Bits and Pieces of Changework
By Chris Cathey
Copyright 2010
The field of NLP is patterns galore. We have a pattern for this, we have a pattern for that. If you want to change a belief you only have to decide how you want to do it. When I first got into the field I thought you were only a success if you could follow a pattern from start to finish and achieved your intended result. As I’ve matured in my understanding of the field I’m learning more and more that rarely do patterns work as intended from start to finish. People are just too complex to fit into a handful of recipes.
I was working with a kid the other day on an anger issue I initially intended to map across anger to forgiveness and be done with it however the process ended up getting a lot more in depth and involved than was my initial intention. Ended up having to whip out some state elicitation, anchoring, time lines, and a healthy dose of reframing in order bring the situation to a successful conclusion. In the past I would have thought of this as a failure because I had to sway from my original plan. Now I see this way of working with people as part of a greater whole. That being that every piece of change work that I do is bits and pieces of change work. Take a little timelines from here, take a little anchoring from there, add a little mapping across and throw in some reframing for good measure. In my experience when working with people setting oneself up with the intention that there is only one way to create a change while disregarding other avenues in order to achieve ones outcome is essentially setting oneself up for failure.
A common pattern that I’ve seen at trainings is that a practitioner is taught a new skill or technique and for some reason when they go to test it out they disregard all of the other skills that they already know while practicing the bit of information that they were just taught. Now it can be useful to do something like this up until the point where the person inhibits their ability to achieve their intended result. I’ve had times where I have been mapping across some submodalities and that for whatever reason I could not identify the difference that would make a difference so rather than just continuing to look I elicit the state that’s needed to take the person I’m working with over threshold to the new desired change and then I anchor it and fire it when I need it. It’s very useful to learn to cheat a little bit when working with people.
The other day I was intending to work on my strategy elicitation (something that in my eyes I sorely need practice doing). As I was doing this things started to go south in terms of when I elicited the person’s strategy for a good decision and a bad decision I was unable to figure out how to successfully install the good decision into context in which the bad decision was firing. Turns out when I asked the person to reveal the content that the person’s bad decision strategy had to do with an addiction that the person had. Well, shit I wasn’t expecting that to be what we were working on especially since I prefaced the elicitation by stating ‘pick something little’ for us to work on. Since we were on the topic I decided to see where we could go with this information.
First I began with establishing an outcome implicitly I knew the result that I was going for inside my own head I just didn’t know how I was going to get there. I did some anchoring, and submodality work but the thing that worked the most was I laid out a time line on the ground and I used that to essentially grow the resource that the person needed through time until it reached a certain threshold and the person simply said, “I Quit”. This was an interesting result that I did not see coming. The interesting thing is that if I had I clung to the belief that there was a ‘right way’ to produce my intended result that I probably would have never achieved my intended result.
Sometimes the best way to work with people is to make it up as you go.
I was working with a kid the other day on an anger issue I initially intended to map across anger to forgiveness and be done with it however the process ended up getting a lot more in depth and involved than was my initial intention. Ended up having to whip out some state elicitation, anchoring, time lines, and a healthy dose of reframing in order bring the situation to a successful conclusion. In the past I would have thought of this as a failure because I had to sway from my original plan. Now I see this way of working with people as part of a greater whole. That being that every piece of change work that I do is bits and pieces of change work. Take a little timelines from here, take a little anchoring from there, add a little mapping across and throw in some reframing for good measure. In my experience when working with people setting oneself up with the intention that there is only one way to create a change while disregarding other avenues in order to achieve ones outcome is essentially setting oneself up for failure.
A common pattern that I’ve seen at trainings is that a practitioner is taught a new skill or technique and for some reason when they go to test it out they disregard all of the other skills that they already know while practicing the bit of information that they were just taught. Now it can be useful to do something like this up until the point where the person inhibits their ability to achieve their intended result. I’ve had times where I have been mapping across some submodalities and that for whatever reason I could not identify the difference that would make a difference so rather than just continuing to look I elicit the state that’s needed to take the person I’m working with over threshold to the new desired change and then I anchor it and fire it when I need it. It’s very useful to learn to cheat a little bit when working with people.
The other day I was intending to work on my strategy elicitation (something that in my eyes I sorely need practice doing). As I was doing this things started to go south in terms of when I elicited the person’s strategy for a good decision and a bad decision I was unable to figure out how to successfully install the good decision into context in which the bad decision was firing. Turns out when I asked the person to reveal the content that the person’s bad decision strategy had to do with an addiction that the person had. Well, shit I wasn’t expecting that to be what we were working on especially since I prefaced the elicitation by stating ‘pick something little’ for us to work on. Since we were on the topic I decided to see where we could go with this information.
First I began with establishing an outcome implicitly I knew the result that I was going for inside my own head I just didn’t know how I was going to get there. I did some anchoring, and submodality work but the thing that worked the most was I laid out a time line on the ground and I used that to essentially grow the resource that the person needed through time until it reached a certain threshold and the person simply said, “I Quit”. This was an interesting result that I did not see coming. The interesting thing is that if I had I clung to the belief that there was a ‘right way’ to produce my intended result that I probably would have never achieved my intended result.
Sometimes the best way to work with people is to make it up as you go.