response you get. Jameel does not care what he meant. He cares what each person received. And he calibrates endlessly, to make sure each person receives what keeps the mission moving.

A senior leader I once worked with had genuinely good rapport with his team. Coffee chats. Birthday wishes. Attention to people’s lives.

But I noticed something. Whenever real pressure arrived, the rapport cracked. He would tighten up. Become formal. The team would notice. Trust would dip. And he would spend weeks afterward repairing what fifteen minutes of pressure had broken.

I asked him a single question one afternoon.

“With whom, in your team, are you actually loyal? Not friendly. Loyal. To which person are you committed enough that you would name a hard thing in their interest, even if it costs the friendliness?”

A long pause. Then, slowly. “I now realise, that is why my rapport keeps breaking. There is no anchor.”

Performative rapport snaps under pressure. Loyal rapport bends and holds.

He spent the next several months building quieter, deeper relationships with two of his direct reports. By the next round of hard conversations, he didn’t break. The rapport was now built on a different floor.

 

Pacing. For Decades.

NLP teaches Pacing and Leading. You first pace the other: match their tempo, their thinking, their emotional weather. Only then do you lead, gently, in a direction they would not have gone alone.

Jameel paces everyone. For decades. No rush to lead. No tell.

The amateur in rapport is visible. You can see them trying. The effort leaks through the skin.

The master in rapport is invisible. They are simply present, and you feel at ease, and you find yourself telling them more than you had planned to tell.

Jameel is the master. He is invisible because his rapport is not a technique he applies. It is a setting he has left switched on for forty-five years.

This is the deep warning for every coach, every leader, every parent. Rapport cannot be performed in bursts. If you break it on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and then try to repair it on Thursday, you are not doing rapport. You are doing damage control.

This is one of the hardest disciplines most coaches have had to learn. When a client struggles, it is easier to get into solution mode immediately. Especially when the coach has the framework and the answer. Why wait?

The secret here is that some clients are not yet ready for the answer. Pacing is not a delay. It is the work that makes leading possible.

Now, in difficult conversations, masterful coaches remind themselves: pace before you lead. Sometimes pacing takes minutes. Sometimes months. The lead, when it lands, lands cleanly because the pacing earned it.

The dhurandhar of rapport lives in the setting, not the technique.

 

Utilisation. Everyone is a Resource.

Milton Erickson gave NLP one of its quietest and most powerful principles. Utilisation.

Use what is there. Whatever is there.

The resistance in the client. The distraction in the room. The objection in the meeting. The behaviour of the enemy.

Jameel utilises everyone. Rehman’s ambition. Aslam’s pressures. Iqbal’s ideology. Even his own daughter’s life, in a way only a man with forty-five years of discipline could hold without breaking.

Utilisation is not manipulation. It is the refusal to wait for perfect conditions before moving. You move with what you have, and you make it count.

A founder came to me one season, frustrated by what he could not have. The team was weak. The board was unsupportive. The market was contracting. The competition was better-funded.

I let him list everything that was missing.

Then I asked one question.

“What is in the room?”

A pause. A confused look.

“Name what is actually present”, I said. “Not what’s missing. What’s there.”

He thought for a while.

“There is one team member I would trust with anything. There is one product line still profitable. There is one client who has stayed with us for nine years and would speak for us anywhere. There is a small market niche my competitors haven’t noticed.”

“That is the room”, I told him. “Now build with it.”

He went away. Twelve months later, his business was unrecognisable. Same weak team. Same unsupportive board. Same contracting market. Same competition.

Different relationship to what was already in the room.

The amateur complains about what is missing. The dhurandhar works with what is there.

 

The Return

At the end, Jameel helps Jaskirat come home.

Forty-five years of work, sometimes, resolves in a single move.

The elder dhurandhar making sure the younger one gets back to his country.

In NLP terms, this is the completion of the meta-outcome. The mission was never just about information, or about one operation. It was about a country that could, eventually, bring its own men home.

Every good mission ends with a return.

 

Three Questions

1. With whom do you hold rapport that is clean, calibrated, and generous, versus rapport that is performative and breaks under pressure?

2. Where are you waiting for perfect conditions, instead of utilising what is already in the room?

And the hardest one:

3. What is the Mission you are willing to hold, quietly, across a decade of noise, without needing to announce it?

That third question can take a quiet evening to answer. But quiet evenings are where forty-five-year missions get their start.

