Episode 21 - "Reframing Mastery: Turning Limitations into Strengths"

I mean, you, you know, those couple of days before you go on a holiday and it's all, it's like, it's like any project, isn't it? No matter what timeframe you give yourself for a project, there's always that last little rush to get everything ready, you know? So yeah, going through that stage at the moment, um, although I am actually getting things out and then just putting them away, I'm gonna be traveling light. So. I don't think I'll be seeing many of you guys for a couple of weeks.

Tina's gonna be covering everything, so, um, yeah, it's gonna be quite a gadget free couple of weeks, although it depends wherever I go. 'cause apparently there was an earthquake just off. I'm going to Crete. So there was a 5.9 on the Richter scale earthquake, you believe just off the coast. Oh. And they're given out a potential tsunami warning. The good news is we're halfway up a mountain, so we should be all right. Yeah, I hope so. I'm doing good though. Thank you.

Well, I mean, I mean a tsunami, I mean, how, how could I possibly reframe that in a positive way? It can be the first exercise for the group. Help me to reframe

Now I've got that picture in my mind. But at least the chances of drowning lower, um, you can swim. You'll

I mean, the theme for today is reframing mastery. We've already started.

And I always like to have a question in mind for me when I put together what I am gonna do and, um, share with you and Tina, I have a conversation to make sure what we're doing kind of fits together.

So there's a question I wanna pose to you now, and I want you to sit back for a moment and I want you to think about the answer. Just take a minute to think about it. And then I wanna see in the chat what you think your answer is. Okay. So here's the big question for this evening for coming from me. What is the purpose of suggestion in trance? What is the purpose of suggestion in trance? Hmm. So, you know, guys know how to do this. Get into the physiology of curiosity.

You know, stroke your beards even if you don't have beards. Hmm. What is the purpose of suggestion in tra?

Creating possibilities in the direction of desired state. Oh, that sounds like a hypnotic induction. Or certainly a deeper, doesn't it deeper offer a new pathway for thoughts to travel to help with change work? How specifically lha, how specifically does it help with change work to change behavior and state? How specifically does it change behavior and state? How do suggestions do that to implant a new story?

Possibly could be a new story, could be a variation on a story, could be a a, a different ending options. Yeah. Um, sometimes we need to have a fork in the crossroads, don't we? Instead of just going in straight line. I like those selection restrictional violations. You know? Is there a fork in the crossroads to open and shift beliefs to create a new program? Adding more options and flexibility? Yeah. You guys have got the idea to reframe the mind. How specifically does that help?

By reframing the mind, Milton Erickson said it was to bypass conscious mind limitations and to evoke potentials. So to open up potentiality and to provide newer and better mental maps for navigating life. I. Better mental

maps. You know, when we unscrew our heads and we take the maps out through which we navigate the world, those maps that tell us the ways of familiarity, the ways that have worked for us in the past that contain all of the beliefs and the ideas that we've so quickly jumped to conclusions and made, um, in hypnotic realities.

'cause one of the things that I say I love about doing this practice group is it gets me to kind of go back to the library and pull out a few books and I go, oh, I know there was something else he said, Ericsson and I should have written down the page number, but I'll have to find it. And if anyone wants to know where this is, is in hypnotic realities. And he talks about suggestion and he says, suggestion or rather, suggestibility is composed of two elements.

The ability to receive an impulse from without. And the idio plastic faculty, the ability to change your mind. I mean, everything Milton said was a trance, wasn't it? You know, it's the suggestion or suggestibility composed of two elements, the ability to receive an impulse from without. And the idio plastic FA faculty, the ability to change your mind. So it's the ability, the purpose of suggestion is to be able to let its ideas go in.

And then the idio plasticity is the ability and the willingness of the mind to change and to reorganize that map. So, for some of you who might be a little bit new to NLP or hypnosis, I, I wanna put a little bit of a pre-frame around this, what we're doing, okay. In the structure of magic. In fact, I've got the actual quote here. So let's see. See if I can actually give you the right quote from the structure of magic. Let me find, I've got reams and reams of notes. Bear with me.

