A New NLP Book is Published

Looks like there's a new NLP book out. Stan Rockwell has reviewed the recently published, NLP: The Essential Guide to Neuro Linguistic Programming at the @PsychCentral blog. You can read the review here. I trotted along to Amazon.co.uk and found the book on sale for £7.58, which is pretty good value for a 464 page book. Conveniently I only remembered my self-imposed moratorium on book purchases after the thing was bought and leaving the Amazon depot.

Rockwell gives a pretty positive review; he does comment on the amount of jargon filling the pages and that can't be denied; but he he goes on to say that he's been using the techniques described in the book and doing the exercises and they've been working for him. My criticism here is that yet again we have a book re-packaging NLP as an easy guide. 

What we actually need is someone developing new models, researching the effectiveness of what we already have or applying NLP in new and interesting contexts - as my friend and colleague Chris Mitchell does in her excellent Behaviour Management Toolkit reviewed by me here. I seem to remember John Grinder, one of the co-founders of NLP, talking in a YouTube clip of the need to 'replenish the well'. It's a good metaphor, as you would expect from Grinder, because of course if everyone draws water and the well is not replenished then eventually the well runs dry.

I've been having a fun time with NLP at the moment. I'm teaching the principles of NLP and drawing on my experience of using NLP as a therapist to groups of psychology students at the college where I work. Teaching this stuff has really helped me reach an even better understanding of NLP. In particular I'm really appreciating the 'explanatory power' of the approach when, for example, the class and I explore the psychology of negative emotional states - often called 'disorders' - though 'differently ordered' might be a better term; and I'm appreciating the creativity of NLP and the strengths based approach to therapeutic work: helping clients to access resources and creating choice about how they'd like to feel.

Chris Parry-Mitchell and The Behaviour Management Toolkit

I have been good friends with Chris Mitchell for a while now and this week had the pleasure of her company over coffee and a cup of tea in Blackburn's nicest cafe, The Coffee Exchange. It was great to see her again, happy and healthy. It was a great chance to catch up, and for me to talk at length about David Allen's book, Getting Things Done, and my personal quest to improve workflow and productivity. Not only did Chris stay awake during this (and she was drinking tea, not coffee) but she listened and gave good advice and inspired me to make changes; but what else would one expect from the author of The Behaviour Management Toolkit? 

I have to declare an interest at this stage, because not only is Chris a friend of mine, but we also share a common perspective on working with people and have similar training, often with the same Neuro Linguisitc Programming (NLP) practitioners and trainers. Indeed there are many similarities between Chris's work on avoiding exclusion from school and the Proactive Carer Programme I developed and delivered with my friend, Adam Gibson of Lancashire Counselling Services. Both draw on NLP and Transactional Analysis and both share a common ethos, the fundamental principle that if you help people develop resources they will have more choices and their behaviour and circumstances will change in positive ways. There are other shared principles: the power of groups and group work and the need for passionate and committed leadership that encourages and equips individuals with the knowledge and skills to make small but significant changes. I often use a metaphor that someone gifted to me, that if you sail from Portsmouth to New York and you're one degree out at the beginning of your voyage, you'll be in a different country by the time you've crossed the Atlantic. Fine if you don't mind landing in Canada, but you get the idea: small changes over time yield significant results.

So what's in The Behaviour Management Toolkit and how useful might it be to teachers and trainers working with young people at the point of being excluded from mainstream education? It's a ten session programme, with all the handouts and worksheets on a CD-ROM taped to the back page. It aims to equip young people with the insight and skills needed to make different decisions, change their behaviour and get better outcomes. Almost 300 children have been through the programme run by Chris in Preston, Lancashire, and  more than 80% of those have remained in education. Now this could be the programme, it could be the expertise of Chris and her two colleagues, John and 'Swifty' (Andrew 'Swifty' Swift is an old student of mine, but I take no credit for the excellent practitioner he has become). More likely it's a combination of these factors as well as the potential all young people have to seize an opportunity to change when they are given the chance by adults who appreciate their struggles and care about their futures!