Some dhurandhars carry a blade.

Some carry a file.

The longest-serving of them all carry only a mission.

Till the time we meet next, stay cinematic, and keep the curiosity alive.


Tomorrow. The finale.

Chapter 10 of the Dhurandhar Arc. What Cannot Be Burnt.

The mission could bring Jaskirat home. The mission could not bring him back whole.

Make sure to subscribe to receive all updates from W3 Coach directly in your inbox.

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Explore the complete set of online recorded courses at W3 Success Academy now.

Sanyal and the Long Board: NLP Insights from Dhurandhar (Chapter 8)

Sanyal and the Long Board: NLP Insights from Dhurandhar (Chapter 8)

Lights! Camera! NLP! · The Dhurandhar Arc, Chapter 8 of 10.

Previously, we read three antagonists through their positive intentions, without losing the line between understanding and endorsing. Today, we cross the table. Sanyal. The man who is rarely in the room, and somehow in every possible room.

(For the full arc, visit Lights! Camera! NLP!.)


Jaskirat is the blade.

Sanyal is the hand that sharpens, positions, and aims.

In every main hero story, there is a second hero. Rarely on the poster. Never in the action cut. But without him, the blade is just a loose weapon, not a mission.

Sanyal is that second hero.

Watching him work is a masterclass in what NLP calls strategic chunking. The rest of the cast plays in one frame. Sanyal plays in several frames at once.

 

Chunking Up

Most minds live at the chunk-size of the problem in front of them.

The amateur sees a deal. Sanyal sees a decade.

The amateur sees a country. Sanyal sees a geopolitical chessboard with six players.

The amateur sees a setback. Sanyal sees page 47 of a plan that runs to page 200.

NLP calls this chunking up. The ability to lift your view, on demand, from the detail in front of you to the frame around it, then to the frame around that, until you are looking at the whole board.

The opposite skill, chunking down, gives you the craft to execute. The dhurandhar needs both. The handler lives at the top.

If you have ever worked with a founder or a leader who seems to read three moves ahead, you have met a chunk-up mind. It feels like magic. It is actually a habit.

 

Reading the Man Before Reading the Mission

Before Operation Dhurandhar is ever assigned, Sanyal has already done the deepest NLP work.

He has modelled Jaskirat.

He has read his values hierarchy (family first, now wounded). He has read his capabilities (army training now married to rage). He has read his identity stage (post-collapse, seeking meaning). He has read his motivation strategy (dard turning into endhan, searching for something to point at).

Only then does he recruit.

Because a man recruited at the wrong level fails. Recruit him at Behaviour, he quits in six months. Recruit him at Mission/Purpose, he stays till the last frame.

Sanyal does not recruit a soldier. He recruits a meaning.

This is NLP meta-leadership. The leader who can see which layer of a person is ready to be activated, and speaks to that layer specifically, carries a quiet, devastating power.

A founder I worked with for a season was building his executive team. Hiring fast.

I asked him at what level he was running the recruitment.

He paused. Skills. Experience. Salary fit. Culture fit.

While all that is useful (Behaviour and Capability layer), Sanyal’s thinking strategy would have gone deeper.

I asked him what each role’s Mission/Purpose actually was. Not the job description. The deeper one.

He took a moment. Then said, slowly, “Honestly, I do not think I have asked that question of any of my hires.”

We started asking it. Of every candidate. Of every existing team member. Of ourselves.

Six months later, he told me that retention had become a non-issue. Hires who used to leave within a year were now staying past year three.

The recruitment had moved up the ladder. The team had stopped being a stack of CVs.

 

Second and Third Position

When Sanyal plans a move, he is never only in his own head.

NLP teaches the Perceptual Positions model. Three chairs at any table.

Perceptual Position Whose Chair You’re In What It Reveals
First Position Your own What you think, want, fear, need
Second Position The other person’s How they see this, what’s driving them, what they would say next
Third Position A fly on the wall The pattern between both of you, observed without attachment

Sanyal runs all three, constantly.

What does the target believe? How will the target read this signal? What will his handler conclude? What will the papers print? What will history say, five years from now?

While he is rarely in the room, he is in every possible room, playing out every possible reaction, long before the move is made.

This is a skill I have built slowly through NLP, over years. For a long time I lived almost entirely in first position. My chair. My read. My agenda. Then I learned to spend a minute in the other person’s shoes before any difficult conversation. Then to step out and watch both of us, like a fly on the wall.

