ALAN: Hi anyone who’s listening. Well, thanks for tuning in! My name is Alan Whitton from “WestEssexHynpotherapy.co.uk” and with me today is Nick Kemp who’s done much to promote the work of Frank Farrelly and Provocative Therapy. So, I’m going to be talking to Nick today about NLP, about Provocative Therapy, and also about the upcoming training that I’m hosting him for in February. So Nick, thanks for joining me. Have you taken time out of your busy schedule?
NICK: Well thanks for inviting me. So far, so good...!
ALAN: I haven’t started asking questions yet so you might want to hold your judgement on that! Ok. Anyway the first thing Nick, can you tell us a little bit more about you. Because I know a lot of stuff about you, but, you know, just for the purposes of the people who don’t, just tell us a little bit about yourself.
NICK: Sure, well I have been involved with personal development for many many years. Actually going back to the late 70’s,
so what a lot of people don’t know is that I’ve actually been running workshops for probably 20 years before I started doing any sort of
NLP, and certainly before I met Frank and started to do any kind of Provocative Therapy kind of work. So back in the day my interest was more in
meditation kind of areas, personal development, and personal enhancement.
I started training in NLP in the 90’s, pretty much back then with Richard Bandler, and did all the stock trainings that you’d expect. Then
helped out behind the scenes on the main London UK trainings, and that would between 2000 and 2003. So in a typical year I might do 30 days actual
training with Bandler and helping out on courses, plus any other courses that I’d do in NLP, which would be usually in the UK, but sometimes in
Ireland, and sometimes in the USA as well. In 2004 I set up a training company, and in 2004 to 2008 ran certificated trainings in NLP,at that time for
the Society of NLP.(I) moved on to become a Board Director of the ANLP which is another story. And each year we’d run usually 2 Practitioners,
Master Practitioner and hosted a whole bunch of different people- most years hosted Doug O’Brien- hosted Frank Farrelly and in the past hosted
John LaValle, who some people have probably heard of!
I met Frank in 2004 and from then we started to look at his work and developing Provocative Change Works which is a combination of using Frank
Farrelly’s approaches and also Ericson’s approaches and other insights and elements I’ve been involved in.
ALAN: Right. So what was the … I mean that’s a whole lot of NLP there. So what was the draw? How did you first hear about Farrelly’s work?
NICK: Well Farrelly, I mean I have to, you know, give total credence to Richard Bandler, because he’s the one who first mentioned Frank, and this was back in 2003 when I was doing a lot of helping out on workshops, and this was an NLP Master Practitioner in London as they like to call them. At that time it was a 9 day workshop, now, it might not be the same number of days. But Bandler was talking about people who influenced him and said, well there’s the standard ones you know about, Bateson, Erickson and …. Also there’s a bunch of other people, including this guy, Frank Farrelly. And he famously commented then ‘If you think I’m wild, you should really meet him’.
ALAN: Fantastic.
NICK: At that point 120 people all reached out for their notepads and wrote ‘Frank Farrelly, Provocative Therapy’.
ALAN: Yes.
NICK: But I didn’t know if Frank was (a) still alive or (b) still teaching until the following year until my very good friend, and on occasion co-trainer, Andrew T Austin, sent me an email, which just had in the subject line 2 words, which were ‘He’s alive’. As I looked into the body of the text wondering if he was talking about Elvis, or goodness knows what else, I realised that Frank, at that time, was going to be doing a workshop in Bournemouth, and both Andy and myself and my wife and a friend of Andy’s we immediately booked on to this event and that’s how I first came to meet Frank. This was May 2004.
ALAN: Right. Ok. Alright. Just before we get into some other stuff you do work a lot with clients yourself doing therapy and coaching work as well. It’s not just a training thing is it?
NICK: Yes, and I think that’s quite important.
ALAN: Yes.
