1st Future Congress for Personal and Systemic Development - "Pathways of Change"

4. Here is the eMail from Ray Wilkins from Belgium who had the idea of the meeting: "The Future of NLP", on the 1st NLP World Congress

ethics and entegrity as i see it are the roots of nlp in the future!

i believe that as an nlp master trainer and a teacher it is our responsibility to be honest,transparent,and as anna has already mentioned walk what we talk!

how many of us can say in a state of good consciousness yes i am all that?

how many of us are free of envy? how many of us attempt to always keep our relationships clear?

how many of us feel that the personal growth of there clients is more important than being rich.

while we are on the subject of personal growth how many of us work on our own personal growth?

i see in the nlp community many nlp leaders who have either stopped changing there own negative belief patterns or never even started changing.

i know some of you will think this is not true or ray is exaggerating or personal growth is not important but as we are talking about ethics and integrity let us be honest for a change!

practising an integral future or using graves levels in our work is great

but without honesty,integrity and  a permanent ongoing personal growth of nlp leaders nlp will not only get a bad name in the publics eye but it will also die!

keeping nlp alive in the future is not about combining social psychological and spiritual methods with nlp it is about growing roots that are stable and strong in a ground where high values of ethics and integrity are a must not a rarity!

          "a real change for the future can only originate from the heart not from the mind"

ray

5. Here is the eMail from Daniel Bichis from Romania regarding NLP gem

I strongly agree with Ray. In Romania , we say that the best hairdresser wears the worst haircut, because s/he must use the skills of another hairdresser, less trained or less skilled. The same thing is true for NLP coaches and trainers - at least as long as the "original sin of founding fathers" indicated by John Grinder remains active (e.g. being able only “to do NLP on other people”).

As in any other form of psychological and/or spiritual intervention, an NLPer can be as effective as s/he purified her/his heart. I mean by that the degree of liberating ourselves from the effects of projections and counter-transferences, as defined by psychoanalysis. When I work with someone, I conceive myself as being a mirror, in which the other can look for discovering what it was hidden before. It depends on me only to keep this mirror as clean as possible, as flawless as possible, as reflective as possible.

Those of you who are working as coaches or psychotherapists know that quite often the client's problem strongly, deeply, unconsciously resonate with our own perceptual limitations, meta-model violations, Milton-model patterns of speaking and thinking. And in such cases, I am grateful for having a mirror in front of me, which lets me identify as many sources of distortion and ambiguity as possible. I am using the third, fourth and fifth perceptual position as a cleanser of my perceptions, as a source of "less tainted" maps of the world and actions, using my client's feedback as reference. I imagine that this was Milton Erickson's way of dealing with such things (yes, you know now whose expertise I model when I enter in the third position). And once clarified or adjusted in my contact with a client, that area remains clear for a while.

Using this "trick", I continued my personal development, which in fact was a three-years work before beginning my NLP-Coach activity. And I imagine that it permitted me to wear a better haircut as the one I wore 6 years ago ;)))

The same thing is possible, on linguistic level, by using David Grove's "clean language". It means focusing your attention on the linguistic structures as a reflection of deep structures which are governing your interaction with another person. And by keeping them as clean as possible from any presupposition, projection, counter-transference, after each interaction your deep structure grows clearer and stronger. There is a spiral dynamics in this process, as I observed on myself.

I think that here we are in a different kind of rapport with the client, the one which amazed so many of the participants to Megha's and Ueli's, Steve's or Thies Stahl's workshops in Potsdam (and I am convinced that it was also present in other workshops that I could not attend at that time). I would name it "structural rapport" and I would describe it as identifying your own deep structure which resonates with the other person, working on it internally for eliminating as many perceptual and interpretative filters as possible, optimising it in yourself, and then offering it to be "cloned" in the other person.

For taking Ray's example about envy, this kind of rapport is accomplished by mirroring more than your client's posture, verbal and vocal elements, more than identifying his/her metamodel violations, Milton-model patterns, values, secondary gains etc., but by emerging your own deep structure sustaining this kind of emotion and working on it. As with so many other patterns and techniques in NLP, once the person is in contact with an optimised strategy, s/he takes it over and uses it in a generative way. But for doing it, it is necessary to accept that you are still able to be envious, or jealous, or greedy, etc., etc. And this is the challenge for those who really work on their personal development. You are cleaning, and eliminating, and optimising your deep structures, and in the same time you must keep your feet on the earth and accept the idea that there are other deeper levels in your unconscious which are waiting for your actions. For me, this inner attitude was clearly expressed by Ray during our panel discussion in Potsdam - and it continues to be expressed in his message. And I consider it the proper way of dealing with this kind of inner evolution, because it counter-balances our Ego's tendency to inflate as result of our actions and successes. Personally, I am using Hercules' example for keeping me centered and focused, always prepared for a new challenge which only opens the way and prepares me for another challenge.

Therefore, as I said in my final intervention in Potsdam , and I discussed Sunday with Karl, I think that beside the usual 18-days training, there is need of mandatory personal development work to be done by each person wanting to use NLP in a professional way (coaching, psychotherapy, or training). Projecting my own experience on others, I imagine that once started, the spiral dynamics I described before would lead every person on the way of a deep personal development. In this way, in few years there will be a significant amount of emotionally balanced people, having a good contact with their unconscious, being able to lead the progression of both other people, as of NLP as well.

I think that this a good way to trespass “our father’s original sin” I mentioned before, and is offering a way of using the interaction with the client as a resource and a tool for our own continuous personal development. I am very interested in knowing your own solutions or approaches of this issue, being convinced that I have a lot to learn from each of you.

Friendly,

Daniel

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