Three positions, run consistently, slowly become a habit. Not a technique. A setting. Become a fly-on-the-wall on the fly (on the go).

 

The Last Trump Card

And then there is the Israeli deal.

The whole film turns on it. Without it, Dhurandhar is a good mission that ends at a wall. With it, the wall is suddenly not a wall.

This is where Sanyal’s craft is most visible.

Because the trump card was set up long before it was played.

The Law of Requisite Variety says the person with the most options controls the system. Sanyal, through years of quiet arrangement, has engineered himself more options than his opponent. The opponent is playing with few visible pieces. Sanyal has many more.

But there is a deeper NLP move here. You do not play the trump card at the first sign of trouble. You keep it in the back pocket, unseen, untouched, until the only remaining move on the table is the one only you can make.

Amateurs show their cards for comfort. Masters wait for the hour.

And the real power of a trump card is not the card itself. It is the fact that the opponent does not know you have it.

Awareness widens choices. But quiet awareness, the kind you never announce, widens them the most.

A senior corporate executive came to me wanting a particular role inside his organisation. He was qualified, ambitious, ready.

I asked him a different question first. What if you do not get this role?

A pause. He had not really thought about that.

We slowed down. We talked about what paths might exist if this one closed. External offers. Industry-adjacent moves. 

He spent the next year building up. Not loudly. Not as a backup plan announced to anyone. Just quietly.

Around month thirteen, the role opened. He went into the conversation differently. He was not desperate, because he had options. He was not pushing, because he had a centre.

He got the role.

Looking back, he told me, “I never used the options. But the fact that I had them changed how I walked into that room.”

That is Sanyal’s craft, in a boardroom. Not playing the card. Building it.

 

What This Means For You

You are probably not running a geopolitical operation.

But you are running something.

A business. A team. A home. A career.

 

Four Questions

1. Where are you playing at the chunk-size of the problem, when you should be chunking up to the frame that contains the problem?

2. Whom are you trying to lead at the wrong layer, Behaviour when it should be Mission?

3. Are you seeing only from your own chair, or have you walked once around the table lately?

And the quiet one:

4. What is your “Israeli deal”? The card you have been patiently building, that nobody around you has yet noticed, because the moment to show it has not yet come?

That fourth question, reflected deeply, can change what you build over the next twelve months.

But quiet building is the work.

Till the time we meet next, stay cinematic, and keep the curiosity alive.


Tomorrow.

Chapter 9 of the Dhurandhar Arc. Forty-Five Years.

Right at the end of the film, after the Israeli deal has played out, the real twist lands. The Curious Case of Jameel Jamali.

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Behind Every Behaviour: NLP Insights from Dhurandhar (Chapter 7)

Behind Every Behaviour: NLP Insights from Dhurandhar (Chapter 7)

Lights! Camera! NLP! · The Dhurandhar Arc, Chapter 7 of 10.

Previously, we descended through the modelling iceberg, layer by layer, ability to belief. Today, we turn the lens on the men on the other side. Rehman, Iqbal, Aslam. Three faces of the antagonist, and two NLP presuppositions that are almost always misread.

(For the full arc, visit Lights! Camera! NLP!.)


Let’s examine two of NLP’s oldest presuppositions.

1. Every behaviour has a positive intention.

2. People are not their behaviour.

Read them again, because they are almost always misread.

NLP Presupposition What It Says What It Does Not Mean
Every behaviour has a positive intention The actor, in their own map of the world, is trying to get something they value. Safety. Power. Belonging. Significance. Survival. That the behaviour is good, right, or excusable.
People are not their behaviour The refusal to reduce a human being to the worst thing they have done, so you can continue to think clearly about them. That you have to forgive, accept, or stay in the room with them.

These are not moral instructions. They are operator instructions.

And in Dhurandhar, Hamza has to work with men who have done terrible things.

 

Three Men on the Other Side

Rehman. Iqbal. Aslam.

A gangster. A major. A police officer.

Three men whose behaviour, in the real world, would be met with a bullet or a courtroom. And rightly so.

But the dhurandhar cannot afford to only hate them. Hate is a closed file. And a closed file cannot be read.

Watch how the film writes each of them.

