the French attitude to Sects

Most foreigners in France will at some point notice that this country has a suspicion of les sectes – what we tend to label as Cults in English. If you are reading this as a foreigner then you may well say to yourself ‘ fair enough I don’t like those brainwashing weirdo’s either!’

What you may not appreciate is that this attitude extends far further, and far more often than it is in America, in England or any other European country. France has an official list of sects, which includes the usual suspects (Scientology, the Mooneys etc) and plenty of organisations I have never heard of, but also groups accepted as probably benign (if sometimes bizarre) like the Jehovah’s witnesses, and Transcendental meditation.

Apart from an official list, and laws to back it up the suspicion of sects runs broadly throughout French Society. I have friends in martial arts who are often asked if they are part of a sect. Then again if I think about it doing movements originating in China, then hitting each other is in many ways just as bizarre as chanting words in strange languages -whether Sanskrit, Japanese, or Latin. When I told a client I was going to a an alternative medicine salon and he told me to be careful because ‘those acupuncturists belong to sects.’ Mmmmm….

Now I’m going to do something quite unusual in the realm of NLP. I’m going to write a little about why I think this is so. It’s naturally relates to the nature of belief and if you have ever been eyed suspiciously for carrying a Yoga mat you may be curious as to why…

It all dates back to the French revolution and the imposition of the laïcité. In taking the immense and courageous step of aiming to thought, philosophy and progress from the control of the Church there was a strong desire to remove Religion from France altogether.

However strong the desire it is not such an easy thing to wipe out centuries of belief and culture. People have tried since, in Russia, China, Cambodia and no one has yet succeeded. Napoleon was wise to this. He did not want to have to fight a war against religion at home while he went off empire building. So he made a deal with the representatives of mainstream religion – the Catholic Church.

He gave them the responsibility to report of any new religious groups that might represent a threat to his power, and the authority to cooperate with government to deal with any such threats arising. He based this on the Catholic division of dioceses, a préfet de police supporting each Bishop, and the chief of the local Gendarmerie working with the parish priest.

Spool on a couple of centuries and you have the situation where anything that falls outside of the cosmology or theology of Catholic thinking is regarded with suspicion. Actually much Christian thinking is regarded with suspicion as well. France is a laïcité after all.

In the Academic world actual research and investigation of unorthodox religious organisations is discouraged. An academic here attempting to write a serious treatise on such an organisation is likely to be labelled as a an apologist for sects, and lose their post. The basis on which a sect is designated in France has been attacked because of insufficient research combined with unchallenged negative bias.

If you'd like the long version of this story I recommend the following link, with this story from the Montreal Gazette for dessert.

Of course it’s natural that people find facts to support their beliefs. That applies to whether their beliefs are that the world is a random occurrence in a universe that is slowly running down, or that the world was created in 7 days by a deity with an impressively bushy white beard.

This relates to NLP because NLP includes a pretty good set of techniques that you could apply to setting up a sect. I talk more about people's suspicion of NLP here. Still, we are not always helped by journalists.

Recently on French TV there was a program in which unscrupulous salespeople were filmed swindling old folks by selling them services that they didn’t need. When asked how they had learned to do this they answered they had learned through NLP. Not great publicity for us, but probably a good reason to learn NLP to help deal with that kind of unscrupulous person.

Practically speaking there is not much I can do about this situation – except be scrupulously ethical in how I teach and use NLP. Acting like a relatively normal human being helps. Not that I know what the definition of normal human being is of course.

Occasionally I get mischievous, I’ll admit. People have asked me if I’m part of a sect and sometimes I answer ‘Yes! But my sect has a maximum membership of one. So you can’t join, Sorry.’ It tickles me to imagine extending that idea in a democratic way. To adapt the old saying goes ‘one man, one sect’. Of course if you are a woman you can have your very own sect too. I have not considered if there should be a minimum age for individual sect leadership.

I think a more interesting set of question is: If you were both the guru and membership of your own sect, what would your teachings be? Where might they have come from, and how are you following them?

Only for people of a certain development

I started this blog about a month ago, with a number of objectives. To offer ideas and techniques that can make a difference to the readers, for the pleasure of writing, and finally to attract people onto our courses.

For the last few weeks I’ve been questioning if I’m going about this the right way. I was thinking to be eligible for our trainings there are a number of criteria you need to meet.

You need a certain degree of emotional stability. Our trainings are to teach NLP, rather than to give therapy – though our students to have plenty of opportunities to resolve issues during the courses.