Or maybe I'll just paraphrase it. Just talk amongst yourselves for a moment. Somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, somewhere. I've got some, I've got so many notes. Okay, I'm gonna paraphrase it. People with problems operate from impoverished maps of reality. You, many of you on trainings would've heard me say that before. Anyone remember me saying that before? Few of you? Yeah. So what does that mean? We, we have, we create maps from. The experiences of life.

And we use those to navigate our way through life. And if those maps are impoverished, if they're poor maps, they don't take us on the right journey. They don't take us to the right destination. Maybe they keep taking us around in circles or we don't go anywhere with the map 'cause it's impoverished. So our job as communicators, when we are working to help people, is to help people to enrich their map.

So John, Brenda, and Richard Bander said People operate from impoverished maps and as therapists we help people to enrich their map. 'cause they were talking from the perspective of therapists, we help them to redraw their maps, to be cartographers of their mind. And suggestibility is based upon our ability to give them impulse from the outside and their ability and willingness to be plastic enough in order to take the suggestions and change.

Then they get to redraw the map and hopefully this map is a better map and it will take them to where they want to go. I just wanna check, does that make sense? As a framework? Does everyone get that? Can I just have a show of hands? Yeah. To me it's foundational.

When I'm working with someone, I want to get a better idea of them map of reality and how do, how do I do that? Some, someone in the chat. How do I get a better understanding of somebody's map of reality? Yeah. I ask questions then metamodel questions. Where specifically might I go at the very beginning? What sort of questions might I ask at the very beginning in order to enrich the map? Rather than me just going, I am now going to metamodel you, I'm going to challenge your deletions.

We are getting there. Ask, what do you want? What do you want? Okay, so we, we've all gotta do this in an Al Pacino voice. What do you want? Okay, what do you want? And what model is the, what do you want question in? Where does that sit? Yeah. So the question, why are you here? That's a great one. Why are you here? To my clients, well-formed goals, Celia. Well done. Celia wins a prize. I dunno what it is. Okay. Just, um, my adoration and love. There we go. Um, well-formed goals.

Now what do you want? All of those questions help us to, for us to enrich our map and understanding of somebody's reality, but it also helps them to get a better understanding of their map and to explore it. Okay? Now while I'm going through eliciting and listening really carefully listening, I. Sometimes people need a damn good listening to. It's a phrase that our colleague Gloria uses a lot, which I love. I heard him went, oh, I'm gonna borrow that. I will give credit to Gloria.

Sometimes they need a just a damn good listening to, and they will leak information that's come from the map. So now I've got a more enriched understanding of the map and they've got a more enriched understanding of their map as well.

And what's gonna happen is the maps going to reveal and the questions that we ask are gonna reveal where there are the obstacles, where there are the restrictions, where there are thresholds, where there are limitations, where there are places where maybe they're too scared to go, where there are places where there's been familiarity and they just keep staying. It's stuck in the familiar and the revelation of those obstacles.

Those limitations and those thresholds that tells us where there's some valuable work, doesn't it?

How many of you know that at some, somewhere, someplace in your map of reality, you have got a block, a limitation, some resistance, a threshold, something like that as stopping you from really fully expressing your full potentiality? Anyone and the rest of you, you fib about other things as well, do you? Okay, let's just see those hands go up again. Let's have a look. Hold on, don't we? Aren't we all in the caring and sharing space? Yeah. Well maybe it's 'cause there's always more.

Maybe there's always more. So what I invite you to do during this practice session is to explore ways to make sure that you have that idio plastic faculty. It means you've gotta be willing to change your mind, be really willing to change your mind. Now, a little bit of willingness is good. A little bit of change is good, but what tends to happen is the system reverts back. 'cause systems don't like to change, do they?

You know, systems like, 'cause if a system's working, the system wants to stay as it is. So sometimes we need to have big changes or incremental changes. One change that leads to the next or the next, to the next, to eventually the system changes. So your ability to have more idio plasticity of your mind comes from your willingness because, you know, your, your all accomplished at this. You're here to play, aren't you? You've got open minds. You're willing to explore and try new things.

Your, the real skill is you being able to convince your clients to just follow your blessed instructions and explore that ability to change their mind and have the willingness to expand and try new ways of seeing things. 'cause do you know what they'll do? They will fight to hold on to their limitations. That's what a lot of people will do. They'll hold onto limitations simply because it's familiarity. So what I want you to do a, a quick thought experiment is this.

