At the end of November this year, I (and 30 of my friends) completed the NLP Master Practitioner training in Ecclefechan, Scotland.
One of the exercises was a breakthrough session, where we would be given someone who had a problem and would work with them until we had a solution to their problem in very much the same way we would work with a client.
I had a man with a problem with responsibility. He gave his example as: “His mother needs to go in a care home, so he called her to tell her, and she became defensive so he told her he would look into some care homes and arrange for a time for her to see them next time she was around. He delegated responsibility to his wife and when she was too busy to do it, he called his mother and told her he hadn’t had time.”
He was the youngest of 5 brothers, and every brother did better than he did with his academic studies and believed that he was treated differently for it. He thought because they were better academically, his parents thought less of him.
I got him to ask his unconscious mind for a time when this started, and he remembered a time when he asked his music teacher to rescore some music from piano into saxophone. When she handed it back to him, he said “oh great!” and thought no more about it. A few hours later he was summoned to the head teacher’s office and she yelled at him for what he had done, so he said “nuts to it” and from that point on he wouldn’t do anything for anyone including his homework.
So by his own action he had affected his academic performance.
Using a Time Line therapy, I took him back to the time before that occurred and he used resources to change the event, but although he could remove his emotions he couldn’t change her’s.
I asked him to go back to a time when he used please and thank you, to which he said he never used those words. So I took him back to the time and got him to use these words, so “oh great” became “oh great, thank you” which diffused the situation and when applied to every Significant Emotional Event up until the present and I noticed a change in him.
I also pointed out that goals should be replaced by projects, since you can break down a project into smaller chunks called milestones and those milestones can be allocated to another person, checked to see if they have done it and handed back if they don’t have time.
Now, when his mother is due to come down next he has already planned for her to go to a number of care homes and he now replies to emails with a thank you with new vigour and vim.