S1E1 Creative Changework: Making Tools Your Own
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Voice Over: Changeworking: Moving minds for change that lasts.
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Ruckus: Hello, friends, and welcome to the very first episode of Changeworking, a show for practitioners and coaches who help their clients create change. My name is Ruckus, and as always, I'll be in conversation with James Tripp. Today, we're talking about A subject I'm very excited about, which is making tools your own, personalizing protocols, frameworks, ways that you've been taught that you've learned in hypnosis or NLP or whatever modality you're using and utilizing your own creativity to make them unique in ways that work for you and maybe ways that it might not work for other people.
I love this subject, it's very dear to my heart because I'm just naturally a creative person and I find myself doing this without even thinking about it. So it was great to have a conversation with James. and get his thoughts on this matter. So let's go right into it. Here's my conversation with James about making tools your own.
I was thinking the other day, I don't know that I've ever done a pure version of a protocol in a client session that he didn't end up tweaking a little or changing a little,
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James: I think that's a good thing. It's a good sign if you're kind of tweaking them, because you have to, if you're being alive to what is coming back from the client, but the other thing to say about.
protocols in general is the correct version or what is the correct version? I know, for example, there was a lot of back and forth. I think it was between John Grinder and Steve Andreas about the correct way to do something or rather, you know, I've seen these back and forth between NLP trainers on what the right way to do something is.
I really like Melissa Tia's take, which is look, this shit is all made up. Right. You know, somebody made up every single one of these patterns, every single one of these protocols, someone made it up. So there's no right way of doing it. You know, there's a really. Interesting thing that I read about the other day, I think it's James Ezdale, who is famous for the Ezdale State, which was revivified by Dave Ellman.
Now he was out in India in, I don't know what it was, 1840s, performing lots and lots of surgeries. using ostensibly mesmerism. Now, he didn't know much about mesmerism when he started using it. He started using it out of desperation because he was doing these surgeries, people were in a lot of pain. He thought, I'll try this mesmerism thing.
I've read about it a little bit. He'd read a newspaper article about it and spoken to one person who had seen a demonstration of mesmerism and told him what the mesmerism was. did. So he just went ahead and thought, right, I'm going to give this a try. I don't really expect it to work on a patient that he was going to perform a surgery on to remove a tumor.
He started to do the surgery and the guy was in so much pain. So as I started doing this mesmerism thing that he just kind of heard about and it, and it worked. You know, much to his surprise, it worked and he developed it a bit more, but as there was a surgeon, he didn't want to be a mesmerist. He didn't want to be the term hypnotism hadn't been developed at that time.
He didn't want that. He just wanted to be able to do his surgeries. And it was taking a very long time to do the mesmerism. Sometimes it would take up to an hour, an hour and a half to get somebody into a really good state where he could perform surgery without them feeling pain. So what he basically did is he just hired some local.
Uh, you know, local people, just regular people, and taught them his mesmerism ideas that he just kind of come up with. Uh, so he had this team of mesmerizers that would mesmerize for him. Now, when I was reading about this, I was, you know, reading an account from the 1800s talking about what Eszter was doing.
Each one of them ended up with their own methods. Some would do the passes this way, some would do the passes that way. So his little team of mesmerizers didn't all do it the same. They all did it differently. But the thing that was consistent is it was working. He did over 200 surgeries using quote unquote mesmeric anesthesia, but all his mesmerists, his little team of mesmerists were all doing it differently.
They all found their own way of doing it. And I think that really is illustrative. of some things is nobody really knows exactly how all of this stuff works. Even after all this time, after all these years, all these different theories about how hypnotism works, even the theories of psychology, nobody really knows how the mind works, the psychosocial dynamics are playing.
Nobody really understands them. Certainly not in that kind of left hemisphere way. People have got theories, people have got models, people have got ideas. But in the end, It's like getting good at anything. You know, you do want to reflect upon it. You do want to develop your understandings, but in the end, the way you get good and the way you find your way of doing it is by doing it.
So I think it's natural that tools, techniques, yes, they unfold, but it's natural that people adapt them according to their own discoveries, their own experience, their own proclivities, what's coming up in the moment. That's a perfectly natural thing. And in the end, there can't be a right way of doing it.
It's all made up. The question is, is the made up thing that you're using Working to get the result that you want, or not. That's the only real thing that counts, I think.
