Nigel & Jenny Heath.
“A Mixed Agender!”

Jenny and I were excited to be presenting our new findings and looking forward to the learnings we knew we would make from the group. We were rewarded with even more than we expected, so a BIG hug and thank you to all who attended and joined in the games so enthusiastically.

So what did we do, what did you miss by not being there?
We began with a song from “My fair lady”, “why can’t a woman be more like a man?” And to bring more humour into proceedings from the very start we also had some posters around the room where everyday objects had been assigned a gender. You can find these here.  After my usual welcome to visitors I handed over to Jenny to frame the evening.

From my work as a ‘change agent’ / coach, I find when working with couples or individuals with a relationship issue, the greatest ‘wish’ is to understand their partner and be understood by their partner.  This lack of understanding seems to be separating the genders like some sort of gulf.
There has been a lot of research done recently including MRI brain scans with sophisticated techniques which show that men and women think differently. You may not have needed all that research to tell you that! What is interesting about all this is that understanding may be a ‘holy grail’ that is as elusive as the alleged ‘real’ grail.  Chasing after understanding may take a lifetime and produce nothing of value. So maybe we need to find an NLP based substitute for ‘understanding’. To have a ‘place’ in the ‘gulf’ where men and women can meet and converse with a semblance of the understanding they seek. A place where communication can happen, effectively and respectfully, where understanding no longer becomes so important.
Jenny related a ’gender’ story from her past, and acknowledged how this has changed, despite the ‘glass ceiling’.
Nigel then introduced the social stereotyping of gender roles and the humour around the differences. We both told a ‘gender’ biased joke. We also went through the difficulty of women wanting to talk and men offering solutions!

And so on to our first exercise. Dividing the genders. Ladies stay put Gents follow me.
In our gender separated groups we discussed “What is good about being a man?” And the Ladies were discussing “What is good about being a woman?”
Jenny and I facilitated and wrote the answers on a flip chart. When we had filled a page we asked our separate groups, “What’s good about being a woman / man, to gauge how the oposite gender perceived each other.” It didn’t take long for smut and sex to raise its head and we larfed a lot!
We eventually came back to the main group to compare our efforts, placing the flip charts side by side. The most interesting thing noticed by all was how similar  the charts were. Both men and women had very similar answers for “what’s good about being a man / a woman”. We wrote some of the words on two flip charts onto a ‘continuum’ between male and female. Some went towards one end or the other and many went near the middle. We handed out simple sheets for people to make their own choices and take home to consider how they relate to the continuum. More on this after the break, which included the festive addition of mince pies.

A chance to try out the continuum in ‘the muscle’. As during the break we had marked out the male/female continuum on the floor. We asked people to find their most comfortable place on the line and gave them an experience of how that is. We had a break of state and then took them off the line and asked them to find a place they might go when having an argument with the other sex. Again a time to notice how this felt, seemed etc. Was this a place to gather new resources for the context? Another break state and the next position was to find a place on the line for competitive sport.  More  experience opportunity as Nigel once again took everyone internal. Then another place in a nurturing role looking after young children, and once more noticing how this was. There was a lot of movement up and down the line, demonstrating how flexible we are naturally and how we use our own internal resources of femaleness and maleness. The last place offered was experimental and we asked if people would like to go somewhere on the line where they would not normally go. Or to go to their ’default’ place and notice if this had changed. This exercise was more profound than we had expected for many who were there.

Our last exercise of the evening was about producing a ‘gismo’ or ‘translator’ to enable better communication between men and women. We talked about Star Trek and the space age box they beam down on to alien planets with, (apparently called a ‘babelfish’) this translates every language into American! We came up with some fun phrases, “parlez vous feminine?” “Sprechen sie Mensch?” Our strategy is based on Nigel’s work with couples therapy and our own relationship, when things don’t quite work out as we intended! We demonstrated the ‘problem’ state and how to then activate the translator strategy.
This is still under construction and we knew the group would join in with developing this model and provide us with fertile information to take this further. They sure did!!
I’m not going to detail exactly what we did, as we are still developing this and its not in an ‘internet ready’ state for you to play with at home. We will fit in another session in 2007 to update the group on our progress and bring more models to play with. We broke the group into fours and set up an exercise to see how they took the ‘translator strategy’ forward. We were aware that in the grander scheme we would introduce this strategy only after a lot of easier steps and set up exercises. Having a group of NLPers allowed us to take a short cut and explore how this ‘warts and all’ experimental model worked with people other than ourselves. With two observers/facilitators in each group, there was plenty of support for the ‘protagonists’, and plenty of opportunity to expand and adapt the model.
In some of the groups this proved to be a powerful and life changing experience. In all groups there were new learnings for the group and us. There were some excellent demonstrations of NLP skills and some great facilitation.
Normally at this point in the report I express my thanks to our Guest Speaker. On this occasion I want to express my thanks to all who came and supported Jenny and I in December and to everyone who has come along this year to the group. If you read these reports but somehow never quite manage to make the meetings, do please make a note in your diary for the 1st Thursday in the month to be with us in Eastleigh. I’ve run this group now for 9 years and every month I learn something new and have a chance to practice my NLP.
I’d like to wish all my readers a happy xmas, however as I’m finally finishing this in March its a bit late for that sentiment! So instead I hope 2007 is already turning out to be an amazing year for you.
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