It sure looks like Holmes was originally published June 26, 2019, and it is now available in video format too! I love giving you options: the blog has now a Vlog section, where you can see me sharing techniques and my experience as a Life Coach.
There are many different terms for Coaches, one of my favourites is John Grinder’s Agent of change. At the same time, I have often played with the thought not to have the word brain or the word Coach in my logo but Sherlock Holmes, as I sometimes act as a detective before the change work or Coaching work begins.
I was sitting; no actually, I was lying on a treatment bench at my acupuncture clinic in Mahon, here on Menorca. And as I lay there with the needles in my back, Jan Peter Van Der Graaf* my therapist said to me: “I once had a conversation with someone with the same kind of training you have, it was very hard work, the way you guys can question someone….. it was exhausting”, “really you are like detectives?” I was surprised as it was the first time I have heard someone having that metaphor for what I do. So I said, “Yes! Exactly, that is an important part of what I do”.
One of the techniques we use for this is called the Meta-model, which is a language model that the Co-creators of NLP John Grinder and Richard Bandler modeled from questioning two of the most prominent psychotherapists, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls. They used these language patterns to recover missing information from their patients. There are 12 patterns and each pattern deserves a blog of its own, at least the format that I have in my blog, which a friend of mine describes as “small pills, easy to take”. And if I was to put all 12 patterns in a pill for you it just might be too big to swallow.
As you have read in my blogs before this one we all have our own map of the world, created by our filters. We receive constant input to our brain through our five senses and to make sense of it all we filter it by deleting some of it (that is we reduce the vast amount of information), we distort some of it (we change the information so it fits into our map of the world and the filters of our perception) we generalize and put information and people into groups, small ones, and big ones.
So when we talk to one another we delete, distort and generalize, no wonder some information gets lost in translation and we misunderstand each other. However, that being said there is a practical part of this process and that is that the length of conversations might very well be multiplied if we did not delete, distort or generalize.
Still, I’m sure you can see that the information that is lost in the deletions, distortions, and generalizations can be useful some times and it can be quite the detective work to recover it. You can also learn how to do this; (you can book a session if you want to). It is useful to learn how to recover all of this information in your personal and family life as well as in your professional life, since the lack of this information may very well be what has created a perception of a problem and so we can use the meta-model to create different perceptions and change the sensation of being in a problematical situation to having more choice.
I hope you have found this information useful, I wish you to be as happy as you would like to be and remember it is free to be kind.
Best wishes
Ivalo
* Jan Peter Van Der Graaf works as a Physiotherapist and Acupuncturist in Bajo Mahon.