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Ruckus: I'd learned a protocol in the past, and I was at the stage where I was practicing with friends who were also learning. And this person had also watched the same training, the same videos.
And so I led the session, and at the end, she goes, I like the way you do it better then. But in my head, I had followed every step exactly that I had learned.
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James: Right.
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Ruckus: It's just like, no, I like the way you do it better than what we learned. I was like, what do you mean? I did every step. It's just like, no, go watch it again.
And I watched it again. And even though I thought I was doing every step, I was doing different things. I just thought it was interesting.
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James: Right.
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Ruckus: Not even realizing that had gone astray with
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James: where you're going to get that natural kind of copying error It's that game where somebody whispers a sentence in one person's ear once And then that person whispers it in the next person's ears like a party game and then you whisper it on you whispered on And then what comes out the other end is completely different from what went in
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Ruckus: Yeah
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James: at the front end because of the little copying errors in the mishearing
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Ruckus: we call it the telephone game,
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James: right?
Right, and if you look at Chinese martial arts in general Uh, that which people often refer to as Gong Fu, which is not really a correct term, but gets used. There's hundreds and hundreds of them. Gong Fu isn't one thing. There are many, many, many, many styles. They probably largely have a common origin somewhere way back, but a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, each person changes it because each practitioner, I've often said this about martial arts.
If you're a martial artist. true martial artist, you wouldn't be just copying what you learned. There's no art in that, right? The art is in bringing it to life in a unique, individualized way. Not so unique and individualized that it doesn't work anymore. That would be, you know, that, that would not be, you know, if it becomes all art and no martial, that's not so good.
But I think you get that in every, every field, you know, particularly the old school ways. Things were done. We've got this kind of academic academicization. Did I just make that word up?
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Ruckus: Yeah, you might have. You
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James: know, everything becomes held in the world of academia. There's less kind of vocational training available for people, less learning on the job, less, you know, fewer apprenticeships available.
I think, I think that's a shame across the board, but particularly in the area of changework, which is the area where we're talking about, I think that real getting in there, sort of getting in the trenches, uh, you know, or to the coalface or whatever it is, and figuring out the craft, how do, how do we create these changes, how do we bring this person from where they have been to where they are desiring to be, and that is as much It's more arts than it is science, I think, which is why I have a beef with some of the evidence based protocols, which I often think are more evidence bound protocols than evidence based protocols.
Do you mind saying more
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Ruckus: about that?
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James: Well, evidence based protocols, they are things that have got the effect, there's been studies run.
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Ruckus: Right.
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James: That give evidence that show that this method of doing things is the way that works. But the problem is we're doing things in an overly scientific way. I mean, in order to conduct a science experiment, you want to, you want to sort of remove as many variables as possible.
You want to standardize things as much as possible, which is fine for experimentation. But if you then take that same mindset into practice, well, now you're ignoring all the variables. And that doesn't really help. So evidence based protocols, the way they generally work is, well this, this particular protocol when you do these things in this order, this has been shown to be helpful in X number of, you know, X percentage of cases.
So therefore, this has strong evidence for it. You get a real shift in the, in the culture of the therapy world towards that over the last few years, few decades, maybe. And now a lot of practitioners are thinking, I just need to know the right things to do in the right order. What's the evidence based protocol?
If I follow it by the numbers, I get the results. And that's very different from how therapy was in the 50s, 60s, 70s, where you have what I call the rock star era, where you get these real, you know, these particular people who are highly skilled and highly adept. Uh, at doing what, what they do. Uh, much more like the sports world today.
There's no evidence based protocol for winning a tennis match. There's just good skills. You know, there is no protocol. There's just good skills. So, I'm biased towards that, and there's a reason for that. I've worked with a lot of military vets who have been through evidence based protocols, particularly EMDR and CBT.
Those are recognized in the UK as validated treatments for PTSD, and I see people that have not been helped by those or made worse. Particularly EMDR can often end up making people worse. Now, I happen to know that EMDR, that's eye movement desensitization and repatterning or something, I think that's what it stands for.
I happen to know that's Got some solid stuff behind it. You know, I use eye movement stuff myself with people. But when I ask what's happened with the people who have been made worse, it turns out that no one was paying attention to them. Right, they just gave the instructions and went through the process.
You're inviting people to revisit traumatic material when you're doing that process. If they lose themselves in it, it can deepen the traumatization. Now, if you're not really paying attention to the person, if you're not looking at managing their relationship with the problem material, you're just going through the steps.