The Behaviour Management Toolkit applies some classic NLP patterns: the Mercedes Model, submodality shifts and an extremely effective perceptual positions exercise to educate group members about their own thoughts and feelings, the impact of their behaviour on others and why that matters. It uses ideas from TA (warm fuzzies, cold pricklies, the Drama Triangle and game playing) to help young people understand and take responsibility for how they communicate. Each session begins with participants identifying and sharing their achievements that week, creating positive feelings, generating positive feedback and helping to change internal filters so a young person starts to notice what's going well in their lives and not just what's going badly. The whole programme is well put together, so each session builds on the previous  one and models learnt early in the programme are reapplied later on. Chris says she responded to feedback  from her young participants, making changes and increasing the programme's relevance and effectiveness. I think it's a superb piece of work, but the ultimate test is, does it work? Well, the statistics and the participants' feedback says it does; and whenever I've visited the project I've noticed an atmosphere that's warm and safe and purposeful, and the young people I've met there are full of praise for Chris and her team.

I hope practitioners working with hurt young people and their sometimes challenging behaviour make use of the Toolkit. In a previous career I delivered offender programmes for the National Probation Service. These were based on the principles of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, an approach I much admire, but which, in that context, lacked the optimism and the humanistic underpinning found in The Behaviour Management Toolkit. I use it when teaching NLP based interventions to students on the BA (Hons) degree Working with Children and Young People at The University Centre at Blackburn College, a course that 'Swifty' graduated from several years ago! Congratulations to Chris Mitchell and her team, changing lives and living your mission!

NLP In Blackburn

I facilitated three days training in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) last weekend. I was with my friend and fellow NLPer Cath Birtwistle at the University Centre at Blackburn College. We got some great feedback from our trainees in what turned out to be a fantastic training experience on a hot and sunny weekend. Coming home in the evenings to see our Olympians win multiple gold medals was surely the icing on the cake! In this post I want to publish some links to my favourite NLP resources on the Web.

NLP Links

Andy Bradbury has provided a collection of insightful NLP book reviews at Honest Abe's NLP Emporium

The Anglo-American Book Company is a good place to go for NLP books including those by Crown House Publishing

The Association of NLP is one of the UK's leading organisations for the promotion and regulation of NLP

INLPTA is the International NLP Trainers Association and certify training around the world

I learnt most about modelling from David Gordon, his website is here: Expanding Your World

One of the wonderful out-growths of NLP is Symbolic Modelling and Clean Language, modelled on the work of the late David Grove by Penny Tompkins and James Lawley.

For NLP training in Lancashire - Diploma, Practitioner and Master Practitioner courses - you can check out Chris and Glenda Grimsley at: The Insit2te for NLP for Public Services

Robert Dilts the NLP developer has published lots of resources at his NLP University website.

My friend Fran Burgess, author of The NLP Cookbook has a website called The NLP Kitchen

Another friend, Chris Mitchell has successfully used NLP with disaffected young people and you can see how by reading her book The Behaviour Management Toolkit

Another of NLP's developers is Steve Andreas, you can see some of his videos at his YouTube site: NLPComprehensive

Walking with Power and Grace

There was a flutter in the chicken coop this week as research published in the British Medical Journal strongly suggested that exercise does not help with depression (see the Guardian report here). 

The claim seemed counter-intuitive, but the evidence was pretty conclusive. People with experience of depression protested (see here and here), whilst Clare Slaney saw a hidden agenda at play - the dread hand of austerity around the throat of the prescription gym membership.

There has been evidence that exercise helps with depression (see, for example, the BBC News website here and here) and what about all those endorphins that exercise releases? On Twitter Professor Cary Cooper said the study focused on severe depression only. I'd like to read the BMJ to see for myself, but it's by subscription only and times are tough.As compensation there was a pretty well balanced report, reminding us that this study tested prescribed exercise only, in the Daily Telegraph here.

If the study did involve only those living with severe depression then I can well imagine how exercise came out as ineffectual. Might as well whistle down a storm. But thinking of the guys I have helped - people with moderate levels of depression - life style changes have often been beneficial. Sometimes it's difficult to work out whether people become more active as their depression lifts; or is it that the depression lifts and enables them to become more active?

I'm reminded of a story about Milton Erickson, the psychiatrist and hypnotherapist. He told a man living with depression to count the chimney pots on his way home from Erickson's house. The man did this, mainly to humour the old fellow; but by the time he had arrived at his own home he did feel quite a bit better. Erickson's intervention changed the man's thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Instead of looking down he was looking up, instead of ruminating he was counting chimney pots, instead of sitting at home on his own, he was walking down the street meeting people - you get the picture. The man had a strategy for maintaining his depression and Erickson flipped it round.