You need a certain degree of mental maturity. NLP isn’t magic. The use of it depends on certain cognitive skills that not everyone has developed.

Finally you need to be able to be able to pay. We offer discounts and exchanges in certain cases, but we are a business and we won’t stay around for long if that’s all we do. If you are a charity, or working on a voluntary basis then you’re the kind of person we will be more flexible with.

Now, the most profitable sector for us is businesses. Ideally big ones who can send a long stream of people on our courses. If I was to write for a business I might be better to adopt a more business like style.

I could include more figures, include jargon culled from my targets, and pull out examples relevant to their situation. There would be lots of articles on ‘maximising team motivation’ ‘6 steps to leveraging customer loyalty in a changing market’

But so far you won’t find many of these articles. Once I noticed they weren’t there I began to wonder why….I mean I could write them, I have the skills, the experience and al the resources I need. So why doesn’t this blog read like a business journal?

It’s because the people I’m writing for have a certain level of mental development. They appreciate that the objective measurable parameters that are required by business, and they also appreciate that there is much more to success than that.

The people who I’m writing for know that being able to work with differences in style, and differences in mindset can make a huge difference to success. It's one of the qualities of the most successful leaders. Some of these people will be working at different levels within the kinds of businesses that we provide training and coaching for.

Having a sense of the value of difference means that they can enjoy that I’m writing in the way I like to naturally. It is my capacity to foster an appreciation of difference rather than a resistance to it that they will value in my coaching and training.

What we do in our trainings is not get people to conform to some norm of ‘effective’ behaviour. Rather we help people to adapt their unique skills and innate capacities to be more effective by being more themselves, and do the same with others. That is something that I consider a ‘higher’ level of development. It’s also something that has a profoundly right sense to it. Right beyond simplistically defined rules.

So the people who are concerned mostly with conformity, and procedure will skim past this blog, or possibly be offended by it. The ones who recognise the value of being more present, more integrated in their work will find areas of attraction, points of resonance.

The conformers could probably do with our training most of all. Certainly the ones who have reached limits of their ability by trying to fit themselves and others into overly fixed structures or hierarchies. When we make presentations, in personal interviews we make sure we speak their language. If we didn’t we couldn’t communicate or motivate them, and we do.

So this blog is a message to people frustrated by opportunities that rigid thinking passes by. People who are pained by the gaps between values and action I'm writing written for the people who perceive the suffering that comes from trying to reduce human issues to mechanical, financial ones, and who recognise that more humanity in the workplace can make it more successful as well as more pleasurable.

If you are one of those people keep browsing. As I go along I'll include more tools you can use in different areas, with overbearing bosses, with intercultural conflict and misaligned communication. You’d probably enjoy our trainings, and know people who could use them to take that next step in their development.

Want to contribute to wisdom and compassion in the workplace and in the world? You are part of a network of people working overtly, or covertly for a more compassionate, sustainable world. There's something a little subversive here. Not subversive in a conflictual or destructive way. Rather we share an interest in being creatively subversive to make things better.

You have allies here. Now what can we do to help?

Xmas xcess and rich pickings for a coach

In my previous life as a personal trainer in Paris one of my busiest times of year used to be January. I dealt with people who had gone overboard at Christmas. Having hauled themselves away from another scene of culinary carnage, weighed down by foie gras, good wine and a rich heritage of cheese they examine their lives with a faint feeling of nausea. Unable to move they had no choice but to reflect back on the previous year. On January 1st it’ll be time to change….

Actually things are not so different for me since I gave up the physical fitness side of my practise. People still get overdo it over xmas and want help to see the coming year in a new way, which often involves discussion and the putting together of plans with dreams or values.

I consider myself a good coach – that is I aim to do my job well and thus put myself out of a job pretty quickly. If the above scenario seems familiar to you and undesirable then read on as I plan to put myself out of a job.

Our perceptions of things and the decisions we make are state related. In a state of toxic overload it’s a lot harder to look at your life and feel good, resourceful and able to cope with challenges than after some exercise. I am not about to start praising the virtues of brisk walks, and bracing cold baths in the mornings – but I think you get the point..

So in preparation for Xmas here is a mental strategy you can apply in all sorts of activities, and works especially well with food. When you are choosing to do something expand the time frame of your decision . Whether it’s eating, asking for cigarette, staying up all night with that Calvados you brought back from Deauville. Don’t just think of how good it will as you relish the texture and the aroma of each mouthful. Think longer term. How will you feel just after you’ve eaten or drunk. Extend the time frame along to January 1st when you look at yourself in the mirror, or stand on the scales, or pull on your favourite jeans.