Well, maybe the formal instructions deal with that, but maybe they don't. You know, so having this idea that there's just a thing I can do, I can be absent almost and just run the steps or whatever. It can work. There's nothing that never works any of the time. All therapies work some of the time with some people.
All changework processes work some of the time with some people. So I'm not saying there's any rule that says if you do it this way it's guaranteed that it will never work. But I do think that what it does is by, by leading people into this understanding that all we have to do is do the right things in the right order.
It can lead to this, this tendency to be absent, to be non creative in your engagement, non adaptive in your engagement. So ultimately we're living creatures. We're dealing with living systems here, and the essence of life is adaptiveness, you know, generativity. That's how we want to be engaging ourselves.
So that's kind of my thought about, and this is why like evidence based, I don't have a problem with truly evidence based, because that means you did some research, you got some ideas, and then you creatively apply those ideas. I'm all for that. But if you do some research and you go, this is the way we must do it, and we mustn't deviate from this, because if we deviate from this, we are not evidence based practitioners anymore.
Then it's evidence bound, not evidence based.
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Ruckus: Hmm. Well, back to that idea of changing tools that you've learned and expressing yourself creatively using tools in different ways than you were taught. And I always called it bastardizing tools, uh, mostly because it sounds kind of cheeky and it just makes me laugh.
I know there's maybe some negative connotations in there, but that's what I call it. As I was saying earlier, I don't know that I've ever, maybe more than once, you know, used a tool perfectly step by step, the way I learned it, the way it was taught, just kind of naturally evolved from there, um, mostly because it just gets boring just to have to follow a step.
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James: You, you know, that, that's a valid thing. I, I don't think, I remember I was working with a client once and I was about to do something and I actually turned, I stopped and paused and I turned to the client and I said, do you ever find yourself about to really bore yourself with what you're about to do?
And he was like, Oh, and I said, you know, I think we'll do something different. A lot of people go, why did you say that to the client? And I'm like, because I genuinely believe the live flow, the interplay is a valuable thing, right? That's a, that's a human thing. It's, it's recognizing that we don't have to do things by road all the time.
That could be a beneficial thing for the client. They may create some useful shift with that. I don't know. You say about bastardizing, really it's just enlivening though. You know, it's enlivening. All of these methods, these techniques, these tools, they're all bastards to start with. You know, they're all, they're all the progeny of the fornication of different ideas, the, you know, the unfettered fornication of different ideas.
And that's the way it's been going back for a long time. So they're already bastards. The ideas are the techniques, the methods, but, you know, are they vibrant and living?
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Ruckus: The challenge is like, say you naturally come to some new technique no one's ever done before and you want to tell other people about it.
Well, now you have to reverse engineer it to break it down into steps to teach it to someone else. And that, that's the natural challenge of, well, now they've given me these five steps. That's the way to do it. But if you, you know, invented quote unquote, if you came up with a way of doing it, you didn't start by writing out five steps.
You know, that's not the way you got to it. But the only way to teach someone else is to break it down to some extent.
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James: Yeah, yeah. You've got to start somewhere. I mean, you know, no, it's interesting. I mentioned to you, I've been doing this sort of deep dive into, um, 18th and 19th century mesmerism and early hypnotism.
And, you know, this is such an interesting era to look at because people are just figuring stuff out and they're unencumbered by a lot of. ideas about, you know, they're certainly unencumbered by ideas from psychology, because it wasn't really a thing back then. You know, modern psychology traces its roots back to the mesmerists and the, the hypnotists rather than, so they were, you know, they were the font of that.
But it's this sort of creative exploration. Such a fascinating thing to me, this creative exploring exploration that like, well, we did this and this happened and we did this and this happened. And I think it might be because of this, but then, and it's quite interesting, you know, you get a lot of people like James Bray, for example, he came up with his original theory of hypnotism and then he, he retracted that later on.
Um, there's a guy called Collier as well. Uh, I think it might be Robert Collier. I'm not sure, but he was a, a Freno mesmerist. So like phrenology, which has to do with these different organs of the brain, the different lumps. He was all in with, with Freno mesmerism. Um, it was kind of his field, his baby. And he announced, I think in 1843, this great discovery and within a few years he said, no, I was wrong.
That's all BS.
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Ruckus: Right.
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James: I love the fact that he could turn around and do that. Having made a name as the Freno mesmerist guy, it's like, no, actually that phrenology bit. Meh. Not so much.
