NLP UK Training Podcast

“Eight hours of my time last week. What else could I be doing with that?”
Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.
In this episode, Steve and Kali pick up where the last one left off and turn the spotlight from connection back to the question we’d rather not answer: how much time is your phone actually taking from you? It starts with their podcast recordist Carl showing Kali the screen time setting on her iPhone that morning. Kali confidently guessed a couple of hours a week. The real number? Eight hours. In a single week. Steve, smugly, had his screen time tracking switched off – so he gets a free pass for now, but admits he probably wouldn’t fare much better.
From that one number, the conversation opens up into something bigger. How often do we tell ourselves we “haven’t got time” to learn something new, look for a different job, paint the spare room, do a course, get coaching – while a quiet eight hours a week disappears into scrolling we barely remember?
Steve and Kali run the maths (kind of) and the point lands: eight hours a week, every week, for a year, is not a small chunk of life. What could you write, walk, learn, finish, or simply enjoy with that time back?
The second half gets into the NLP of it. Because we are, as Kali puts it, a bunch of habits – strategies running on autopilot, including the morning grab-the-phone reflex that eats ten minutes before you’ve even stood up. NLP can’t fix that on its own. As Steve puts it, it’s like learning a musical instrument: there’s no point knowing the technique if you never pick it up and play.
They introduce the idea of a pattern interrupt – deliberately replacing one habit with another – and share a lovely tip Kali picked up somewhere: look at some sunshine before you look at your phone in the morning. Open the curtains, step outside, get the natural dopamine hit before the digital one. Steve, fairly, points out this is harder in Manchester in winter.
The point still stands: small interrupts, repeated, quietly change everything. If you’ve been telling yourself you don’t have time for the thing you actually want – check your screen time, and then decide what to do with what you find.
In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:
Carl’s iPhone screen time suggestion – and Kali’s eight-hour shock
Why “I haven’t got time” usually isn’t true
The maths nobody wants to do: eight hours a week, multiplied across a year
Why NLP only works if you actually apply it (the musical instrument analogy)
The “pattern interrupt” – a simple NLP tool for breaking habits
A morning experiment: sunshine before scrolling
Why we are, fundamentally, a collection of habits – and the ones we choose

“I’m not in the concert. I’m recording it. Why am I recording it?”
Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.
In this episode, Steve and Kali tackle a quiet epidemic of modern life: the slow erosion of real connection in a world built for scrolling. It kicks off with a perfect moment – Kali introducing the topic while Steve is happily filming something on his phone next to her, oblivious. That’s the whole conversation in miniature, and from there they dig into what it actually costs us when our attention is always somewhere else.
Kali opens up with her own confession – sitting on the sofa after a long day of training, scrolling Instagram reels, until her partner Matt tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to put her phone down because she hadn’t heard a word he’d said. She follows it with a beautiful contrast: a recent Italian dinner where she watched a family of four spend £120-plus on a meal while Dad scrolled, the kids were on their phones, and Mum tried gamely to hold the conversation together. On her own anniversary dinner a few weeks later, she and Matt made a deliberate pact – phones in handbag and back pocket, not touched all night – and ended up watching the young couple at the next table, where the girl scrolled almost the entire evening while a clearly smitten boy tried his best to impress her. The moment dessert arrived and her phone went down, the connection finally appeared. But it had taken the whole meal to get there.
Steve weighs in with two stories that land hard. He once paid £150 to see an artist he loved, and spent the gig watching the band through his phone screen, recording it, missing the guitarist, the drummer, the whole atmosphere – until he caught himself and asked the question that gives this episode its hook. He follows it with the football fan at Stamford Bridge, phone up, recording a free kick – and missing whether the ball actually went in. They round out with the harder edge of the conversation: how apps are deliberately designed for dopamine hits, why human wellbeing is genuinely predicted by the number and quality of our connections, and how disconnection – not just emotionally but physically – quite literally makes us sick. The takeaway isn’t anti-tech or anti-phone. It’s a simple invitation: next time you go out for a meal, leave the phone in your bag, and see what happens when you actually look up.
In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:
Kali’s story: the sofa, the scroll, and the tap on the shoulder
Two restaurant tales – the family of four and the young couple’s “phone-down” turning point
Steve’s £150 concert – and the moment he asked himself “why am I recording this?”
How apps are designed to keep you scrolling (and what to do about it)
Why disconnection isn’t just a vibe – it has measurable effects on physical and mental health
A simple challenge: leave the phone in your bag the next time you eat out