I want you to take a moment and just think of a limitation that you have, uh, a belief, a threshold, uh, maybe like you're at the edge of the map of your reality, or maybe it's unknown territory you don't wanna go with. There's a, there's a limitation, there's a belief. I just wanna check, has everyone got one? Or some of you, some of you thinking deeply, is that because you've got too many to choose from? Yeah. Let me just check in. Who has one to work with? Fabulous.

Joel, I'm not seeing any sign from you. We're picking on you. There we go guys. It's a bit slow today, isn't he? Alright. Okay, so I'm gonna take you through a, and by the way, hold onto this one. Not like it's your precious, okay? And when I say hold onto it, you don't have to defend it. I want you to be, to be willing to shake it up a little bit and to see it from a different perspective and to explore what it's like from different points of view.

'cause that's what reframing is, is to take something and see it through from a different framework. But when we see it through a different framework. We see things that maybe we hadn't seen, if we'd just seen it one particular way, that's being stuck, okay? Seeing things only one way doing things, only one way is being stuck. And when you get good and better at reframing, you will unstick not just yourself, but also other people.

So make a mental note of what this limitation is, and I want you just to clo close your eyes. Just close your eyes. Now, Milton didn't say that suggestion or suggestibility is based upon the depth of trance at all. He didn't say anything like that. He did say the purpose of trance is to bypass conscious mind limitations to evoke potentials and provide new and better metal maps for navigating life. Yet you all know that people are all in a trance anyway.

Whatever trance you are now in is just the right trance for you to be able to look at that. I'm gonna call it a belief, okay? I'm gonna call it a belief. Whatever it is you're thinking about, it's a belief because even if it's a threshold, it's still only you believe there's a threshold there. If it's a limitation, it's still only because you believe it's a limitation. And if you hold onto that belief, well, let's think about that. I want you to imagine seeing the belief in front of you.

Now, I don't know how you're gonna represent it. Maybe you will see it in a written form, maybe you might see some form of symbology to it, but a way where you can recognize that that's the belief and there's, there will be a structure to a belief. 'cause there always is a structure to a belief. There's either cause, effect, beliefs, or complex equivalence beliefs. Cause effect. Something happens and there's an effect. Complex equivalence, something happens and we attribute a meaning to it.

So the belief is there. There's a structure to it. I want you to give yourself permission to see the belief and imagine moving back through time. Now, I dunno how you're gonna do this. Maybe you're gonna imagine the past is to the right of you and the future is to the left for the purpose of this. That would be a useful thing to do. And I want you to imagine moving back through time parallel to the past and going back to some of the, some of the earlier moments.

So you're only observing, you're just observing, where maybe you picked up these beliefs or this belief, maybe things happened. You can change the timeframe reference. So you can look at. The events, the situations, the people when maybe this belief was first born. And some of you, you'll have clarity on that. Some of you, you may just get a sense of it.

The thing is, whether you are consciously aware of it or not doesn't matter because you, unconscious mind is aware of when it first formed this belief. 'cause you weren't born with it. You learned something. And perhaps there was a time in the past where that belief would have served a genuine, useful purpose for you. Maybe it kept you safe or secure. Maybe it kept you just quiet. You know, I've heard people that were told to. Don't leap too high.

You know, children are meant to be seen but not heard. All sorts of limitations like that. They can be the breeding ground, the formation of all sorts of limiting beliefs. So I want you to give yourself permission to float back parallel to time, back to when those beliefs were born. So you can see them for what they were, which was they served a purpose at some point. Yet now you've outgrown those beliefs. They may have served a purpose.

We honor, we honor the ser, the service they've given to us. The first thing we do is we honor, we acknowledge, we accept. We appreciate that they had a good intention. And once we've honored that. Once we acknowledge, once we appreciate the intention, we can ask the unconscious to be willing to look at anything else that may be there to support the belief. So what I want you to do now is to move back to the present and just to consider any of the, what we call secondary gain.

You might get from holding onto this belief. What currently does holding onto this belief do for you? What does it give you? What does do you get from it? What's the secondary gain? That means the belief still serves a purpose at some level because when you know what the secondary gain is, you can then start to look at alternatives. You can preserve the positive functions of the gain, but get rid of whatever the cost is for holding onto the belief. So how are you gonna do that?

