Make it so……I told you so

In the words of Jean Luc Picard – “make it so”.

And I did, well I had a damn good attempt at it. The “making it so” related to the formulation of a new course I was asked to put together on Comfort Eating and binge eating.

I thoguht it was going to be easy and after much tussling with PowerPoint’s and manual corrections plus a bit publisher it finally came together.

Its one thing being involved in treating eating disorders and issues, another writing a course on it. One major item I bang on about endlessly when I am teaching NLP Practitioner courses is the flexibility of the Practitioner to the client. Not to be rigid, ebb and flow with the client following the stream and the links they present and waiting for them gem of a sentence which will let you into thier private view of the world so you can see what the crucial secondary gain is or the key factor, for them, in the entire problem.

So, when writing a course for people who have a binge of comfort eating related problem it becomes difficult to eb and flow en mass!

It was much easier designing the course for already practicing therapists in how to deal with weight related problems and what to do if presented with a hidden eating disorder than to cover all the bases for individuals who are currently dealing with it. So, I suddenly found myself with a 75 day course instead of a 2 day one! Blimey! So, the editing began and one thing struck me – it was the fact that I was addressing each person who was sitting there, bending to their own model of the world and realistically, unless I stepped into thousands of parallel universes at the same time, that was never going to happen.

So, the learning of the entire profound experience was to strip it all back to easy to understand basics and teach them how to adapt it for them. In fact, that was very much the ethos if an entire morning – making it work for them and not expecting someone to wave a magic wand and solve the problem for them.

We teach practitioners how to move someone to cause, moving a group with a problem to cause is another matter. So, why not carry on the teaching principal of explaining about “being at cause”, treat them exactly the same as a room full of first day practitioner students and then give them the information to utilise for themselves.

The interesting thing was that during therapy work, this pre framing with a client could take anything up to an hour on an individual basis and you are adapting to the client as you work, so the risk was that applying the Practitioner Course teaching to a group of clients wouldnt work for them.

Anyway, I taught the course, the group took on the entire lecture of moving to cause and what “being at effect” really was and that it is all our responsibility to make the changes that we need and to reap that information for ourselves instead of alsways searching for that one person who can fix us. We need to “make it so” ourselves. Out of that 25 full course of comfort and binge eating sufferers, 80% of them all came back in 48 hours to say that they had stopped, the other 20% had positive results and had other issues attached which just needed and final step.

The perceived risk was expecting individuals in a group setting without group interaction to resist being moved to cause and happily they shifted relatively smoothly which for me was a big learning and I have to admit having anxiety about the approach I was taking as it would be perceived to be reasonably “confrontational”.

I thought I would share that, it may help some, others may wonder what the point of the post was, however, sometimes the simplest of  tasks can be overcomplicated by our own knowledge when in fact we should trust in others abilities to grasp the concept of which we are talking.