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Ruckus: I don't think a lot of people are willing, would be willing to do that or these days, but I don't know how you're ever going to progress in anything, but not willing to.
I love when I go, Oh yeah, I was totally wrong about that.
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James: Right. Right. Or even going, even just, I think it's really healthy to go, what is it that I'm certain about? And, and let me just look at that. You know, have I got good reason to be certain about that? Or is it just a certainty that I've arrived at and now I'm holding on to it?
Because whatever certainties we hold on to, I always like to say that certainty is the opposite of possibility. Because it is, whatever we're certain about, we are excluding every other possibility. No, it definitely works like this, so it definitely doesn't work like that. So I think it's really good for people if they want to stay on a developmental pathway for themselves to look and go, what are my certainties?
You know, and, and can I really be certain about those things? Can I really be certain about them or is that just something that kind of feels right or makes sense to me, so I'm going to stick with it. I'm a big fan of throwing out certainties. Uh, you know, my book is called Hypnosis Without Trance. I came to a pretty much certain conclusion that this trance thing was a load of nonsense or at least the way it was.
Traditionally rendered up by many people and I kind of threw it away and for a long time, I was just, I use this term the other day, essentially a suggestionist, right? It's the suggestion is how you're shaping attention and what ideas you're seeding, which is a huge part of the work. But it's like, well, what did I throw out by going?
That's not. You know, we don't need that. Okay. Maybe we don't need that, but can we use that? So I ended up coming back around to sort of more classical trance work and going, okay, I, I don't need it, but what does it do? Can I use it? Can I creatively use it? And I came back and I've come to really value it now.
That doesn't mean I disagree with myself back when I. did the hypnosis without trance stuff. Everything I say, I stand by in that you don't need it. You don't need it in order to get hypnotic effects happening and all of this. You don't need to do the kind of classic trance induction stuff. Quote unquote trance can be something very, very valuable, something that you can work with, something that can help people fall out of.
stuck response sets into a kind of more of an open space. I like to say fall out of your thinking and into your well being or into your creativity or into your wisdom. You know, there's a different way of being an orienting to the problem material or the outcome that you want to create space for newness to come through.
I think that's very, very valuable from that perspective and there are possibly other things within it as well that are useful from a kind of neuro physiological perspective.
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Ruckus: I was thinking about every new area I study in changework, I believe you're probably the same way. You like to do the deep dive.
Um, uh, like recently I, uh, I think I've told you, I'm very interested in internal family systems. Um, so I read everybody, probably like a four month where every book, every podcast, and I did four months of weekly IFS therapy. In everything I've ever done, I always reach a point where I'm like, this is it.
This is the thing.
Right.
This is all anyone ever needs, right? This is the absolute thing. And then I always come out the other side going, I love a lot about this. But there's always another, you know, side. I just picked up a book. Um, I can't remember the name. I'll have to look it up. But it is a psychologist who has a dissociative Disorder of some sort, not DID, but something in the realm, who's written a book about trying to explain to the layman what a dissociative disorder is like.
And she started the book, there was this two sentence thing about how, how much she disliked IFS. And I was like, whoa. My first thought was, I better listen to the rest of this book because there's something I'm, she's getting that I'm missing after my four months. Rather than going No, I love everything about it.
I'm not going to listen to rest. Right,
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James: right. You know, I think that's a pretty healthy thing. I'm kind of like that with NLP. I love NLP. It's been life changing for me, but I am by no means a true believer. I'm not like, right. Everything in NLP is brilliant and useful and all of that. I'm like, yeah, some of it, not so much.
And some of it's been really great. There's a lot of. Over claiming, um, uh, you know, for, for things I think in NLP and some of the stuff I'm aware that I may have dismissed, maybe I'm just not very good at those bits. That's a, that's a strong possibility and somebody else might go, no, no, no, I can really work that.
But I think if you have no criticisms, let's say of your, of your chosen system, you probably don't really have a very deep relationship with it. Because how, how could you have a deep relationship with it without having questions, without having drawn subtler distinctions and this kind of thing? Do you see what I mean?
Nothing's perfect. Nothing is, you know, the be all and end all of everything. So, so if you, if you have no criticisms of. With the work, you know, your paradigms, how deep is your relationship with it? I don't know.
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Ruckus: Yeah. I wonder if it's, it's fear-based because we're, we're always constantly searching for certainty.
