Neuro-Linguistic Programming
- it's not what you think!

2. How do you know the sun is going to come up?

Now that I think about it, change was a big theme during the course. We were encouraged to experiment a lot during the practical work where we were surrounded by groups of assistants, who seemed to know when to be invisible and when to intervene. Richard said that N.L.P. was a "made up" word so that people could do whatever they wanted. This was certainly true on this course. One of the first things we were asked to do was to get into contact with that inner critic we all know so well. You know the one I mean. The one that keeps telling us what we aren't able to do. We worked on how it would sound if it had a different voice. for example a "sexy voice" or a high-pitched squeaky voice. We worked at the same time on changing the tonality of the vowels used by the inner critic when it speaks. In the end as Richard says, you are able to just tell that silly critic "to shut the fuck up." It is perhaps important to remark that putting in some often quite earthy humour was a significant part of the way Richard works. For me bringing my own sense of humour into working with my own inner critic has empowered me to do things both in my personal and professional life that I would never have tackled before. And..this is important..if things I do try don't work out..well it's not the end of the world.

Much of the work we did together during that magical eight days was intrapersonal. We were required to get in touch with ourselves. Find out what was working well and why and what was not working well and how we could change it. We went looking for the places of positive beliefs and then the places of unbelief. So, at least for me, there was a lot of "clean up" work to do. Much trying out how things would be if we switched them around and put them in a different place. In other words, again in Richard's words, we learned to see through "the bull shit." It's like being able to say to yourself, "Do you really believe that? Are you certain of it enough to be uncertain?"