Well, maybe you can look into the future, the timeline, if it, the future extends off to the left. Move yourself to the left and look at the consequences of you holding onto that limitation. What's the downside? The what's the, what's the cost of holding onto that? Is that what you want? Probably not come back to the present and just imagine stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. Look at all of the.

Ecology around you, your family, your friends, your work colleagues, your relationships. Are there any other secondary gains that you get by holding onto that limiting belief? Because the blind spots, once they're revealed, they're no longer blind spots. We get the chance to experiment and look at different ways of preserving the positive benefits of the belief, but without the belief. I want you to give yourself permission to look at multiple different perspectives of this belief.

Could you see it as maybe even funny? Could you see it as ridiculous? Could you see it as childlike? Could you see it as cute? Could you see it in what other ways where you might have a completely different perspective of it? And just take a moment just to use your creative imagination. I want you to imagine how many other ways there are to maintain the benefit of the belief, but without the limitations, how many other ways are there that maybe you've not even considered?

'cause you just accepted the limitation as it was.

So I like to honor. The ecology. I like to address the secondary gain. I like to enrich mental maps, and I like to increase requisite variety and requisite variety. It comes from cybernetics and it's the study of systems and it's the ability to be able to have more variations and flexibility than limitations.

It's the ability for you to look at something that maybe has five ways of blocking you and stopping you, but you have five ways of overcoming it, and this comes from you being willing to explore multiple perspectives given you, as many of you rightly said, when I asked that question about why do we give suggestions in trance? Gives you options. People that are stuck have no options. If they've got one way of doing something, there's only one way of doing something.

The more options and choices you have, the more flexibility you have and it's time to flex your ability so you become the cause of the effect of your life. A lot of people live their life at effect, where the outside world is the cause of their experience. It's time for you to have the ability to flex and see different ways, so you become the creative, your experience. You get to rewrite, to redraw your maps. You get to reframe them.

You can look at something and you can change the meaning of it. You could look at something like a belief. You can see we're in another context that would be useful, but not in this one. So in a short while, I'm gonna hand over to Tina and you're gonna explore multiple ways, different ways of stretching and flexing, enriching mental maps for yourself and for other people.

Now, tonight, while you sleep and dream, and dream and sleep, I, I invite and encourage your unconscious to continue to work on this because this is something that you bought to the party. You bought to the practice group. You raised it up, you bought it into your conscious awareness, and you've already begun some work on it just by this guided reflective exercise, this ecological reframing. I want you to take the limitation into the next part of what we do and to practice.

Practice looking at limitations in completely different ways. Instead of seeing them as obstacles. Maybe you could see them as stepping stones. Now that's a reframe, is it not? Here's one last thing for you to consider. Who would you be without that limitation? Who would you be without that limitation? Oh, but I'm not gonna honor my word. That wasn't the last thing to consider. I just thought of one more you to consider. What makes you think you have to believe in that limitation?

What makes you think you have to even believe in that limitation? Could you doubt it? Who would you be without that? So in a moment, I'm gonna ask you to open your eyes and then come back and just take a moment and then just in the chat, what did you get from that experience? So take a deep breath in. Open your eyes. A big stretch. Oh, shake yourself out. Who likes watermelon? No, no. That's the watermelon break. State. Sareen does. She likes watermelon. Okay. She's not the only one.

Reflect upon it. What insights did you get? From that guided thought experiment. I call that ecological reframing, that four step process. And I put a blog out today on the website. So when we're done here, there's, there's a, it's too much to train here actually, so I just wanted to take you through it. Go and read the blog, go through and play with that four part model. It's not an NLP model, it's just a process I developed many years ago. So, um, in the chat, what did you get? Insights.

Have a look. I'm not answering questions about the blog. I wanna know about, know about the exercise. A limitation being a stepping stone, not an obstacle is a revelation. Nice. Put space between me and my obstacle. Yeah. 'cause if you do that, you can go over it, go under it, go around it multiple ways. I haven't, hold on. So do quick, slow down. I have a new job. Instead of enabling others, my new job is to empower others so they feel stronger. Oh, I like this one.

