Nick Kemp Blog

I love New York and it makes London look like a sleepy village. There is a buzz and an energy quite like any other city I have visited. I liked San Francisco and Orlando was "ok" but a bit for tourists, New York is the real deal with the best food, best music, best shopping and now some great trainings!

Great to meet up here with some stella musicians, writers and presenters for The Mindscapes weekend. We have a great group interested in learning and developing skills. Really pleased to be co presenting with Doug O Brien and Andrew T Austin, two very talented trainers so rare these days. Can't wait until Friday night, but plenty to do until then!

“There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying.”
Josh Billings

I was looking online today at a number of online postings on the internet while doing some research for a legal issue and discovered some of the most ludicrous and funny comments I have seen to date. It seems that especially in the field of NLP and other changework, practitioners and trainers feel the need to embellish and amplify comments to a farcical level. For a field that claims linguistic skills and precision, this seems to me to suggest a massive incongruity. Amazingly we now have some individuals claiming to cure whole groups of 50 phobics at a time with (100% success rate of course)  and others desperately trying to sell books claim to have “cured” thousands of phobics!  It reminds me of the wonderful Monty Python four Yorkshire sketch.

The culture of newsgroups and associated behaviours has in my view created some of the most dreadful behaviour that only damages the perception of the field. I have blogged previously about individuals who talk about “being qualified” in NLP, when in reality they have only attended a few brief days’s training. Others talk about getting “their Masters…” which actually in many cases means they sat in a workshop for a few days and “became” a “Master Practitioner” Some trainers actually fabricate having qualifications and add logos to their sites until they are outed by the professional body that runs the trainings who are understandably unimpressed by such misleading behaviour.

Of course without any regulation and in many cases professional standards, individuals can literally run riot and the internet is full of such examples of behaviour.

This gross exaggeration extends beyond inventing “qualifications” with many individuals regularly talking about billing thousands for corporate work while always seeming financially broke and having “huge success” with clients while lamenting a lack of regular client income. Some practitioners attempt to charge thousands of pounds for their services often referring to themselves as “success coaches” and “performance coaches” without any obvious factual evidence for any such “success” Other ludicrous sets of claims usually start with “The world’s greatest” (insert whatever you want after this initial proclamation…Often individuals will proclaim "I've got a client" online or "I've got a new training opportunity" which suggests to me a certain level their own surprise...

The tragedy of this kind of behaviour is that some people can (having seen such comments) then totally dismiss the entire field of NLP and changework as “kooky” and without any substance. Considering how useful some of these skills can be when used in the right hands this is a real shame. I have become pretty embarrassed (but not surprised) by such behaviour and am pleased that some groups such as ANLP and a few others advocate a set of ethics and standards and promote professionalism and accountability.  

PS a colleague just e-mailed me this which appeared online

"The best hypnosis 6 day certification training in the World"

The 36 provocative icons allow the therapist to adopt different perceptual positions when working with clients. The key to this approach is to work only “in the here and now” and to make suggestions and observations to the client by “running them up the flagpole and seeing if they salute them.” This produces a wonderfully improvised way of working that is in many ways the total opposite of standard talking therapy, hypnosis and NLP style approaches. The therapist can literally move in any direction at any speed to provoke new and more useful ways of thinking and feeling, from a new and greater perspective, without offering solutions, so that  the response appropriate for the client is literally” called forth” from them .

 Shifting from Disassociated and Associated Positions

Here are some of the phrases that can be used in moving a client’s way of thinking from an associated to disassociated perspective and vice versa

 Disassociated Phrases

• Some people say…
• I heard that…
• Studies have shown…

 Associated Phrases

• Do you consider yourself to be…
• Are you A, B or C?
• How long have you...?

 By using the Provocative Icon System™ in conjunction with these shifts, the client is moved from “a stuck state” when they are often extremely associated, into a new more useful state. Often the conversations that take place can appear to be quite surreal from an external viewpoint, but make perfect sense for the therapist and client.

