Irony

As a NLP trainer one is often better at the stuff you are teaching than the people you teach too. Especially on the subjects of decision making, feeling good, communicating well and achieving goals. For that reason it is important to make sure that in your training their is enough room for self-irony so to overcome any distance between you and your audience.

The inhumanity of the sage. – Since the progress of the sage, who, as the Buddhist hymn says, ‘walks alone like the rhinoceros’, is heavy and crushes all in its path – there is need from time to time of a sign of a conciliatory and gentler humanity: and by that I mean, not only a swifter progress, a politeness and companionableness, not only a display of wit and a certain self-mockery, but a self-contradiction and an occasional regression into the nonsense currently in vogue. If he is not to resemble a steamroller which advances like fatality, the sage who wants to teach has to employ his faults as an extenuation, and when he says ‘despise me!’ he pleads for permission to be the advocate of a presumptuous truth. He wants to lead you into the mountains, he wants perhaps to put your life in danger: in return he is willing, before and afterwards, to let you take revenge on such a leader – it is the price at which he purchases for himself the pleasure of going on ahead. – Do you recall what went through your mind when once he led you by slippery paths through a dark cavern? How your heart, beating and discouraged, said to itself: ‘this leader might do something better than crawl about here! He is one of those inquisitive kinds of idlers: – does it not already do him too much honor that we should appear to accord him any value at all by
following him?’

Daybreak paragraph 469