Wow. That was so profound for me. I realize holding onto the belief allows me to make excuses when I make mistakes. Nice. Well, on It's about a fear of failure and I never knew that before. Forces you to look at the limitation from several angles. Yeah. What you don't achieve and what you could achieve and how you could be nice. So I'm not gonna go through all of these. What I will do is, um, we'll save the chat. Um, and maybe we'll do something with the chat.

I don't know, I'm not gonna promise anything 'cause I know I'll end up having to do it. I'm going on holiday soon, so I can't be bothered. Uh, they're not my limitations, but inherited beliefs. Yes. You uh, uh, what's that? What's that joke? Oh yeah. With the best will in the world. I own everything. I love that as a joke.

Okay, so, um, but how many limitations have been handed on to you and you didn't even know that they were handed down to you and you picked them up and been carrying them around? Seriously, put them down. I can change the outcome if I don't stick to the belief. Yeah. Fabulous. So you've got some good alternative ways of seeing things. Those are reframes by the way. That's what we do.

We reframe something by thinking of it in a different way and it changes our map and it changes our thinking, changes our behaviors, and changes our results. Fabulous stuff. So I'm now gonna zip it and I'm gonna hand over to Tina. Over to you, Tina,

to me. Reframing, ah, love reframing. I found when I first started out seeing clients, I. When they would come to see me, I would reframe their problems while I was asking questions, getting more information. And sometimes I actually managed to get rid of their problem before the work was being done. I used to give like a free consultation 25, 30 years ago when I first started seeing people, they'd get a 20 minute free chat with me.

Um, they loved it 'cause they could get to know me and ask me questions. And as a new therapist, I got to get all the information I needed before I got to see them. 'cause at that point I was a little bit unsure, oh, what am I gonna do? And that was kind of like my safety net when I first started out. Then I realized that by reframing while I was chatting to them, sometimes I got rid of their problems. And it was a free chat. Oh. So I stopped doing that.

Although I can't, I think when you, the kind of reframing that I do and, and I've seen Steve do it as well when we've been training, is it's kind of like teasing. We reframe with humor, we chive people. 'cause what happens when you laugh, you get different chemicals in your brain.

And when you can actually see something as being silly, something that you built up to be really serious and you break it down and you get them to look at it from a different perspective, especially with humor, it can be so powerful. Now when you're gonna do this, or even if you're just reframing, you have to do it in a respectful way. You've gotta do it in a way that helps them stop that rigid thinking. Somebody got their microphone on, can I hear something?

Okay. You, you've gotta do it in such a way that they can see the rigid thinking. They can step outside of that unhelpful state, those patterns they're running and look at it in a new light Now, done skillfully. It creates a lightness, um, a, a safe place for them to actually look at something differently. Find that humor, you know, by playing the devil's advocate as well, maybe siding with the negative half of their ambivalence towards their life and their life's goals.

You know, sometimes people come in and they're a bit like, um, like ior, oh, nothing's ever gonna work. Oh, I've tried everything. And oh, and if you've got somebody like that in front of you, you've gotta change their state. You've gotta move them into a different position. Now, I grew up in a family where we teased and we chided each other. And it's something that you do with your friends who here, you've got friends.

And when you're talking to them, I've gotta go onto the um, uh, the gallery view now so I can see you all. When you're talking to your friends, you tease them. I know Steve doesn't have any friends, so he's just shaking his head like this. You know, you tease them, you chime to them. Um, and, and they'll, they might come to you with something really terrible. I remember once someone, I knew he was in the army and, and people in the army have the most bizarre sense of humor.

Now they have to, because of the situations they're in, they're in horrendous situations sometimes if they're in a war zone or a particular incident. And he was telling this story about his colleague who'd been blown up and was worried about something and he'd lost a limb and he's going, I've lost my arm. And they're going, no, you haven't. I've got it here. And all the soldiers were just laughing and that's how they get through the whole stressful situation.

Years ago here in London, we had, um, some terrorists around London Bridge, and they were. Stabbing people and they killed some people. They injured a lot of people quite badly. And there was one particular guy. And in London we have a football club called Mill Wall. And the Mill War supporters are said to be, you know, quite fierce. A lot of them what they will fight for their club. There's lots of fighting that goes on.

And there was this guy in this pub who was a mill wall supporter and he was the whole, whole generalization of how many people think of a mill wall supporter to be. And he took umbrage that these people were trying to stab people in his pub while he was having a quiet drink. And he defended the other people in the pub. And he was stabbed multiple times. He did manage to, to get knives off of some of these terrorists. And he ended up in hospital.

