It seemed such a sad surprise, only 12 months previously I had spent 17 days with Andy Harrington and Topher Morrison, completing my trainers training qualification which would allow me to teach NLP Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner courses of my own, both of which I had previously passed with Inner Compass. And yes, it does now seem, as I remember my Master Practitioner training, that perhaps the cracks were already beginning to show. Yet the courses were becoming busier and certainly all of the delegates who had noticed a change in Harrington's attitude put it down to the increasing pressure he must have been under. Little did we know.



The news was broken to the Inner Compass fan base in the strangest possible way. Generally people heard through the grape vine. I found out when I called up the company and asked to speak to one of the key team members, only to be told that they had been ?let go.? Knowing that something really wasn't right, I questioned further, only to discover that most of the familiar faces had been ?let go? in an effort to save the company, but was told it was very much business as usual. Later, emails were sent around and the gossips got going. I'm certainly not ashamed to admit I was one of them. I can only compare the atmosphere amongst the ?fans? to that of driving past the scene of a horrific accident on the motorway. You can't help but look and wonder at what must have happened.

I guess the thing was, that outwardly, Inner Compass appeared so very successful. Having now had the experience of starting up an NLP training school, I can tell you that simply offering a free event isn't enough, that in itself doesn't get sell trainings, it takes much more than that. And Inner Compass seemed to have acquired the winning formula. Having around 100 delegates at each free event became the norm. So how could this great success suddenly crash in such a big way? The truth is, I don't know the real reasons why. Like anyone else who knew about what had happened, I heard the rumours, but having never heard Harrington speak about the incident directly, what I have heard is only hearsay.

Is it right then, that I should capitalise on his misfortune by promoting my own training in an article written about the Inner Compass crash? Probably not when you look at it that way, but I remember Harrington once saying that he hoped we (the delegates) would one day set up training schools good enough to compete with his own. That this would be the greatest gift, to prove how well he had trained us, and it would encourage him to grow, by having some decent competition.

Andy wasn't a friend of mine, and to be honest, there were times when I thought he behaved quite arrogantly, but he was an awesome trainer. The Inner Compass team were the kind of team I aspire to be part of myself. So, my invitation to Andy would be this. Set yourself up a training school good enough to compete with mine, to prove how good a trainer you created, and to give me some decent competition. And don't leave it too long.