NICK: My background also, as well as parallel to doing NLP training, I was doing work earning money in the ”real world”. I also ran a number of start-up companies. Set up 3 recruitment businesses from scratch. Two of them were multi-million pound concerns. So my background was, you know, extensively in business.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: And in business trainings. I had already done coaching work for my old industry, the recruitment industry which was also old business arena, all done through referral. There was never really any advertising for that.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: Then I started seeing private clients probably around the back end of 2004 and the early part of 2005 and then in 2006, was asked to go on BBC radio to talk about the work that I was doing, and specifically working with anxiety states and people with phobias. I did that for 26 weeks at one hour per week in Leeds with curing people live with phobias, on the air, so you have to really know your stuff!
ALAN: Yeah.
NICK: From that I started to develop a very successful private practice which has been going a number of years in Leeds now and in any given month, I may see up to, I think the most in a month has been about 60 clients.
ALAN: Wow. That’s very very busy.
NICK: And also it gives you a huge amount of experience.
ALAN: Yes.
NICK: And not all of these are paying clients. Sometimes I might do half a dozen pro-bono depending on if they are referred to you from the Social Services or similar types, but that’s the kind of work rate month in and month out that I am involved in.
ALAN: And say for instance, during a therapy session, would you be using exclusively your Provocative Change Works or do you allow yourself some flexibility to pick and choose whatever you think is going to be appropriate?
NICK: Well Provocative Changes Works is the flexible approach which allows you to pick and choose.
ALAN: Ok.
NICK: The difference between … I’ll explain the difference. Provocative Therapy Works is essentially a conversational way of working with clients where you are always arguing ‘for’ maintaining the problem with the client. So you’re always advocating being Devil’s Advocate.
ALAN: Yeah.
NICK: And you adopt a number of different positions and perceptual stances to get the client to respond in different ways. Now crucially, this is important, it’s the manner of the Provocative Therapist is as if they are communicating or talking to an old friend.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: This is not like the Spanish Inquisition. And this is not let me see how aggressive or rude or unpleasant I can be to other people! This is an ability to work in a conversational and light hearted way so that there is essentially a teasing, warm hearted interchange between yourself and the client.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: To just give you a quick example of the difference of the approach between the NLP approach and the PT approach. NLP or the standard coaching approach, would start a session with ‘Well what do you want’? Illicit from the client what direction they want and where they want to go to. A Provocative Therapist would start a session with ‘What’s the problem’? and then seek to continually advocate the benefits of the client maintaining the existing problem.
ALAN: Right. So that’s almost diametrically opposed really because, you know, that would have a lot of NLPers kind of crossing themselves and in the thought of ‘Oh you’re focusing on the problem’ and ‘Oh my goodness we can’t go anywhere near that’ wouldn’t it?
NICK: It’s very different and what’s interesting to me is that certainly the years of training and you know the talking. Not only the training, I would listen and buy and watch pretty much everything I could that was related to the trainings I’ve been involved with. So I’ve seen 100’s of hours of Bandler, Grinder stuff and a lot of Ericsonian stuff. Steve Brooks is also very very good. Doug O’Brien another excellent Ericsonian Hypnotherapist. And with all of these different issues, it’s about developing as much flexibility as possible. Interestingly on the PT events, a lot of the NLPers, particularly for one school of NLP, really struggle with the fact that using PT as an approach really requires an ability to improvise and not to rely purely upon techniques.
ALAN: Right I see. Yeah. So it’s not so scripted and procedural then?
NICK: There is a process which is certainly not scripted. To give you an example which might be more fitting for your sort of background. I had a friend of mine who used to do Thai Boxing and mixed Martial Arts in Leeds and he said we would have these Karate guys come down and call us out and want to try and fight us and it was just like sending a sort of five year old kid in to fight Mike Tyson you know. Just getting involved in this because the flexibility of having many ways to work is hugely different than just believing there is just one approach.
ALAN: Absolutely.
NICK: NLP talks about flexibility massively. The demonstration and the fluidity and the awareness of language interactions and interruptions and using that is of course a very different matter. I’ve probably only seen, in 12 years, maybe five people who I would rate hugely in the world of NLP as people who can work with clients...
ALAN: Right. Right. Ok. Cool. Alright Nick well thanks for that.
Go to part 2 - Nick Kemp discusses Provocative Therapy
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