Right. And if I find this, this new tool or protocol that, like that is it, Hmm. Then I said, I have a, I have a certainty that I can do, I can help anyone now.
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James: Right.
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Ruckus: And if, and there's a fear inside that if like, oh, I, what if I discover that's not true?
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James: Yeah. You
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Ruckus: know, so maybe that's the, the resistance.
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James: Well that's that, that's already interesting.
point, I think. Now, now I know that's been true for me because when I started out doing changework, I absolutely wanted to be able to help everybody. And part of the reason for that was obviously I'm setting myself up as a professional. I'm taking money. If I was a plumber, I wouldn't want to take payment from someone and then just like leave their toilet leaking all over the place and going, yeah, well I kind of did my best.
Uh, but you know, it's. Um, so, so I wanted to be able to be consistent. The trouble is, is, you know, we're dealing with complex systems when we're dealing with human beings, you know, people in their lives. And the marker of a complex system is it's made up of all these kind of Diverse interrelating elements, but you have unknown and unknowable interdependencies, right?
And when you have unknown and unknowable interdependencies, there is no way you can know exactly what's going to work or exactly what's going to make the difference that you need to make ahead of time. So it's very difficult to offer guarantees. It's not like plumbing, but you're still offering a service in the same way that a plumber might offer a service if you're a professional change of person.
So it's very natural to want to go, I just need the thing that works. Just give me the thing that works. But what's true is the thing that works in this context is not necessarily going to be the thing. The works in another context. So I think that you're never going to get to a point where you can literally like help anybody get any outcome under any circumstance under any conditions, you can get closer and closer to that ideal.
But there's going to be some slack in there. I think in the end, I used to look for that holy grail and go, well, this is it. This is it. And then I would get like a massive counter example.
Um, but, but that's okay. I just think that's okay. People, um, you know, if anybody's new to doing changework, accept that that's the way it's going to be. And I actually said this. Back in the day, a lot, a lot of people would say, James, what's the best all round changework training you could suggest? I said, I haven't got one I can suggest.
What I recommend you do is pick one thing. And I used to suggest to people in the UK that they go and see a guy called Andy Austin and learn his IEMT, Integral Eye Movement Therapy approach, which is a bit kind of like EMDR. And I said, go learn that because it takes a weekend to learn. You'll be able to help quite a lot of people.
And you can get really good at it. And then once you've got really good at it and you're helping quite a lot of people, you can start thinking about, well, who am I not helping so much and why? And then think what you'd like to add to it. And add something to it. And then get good at that and figure out how they integrate.
And then add something. And then add something. And then add something. And I think this is a natural way of doing things, is to engage in this kind of developmental arc. Instead of going, I need to get myself super ready so I'm the top professional right now. Accept this developmental arc. You will get better across time.
Big influence on me is Milton Erickson. People talk about what a wizard, what a legend he was. He was doing changework, psychotherapy, whatever you want to call it, for decades. And if you track his development, things change. They continue to change right the way up until the end. He never sort of goes, yeah, I got it done now.
I just use this approach over and over and over because it works. You know, he's always, like, developing himself. That's the thing, one of the things I love about this is it's a, a real art and a real craft and there's no end point in your development. So if you love it, you can keep enriching your, your capability and your understanding.
So I love the whole game for that reason as well as it being a kind of useful thing to do for people.
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Ruckus: I think I've decided that When I do the deep dive and I'm in the middle of it, and I'm like, this is it. I've done it enough times that I know, okay, that's not really true, but that's part of my, the way I learn is I have to almost believe that is it to really go 100 percent in on learning it.
Does
that make sense?
Yeah. Yeah.
And then, so even in the middle of it, I know I'll come out the other side with more of a nuance.
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James: Yeah.
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Ruckus: But I just embrace that. I just embrace that.
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James: I reckon it's healthy. I really do. Yeah. I also like just to speak to your point about going kind of all in with something.
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Ruckus: Yeah.
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James: I think that's a very powerful thing to do. You know, a lot of the time people go, well, what's the truth? It's like, well, okay, let's imagine there's no truth. The truth is out there, but it's not any more complex than we think. It's more complex than we can think.
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Ruckus: Right.
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James: So what we have is we have these different models, these different ideas.
