November 2005 Frank Farrelly Workshop
This seminar attracted a veritable Who's Who of NLP in England. In addition to Frank, we also had Jonathan Altfeld, Gabe Guererro, Andy Austin, Jamie Smart, Laura Spicer and Tina Taylor & Nick Kemp who hosted it.
Andy and Nick had suggested that I volunteer for one of the sessions because the perspective of the client is critical to understanding the process. I asked Andy if he was volunteering. His reply: "Noooooooo, I'm not going through that again."
So after grudgingly accepting an afternoon slot, I settled down to watch the legend that is Frank Farrelly.
"Who's first?" he asked.
"Dave Gould," replied Nick.
"B&st&rds," thought I.
So having explained my ever-so serious problem (not investing enough time in my career), Frank immediately tells me that maybe it's a recognition that any such investment would be unsuccessful.
I couldn't help but smile and there was a mix of gasps & laughs from the audience.
Now at this point I should explain that I don't have many 'buttons' left. My considered opinion is that these things don't only let people annoy you, but they dramatically inhibit the natural genius of the mind.
My guess is that Frank has a similar viewpoint since he continually seeks to get clients to laugh about such issues. To me this is covert (and very effective) anchor collapsing.
So the interview continued for 25 mins, with a mixture of hits & misses - the latter of which make the client work harder to change. Although still not as comfortable as I'm used to, I was enjoying the interview. It's hard to say how much I got out of it as this has been my #1 changework priority for 3 months.
The main initial effect was to shake up a dozen related issues. There's a delayed effect as each issue is subsequently triggered through the ordinary life situations.
The biggest benefit so far is the discovery of a major extension of the NLP "values" model that determines how we spend our time... To be continued.
We were given no explicit way to model what Frank was doing. Nor were we given seminar time to practice. Chatting with other NLP modelers, it seemed that we agreed on the more obvious aspects of the Provocative Therapy model. But there was less agreement with what Frank was intending through his meandering and seemingly irrelevant stories. It would have been good to have Frank comment on an earlier recorded session.
Frank is a very funny guy, almost as funny as Bandler. My experience with clients suggests that most of the degree of change Frank elicits is dependent on being that funny.