Rehman Dakait is not drawn as a cartoon villain. He is a man who has built his identity on raw power and loyalty. His behaviour says kill. Underneath, his positive intention is control, belonging, a circle where he is visibly irreplaceable. The dhurandhar notes this and uses it. A man who needs to feel irreplaceable can be flattered. Can be drawn into over-reach. Can be lured into a mistake.

Major Iqbal is not drawn as simple evil either. He is an institutional man. His positive intention is duty, loyalty to his flag, a chain of command he believes in with full conviction. He has his own Balidaan Parmo Dharam, pointed in the opposite direction. The dhurandhar reads this and realises: you cannot break Iqbal with a better argument. You have to either match his discipline, or find where his loyalty is frayed.

SP Aslam’s positive intention is often as ordinary as keeping his career alive, not being crushed between two machines. The dhurandhar does not treat him as a monster. He treats him as a pressure point.

Three different positive intentions. Three different readings. Three different moves.

If Jaskirat had walked in with a single label, “they are all bad men”, he would have died in their company.

 

Understand the Behaviour. Never Endorse It.

Here is where the NLP principle earns its moral weight.

Understanding positive intention is not the same as approving the action.

A man who bombs a market is not less guilty because his positive intention is his twisted version of loyalty. He is still fully accountable for what his hands did.

But in order to stop him, catch him, or outthink him, you have to know what is driving him. That is not empathy as indulgence. That is empathy as tradecraft.

It is also the only reason the dhurandhar can walk among such men without becoming one of them. He does not moralise internally, because moralising would slow his reading. He does not glorify internally either, because glorifying would seduce him. He simply reads the behaviour, names the intention, and plans the counter-move.

Judge the behaviour. Do not erase the being.

This distinction is something I have learned slowly, over years. It has taken years of practice. It still does.

 

Your Rehman. Your Iqbal. Your Aslam.

You probably do not have a gangster in your life.

But you have your own Rehman. Your own Iqbal. Your own Aslam.

The boss whose behaviour you cannot stand. The family member who disappointed you. The ex-partner who broke something you hadn’t finished building. The colleague whose one action you still replay at two in the morning.

You can choose to treat them as reduced versions of themselves, fixed at the worst thing they did. That gives you short-term moral comfort. It also gives you a closed file on a living person, with no new information coming in.

Or you can ask the dhurandhar’s question. What positive intention, in their own map, was this behaviour trying to serve? Not to excuse them. To see them clearly.

A senior leader once told me, in a workshop on Leadership Lessons from Dhurandhar, that her boss was simply toxic. The file, in her words, was closed.

I asked her to try one experiment.

What might his positive intention be, in his own map of the world?

A long pause.

Then, slowly. “Maybe insecurity. Maybe fear that the team will outgrow him.”

You are still allowed to hold your line, I told her. You are still allowed to leave the role if you choose. But you now have information you did not have a moment ago.

The closed file was open.

A different client once told me about a wound from a relationship that had ended five years earlier. One particular action by his former partner had stayed in his head, replaying at two in the morning.

I asked him what might have been driving that action, in her own map of the world.

A longer pause.

Then, slowly. “Maybe she had not yet learned to see herself clearly. Maybe she had been carrying a wound from her own father all along, and what came out at me was actually that.”

So the positive intention, he figured, was survival. Self-protection.

“That doesn’t excuse her”, he said.

“It doesn’t”, I agreed. “It doesn’t lift accountability either. But the closed file is now open. And from open, you have options. You can hold your line. You can name the harm. You can walk away. You can forgive, or not forgive. But you do it with open eyes. Not with a caricature.”

Every behaviour has a positive intention.

People are not their behaviour.

Two sentences that could change how you think about every difficult person in your life.

 

Three Questions

1. Who is the one person you have reduced to their worst behaviour, and what are you losing by keeping that file closed?

2. What positive intention, however distorted, might have been driving their behaviour that hurt you?

And the hardest one:

3. If you had to work with this person tomorrow, without needing to like them, what would you need to read about them first?

That third question is the dhurandhar’s question. It is also the question that gives you back your own clarity, regardless of what the other person ever does.

But reclaiming your clarity is the work.

Till the time we meet next, stay cinematic, and keep the curiosity alive.


Tomorrow.

Chapter 8 of the Dhurandhar Arc. Sanyal and the Long Board.

In every operator story, there is a second hero. Rarely on the poster. Never in the action cut. Without him, the blade is just a loose weapon.

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