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.