On some of the NLP training I've done I've been encouraged to walk with 'power and grace' and if you can behave differently then you will tend to think differently and feel differently. Like Gregory Bateson I think we're built that way - we are cybernetic.

Will walking with power and grace lift our mood? Possibly. Will it shift clinical depression? Probably not. It'll be the same with exercise (maybe).

Personifying Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

In a recent blog post on Psych Central, Janet Singer wrote about her son Dan and his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which became so severe at one point that he was unable to eat. Distressed and confused Janet turned to a psychologist friend for help. He told her that Dan and his OCD were in a 'battle'. On good days Dan had the resources he needed to win the battle, on bad days the OCD over-powered him. This made a lot of sense to Janet and she began to refer to her son's OCD as 'the enemy'. She says it's a common approach to the treatment of OCD and enables the individual living with the condition to separate himself or herself from the 'disorder'. Janet says OCD is an 'insidious disorder' and that some 'battles' in the 'war' will be won and some lost, the important thing is that 'those suffering from OCD keep fighting'.

Over the years I've worked with many individuals living with obsessions, compulsions, and with OCD. I've been mostly successful in my helping, using a pluralistic approach, creating an individual therapy for each of my clients, using counselling, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) .

Sometimes though I am unable to help. Often this is because the client has something else stressful happening in his or her life that constantly activates intense episodes of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. It's incredibly difficult to control OCD when the storm is raging. In those circumstances I offer support and I work with the client to resolve these 'external' sources of stress. If stressful life events happen whilst the client is having counselling then it's likely that he or she will have learnt strategies (1) to deal with this 'incoming' stress and (2) to manage their OCD. This usually prevents the OCD from escalating out of control.

In many ways I agree with everything that Janet Singer has said. One of my aims when working with clients living with OCD is to help them recognise and label OCD thinking; and it can be difficult to identify obsessive thinking when one is in the middle of it, the most irrational of intrusive thoughts can seem real when they are accompanied by intense feelings. But recognising and labelling OCD thinking requires the individual to stand outside of the OCD ; it is, I think, the first step towards mastery. It introduces the possibility of choice - 'This is my OCD wanting me to check the doors and windows of my house. Do I comply or do I not?' The next step may be to learn to tolerate the agony of not complying or not seeking re-assurance. There are many more rounds to go in this boxing match, but at this stage, and possibly for the first time, the OCD is on the ropes!

As you can see, it's very tempting to use a martial metaphor when talking about OCD. I've likened OCD to a boxing match, and Janet Singer uses words such as 'battle' and 'war'. Clients often use this kind of language when describing their experience of OCD and the process of recovery. When this happens I will often follow suit, working to create 'critical distance' between the client and their obsessions and compulsions, for the good reasons Janet Singer identifies in her blog post. I do have a reservation though about labelling OCD as the 'enemy'.

I worry that labelling OCD as the 'enemy' in effect creates a state of perpetual war within the individual, or possibly, periods of peace interrupted by fresh outbreaks of conflict.

These concerns come from my belief in the NLP pre-supposition 'all behaviour has a positive intention' and my training in the 'parts work' of family therapist Virginia Satir. In my view OCD is a 'part' of the individual and it has a positive intention. Like all anxiety disorders it is working incredibly hard at keeping the individual safe from harm. For example, when a person obsessively checks to see if their front door is locked there is a positive intention behind their behaviour, it is to keep his or her property and family safe and secure. In this context OCD isn't the enemy, it's the fire service, police force and National Guard all rolled into one. But of course whilst OCD behaviours might have a positive intention they nonetheless create havoc in the life of the individual living with OCD - this is a 'part' that needs retraining and re-assigning.

So, whilst I do help clients to personify their OCD - and use martial metaphors to 'defeat' the disorder - I may also look to re-assign or re-integrate a 'part' that is out of control by re-directing an individual's obsessive and perfectionist tendencies towards the perfection of a skill or hobby - I sometimes refer to the healthy obsession of the concert pianist. This means that time previously spent 'doing' OCD is spent having some fun and creatively filling the space that OCD used to occupy.