And he's sitting in hospital and he's got stitches and he is bandaged up and he is been stabbed in the face and he just looks a mess. Yes. Um, and they, they were talking to him and asking how he was doing and, um, commending his bravery and, and he said, well, mates bought me a book. And they said, yeah. And he went, look, and the book that his friends bought him was entitled Learn to Run. Now this is the kind of chiding that I'm talking about.

It's the kind of chiding that people do do with their friends.

Now you can do this with your clients. To be able to do this with your clients, you need to be. Deep rapport. Now, if any of you have seen Richard Bangla, he does this all the time. He chis the people he's working with, he's teasing them, and you do it in such a way. You are not, you are not. You are not making fun of their pain.

It's all about having a twinkle in your eye, smile on your lips, and it's, you are employing like the affectionate banter between friends, using humor to help sensitize and desensitize them to their problematic behavior. Now, while you're doing this, the purpose is to affirm their self-worth verbally and behaviorally. And get it so that they assert themselves appropriately. 'cause you'll find that if you do tease them, you get that rapport going and you can tease them.

They will begin to say things like, well, no, that's, that's not right because I can do this. And they'll begin to tell you how, how confident they can be and how they can do things. They begin to defend themselves. Uh, now I, I have a, a, a strange way of working with, um, depressives, for example, people that are depressed.

I make them convince me to work with them because while they're convincing me to help them, they're having to go to all those places that as a hypnotherapist or a npa, I'm gonna wanna take them to change their state. And also while they're giving me those arguments and they're defending why I should work for them and all the things that I'll be able to help them do, it then gives me an insight into how their brain is working.

Now we have a friend, Steve and I, and some of you will know her and you would've met her, and she knows that I tell this story, so she's not, I do have her permission. She was amazing. NPA and hypnotherapist, I, and she stopped working with people because she couldn't charge them. She didn't feel that she could actually say, okay, so this session's going to be X. Get the money up front. Get a deposit, whatever she took, she just couldn't do it.

And she, then she was paying for rooms to see clients and then she couldn't take any money off of them. So in the end, she stopped working with people and, and she was saying, I, I dunno what I'm gonna do because I love working with people, but, but I can't. And there's all sorts of suggestions that were given. Um, and I said, so when they come to see you in the office, do you, you know, you, you, they come in and they fill out a form. Oh no, they've already filled out the form.

She said, what I do, the first thing I do is I make them a cup of tea and I give them a biscuit. And I said, there you go. The session's free, the tea in the biscuit, 150 quid. And of course she laughed. And while she's laughing. Her, her brain chemistry is changing. She's beginning to, to see it as being silly. And now instead of this huge limitation, she's like, oh, I can't, I can't do that. And I went, well, all right then. A cup of tea, a hundred pounds, 50 quid if you want biscuits.

And I was just being really, really silly about the whole thing until she was giggling because she could see the joke and the silliness in it. Like the, the poor guy, the mill Wilson Porter in hospital covered in stitches and bandages was laughing 'cause his friends bought him a book that said Learn to run. Now, doing this with humor, as I said, you have to be careful. You need to do it with a smile like you're teasing.

I mean, if I'd have said to so, well, why don't you charge 'em for the tea and coffee, then that's a different to, well, I know what you can do. Charge 'em 150 quid for a cup of tea and a biscuit. It's different depending as to how you make that delivery.

Now somebody puts a limitation in the chat. I'm not gonna mention any names. And this is something that again, we hear quite regularly from people. Um, this particular person said that they've been trying to stop smoking and they can't stop smoking, and they're beginning to feel that they can't be any good at what they're gonna do because how can they help people stop smoking if they can't stop smoking themselves? So how could you reframe that for somebody?

You could put your answers in the chat. How could that be reframing somebody that we know? This particular person was morbidly obese and she was brilliant at weight loss and getting people to lose weight. There you are, you're on the journey together. You understand them more than anyone else. What a gift. You know what it's like to struggle. You have insight. You know all the ways you have lived experience. You're speaking from experience. There we are. We have limitations.