If you like the way you’ll feel longer term then go for it. If not choose something that you will feel good after.

Of course for this strategy to work well you have to start by feeling good. If you feel awful already then what’s just one more moelleux au chocolat?

So in the run up to Xmas make sure you do things that make you feel good, and keep doing them through the festive season. My choice is martial arts and meditation – but you’ll know what helps you feel light, clear and in tune. The idea is to feel so good from healthy activity that the tempting but unhealthy things simply lose their appeal. I recognise they feel bad in comparison.

So try it out, have a great Xmas and do not call me in January!

Paris Sans Clopes – the energy of habit

Now if you are reading this outside of France the title of this post may not make much sense to you. Pretty much everyone knows what Paris is, but 'les clopes?' Clopes is colloquial French for cigarettes, and smoking (verb: cloper – to smoke). In February France follows America, Ireland, Holland, Norway, Montenegro and many other countries in introducing legislation to prohibit smoking in many public places.

Now the change in France is not going to happen overnight. Café’s and bars have a year’s grace period to adjust. But why am I writing about this in an NLP Blog? Well smoking is such a universal, experience and such a good example of a unwanted habit that we often use it as an example to illustrate certain NLP principles. So now that a whole country is aiming to get healthier I’ll take advantage of it here.

We use smoking as an example because there are a lot of people who want to stop smoking, but find it hard. One reason they find it hard is because they start off with a badly formed outcome in mind. They want to not do something. Well formed outcomes are stated something positive to be, do or have.

Wannabe non-Smokers are also at war with themselves. They usually have a string of reasons for smoking as long as their arms. But they are rarely aware of more than just a few of their reasons to smoke.

These are what we call the positive intentions of smoking, and typically include having a treat, having a break, punctuating the day, a way to start a conversation and part of a sense of identity. People often say that they are smokers, they define the world between smokers and non smokers.

If they do not address these positive intentions then in stopping smoking they find themselves missing out on a whole host of what makes life good for them. They don’t know how to have those intentions can be fulfilled in all sorts of different ways.

Not only do they have all these hidden reasons to smoke, they also have a lot of beliefs about smoking. Nicotine is very addictive, giving up is hard, and each time they light up after a period of laying off they consider themselves to have failed.

So now France is in the same position as many of those people. Smoking is (decreasingly) a part of the French national identity. Many Café’s have a tabac, a counter where there is whole range of tobacco products on sale – as well as stamps and lottery tickets. For many people sitting at the zinc counter of a café, ordering a coffee and lighting up a cigarette (perhaps a Gauloise) is a quintessentially French activity.

That is all under threat. That part of French culture is going to die, and people on the tobacco side of it are nervous.

Personally I’m curious. Not just curious, I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be great to be able to drop off my daughter at school, and have a cup of tea in café which has clean air. I’ve seen it happen before in other countries, in houses and households, and I've liked he results.

But when you are on the other side of that change, it can see strange and daunting. Like going from childhood to adolescence, or adolescence to adulthood.

Paris has already started though. I see a smaller proportion of people who smoke, and a general cleaning up of the city. For example there is much less dog mess on the street than when I moved here 6 years ago. Not that I want to draw any parallel between dog shit and cigarettes for the smokers among you. I mean what would you want to clean first, your fingers or your lips? Please don't think about that whenever you see a cigarette, it might spoil your pleasure.

The reality is that this kind of change can be easy. There are moments that people recognise that something does not fit their sense of identity, that they have moved on and the old ways are no longer necessary.

People readjust their actions when they examine their values. I know that when I stopped smoking one reason was I didn’t want to pay my money to companies with a long history of deliberately lying to sell damaging drugs to large sections of the population. What’s the word for those people? Scumbags I think.

No, that’s not very compassionate of me. People knowingly trying to hook other people on carcinogenic chemicals aren’t really murdering scumbags. They are just misguided and doing their best to make a living. Just like arms dealers, and the rest of us embedded in a society that invests money in destructive unsustainable activities. At what point do people own up to what they are doing as wrong?

But rather than getting all angry – which sometimes is justified and a useful motivator, we can also turn towards something more positive.

Something else that helped me leave cigarettes in my past was having something else that I really wanted to do. Once I discovered freediving I lost all desire to smoke. Images of myself playing in the ocean wiped out any temptation. We all have dreams that can motivate us.

Someone at a French NLP training I attended recently gestured to a non-smoking sign. It was the usual crossed out cigarette. He stated that there was no other way of giving the message of no smoking.

