Above the Line, Below the Line - The One Model That Underpins Everything

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