It’s a great sales pitch and it sells workshops. It’s a great idea that produces more practitioners that go on so sell more workshops repackaging the same ideals, but it rarely creates replicas of excellence in many of them.

Because whilst modelling can work it’s a lot more complex than just imitating a few bullet points.

We are all complex individuals all made up of lots of different ingredients.

Unless we have all the ingredients of a particular excellent individual it’s unlikely modelling a few specifics will reap much reward long term for us.

Just modelling excellence most of the time is like being given the blueprint of the icing sugar on a cake you would like to make.

It’s may appear to taste good during the two day workshop, but you soon realise when you get home that you are lacking a large amount of the ingredients that make the whole cake.

The icing on the cake is mainly just marketing bullshit.

In order for us to make any sort of cake we need to know what ingredients we are made of – what we have in the cupboard. Not just our strengths but also our weakness.

We need a way to be truthful with ourselves about the ingredients we haven’t got.

And then we need to get off our ass and get down the shop and get them.

For me, that’s what the cold water training shows me.

I don’t like getting in cold water on a frosty evening, but I don’t know a better way to meet me and my bullshit excuses and also what strengths I’m made of that says ‘stop pissing about and fucking get on with it! Get out there and in that fucking bucket!’.

That’s modelling for me.

It’s our individual and fundamental ground work and understanding of how we work.

It’s the foundation that’s needed if any of the ‘modelling of someone else’s excellence’ – the icing on the cake, is ever going to stick for us.