I disagree. Representing a positive goal that is not compatible with the unwanted activity would work. So a picture of blue skies, or mountains, or a windswept ocean with the words ‘keep the air clean’ or ‘enjoy a breath of fresh air’.

So you may not smoke, and you may not live in Paris – if you do both of these then you might think of visiting Mike Fink (Mike's site is in French and he also works in English). But you may have some activity or habit that gets in the way of what you really want to do.

When you talk with someone who admits that they want to give up their habit, it can be helpful to motivate them to change by kicking their ass, by pointing out the negative consequences of continuing as they are.

I also find that it’s helpful to recognise that even scumbags have reasons to do what they do. If I am going to help them find a new way forward I’d better have a sense of how to incorporate those reasons into any new plan, or way of being. It’s bit like blending with and using people’s force in martial arts. It makes life easier, less violent and takes the existing energy and channels it in a new direction.

So where might you have some energy that could use re-channelling? It may not be a conventional bad habit like smoking. It could be something as subtle as thinking negatively. Then the next question is, once you have freed that energy where would you like to see yourself put it?

NLP, magic wands and smooth moves

Reading some NLP literature it's easy to get the impression that NLP is magic, or that the writers consider it that way. This is (mostly) either marketing or fuzzy thinking. NLP is very effective, and it can seem like magic in that how change happens is not always evident to either the client or an observer, but NLP is still a skill.

I can't resist another martial arts parallel. In Taiji there is an exercise called push hands. Simply explained, the idea is to unbalance a partner with a minimal use of force. People who have a good level of skill can throw bigger, stronger partners around with incredible ease. I have pushed hands with old men who repeatedly bounced me into walls without my ever understanding how they did it, or being able to stop them.

With hours of daily training I found that I could consistently replicate (with a degree less grace) what the old teachers were doing with people who had less skill in push hands. The people I pushed around didn't understand what I was doing either!

Now, if those people came to pushing hands with a superstitious sense of what Taiji is, perhaps with ideas of mysterious qi power - the ancient Chinese equivalent of the Force - then I could pass myself across as magical. A sort of short eared master Yoda!

But my understanding of push hands is probably 70% biomechanics and 30% psychology (awareness and mental state).

I make it a point of trying to make it as clear as possible to the people I work with what I am doing. That they can pick it up faster, and so the general level of play improves. Once certain teachers actually took the trouble to break down and explain what they were doing, my progress in Taiji improved immensely. That's an attitude I'm grateful for and carry on when I teach.

Some people, even without skill or experience would be tricky for me to push. At first I didn't like working with them. Then I understood that I could learn lots working with them. In my solo practise I'd analyse what went wrong with them and train the qualities that would help me deal with it in future. I used to work hard outside of class.

Before I could push hands consistently I had to work with a lot of people, change my body (through physical graft), get my ass handed to me, and learn to learn from it.

It's the same with NLP. NLP techniques are written out as clearly as we can. They still take skill to apply in a live situation. I run patterns with my clients and they don't always work perfectly. It's usually because I've missed some cue the client has given me, or ignored some aspect of my own state, or both. Then I know that I'm in for a good learning experience.

In fact I'll seek out the kind of client or the kind of situation, that will push my NLP skills.

Some students who come on our courses take their manuals home, read them overnight, arrange to practise with their friends and family and really apply themselves. They come back to class and tell us great stories. I remember one woman who sat next to a depressed person at a dinner party. Over the course of the evening I watched them move into a more positive state and view of their life.

That's what NLP is about. A learned skill to adapt the way you act in the world, which helps create the kind of changes you want in your life, and help others do the same. Part of learning the skill is real world application, and part is the controlled situation training and experimentation. The two sides overlap and compliment each other.

When I lived in England I trained in a boxing gym. Someone had written on the wall 'train hard, fight easy'. That's a great reminder for boxing, perhaps outside of the square ring we can say 'train smart, live easy'

If any of this article makes sense to you perhaps you can ask yourself if there are general areas, or specific situations where you could take a bit of time out to develop your skills. Perhaps it's with a person you don't have the most constructive or enjoyable relationship with. Perhaps it's a situation that you look forward to with dread.

The question is, how are you going to train for it?

the submodalities of meditation

I recently read an article by Steve Andreas on the use of submodalities in the treatment of migraines. Briefly he talks about how a coach helped his sister suffering from migraines by getting her to move the sensation of the migraine to different parts of their head, and eventually outside of their head altogether. The paradoxical sounding result was the sufferer said ‘I still had a headache, but could no longer feel it.’