One of the downsides of something like NLP or general semantics, which are huge influences on me, is this tendency to look at everything as just a model, right? And in a sense, intellectually, it is just a model. But if you act like it's a model, then you don't have a real, you know, rich, resonant, living engagement with it.
It usually pays to act like it's the truth. Not like it's a model, kind of know it's a model on one level, but live it like it's a truth. I'm kind of like this, you know, I've been involved with, uh, I mentioned Chinese martial arts. There's a lot of qigong, so I've had some teachers who are really into energy work and stuff like that.
If you were to ask me intellectually, James, do you believe in qi as a kind of energy that you can, you know, manipulate and stuff like that, I would have to say to you. I don't know. Once upon a time I would have said no, uh, but it can be a useful model. Now I say I don't know. I know it's a reality I can go into.
I know it's a reality I can play with, I can work with, and it seems to get certain effects and results, but I'm not going to make any truth claims about it, but I'm very happy to act as if in certain contexts it is true, so that I can engage through that paradigm, if you like, and allow it to create what it creates.
I'm very happy to do that. I think if people are too stepped back, see another thing, and I get this a bit with NLP, see NLP talks a lot about reframing. Oh, that's just a frame, you know, we change the frame. What's the difference between changing the frame versus changing the truth? You know, I, I think it's so much more powerful instead of thinking of, well, I'll reframe this in some kind of superficial, clever way.
Hey, I reframed it. It's like, what if I'm already connecting someone to a new truth now, a different way of seeing a different way of being and a good example of this. I often recommend people check out Byron Katie's Audio book of loving what is so you can hear her doing her client sessions. She does live client sessions in that because her process is these four questions and these turnarounds, but the work she does, the magic she does, isn't really the four questions in the turnaround.
It's all the little bits of business. She puts in the little comments, the little side. She's doing really clever stuff. Now, an NLP would say, Oh, she's using so many reframes. Throughout the process. She's just reframing like everything that she goes, but I bet if you went to Byron cage and said, Hey, you're really great with reframe.
She go, what? Yeah, you got all that. When you said this, she go, Oh, no, that's just the truth, honey, she'd say, right? Because to her, it's just, she's just, she's clarifying somebody's way of seeing right now, when you live into something as truth, or when you come from it as truth, it has such a different power to it.
Then when you live into it as just a construct or just a, you know, um, whatever it might be, if you're sort of always in this place of sort of dissociation and subject object, Oh, I know it's just a construct. I know it's just a model, but it's useful. It's got a utilitarian angle to it. So I'm really for that.
Go all in with stuff, you know, go all in being the truth of it. It's powerful. Like certainly anybody who's learning kind of old school hypnosis, if you don't believe, if you don't have the truth of it and are not alive with the truth of it, it won't have the same impact if you're just kind of going through the motions and going, if I act as if it should work.
So I'm all in for that. I'm all in for going all in.
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Ruckus: Anyone in the early days of NLP later come out and say, yeah, this, this little bit, that's not really. Oh
[00:30:07]
James: yeah. Like there's lots of examples of this now. One, one of them, I'm, uh, share this one particularly because I found this personally validating and I'm a weak and feeble human being.
So therefore love be validated. There's a whole bit in NLP training about eliciting strategies and then installing strategies. And you would elicit the strategy and you'd have this notation and all of that. And you know, I really, when I got into NLP, I had this commitment I made to myself, I'm going to get really good at this.
I'm going to, I'm going to be the best there is. I'm going to make this part of my life. And as I say, some stuff I could really get good results with other stuff. I just couldn't seem to make work. And this strategy elicitation business and installation, it just didn't. Sit right with me. I couldn't seem to make it work.
It seemed very clunky. There was something off about the whole thing for me. And the thing that hit me is that, well, this is a linear sequence. And that isn't how our minds work. So if we're eliciting a linear sequence. If the mind isn't running a linear sequence, what's everything that gets missed? You know, how, if we were really going to map a strategy, how could we even possibly represent it?
This isn't, by the way, for people that don't know, strategy in NLP generally refers to an internal sequence that you're running, not necessarily like your game plan for what you're going to do out there in the world. It can mean that too, but it's talking about an internal sequence. So I just thought this is BS.
It doesn't fit right. It doesn't sit right. And later. In fact, only within the last couple of years, I think it was in, I'm not sure, it was John Grinder who was, he was just making a comment in a book saying that was a failed idea. It was an idea that had captured his imagination because he's a syntactician.
