When I first saw Frank Farrelly in 2004, I had already trained extensively in NLP and was running my own NLP trainings for the public. I was equally inspired by seeing Frank in action and equally confused by what I saw. The first training I attended was 4 days with a very small group. It was (much to Frank’s frustration) advertised as “a master class” and the training consisted mostly of Frank doing demos with the attendees.
I immediately could see that for me this was a truly brilliant conversational way of working and a brilliant way of working with clients. There was very little available material on Frank’s work and aside from the original Provocative Therapy book, the only other material I could find was of the co creators of NLP trying to model Frank which was recorded on a cassette tape. The tape was actually recorded at the wrong speed and Frank always laughed at the the NLP comments on his client session saying “Their main conclusion was that I was breathing at the same rate as the client? Is that it?”
From 2004 I was lucky enough to spend significant time with Frank on a 1 – 1 basis and when he came to the UK and travelled though Europe he would spend on average between 3 – 4 weeks at our house. This gave me the chance to spend literally hours with Frank talking about his work as well as hosting him on an annual basis in the UK and in later years co training with him, decoding his work for the audience.
Frank didn’t have a great opinion of NLP, especially and observed that often NLP enthusiasts wanted to reduce everything to techniques which often made the approach extremely robotic. I independently have made the same observation, referring to this as “NLP aerobics” Many NLP folks seem to want to include all approaches as being “part of NLP” like the Borg in Star Trek assimilating all human life into their hive mind with their well known mantra “Resistance is futile”
When many NLP folks try to present Frank’s work they use terms like ” Stacking states for a powerful push” “Pushing by pulling” and ”
put fun and laughter back into your change work. ” The remaining ad copy is essentially a cut and paste of Frank’s own explanations, but the NLP folks miss that this is not about being comedic or “pushing clients” in any way. The sophistication of Frank’s work is far more elegant than most of what is taught in NLP and in classic Provocative Therapy (often NLPers substitute the term Provocative coaching which Frank didn’t use) the manner of the therapist is equally important as what they do, along with being able to work in an improvised manner.
This ability to work “in the here and now” is the total opposite of working in digital, logical sequences. Worse still many such folks also try to “be funny” I have seen some terrible examples of such client sessions and recently had one poor victim who came to one of my courses, comment on how they when subjected to this robotic pushing that he found it extremely unhelpful. Often in NLP practitioners are too hyperactive and can’t stop “NLPeeing” on the client. This is a shame as when I interviewed Bandler on Farrelly’s work, he was extremely complimentary even though in my opinion he didn’t really understand the heart of what Frank was doing. At least he didn’t try to hijack the term “provocative” and try to repackage it in ad copy. When I inherited Frank’s entire archive dating back to 1960s I was amazed at the sophistication of his work and how far ahead of his time he was.
Many NLP folks are too stuck in trying to run techniques and on one of my PCW courses in recent years one such character was by far the weakest candidate in the class endlessly muttering “I just don’t get it” This is no surprise to me as she simply didn’t have the skills to do anything more that run a series of techniques. It reminds me of when hypnotherapists use scripts when working with clients rather that develop the ability to use their own brains and work in a human conversational manner. I suspect I’ll be blogging on this some more in the future.