We just need time to work on them. And the thing about this particular person, I. Who was morbidly obese but was brilliant at weight loss. Her clients were relieved when they came to see her that they weren't seeing this, um, size zero model type person that was gonna help them lose weight because she would know what's happening. And you see all those reframes in there and That's right. It's like, I've lived it. I'm not preaching from a pedestal. I'm offering you a hand from the same place.

You don't want to end up like me. Yes, yes, you could do that.

So we had. A situation. We, I, I had a situation in Orlando last July. There was a young man on the course who was desperate to be an NLP trainer. He was on the master practitioner, then he was gonna do the trainers training. He flew all the way to the US from Europe and he was sat telling me when he was on the master practitioner training, um, that he had this amazing plan to be the best NLP trainer in Europe. He had everything set up.

He's got his business plan ready, he's got everything in place. He just needs his master practitioner certificate and to do the trainer's training and get his trainer's certificate and what a lot of people must, I guess they go into it without really thinking about it. And, and I did when I took my NLP trainer's training way back in the. Frozen depth of time, I didn't consider this. You have to be able to demonstrate different techniques.

You have to be able to show your students the different techniques. And on Phobia Day in Orlando, there were snakes and spiders, and he had three people on the master practitioner working with him to help him get over his fear of spiders. And right near the end of the session, he came up to me with these three people were with him, and he said, I can't do it. I can't get rid of my fear. I dunno what I'm gonna do. Never gonna be able to be an NLP trainer if I've still got this fear.

And it's ridiculous. Everything in my brain is just going, no, and, and, and, and, and he was just so upset. He was almost crying. And I'd been working with him on the must prac, and I'd been teasing him. And we had a lot of banter going on. Um, and I, and I, I said, well, you know, not everybody's meant to be an NLP trainer. You could find something else to do. Well, no, no, I have to be an NLP trainer. It's my dream. It's what I really, really, really want to do.

Now, while all this was going on, I was holding a tarantula in my hand, and he's talking to me and he hasn't seen the spider. And I'm standing there and I've got the spider in my hand, and he hasn't even noticed. And I was just saying, well, yeah, you'll find something else. It'll be fine. Don't worry about it. Enjoy the course. And he's got, no, I have to do this. He said, I can't go near spiders. And I went, oh. And he, he called himself Jimmy. So I looked at the spider and I went, James.

And he went, my name's Jimmy. I said, I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to James. And I pointed to the tarantula and then he looked and he watched me talk to the spider. And he wasn't phobic and he wasn't freaking out. And something later he said, something clicked in his mind when I, when I said, well, you know, you'll find something else to do. Not everybody's meant to be an NLP trainer. And then I was talking to the spider and he suddenly said, give me the spider.

And I went, no, you can't have him. And he said, I need to hold that spider. And I went, no, no. I said, James is really, really delicate and I, I don't trust you. Why should I trust you with my spider? And to cut a long story, short or shorter, within about three minutes, he's holding the trencher. And he was just laughing. Now everybody went through all the, all the processes and, and all the techniques and nothing worked.

And all I did was just tease him and tried him and reframe the thoughts in his mind.

So that's what you are all going to do now, in a moment, Tanya's gonna put you into groups of three. Now, if you're not gonna wanna do the exercise, can I ask that you drop out now while I set the exercise up? Um, and then you can pop back in about 20 minutes and join us at the end when we close everything down. So, Tanya's gonna put you into rooms of three. As you do with the exercises, choose who's gonna be a, B, and c. A is going to voice a limitation.

B and C will then challenge will chide, will tease, will reframe, and then after three or four, four minutes of doing that switch and then B will voice a limitation and the other two will chide and reframe. So we are gonna give you 15 minutes when you get into your room to do the exercise. Tanya, are you ready?

Um, it can also be, and by the way, it's no big deal if you, if you don't wanna do the practice, you don't, don't have to do the practice. You still get something from being here, won't you? But there's something about going into that situation where you've got a couple of people who are willing to just play and explore with you.

I mean, when else are you gonna get that chance to bring out a limitation and go, go on, tear it apart, have a go at it, you know, make it seem as ridiculous as I probably know that it already is. Yeah, it's a great opportunity. It's only 15 minutes as well, isn't it? So I'd like to know in the chat, what did you get from that? What insights, understandings, experiences, breakthroughs. What did you get from that?