So he really loved, you know, the, the syntax of language and therefore he thought how great if we can come up with a syntax of thought. But language is necessarily linear. One word follows the other. You can't say two words at once. But thought doesn't work like that. It's multi layer. So John Grinder changed his mind about that, and I'm sure there's plenty of other things as well.
[00:32:18]
Ruckus: Is there anything else you want to say about
[00:32:20]
James: bastardizing tools or anything in general? You know, I think it's a natural thing. The more tools you learn. This is the way I think about it. Each tool Or each technique, people talk about them as techniques or processes or whatever. There are a series of maneuvers.
Each one is a series of maneuvers. People don't think about it like that. They go, this is the tool, I do these things in this order, but what does each bit do? There is a series of maneuvers there. I really love to look at these processes because I want to pull the maneuvers out and go, what do the maneuvers do?
What kind of change does each maneuver create? And I'll end up deploying the maneuvers outside of the tool. But also, there's a flip side to it. You can go, not only is there a series of maneuvers, but there is an overall arc and an overall intention. So what other maneuvers can I bring in to this? Hmm. So you can extract maneuvers out, uh, or you can use the original processes a sort of chassis to, to put other things into if you wish to do so.
So I, I, I do think there's a lot of value in it, and one of the things that when I'm teaching processes or techniques or whatever you wanna call them to people, I always say to people, the point of this is not to learn the technique. If you learn the technique, you can consider that a bonus. But the point is not to learn the technique.
The point is to learn from. the technique. That to me is what their real value is. And people that go, I just want the technique that works there. I understand why they want that, but they're ultimately selling themselves short in terms of their potential and their development by thinking that way. So I would encourage people to set the bar higher and have a little bit more faith in themselves so they can be.
You know, truly unique, generative, creative, adaptive agents of change that can draw on a a rich source of inputs to affect the system they're looking to affect.
[00:34:14]
Ruckus: Because I think we discussed before, the more you, the more tools you learn and break down into maneuvers, like you said, the more you start to see how many of them are doing the same process.
He's just under a slightly different framework, but you know, many things you can break down and be like, Oh, that's really just a version of parts, or this is really just shifting some modalities, but it's called something else in this person's framework or whatever. Right. And the more you can break them down, like you said, into maneuvers, which I love that concept.
You, you see it differently than just step, step, step. Here's this thing. I just remember back the first time I, I had done this deep dive on a version of parts work at the time. I think it was, uh, they called it ego state work. And I'd done a bunch of that for a couple of weeks. And then I was like, Oh, I'm going to learn this timeline thing, whatever that is.
I didn't, I did literally didn't know. I just know where, so I started learning that. And the very first time. I did timeline with a client, we're floating above a memory, and all of a sudden something they say triggered, and I asked about a part, and we sat there and did a parts intervention, parts work for about 10 minutes, and then said, okay, look back down at that memory, and we just kept going with the timeline, and it was, it was like the most natural thing, but I.
It was not planned for sure. There's no version. I've never been taught to do that. Those two together. But, but I just, I just love that. That suddenly I saw how creative it could be.
[00:35:41]
James: Right, right. There's something that people miss here. There's a concept that comes from kind of Ericksonian hypnosis called nested loops, or I don't know if Eric's never talked about it in those terms himself, but Bandler and Grindr, when they were modeling out what he did, I think it's probably a Bandler thing because Bandler was into computer programs and you get that nested loops idea and computer programs.
But the idea of nested loops in NLP or how Erickson would use it is often referred to when talking about how Erickson would tell stories. So he would start to tell a story and then he'd segue out into another story. without finishing the first story. Then he'd tell a bit of this story, and then he'd segue on to another story, and then he'd tell that, and then he would often put some really direct suggestions in the middle, and then he'd finish the top loop story, then he'd go back and finish the original story, and then he'd go back and finish the first story.
So, um, Bandler and Grinder call this nested loops. I suspect that comes from Bandler. Now everybody's like, oh yeah, I get that. That's what nested loops is. But what if you take that thinking into the world of processes, which is exactly what you did there. You started out the first loop, which is a timeline pattern.
Then you segued out into some parts work and then you came back and you closed that loop. So if you get that kind of, if you get good with that nested loop kind of thinking, you can, you can apply it. Exactly in the world of process work, um, just as you can in the world of kind of metaphor work or story work.