This story is a little simplified, I don’t know what else went into the coaching process, apart from curiousity, but the results have apparently stood for over twenty years.

As I sat down to meditate before going to wake up my daughter this morning that story came into my mind.

In meditation many people complain that they cannot quieten their minds. As I have mentioned elsewhere meditation is more about dis-identifying with thoughts than getting rid of them. As such having thoughts continually popping up just gives something to practise with.

Equally if there are no thoughts – in the form of internal dialogue, there is less to identify with. So I decided to apply some submodality play as I sat. I moved the location of the voices to behind my head, and turned the volume down. The result some enjoyable silence.

Every now and then a thought appeared, often arising from a different location. But somehow these thoughts took less of my attention, they seemed transparent, like the form of ripples on the surface of a swimming pool on a sunny day.

It was an interesting experiment, and I think I’ll repeat it. As a child I used to love diving up coins from the bottoms of pools. So I’m also curious what is at the bottom of the pool.

If you try this out or have done similar experiments I’d love to hear about your results.

presenting NLP,I knew someone who...

If you’ve been reading this blog I like to think you have gone beyond the view that NLP is manipulative. You may also have added some arguments – or reasoning if you prefer that term to answer people who have that as an accusation.

The next question is how do you talk about NLP at dinner parties without attracting flak or putting people on the defensive. The problem here is that NLP is a little too good. What do I mean? Well NLP promises the ability to improve just about anything. That covers relationships, communication, performance, learning, sex and any other area you think about applying it to.

However, for many people suggesting that they can improve something in their life implies that they are not good enough. It’s a slap in the face that can put people subtly on the defensive, or actively on the attack depending on their character.

Recently an intelligent French student of ours was telling us how his friends have noticed that he is different in some way, and they are intrigued. But they are also wary because NLP comes from outside their Cartesian frame of reference. They ask questions, but distrust the answers, especially when he talks about what NLP could do for them.

So in the conversation we thought a different way of presenting NLP would be helpful in France. It has some parallels with those people who ask the doctor about a problem their friend has.

So instead of saying ‘NLP can improve your ….., and make you happier, healthier etc’ it makes more sense to recount personal experience of how NLP has been beneficial from a 1st person perspective ‘Since I have started NLP I have…’

You can also use third person stories ‘There was a person on the course who…’

That way the listener is less likely to get defensive and argumentative. Less likely because if you present something sufficiently alien to their model of the world, they may tell you what you saw and experienced never happened.

Self referentially, I could talk about how NLP helped me make the transition from a martial arts instructor, to a trainer and coach. It was something that I had struggled with because I didn’t recognise where I was caught. I identified myself so much with kung fu identity that I hardly noticed when the way I presented myself lead to people asking me for martial arts classes rather than NLP coaching. Once I made the connection, I asked a coach to lead me through a technique. Then the change happened quickly and easily.

A lot of people do get caught in transitions. Either they are not sure how to take the first step, or find themselves frozen between different ways of functioning. Most people I know have dreams that they aren’t living, or taking steps to put into place.

We often see people in our trainings who are unsatisfied by their work. Somehow their job doesn’t match their values, the way they see themselves, or put themselves in a position to really offer their gifts to the world. When we see that one of two things usually happen. We have seen some of them decide to leave their job, which is probably a good thing even if seems tough in the short term. Effectively they were only half present at work – it’s hard to be passionate about what you don’t believe in.

We also have stories of others who begin to apply their knowledge to change their working environment. That way they not only apply themselves more enthusiastically at work, they also begin to create the kind of working culture where their colleagues can be more present, more passionate and more effective.

Some people love to help others, without necessarily wanting to become a professional helper. In which case, I could talk about how some years ago I’d spend part of the summer teaching Taiji at a Yoga centre in Greece. One of my my activities in between sessions of Yoga, freediving and teaching was finding out who had a phobia of water and dealing with it. Since I love swimming it was particularly satisfying to watch them come back from the beach exhilarated at the aqueous world that was opening to them.

For people motivated by the desire to succeed in more conventional terms we have reams of stories of how people have rigorously applied NLP in different areas. I can think of several students who used NLP techniques to prepare for presentations, then winning competitions or receiving standing ovations. Others have adapted their techniques and created tools that they use that improve their customer’s satisfaction and loyalty.

So rather than offering something frontally, the idea is more like two tuning forks resonating together. Pick something that you have an intuition might appeal to the listener – and use your NLP skills to refine the precision. Then as you tell the story your listener may well be thinking ‘That’s something I could do with changing too.’

