For the first ten years of my career, I was trained to find problems.
I had spent years developing myself into an outstanding trouble-shooter. I could walk into almost any room, any team, any sales organisation, and quickly identify what was not working. I had the tools, the frameworks, and the training to diagnose issues and fix them.
And for a long time, it worked.
Until I realised it did not.
The Employee Reviews That Left People Drained
When I became Nordic Sales Manager at a large biotech company, our HR department sent out the standard annual employee development review forms.
Page after page of questions.
Strengths. Weaknesses. Problems. Development areas. More problems.
Even though the forms technically asked about both strengths and weaknesses, the conversations almost always ended up revolving around what was missing, broken, or insufficient.
At first, I followed the system.
Then I started noticing what those conversations did to people.
Some employees needed weeks to recover after their annual reviews. Not because anyone was intentionally harsh, but because spending an hour focused primarily on what is not working changes a person’s state. The more detailed the analysis of the problem becomes, the more people begin to identify with it. They think about it more. Feel it more. Carry it with them.
I eventually stopped using the questionnaire altogether.
Instead, I started asking different questions.
The Questions My Team Knew by Heart
Over time, I developed my own approach to leadership conversations. After a few years, my sales teams across Denmark, Sweden, and Norway knew the questions before I even asked them.
When we look back at the past year, what are you most proud of having achieved?
Which projects or customer relationships have created the most value?
What have you genuinely enjoyed doing?
How did you make that happen?
When we meet again a year from now, what will have changed?
What will you be able to do then that you cannot do today?
What needs to happen for that future to become real?
Which resources do you already have?
Which additional resources would strengthen you even further?
And what is the very first step you want to take now?
Something fascinating happened every single time.
People left those conversations energised.
It was as if someone had wound up a spring inside them. They could not wait to get back to work and start moving forward.
The Moment That Changed My Thinking
The real shift happened during a training in Santa Barbara with Dr. Joseph Riggio, one of the people who has influenced my thinking most deeply.
By then, I had already been certified as an NLP Trainer by Dr. Richard Bandler. I believed I understood the model well.
But during the training, something bothered me.
Riggio had been working with people for days without once focusing on the problems they had come to solve. In the NLP tradition I originally learned, you typically started with the “problem state” before defining the “desired state.”
So during a break, I approached him.
I told him I did not think you could simplify the model that much. Surely we still needed to start with the problem.
He looked at me calmly and asked:
“Do you still believe that?”
Then he turned around and walked away.
That question stayed with me.
Because suddenly, I saw the deeper assumption underneath everything I had been taught.
Why are we so attached to beginning with what does not work?
What if the starting point itself is the problem?
It took me almost three years to fully retrain my own mind. To stop automatically scanning for problems and instead begin searching for what was already working. For strengths. For momentum. For life-giving patterns.
Those old filters run deep in most leaders.
What the Research Confirmed
A few years later, I came across the work of David Cooperrider and Appreciative Inquiry.
Cooperrider originally entered a hospital in Cleveland intending to study the causes of organisational dysfunction and poor performance. But halfway through the research, he changed direction entirely.
Instead of asking why the organisation was struggling, he began exploring how people still managed to create dedication, innovation, care, and collaboration despite the challenges. He started searching for the life-giving stories inside the organisation.
What he discovered was powerful:
The questions we ask shape the emotional climate of an organisation.
Appreciative questions create energy, engagement, creativity, and movement. Problem-focused questions often create contraction, defensiveness, and limitation.
Positive language does not ignore reality.
It changes the state from which people approach reality.
And that changes performance.
This was not abstract theory. It was observable, measurable, and deeply practical.
It also confirmed what I had already experienced in my own leadership and sales teams.
What This Means in Practice
Over the past 25 years, I have worked with leaders, salespeople, and organisations all over the world.
The people who developed fastest were rarely the ones who spent the most time obsessing over their weaknesses.
They were the people who became deeply aware of when they were genuinely at their best.
They learned to recognise the conditions that created energy, clarity, creativity, trust, and momentum — and then they built from there.
That is one of the core principles behind what we today call NEW NLP™ at Acuity World.
It is also deeply connected to the philosophy behind Satisfaction Selling and Soma Semantic Modeling.
Human beings perform best when they begin from resourceful states rather than problem-saturated states.
Where attention goes, energy flows.
If you continuously train people to search for what is broken, they become experts at finding limitations.
If you train them to recognise strengths, possibilities, resources, and authentic desire, they begin creating movement.
That does not mean ignoring problems.
It means refusing to let problems define identity, direction, or leadership.
The question is not:
“What is wrong with you?”
The question is:
“What is already working here and how do we create more of it?”
And perhaps even more importantly:
“What becomes possible when people stop defending themselves and start developing themselves?”
That shift changes leadership.
It changes sales.
It changes culture.
And in many cases, it changes lives.
Want to explore this further?
The principles in this article are at the core of our Personal Leadership Program – PLP™.
PLP is designed for leaders who are already good and want to become exceptional. Over six intensive days in Holte, you will develop the self-awareness, state management, and leadership tools to consistently perform from your best, not your average.