I think it's a very useful way of thinking, and I do a lot like that myself, so I often do, I quite like as a sort of base, I'll often start doing say an NLP fast phobia cure or VK dissociation, where you have somebody kind of in the cinema or looking up at the screen. It doesn't have to be a cinema, it doesn't, you know, but you want to get that dissociation looking at the screen.
You're going to do some things. First thing I would say is what is everything that you can do, you know, if someone has a remote control, they can speed it up, they can slow it down, they can go forward, they can go backward, but they can go into it and they can come out of it. They can also, what are the relationship aspects that can happen?
I don't know where this comes from. I think I learned this from Lisa Schwartz of the comprehensive resource model, but I think there's other systems that do this where you have the adult self kind of coming into a nurturing relationship with a previous version of self. So I do a lot of that because it's often, it's really powerful stuff, gets really big shifts with people almost every single time.
Uh, and I like things that, you know, seem to get powerful shifts almost every single time. So I'll kind of segue into that work and then kind of finish back out into the more fast phobia sort of process, if that makes sense. So I'm going to do a similar thing.
[00:38:27]
Ruckus: So you'll, but you'll, you'll circle back and finish, finish that process.
[00:38:31]
James: Yes. And sometimes not. Um, and again, going back to talking about nested loops, people that know nested loops back in the day when I was learning to do nested loops, I learned all these different systems, mnemonic systems for keeping track of the loops that have been opened. And it was all very left hemisphere and very controlling.
And it, and anything that's left hemisphere and controlling is for most people, ultimately exhausting. So it makes the work a lot harder if you're tracking things and you're there's a lot of moving parts to to follow But I used to do nested loops this way and maybe that was a useful phase to go through but what I discovered after a while is that that I would naturally Find that I wanted to segue off and what I would do is I would just put a marker in the ground for my own conscious mind going open loop, just boom, I not worry about it too much.
It's just like, boom, I'm going to market so I can come back and close it later on. But now if you, if you watch Richard Bandland, people say, Oh, Richard Bandley is a master of nested loops. He, he opens. Loop after loop after loop after loop, and he only closes a fraction of them. He doesn't close them all.
He's not that anally retentive about making sure he closes down all his loops. So I started to have a kind of more organic relationship with nested loops. I'm happy to open up loops and let them hang. Some I'll close down, some I'll leave hanging. I think this is true with processes as well. You can come back and close the loop.
Some you can leave hanging. You know, you could make an argument and say, it's good to leave open loops hanging. If you're going to be working with somebody across multiple sessions, because the idea of the open loop is on some level, it creates this sense of unfinished business, this sense of which, which encourages a continued engagement.
What's that Russian psychologist who. Uh, I want to know this, who did the research on, um, how people feel motivated by unfinished tasks?
[00:40:31]
Ruckus: I just tried to Google, I can't possibly pronounce this name, Bluma Zargonit. Yeah, yeah, that
[00:40:37]
James: sounds right. I always said it was Zargonic or something like that, but, but I could be wrong.
I mean, I really don't know. Great. There's a piece of. Piece of research. I need to go and look this up and check this out. But like, basically if you start a task and don't finish it, you feel this sort of pull, this kind of like, Oh, this draw, this, this continued desire to engage. And this is why a lot of people, they have trouble starting things.
You know, they procrastinate, they procrastinate, but then they start, I'm like this with editing stuff, for example, if I've had to do editing, once I start, I can't stop because I just want to engage, right? And if somebody distracts me and they're talking to me about something else, my mind is still on the editing.
because I want to stay engaged because the loop hasn't been closed. I haven't got to a settling point with it. So this is how kind of nested loops create this kind of magnetizing desire to continue engagement. So if you don't close the loop and you've got that running between sessions, there's an argument to be made that it tends to have more of.
Or it tends to encourage a sort of attention towards the material on an unconscious level. Now somebody might listen to that and go, oh, how could you ever possibly know that? And that would be a very valid thing to say, but that's the kind of theory. And I think there's a little something to it.
[00:41:56]
Ruckus: So there you go.
That was our conversation about creativity and changework and making tools and protocols your own and unique to you as a practitioner. I hope you enjoyed that. If you'd like to get in touch, you can reach us here at changeworkingpod at gmail. com. Give us your thoughts, any feedback, ideas for topics. And if you have questions, we'll try to answer those on a future episode.
See you next time.
[00:42:21]
Voice Over: Changeworking is produced by Ruckus Skye. For information on training, go to clientshifts. com