It's also a useful exercise to list or learn from sucesses, whether your own or other people's, whether in NLP or in other fields. It can help to keep grounded in an optimistic state, and also provieds examples, anecdotes and stories that can help spread those states to other people.

So I wonder what have you seen working (recently)? Where else could you use some of that, and who else could benefit from something similar?

the fool in the laboratory

Several years ago I was in a small park in Paris talking to the fool. The sun was shining on an ancient acacia, while undercover police were sneaking around to leap on a couple of lads smoking something more fragrant than a cigarette. A large group of teenage tourists from Portugal were joking around with each other.

Before I carry on I should introduce the fool. He got his name through an accident of birth. His life is a series of radical experiments, financed by the large fees he charges some of the world’s multinational companies for his coaching and consulting services. Funnily enough it’s the effects of his bizarre experiments that make him desirable to his employers.

He once stated proudly to me that he had been fired by all his major clients because he was committed to speaking the unutterable, and was willing to make a mess that employees of the companies were unwilling to do, if he thought that it was of service to do so. All of them had rehired him later on once they had realised the value of what he had said. All of them except one – a major department of the US government. They changed their minds and asked him back a couple of years after he told me that story. I suppose government bureaucracies often react more slowly than multinationals.

Though not a Buddhist, he is not afraid to talk about the roles wisdom and compassion to chief executives. He can do this partly because he is not afraid of being fired. Also because at the levels of management he works, his clients are very intelligent, very experienced and recognise linear thinking often doesn’t create the results they’d like. They appreciate that to look outside their usual sources of understanding and decision making is essential to keep progressing, and the fool lives far outside their frame of references, but can also speak in their language.

So we were in the park and the fool was recovering from an experiment which had exploded. Emotionally, it had had left him a little bit like a cartoon mad scientist staggering out from the smoking remains of his laboratory, clutching a test tube and with frazzled hair sticking in all directions.

After a period of silence he said wistfully "Ed, you know if there is one thing I’d like to have understood earlier, it’s how the way you are from moment to moment, over a period of years, creates your life."

I nodded. I was trying to work out where the fool lived. He had stuff in storage i
on a number of continents, I wasn’t sure if he had an apartment somewhere, or several, or who was living in them. To some extent he finances other peoples radical life experiments too.

"But I didn’t realise back then, and now I’m living with the consequences of years of the accumulated habits of thought and their results."

I nodded again and gestured to the young Portugese tourists ‘Do you think if we told them about this they’d listen? Unlike you," I teased, "it’s not too late for them."

The fool shook his head sadly.

"But what if we told them that if they paid attention to their moment to moment state of being they’d get laid more. Perhaps that would get their interest?" I don’t always raise the tone of the conversation, but to the fool, sex, death, business and spirituality are all so intimately linked that I can leap from any subject to any other and I know he’ll follow the thread.

He perked up for a moment "Well that has a better chance of getting their attention. I know a spiritual teacher who talks about sex for just that reason." After that he told me how he had an escapist habit of reading ancient Greek philosophers and proceeded to discuss the cosmological mode of a particularly obscure one with me.

I understand what he means about the moment to moment way of being. On the one hand it’s obvious. Spend four hours an evening watching TV and you probably won’t have much time left over for developing skills, doing sports, building your business or keeping up with your friends.

But on a shorter timescale our states and habits of thought also affect us. How do you track something as ephemeral, and as seductively involving, as a thought?

Well there’s a very old answer to that question, meditation. Taking some time daily to bring the attention back to a simple part of physical awareness like the breath can create a distance, a perspective that allows you to observe the act of thinking. It has some great measurable physiological benefits as well (lower blood pressure, and a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s disease among others, click here for a more comprehensive overview).

Of course meditation is not strictly speaking part of NLP, but the two are related in some ways. NLP has been defined as ‘the study of the structure of subjective experience’ and meditation is all about the observation (and possibly transcendence) of subjective experience. I certainly consider the two complimentary.

So while meditation is a great exercise to create distance between thought and awareness, NLP has great tools for acting on thought itself. The original language pattern of NLP, the meta-model, is all about teasing out the ways in which thoughts channel our attention. The meta-model provides an intelligent system of questioning to open the thinking, so attention can be paid to what’s more important.

It’s an interesting exercise to spend some time writing down or recording yourself talking about some set of issues in your life. The writing, or recording gives some distance, rather like meditation. Then you can look through to see the patterns of meta model violations in your language, and begin to ask questions, open up the fields of your awareness.