Also take a look at articles on www.afpt.co.uk

I set up The Association for Provocative Therapy to promote Provocative Therapy as created by Frank Farrelly. I was very keen that Provocative Therapy doesn’t go the same route as NLP where in some cases everyone is considered “a genius” “a master etc” or other such nonsense. In the world of NLP there have been attempts to maintain brand interest by linking in all manner of other fields so now we have TFT, EFT and all manner of other attempts to bolt on something to resurrect what in some cases is a saturated field and where demand for trainings is in decline.

Now I notice some people have discovered the term “provocative” and there is a serious danger of an outbreak of clumsy attempts to borrow the reputation of provocative therapy with little or no training in Farrelly’s work. We already have “provocative hypnosis” and goodness knows what will appear next. For anyone wanting to properly study how to use provocative skills-ie the ability to literally “call forth” the desired change from the client- as created by Frank Farrelly there are AFPT memberships, and, of course a code of conduct and standards that is all too often absent from so many fields.

AFPT code of ethics:

1.     Respect each person's right to self-determination in deciding upon therapeutic treatments

2.     Act at all times with integrity, professionalism and impartiality

3.     Represent themselves, their qualifications, experience and membership of professional bodies honestly, and also (to the best of their knowledge) the skills, qualifications and experience of any third party to whom they refer any of their clients.

4.     Only practise Provocative Therapy within the limits of their competency and to update skills and knowledge on an ongoing basis.

5.     Present PT as a professional and effective approach

6.     Respect legitimate needs and requirements for confidentiality at all times

7.     Ensure that clients' expectations, and the basis on which they will be met, are understood by both parties

8.     Act within the law and not encourage, assist, or collude with others engaged in unlawful conduct.

9.     Represent PT as an option rather than 'a certain solution' for any given problem.

                                        www.afpt.co.uk

There is great value in learning from the best, whether this is in the arts, communication or any other area of life. Being around smart people is in my opinion a smart move. This is also true when learning hypnosis, NLP or therapy. However there is also a time to strike out and to build personal skills to move on from being “magician’s assistant” to become “the magician” in your own right.

In the world of change work and NLP there is a definite “pyramid selling” aspect to some trainings and those “assisting” mostly do so on a voluntary basis. In the world of NLP I chose to assist on a number of events for a few years between 2000 and 2003. I am glad that  I did so as it allowed me to see up close how to run an event and also to really see how skilled some celebrity trainers were, having witnessed these individuals many times over teaching the same material. I noticed that for some assisting on NLP events was a very big deal and in some cases such assistants planned their year’s activities around other trainer’s workshop schedules.  Of course for some aspiring trainers assisting and essentially promoting other people’s events can on the surface appear quite glamorous, but can actually be commercially disadvantageous. Often aspiring trainers who are spending time as volunteers on other people’s events are very limited time wise in what they can run themselves as there are key times of year to consider when hosting events. Typically school holidays, summer breaks, Jan and Dec are not great times for running events. There is also a limited number of people who will attend any kind of event and in recent times assisting staff have been given financial rewards for promoting their chosen trainer’s events. Nothing wrong with that except of course sometimes their own events then suffer and there can be all manner of conflicts of interests that occur.

I have blogged a lot about the balance between entertainment and learning and some of the courses I attended in 2002 and 2003 were great fun, but perhaps not the greatest learning experiences. However my original NLP training was just £499 for 7 days, now the same event can be 300% more expensive. I no longer bother for stock NLP events as they IMO are a bit limited and much of what’s taught is not especially of interest to me.  However I am pleased to be running more and more trainings on my own work in the UK, Europe and USA as well as India as well as releasing some really great products.  I recommend any aspiring trainer to assist on other people’s events for a time, but extensive assisting IMO really can dull skill levels and I have seen many examples of this over the years. One of the reasons is that assistants become very polarized in just one way of working, often not exploring other approaches.

Many training companies that seek volunteers or assistants to help out on courses can be notoriously political in their behaviour and it’s not uncommon to regularly hear the word “persona non grata” as people are considered “in and out of favour” in a similar manner to many corporate business concerns! One NLP colleague was bemused to find that she was skilled enough to run her own NLP courses (and be charged for certification fees by the parent franchise) but curiously not skilled enough to “assist” on courses teaching the same material by those who proclaimed her skills as a trainer.  So yes assisting can be useful for a time in developing skills, for a time…