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Cross Training in Changework
By Chris Cathey
Copyright 2010
I still remember the days when the Ultimate Fighting Championship was just coming out. It’s clear as day to me as I recall it now watching Royce Gracie make his way into the Octagon. Back in those days there was the debate of Power over Technique or Technique over Power. People were either strikers or grapplers. People were ignoring the need to cross train in order to become a more complete fighter; people were ignoring the need to cross train in order to truly become a force to be reckoned with. Fast forward to the present day all the best fighters in the world cross train. There are no longer camps like there was in the past that blindly advocated that a person only train striking or that they only train grappling. Those who do not want to be left behind train in all methods of fighting. Be it Muay Thai, Jiujitsu, Krava Maga, etc…
When I took my first class in abnormal psychology I remember the professor standing at the front of the class telling us that when you get into psychology that you have to pick your one school of therapy and stick with it and then you have to fight everyone else tooth and nail. And that was that according to them. When you look at the field of NLP there is a great deal of diverse homogeneity. Diverse in that there are all sorts of different people teaching the skill set. It’s homogenous in that they are all teaching the same thing. This is just my observation.
There are camps, and camps of camps, and camps of camps of camps. There are people who label themselves as being in the Bandler camp, there are people who label themselves as being in the Dilts camp and even people would label themselves as being in the Grinder camp. What I’m not seeing are enough people really cross training. Perhaps it’s just my limited perception. Steve Andreas recently hosted a seven day Advanced Mastery Training. The biggest selling point of the training was that you have five different presenters with five very different styles of interacting with clients and creating change.
Anytime I’ve ever performed a successful piece of work no matter the context it’s always been due to my ability to pull together bits and pieces of knowledge that I have learned from various people. The worst thing in my opinion that anyone could ever do really is train with the same individual repeatedly. It’s very rare that I train with someone more than once even if I like them. It’s very rare indeed. Something that I figured out long ago when I was first studying NLP was that there was a plethora of footage of Richard Bandler doing work and teaching seminars. And as I viewed most of that work I began to think that the only way to do NLP was to act like Richard.
I’ve met quite a few people that train with their gurus of choice and because that is their only model for how interact with people given the context that they are studying they begin to take on the idiosyncratic behaviors of their model. Cross training with multiple trainers is one sure fire way to broaden one’s perspective when it comes to NLP and Change work. You can pull very useful information from various different resources and develop your own style. Everyone has something to offer even the bad trainers (and they are out there) that you might come across.
There is one trainer that I worked with years ago he was very unethical but turns out he is quite exceptional at utilizing hypnotic language currently he’s a model that I’m analyzing and picking apart so that I may incorporate some of his linguistic patterning into my repertoire of skills. I would absolutely advocate that people expose their brains to as many diverse approaches to change. One of the things that I used to do is that I would go seminars and workshops by people who claimed to do Magick in order to witness their approach. Heck there was even a time that I sat in an auditorium at the Church of Scientology just because I wanted to see what they were all about.
Bottom line if you want to limit yourself train with the same trainer multiple times and lock yourself into the notion that there is only one right way to do things. If you really want to expand your horizons and really refine your skills then expose your brain to as many different approaches as is feasible. You’re going to notice how in many ways all these people do things that are similar. You’re also going to notice how in many ways all these people do things that are very different as well. And this is going to give you room experiment with their approaches and to learn what works best for you.
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