And then we'll open up the mic to a couple of you so we can actually hear your voices. That practice was very helpful. I like that. It's very understated. It's very helpful. Love it. It felt silly to defend my limiting belief. Isn't that so? You know, you go, Hmm. You kind of see through your own bullshit, which is belief systems bs. And it does make it, when you can't defend and winning, you can see through it. It, it's like the system loosens up the belief system. It's like a game of Jen.

Yeah. And you kind of, they, what they're doing is they're pulling it apart and then sometimes the belief just collapses, which is fabulous. That's why reframing, um, we can call it replaying by the way. We can, if it's, say you picked up earlier, you can blame your parents. Right. Um, let's have a look at it. We won't be setting up a business. We'll be stuck a, a fun. Fun. Fun. I dunno. What a fun, fun. That's like Tina, she said on do, do she say, you do do this. You only need one.

Do Tina. Just so you know. Okay.

Yeah. You'll find yourself doing stuff and you go, oh, I'm doing that stupid stuff again. It's really powerful. It was quick to establish rapport. It should be actually, and it's one of the benefits. I say that's why I'm amused when people just disappear off. It doesn't fit my map of the world because I turn up and I fully engage and immerse in everything and give it a go and dive in and make mistakes and it's. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable?

Melissa, that's far too, too encouraging. So it reframes our perceptions and we all three have begun to resolve. I I'm interested in the ones reframing that it's easier to help other people. If I can do it for you, I can do it for me.

Melissa, from the Valleys.

50 paces ahead and a guy to the left who's a little slower. And if she compares herself to these people instead of measuring her own development and achievements each day, then she won't, you know, she, she can't see her own measurements of growth and success and development and improvement, and also the belief that she's gonna do better the next day is what's keeping her going. And she was brilliant at reframing. Um, she gave me such amazing insights into, into that.

And I, I sat there thinking, I'm stupid, feeling sorry for myself. This girl is logged in from a, from a rehab center, you know, she, she in pain and she's here right now and I'm feeling like, sorry for myself. So that was brilliant. Yeah. I just wanted to share that.

A lot of change work doesn't always deep, full, complete change work doesn't always happen in the lab exercise. It's normally little pieces of work that can make the difference. So even in these practice groups. You might even just get some insights and that might point to where the work is to, to be done. We are friends anyway. Thank you. You're on our list. All right. We're,

Yeah. Treating it like family members keep some, there's, you know, those family members, you really wanna keep some distance from maybe treat the phone like one of those people. Yeah. So continue to be relentless with these reframes when you're working with someone. Thank you, Jane. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you. Jane. Have we, have we got time for one more? 'cause I mean, Robin's got hand up. We just, Robin. Oh, is this, is, is, is there a good one Robin?

'cause we've got, we're out time. Of course.

I, I didn't do that when I drove a car, but I, I tried to drive a car and I was cautious at first, but, but doing hypnotherapy and NLP for people, I really can't hurt them. Like it, I can't run into them, you know, and hit them and hurt them or, or scrape my car or, or do this. So it's like, wait, wait a minute, like. I'm not holding myself back to, to, to be safe. I'm, I, I, I'm, I can't really hurt people with this.

And even if I do it bad, even if I'm driving badly, you know, I can hurt people, but at least when I'm doing this, even if I do it badly, there's still gonna be something that helps. And that just, that just totally flipped it in my brain.

Yeah. So, um, someone just asked, where do I find Steve's blog? Go to the website. Go to our website, and there's a section up there called Blog and vlog. Really easy. Okay. And look down there and it's down there. So we wanna encourage people to keep going to the website. 'cause then you get the updates. Um, and for those perfectionists, and robin's not the only one in the, in the group, there's some reframes there around perfectionism as well.

Okay. So use them as a starting point and keep exploring how many other ways can you, can you reframe

it? So we are pretty much done. Okay. Yeah. Um, last thing I want to do, um, I meant to have prepared this earlier, going to in the chat, drop a feedback form. And so before we all disappear off, if you would be willing to give us some feedback for tonight, maybe a testimonial that we Fabulous. Um, so there's a link there. It'll take you to a form. That would be great if you do that. I really appreciate that. So, um, yeah, I'll be here for next month. So what are we doing next month, Tina?

I've forgotten.