Reach further than the sky
Discover unlimited progression for business

UP is a business, for businesses that want to thrive. We will help you to reach stratospheric new heights by enhancing your most valuable asset; your people. Our portfolio of inspirational training products is offered alongside pace-setting bespoke products. Explore our website to discover pathways to realising your business ambitions.

Company history

UP began life in 2003 as The Transformation Alliance; a provider of training services to businesses with the aim of “Transforming Lives and Businesses”. The Alliance focused on Leadership and Management Skills and delighted clients with the exceptional standard of content in it's training and in its ability to inspire positive change in organisational cultures.

In 2009 The Alliance added NLP to it’s portfolio of training due to the strengthening of Michael's belief that whilst NLP has been used extensively in personal change for individuals with great success, its huge potential to business remained largely untapped.

The use of NLP led to a rebranding and refocus as ‘UP’. Moving into the future, Unlimited Progression aims to become the number one provider of NLP training to the business sector in the UK, before conquering the rest of the world.

UP's founder and lead facilitator

Michael Pattinson is a specialist in his chosen field, with a rich and varied 20 year history in People Development. He was responsible for the development of thousands of employees within Barclays working at a regional and national level before following his heart to establish his own training consultancy The Transformation Alliance in 2003.

Michael has since designed and delivered a myriad of training events for the corporate sector and household names. His style is as playful as it is engaging and captivates his audience rapidly.

Through his use of rapport he is able to impart his knowledge and experience using his experiential learning approach. Michael believes that training is about more than ‘just knowledge’, people need to believe in the training itself and in their own ability to put it into practice. Michael also believes that every person has the raw potential to reach new heights.

As a fully accredited trainer of NLP, Michael's passion lies in the achievement of excellence through the use of NLP and the sharing of knowledge.

Why UP?

We're committed to to helping you reach stratospheric results...
We take immense pride in what we do and insist that you are delighted with the tangible results that we deliver; measurable improvements in the performance of your business and your people.

We listen:
What do you want to achieve?
What will help you to really progress?

We’ll listen carefully, before advising as to how we can fit in and facilitate your development.

We welcome, and will answer all questions along the way. We embrace open dialogue and will always ensure you're making the correct strategic decision for your business and your training needs.

We practice what we preach
All our courses are delivered by experts. Specialists with an in-depth knowledge of NLP and a proven career history of working in business. We don’t just tell you about NLP, we use it ourselves to maximise our delivery.

Our core aim is to help you to rise above obstacles and reach limitless new heights by enhancing and UPskilling your workforce, your management team and yourself in appropriate, effective aspects of NLP. Delivered and implemented effectively, by experts Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) can transform performance through effective and ethical techniques at all levels.

NLP isn’t ‘magic’. It’s based on detailed, rigorous research and is logical, straight-forward and easy to use. The possibilities of NLP are so engaging that they can sometimes appear magical or miraculous.

We build on existing strengths, equipping people with role-appropriate new skill levels. We make your people better at what your business needs them to do.

UP has a number of courses to get you up and running. We also offer fully bespoke training solutions designed and finely tuned to help you and your organisation reach higher.