The fool may have wished that he had realised the importance of how his way of being from moment to moment created his life when he was younger. The aliveness and the intensity of the realisation he shared that day was the result of years of work, observation and experiment. I understood what he said, but I suspect the fool understood at another level to me. We can continually get to deeper, or higher levels of awareness and apply them to daily reality.

Perhaps in twenty years time we’ll be in park in Portugal watching a group of middle aged French tourists and after a period of silence he’ll say "Ed, you know if there’s one thing I wished I realised when I was younger…"

In the laboratories of our lives the experiment has already started for all of us. What results are you getting? Is it time to change the nature of how you are experimenting?

Pass this on to any boring coaches you know (but don't tell them why...)

Do you have your clients crying with laughter and changing? Would that be right - to be effective and have fun at the same time?

You know those moments when a client does something really annoying and you have to bite your tongue to stop yourself doing something unprofessional? Well wouldn't you like to do something much, much more satisfying than firing you patience anchor?

I notice a tendency in the helping professions for people to get quite earnest. Helpers are drawn to help because of their compassion, their capacity for empathy - those qualities are vital for good listeners.

At the same time they cary with them the capacity for a kind of earnestness and heaviness and, in extreme cases, a martyrdness.

At the end of the 1980's I was once asked to leave a seal sanctuary in Scotland where I was working as a volunteer. I think the main reason reason was because I refused be sucked into the general atmosphere of worthy suffering. During the short time I was there I remained well fed, rosy cheeked and cheerful. I hadn't discovered NLP yet so I didn't realise the importance of pacing. Of course the long hair, beard and tendency to wave a wooden Taiji alongside the road in a conservative area, may also have had something to do with their decision to let me go. That is another story and its not like I caused any car accidents or anything!

Recently I met a man who teaches a very different way of listening and working with people than the earnest and sincere and genuine and empathetic and concerned and respectful and.... way. His name is Frank Farrelly and in the early 1970's he wrote a book called Provocative Therapy. Richard Bandler spent a few days with him after the conception of NLP. Bandler still uses many of Frank's mannerisms, ways of delivery and stories. Frank is not news to NLP, but he has been and still is a rich resource of skill for us. He deserves plenty of acknowledgement for that.

Frank works by teasing his clients, relentlessly. From the moment he meets them - often before they open their mouths', until he leaves them. He is extremely skilled, highly effective, ridiculously funny and not very earnest at all.

Frank was a student of Carl Rogers, founder of Client Centred Therapy, who has had a great influence on therapy. However rude and offensive Frank is to the people he interviews - you also have a sense that everything he does is also connected to deep sense of compassion for the client, not to mention the client's family, friends and workmates. He has a wonderful balance of strength, humour and caring.

I promised something practical, not just the ramblings of a new Farrelly fan. Frank's work has a lot of parrallels to NLP and Milton Erickson's work. One of them is that it's useful to be flexible - more flexible than the client. If you as a coach are stuck behaving in an earnest and respectful way - while your client is not - then your client has the upper hand in flexibilty and may well begin to control the interaction. So being able to outrageously tease someone is a pretty useful way widen flexibility. Its also fun!

If I was to condense a Provocative Therapy session to a 7 step technique, easy to pick up for NLPers, then I would do it this way:

1. Get in state - up beat, up time, intuitive. You're not there to help the client, the client is perfectly capable of helping themselves. You're just there to tease them until they do.

2. Get into strong non-verbal rapport with the client.

3. Exaggerate the clients issues. Mimic / caricature their voice tone, posture and delivery. Take their map of the world and distort it in ridiculous ways. Give them plenty of reasons not to change. Play with the positive intentions of unwanted behaviours and give them ridiculous solutions to the problems. Be bizarre, ambiguous, confusing.

4. Notice where the client get's uncomfortable - and go there.

5. Notice what irritates you about the client - and dig into that too.

6. Maintain the rapport.

7. Debrief - and stay ready to tease.

This doesn't do anything like justice to Frank's skill and richness, but it does give a foot in the door for people who want to have fun and create change through teasing.

Most of us do something like this with friends, and siblings already. Add in attention to rapport, the idea of positive intention, an awareness of meta model patterns, the use of Milton Model confusion, and you have some amped up teasing that can really change lives for the better.

So are you ready to have some fun with your clients?

NLP manipulation, psychic attack and the 42nd Rolls Royce

As a first post I’ll deal with what I consider the most common accusation I get as an NLP trainer – that NLP is manipulative and lacks values. There are other things some people dislike about NLP and I’ll deal with them another time.

If you’ve already gone beyond the NLP = manipulation then I promise, the next post will be more positive and practical.

