Report of last meeting. Billed as Lynn Kelly from Vievolve on Integral Change Management. The work of Wyatt Woodsmall, Clare Graves and Ken Wilbur. A short digression. In one of my previous careers, as the co-owner of a sell on commission second hand shop based in the Midlands, I became aware of the power of inanimate objects to influence people. Picture the scene .... A bright sunny morning and there I am in my shop just starting the first cup of coffee and wondering what the day will bring. (You never know as a shopkeeper whether it was worth getting out of bed in the morning until you finally close the shop at the end of the day, by which time its too late to do anything about it.) In comes an existing customer, who brought in a once treasured and now spurned possession 3 weeks ago. ”Have you sold my thingy yet?” Check the book, no not sold. ”No“ I reply, ”and if its still here next week it goes down in price.” ”Oh if its still here next week I’ll take it back home!” The magic words. No matter where in the shop ”Thingy” may be one of two things will happen. Either thingy is pining to be back ”home” and will send out ”keep off” messages to other prospective purchasers to be duly collected by its errant owner next week or, more often, thingy feels spurned and incensed at being subjected to the ignominy of a second hand shop so it sends out irresistible ”buy me now” signals, which will hypnotise some poor innocent customer into thinking this was just the item they came into the shop to find. Triumphantly thingy goes off to a new home to become once more a treasured possession! I sometimes used to wonder what its new owner thought when they came out of the trance, or whether thingy kept them in a permanent trance about their purchase. This may sound like fanciful musing, but when you notice a pattern you start to look for it again and it becomes more obvious. We used to test this by changing our reply to ”go and tell thingy that if its still here next week you’re taking it back home.” The quickest sale this ever produced was 2 minutes after ”the threat of repatriation” whilst the ex-owner was still in the shop! Even with this ”interference” from us the pattern continued to repeat! So the moral to this tale is:-”If you plan to dispose of something, you may be wise to keep it a secret from the item due for disposal, lest it find a way to leave you before you have completely finished with it!” This is especially so if its your car and you are due to travel to Eastleigh to talk to an eager group of NLPers!!! Sorry Lynn that you spent a less than exciting evening with the AA man at Fleet services, and finally arrived home late in the evening in a pickup truck. I know you will have put some time and effort into the preparation for the evening. Perhaps we can ”take a rain check” on this for later in the year. More info on Integral Change Technology at www.vievolve.co.uk In the absence of our guest speaker we used the rich resources of the group and played.”NLP, Ready, Steady, Cook style”. How does that work? Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin... Despite my natural shyness I took control of the flip chart and the pens and asked for some areas that the group would like to play with or discover more about. Our ”shopping bag” consisted of 5 assorted items. 1) Clean Language / symbolic modeling. (Based on the report of the last meeting more of this was wanted). 2) Asking the right question. (How do you know what question to ask next?) 3) Having 5 other lives as well as the one you have now, objective FUN and extra resources. (a technique useful for creating characters in a book). 4) A quality toolbox. (means something different for us all, in the end we found a quality tool to put in our own box). 5) Its all a matter of perspective. (there were some differences of view over this!) .. And what could you make of these????? We kicked the ingredients around for a short while and added from our NLP store cupboard:- An awareness of ”Parts”. - An ”AS IF” frame for use in the ”other lives”. - State management. - Chained Anchors. - Spatial Anchoring. - Rapport. - A sense of wanton curiosity. - a willingness to play and have fun. Armed with the ingredients, we hammered out a method (process), and then we tested it (cooked it) out and finally compared notes (tasted the final result). And after two hours approx. of fun and laughter had we actually produced anything of value? and is it edible? palatable? Or useful? What should we call it? We had created:- 1) A way of being generative and inclusive with NLP and other techniques, in groups. (Also usable with non NLP groups I hope). 2) A process or technique, which discovers or releases new or hidden resources. (Several ”WOW’s” were enjoyed and powerful symbols discovered). 3) An understanding that NLP is a flexible and useful way of developing our own talents. Want to know more? I am going to produce a full version of this, which is too long for an e-mail. I will publish it on the new NLP-South web site which goes live any day now, so you can read it there, and please if its of use download and share it, add your own spices and feedback how you’ve used it. By then I may also have a name for some of the parts and maybe even the whole recipe. How about (NLP-South cass-e-role?) (NLP-South roulade? Pronounced role add!) 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