Thoughts on NLP and Sales Skills

Any business that operates in sales benefits from having a competitive advantage and trying to compete on price is not always the best strategy as it can often lead to falling returns. More sales for the same or less profit can be a recipe for disaster over anything but the shortest term. Unlimited Progression (UP) has explored the issues of selling closely and the findings indicate that by up-skilling salespeople with the right skills, skills that competitors don’t have, can allow businesses to flourish even in the most competitive environments.
Feelings can run high on the subject of selling. Many people feel comfortable and happy in the sales arena whilst others can feel unsure and nervous. Both are completely normal reactions and, as is so often the case, it is the beliefs of the salesperson that are the defining factor.
If a sales person genuinely believes in the product or service they are selling then this belief translates hugely into the experience for a buyer, manifesting itself as a sales through service experience. It is a truism to say that people buy people first. We have all probably felt most comfortable and happy when buying something from a person we find to be on our wavelength.
What is it though that makes us feel someone is on our wavelength?
Initially and most importantly it is rapport, a word that is used a lot but is not always that easy to describe. It is the feeling of mutual trust and understanding and is a very natural and human thing to experience. Have you ever met or talked to someone and felt it, some people we just “click” with and others we don’t but the big question is why? What is it that makes us comfortable with some people and less so with others? It can take seconds to decide whether we like someone or not, whether we want to talk to them or not and whether we see eye to eye with them or not. Our thoughts and feelings are genuine and we just know if someone is our sort of person. In effect we have, through some unknown process, decided whether we are in rapport with someone.
The answer as to how we make the decision lies deep inside us at the unconscious level. The unconscious level is therefore the sensible place we need to begin any sales process. It is also why our sales training includes training on that very subject.
Every person has a filtering system hidden away inside, usually one they are not even aware of, that reads lots of signals from another person (signals such as the way someone looks, and sounds as well as the content of what they are saying) and then it runs the results of those signals through a process and decides if we are comfortable with the person or not. We are unaware consciously of the process. Our unconscious mind does all the hard work in the back ground and then delivers to our conscious mind the appropriate feeling.
In the role of a salesperson, whether face to face or on the telephone it is the ability to create rapport rapidly and deeply that can be the difference between a person becoming a buyer and a person giving the polite brush off.
Until the advent of NLP people often talked about “animal magnetism” or someone who was a “natural people person” as though that person was born that way and other lesser mortals could only look on with awe or envy. However we can now see exactly what it is that those people do that causes other to decide to feel that way about them.
As a result of modelling these people, exploring what they do and how they think, it is now possible for every person to be as gifted and adept at building rapport.
Imagine a sales force made up of people passionate about your products with the ability to tune into a prospective buyer as the unconscious level to build a deep rapport with them quickly. Being able to do so allows the salesperson the opportunity to have a meaningful and useful conversation about the product and what it can do for the buyer. UP cannot guarantee that every single prospective buyer will say yes or that profits will automatically springboard to stratospheric heights, what we can say is that people buy people first. If your customers buy your salespeople first then the chances of them buying your product next is greatly enhanced. It was to help businesses achieve this outcome that UP developed it NLP Sales Training offerings.
UP designs sales training events specifically for sales people, and yes we train them in all of the sales skills you would expect, things like great questioning and listening skills, how to present a product with its features, its advantages and especially with its benefits specific to each customer, how to avoid objections and how to close the sale. The things that makes our sales training uniquely different is that we also train people in how to interact with the customer at the unconscious level, enabling rapport swiftly, using the right language with the right people, the use of embedded commands and much more. As well as teaching our learners the content, our trainers and facilitators actually use the techniques during our trainings, helping the learners to recognize the benefits of the products they are selling so that their own belief in the products is enhanced. This enhanced belief creates congruity when they talk about the products and again enhances their skills and deepens rapport even more.
UP believes in the power of using NLP in Business because a well-trained team of people well motivated are the major key in reaching new heights of performance whether you are selling products, services or ideas.
If you would like to know more about our sales trainings and how we run them please feel free to get in touch we’d be delighted to talk to you.
 

Thoughts on Coaching in Business with NLP

I trained as coach in the early nineties and found coaching to be a really useful skill in helping my people to develop and move forwards in terms of their skills and by helping them to define what it was they wanted to achieve in their careers. It was also very useful in the cases where one of my people had a performance issue that needed to be resolved.
In both scenarios coaching helped because it had an outside person challenging assumptions and pushing people to really think in detail about what is was they wanted and then to think creatively on how to achieve their goals. This was useful to a point and did help many people. The thing I started to recognize though was that more often than not the barrier to success for the person being coached was rarely anything to do with low skill level. Most of my coachees were intelligent people who knew how to go about getting the skills they needed. They were also often very creative and could come up with a multitude of ideas with only a minimum of encouragement. The thing was, even these enlighten, talented people still failed to achieve anything like their full potential. Their great ideas remained untried and their goals were not achieved.
The reason for this was at once very simple and very profound. They simply didn’t believe they were capable of greatness or success. On the surface they used all the right words and presented themselves in the right way and convinced others of their strengths and skills but inside they themselves didn’t believe their own press!
Traditional coaching achieves results for people but only to the limits of the coachees’ self-beliefs. You can train someone to be the world’s greatest pianist, but if that person doesn’t believe they are then they will not perform, they will not practice and they will shy away from playing for others.
The addition of some NLP skills to the arsenal of the coach can make a huge difference. And that is why UP trains new coaches in the traditional and well used skills of coaching, like questioning and listening or gaining commitment, but UP also augments those skills with NLP skills which help them to first of all identify where people have limiting beliefs locked away inside. Once these limiting beliefs have been identified then the other NLP skills we provide help our learners to assist their coachees to delete the limiting beliefs so that the coachee can achieve new heights of performance unburdened by un-useful beliefs about themselves.
UP also trains existing coaches in the highly effective NLP aspects appropriate to the coaching environment so that they can develop their coaching abilities UPwards and achieve new heights of performance for themselves and for their clients.