I first heard about Frank Farrelly from one of the NLP creators in 2003 and met Frank in 2004 in a workshop which attracted a number of NLP trainers. Although the co-creators of NLP rated Frank, Frank didn’t have a high opinion of NLP. In our many discussions he regularly pointed out that the co-creators had a tendency to steal Frank’s clinical stories and present them as their own! One of Frank’s students Rusty Palmer berated the co-creators for this and Frank was wholly unimpressed by such behaviour.
My own experience is that many (not all) NLP folks simply don’t get Frank’s work. Part of the reason is that in NLP there is often a tendency to dumb down everything into techniques with little actual regard to what is happening in any client session. The worst characters in my experience tend to be many “NLP master trainers” who seen to have modelled the latest USA president proclaiming themselves to be experts in all things including Provocative Therapy! They often dilute and distort Farrelly’s work and bolt the term “provocative” onto a whole range of approaches including coaching and hypnosis.
During the current global health pandemic this magpie style behaviour seems to be at an all time high and today I heard one character proclaim one of the co-creators as an expert in “provocation” This did amuse as the same person wrote what I consider to be one of the terminally most boring books of all time, so bad I felt myself slipping into a coma after a mere 10 pages. Frank made great use of sensory language and stories to engage clients rather than bore them into submission with academia and jargon.
Provocative Therapy does not have any grandiose titles or pyramid selling/upselling workshop strategies.
Frank was more interested in client results than getting bums on seats in huge workshops which often at best are of average quality. Frank also treated everyone equally and didn’t care if a person was a self-proclaimed expert. I frequently saw him slap down NLP master trainers who lacked good manners and communication skills as well as a number of extremely disassociated clean language trainers.
The tragedy is that the core skills of NLP are really excellent, but many NLP folks do themselves no favours with making really daft claims about “shields against covid 19” and other such nonsense. Frank would often say “Show me the evidence!”
Frank also commented “Throw away your professional dignity in the service of the client” Many NLP folks could learn a lot if they adopted such an attitude…