If you think that NLP has no intrinsic moral values you’d be right. NLP is a tool, a technology - it has all the intrinsic morality of a machete or, more precisely, a scalpel…

You can do all kinds of lovely things with a scalpel. You can use a scalpel to cut delicately into sensitive tissue with the result of health. You can use it as a tool for cosmetic surgery – thus creating the appearance of health – a little superficial, sometimes pleasing, but taken to an extreme, quite grotesque.

In fact there are some people who apply ‘rapport and influence skills’ to create all the genuine connection of a silicone dancer during a lap dance. With all that jutting and gyrating it might be fun, it might be exciting and the dancer may succeed in creating a warm feeling. But you know why that dancer is dancing that way and it isn’t because they see the light inside of your wonderful being. It’s because they imagine your wallet being lighter.

I have met people who use NLP on rather than with business partners, customers and so on. They sometimes get away with it for a while, but sooner or later, you catch on and then the technique becomes transparent. Most of us have a sense of whether someone is genuine or not, just like being able to spot sales people on the phone within the first two words of their pitch. We can mistake or ignore the warnings for a while, out of curiousity or politeness, but those relationships rarely get very far.

Given that most of us can spot manipulators some way off, I wonder why people feel so strongly about the idea of NLP as manipulation. I’ve come up with two reasons.

The first is that they are scared that other people will using cunning NLP tools to manipulate them. Derren Brown certainly does some spectacular manipulation for his TV shows. What you don’t see of course are the times it doesn’t work or his use of stage magic which isn't a part of NLP training ( Derren in action). For me though this is an argument for learning NLP, so that you know how to defend against psychic attack by NLP. I put the 'psychic attack' part in italics because it seems so cheesy to me.

The other reason is that people worry that if they had this amazing mind power that they imagine NLP confers, that they would be tempted, ohhh so tempted, to use it. They picture strings of crying ex-virgins and weeping families barefoot in windswept streets after having been ruined by an unscrupulous mind trick. Perhaps they fantasise about having their own cult filled with adoring brainwashed adepts slaving to buy the 42nd Rolls Royce. Then there are the curses, NLP can get rid of phobias quickly and easily, so it can probably install them too. It is used to help heal people from a wide range of diseases so it could be used toxically too. It is that scalpel used as a deadly weapon. Those enemies won’t know what hit them (laugh evil laugh).

Of course if you’re not tempted by these things, then your moral fibre is probably sufficient for you to use the scalpel of NLP in a wholesome, helpful way (smile smugly).

Which brings me to the values vacuum of NLP. As I said, NLP does not have morals. There are no ten commandments of NLP – it is not a religion. NLP does have presuppositions, ideas based on observations that change the way you perceive and act in the world.

One observation of NLP is that in all cultures people have values and that given the choice they act in a way that satisfies those values. NLP does not need to prescribe values because people come with their own. As people develop, their values become increasingly clear, increasingly important to them as a guide and a choice for behaviour. Ignoring those values comes at the price of loss of happiness.

Sure I could use NLP to get people to do things against their better judgement and wellbeing, but it would leave such a bad taste in my mouth that the idea dies as soon as it appears and well before action.

With increasing development the perception through time and across the spaces of the world becomes more and more profound. We live in a culture that has developed to the point where people are willing to protest in the street for the sake of others that they do not know and many of whom would wipe us out if it was in their power.

That compassion is a triumph. In less developed societies the easy option of genocide is still being taken. That compassion isn’t the result of religious education as our society is becoming increasingly secular. It comes from rational thought that allows us to recognise that people are basically the same, whatever the race, they feel the same hope, despair, joy and pain that you and I do. It comes from the ability to imagine different perspectives beyond family, tribe, race or religion. Not that this triumphant compassion takes place in a perfect society.

You can probably think of some parts of your nation’s behaviour that you are unhappy about or even ashamed of - its unpatriotic not to. When you think of them you feel pain for those things that offend your values and by implication, however distant, you are a part of. As a result of your awareness there is the possibility of positive change.

It’s you who has the values, and that’s why NLP doesn’t. NLP doesn’t presume to dictate your values to you. NLP is a tool to use yourself more effectively, to uncover your values, to give you more choices to act in a way so that those values get honoured in the world.

So you could use NLP in a shallow, manipulative value free way. You could see it in a way that reaped some short term result and lead towards distrust, disillusionment and despair, but given all the healtheir ways you can use it, why would you want to?

Damn I’ve strayed some way from that lap dancer in paragraph 5. As I said something practical for next time.