John F had just finished two weeks of immersion training in Lisbon when we recorded this conversation. I wanted him to explain the experience: how he arrived, what we worked on and what he took away.
Knowing the material and doing it
John describes years of trying different approaches before finding my books and joining the group. He says the written material helped him start getting results, but the in-person work exposed mistakes he had not noticed.
That distinction runs through the discussion. You can recognise a method when somebody explains it and still change it when you try to use it. Watching the actual interaction reveals things that a description afterwards may miss.
The difficult first days
John describes the first six days as hard. We spent long periods outside, repeated approaches and encountered rejection. He says that seeing himself handle different situations helped make the next approach less intimidating.
He does not describe becoming a person who never feels anxiety. He talks about still having some nerves while being able to act. That is a more useful distinction than treating confidence as an on-or-off switch.
In the conversation, I point to specific habits I noticed, including talking over people and leaving pauses in the wrong places. Those are concrete things to work on. They give the student something more useful than a general instruction to be confident.
Watch the review for John's account of those two weeks. It is one student's experience of an intensive training period, told in his own words. The teaching page is the place to explore the current coaching options; this November 2020 recording remains a record of the Lisbon training.
