Or, should it be, “When the NLP Student Becomes The Trainer”?
As an NLP Master Practitioner and Trainer, Every once in a while you come across an NLP client or NLP student who teaches you far more than you teach them.
Or to put it still another way, when the teacher is ready to become a student, the student who is ready to become a teacher appears….
William Wood ( NorthernUtahHypnosis.com ) took my nlp practitioner and Master practitioner trainings with me. He found me at a time when I was taking a break from doing trainings and gearing up to begin putting all my NLP tools to work for myself as a singer/songwriter (Positive-Songs.com).
He asked if I would be willing to do a one on one training with him. I agreed. And he flew to the Albany New York area without complaint (check out my last article where I talk about this characteristic of an excellent client or student).
I deeply believe that people appear in our lives for a purpose. I feel that Will showed up in my life to teach me a number of things. One of them was that I deeply and truly love teaching NLP, Hypnosis and Time Line Therapy™ and I love learning and practicing it as much as I love writing songs.
This became really clear a few days ago…
Here’s the point of this article: I’m in a great relationship with a beautiful woman and we are now in to our 3rd year of living together…
And we are triggering the hell out of each other. Our “STUFF is UP” as we like to say in the transformation business…
I’m a highly trained and, (if I say so myself) pretty damn good NLP practitioner. And like a lot of coaches and therapists, sometimes you are just too in the middle of your own stuff to be any use to yourself.
My girlfriend Marylynn is also a highly trainer practitioner in her own right of “The Work” of Byron Katie.
Like millions of other couples we are perfectly matched to trigger each other’s stuff in myriad small and large ways so that we are struggling…. We have great days when we are full of love and connection and in just moments all that love can turn into something that doesn’t feel so good…And we start questioning whether we are going insane!
We know from our training and our experience that this is part of the healing gift we bring each other. The things we trigger in each other are issues that are up for healing.
The challenge we have is we both know we are each creating our own stories and dramas. We also don’t see the point in going to some talk therapy thing. We learned our leading edge techniques because traditional therapy didn’t help us with this…
We also both see that we’ve done this dance before in other relationships. We both sincerely love each other and want to be supportive of each other’s growth and healing…
So I was just checking in with Will the other day because I hadn’t heard from him in a while and it turned out he was in the middle of a training. In fact he had just learned a new (for me) NLP pattern that he was just itching to try out on some willing “victim”, I mean “subject”… I mean… “volunteer”:
It was a perfect technique to collapse a negative emotional “trigger” or even an allergy.
So he spent about 20 minutes with me on the phone while he was driving in to his day of training… (yes that’s how good Will is!)
He went through the new technique a few times with me and he finished with a bit of hypnotic languaging to “lock in the changes”… all I remember from the hypnosis part was that every time I saw the color RED I would strengthen and reinforce the new behavior and neurological pattern. Of course I started seeing the color RED everywhere!
The next day something happened that would have normally triggered my feelings of hurt…
My reaction?
NOTHING.
It was like the lock had been changed and the old key no longer worked. A very good feeling!
The day after that Marylynn was really triggered by something I did or didn’t do and was deep in her pattern. Again, I was able to not take it personally. I sat with her and just focused on keeping my heart open and beaming love at her. I focused on my breathing. I relaxed consciously and grounded myself into the earth and just stayed present with her. The gift for me was that because I wasn’t triggered into my own stuff. I was able to be a container for her.
At one point I made the mistake of trying to hug her and she was so ticked off at me that she just pushed me away. In the past that would have HURT. Big time. This time? I just gave her some space and went off to my Man Cave office in the basement to get some work done…
10 minutes later she came in and was soft and gentle and apologetic. Again, I didn’t feel like any apology was necessary. I wasn’t waiting for her to come and apologize. I was still open. I never closed down.
This was a huge breakthrough. I don’t know if I described how excruciating this pattern of ours has been for both of us in the last 2 years. We kept working on it and not really resolving it. We both know that if we give up and go off into other relationships we will just repeat the patterns.
This time it feels like we made a major shift.
So I just want to give props to William Wood. The guy is an awesome practitioner of NLP, Hypnosis, Time Line etc. I just feel tremendously grateful to have been able to be his student the other day.
Mark Shepard, NLPT, Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP, Hypnosis and Time Line Therapy(tm).
http://ModernJedi.com
p.s. 2 years ago when Will was taking my private NLP practitioner training I taught him to to the NLP Like to Dislike Script. Since it was a private training, I was the “volunteer” and I chose to stop liking coffee so much. I was drinking several cups in the morning and a few in the afternoon. I now only have coffee once or twice a week… Just sayin’ William Wood is the real deal.