It wasn’t about the promotion, it wasn’t about the job title – it was about the work itself.
Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.
In this episode, Steve and Kali turn their attention to a quietly common career predicament: the grey zone. You don’t hate your job. You’re not in crisis. The salary’s decent, you can afford a holiday a year, you’ve got Netflix, you might even have your own parking space. But something’s missing — and you can’t quite put your finger on what. It’s not bad enough to leave, but it’s not good enough to feel alive either.
They also dig into the trap of “destination thinking” (“when I get this title / hit this salary / reach this level, I’ll feel better”), why finding the 99% of work you love matters more than escaping the 1% you don’t (Kali’s solution to her hated accounting work: hire an accountant), and a wonderful Jim Bowen “Bullseye” analogy about the 55-year-old delegate who said she wanted to be a coach — and what she’d be looking back at in ten years’ time if she didn’t take the small first steps. If you’ve been telling yourself “I should be grateful — it’s a good job” while quietly wondering if there’s something more, this is a permission slip to take that seriously.
In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:
What the career “grey zone” actually feels like — and why it’s harder to escape than outright misery
“Destination thinking” — why “when I get there, I’ll feel better” rarely delivers
The Bullseye principle: what you could have won, and why small steps now matter
How to double down on the work you love (and offload the bits you don’t)

The diagnosis is the diagnosis – but how you experience it is up to you.
Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.
In this episode, Steve and Kali introduce what Steve openly calls the single most important thing he’d teach if he only had one model to share: above the line, below the line. It’s a simple framework with a huge ripple effect. Above the line lives Ownership, Accountability and Responsibility (OAR — you’re rowing your own boat). Below the line lives Blame, Excuses and Denial (BED – you’ve pulled the duvet over your head and hidden from the world). The premise is uncompromising: you’re either in one place or the other. You don’t get to fluctuate in between.
What gives this episode its weight is Kali’s story. She shares openly about being diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis around the time she met Steve — a diagnosis that forced her to give up the dance company she’d been running five nights a week. For a long time, she sat below the line, blaming the condition for how she felt. The shift came when she realised that while the diagnosis itself wasn’t going to change, how she experienced it absolutely was within her control. Once she started taking small responsible actions for her own health, something quietly shifted – and kept shifting.
They also bring in lighter examples: Kali’s wet-weather drive that morning (left earlier, cup of coffee, music on, no panic), the manager who taught his whole team the model not by lecturing but by saying “I’m a bit below the line about this” until people got curious enough to ask, and the litter-pickers Steve spotted in Ashby on a Sunday morning – a small act of personal responsibility that quietly changes a community. If there’s one episode of the podcast worth sending to a friend, Steve thinks it’s this one. Listen, draw the line on a piece of paper, and ask yourself the question that genuinely changes everything: am I above the line about this.
In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:
The above-the-line / below-the-line model in full (OAR vs BED)
Why you can’t sit in the middle — and how to spot which side you’re on
Kali’s personal story: a life-changing diagnosis and the shift from blame to ownership
How to introduce the model to a team without lecturing them
The “cause vs effect” concept from NLP and why it’s a powerful place to live
Steve’s pick for the one thing he’d teach above anything else

You don’t need to turn the wheel ninety degrees – one degree, held over time, will get you somewhere completely new.
Welcome back to the NLP UK Training podcast! Hosted by NLP Trainers Steve Kay and Kali Fraser from NLPUKTraining.com – a leading provider of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification in the UK.
In this episode, Steve and Kali tackle one of the biggest reasons people give up on the lives they say they want: the gap between where they are and where they want to be feels too vast to bridge. The fix isn’t a dramatic overhaul. It’s a one-degree shift – a small, sustainable change that compounds quietly over weeks and months until you look up and find yourself somewhere new.
Steve uses the analogy of a boat: turn the wheel just one degree and in fifty miles you’ll arrive at a completely different destination. They bring it to life with real examples – the learning and development manager who wanted to go freelance and was advised to start with one evening class a week rather than handing in her notice, the coaching delegates running their first small Sunday events with five attendees (two of them friends), and Steve’s own visit to see his daughter in Nassau, where the Instagram-perfect poolside photo masked the tropical storm, the flooded roads, and the nine-hour economy flight that came before it. The point lands hard: what you see on socials is one frame of someone else’s reality – not the journey that got them there.
They also unpack why instant gratification is the enemy of progress (the January gym crowd makes a cameo), how compound interest works just as powerfully on actions as on money, and why comparing yourself to someone’s curated highlight reel is a fast track to giving up on something you’d otherwise be brilliant at. If you’re feeling stuck or stretched thin, the takeaway is liberating: you don’t need to do everything right now. Move the dial one degree, set your sail, and let the compounding do the rest.
In this episode, Steve and Kali discuss:
The boat-and-wheel analogy: why one degree changes everything over time
Why January gym memberships rarely make it to February
Compound interest – and how it applies to action, not just money
The hidden work behind every “perfect” social media post
A real client story of building a coaching business one Sunday at a time