Nick Kemp Blog

I have just completed a mini road trip running three Provocative trainings in the UK. The first was an evening in Swindon with Tony Nutley’s NLP group and then an evening and a full day’s training hosted by Al Whitton from Essex.  My thanks go out to Al and Tony for organizing these events and especially Al for the two London events as I know just how much work takes place behind the scenes.

When I am teaching both Frank Farrelly’s “classic” Provocative Therapy as well as my own Provocative Change Works™ material requires careful sequencing so the attendees don’t become totally confused. Both these approaches are very sophisticated multi layered ways of communicating and in my view far superior to other approaches I have studied including NLP. This way of working really requires the therapist to pay excellent attention to their own state and to be able to maintain excellent rapport with the person they are interacting with while at the same time being able to provoke or stimulate a wide range of responses.  For the casual observer much of what is occurring can seem at times like a scene out of “Alice in Wonderland”, truly surreal and with no immediate obvious thread, but as the training progresses people begin “to get it”

The ability to improvise is crucial to producing great results and I was very pleased with all the attendee questions during these events. It’s great to have individuals really think about what they are witnessing and asking good questions that also get me to think about this process in new ways. It has become clearer and clearer to me that creating The Provocative Icon System ™ was a very smart move in making this material more accessible. Using the different icons to demonstrate how the therapist can adopt a variety of “perceptual positions” allows me to really allow people to access a lot of what Frank does in an easier way and crucially in a way where they can then begin to use these tools. These approaches also require the therapist to have really good state control and to be able to provoke or stimulate a wide range of different behaviours and reactions in the Provocative interviews and exercises. This can at times be pretty challenging and at least one seasoned NLP/Hypnosis trainer felt they were well outside their comfort zone during the London training. I felt exactly the same way back in 2004 and absolutely loved the fact that I had discovered a great new way of producing excellent results with all the jargon and clunky techniques that are all to often present in some change work approaches. We filmed everything (thanks to Mark Zaretti for this) and a section of the filming will appear on the international Hypno Summit transmission in March this year.

I was also pleased to put a number of faces to names I had heard about in recent years and attendees for these three events came from all over the South of the UK with one London attendee travelling in from Paris! I have already started discussions about running a two day training on Provocative approaches for Tony’s  NLP Master Practitioner later this year and have a number of invitations to present at evening events in the UK. It’s a real pleasure to meet people who are both warm hearted and genuinely interested in learning. For those reading this who live in London , be assure “I’ll be back!” For everyone reading this, remember that in May I am running a weekend Provocative training with Frank Farrelly. As one of the co creators of NLP once remarked

“If you think I’m wild, you should meet Frank”