Training

mastery: (noun) comprehensive knowledge or command of a subject or skill

There’s a big difference between a good driver and someone who has just passed his test. There’s a big difference between a cook and a chef. There’s a big difference between a hill walker and a mountaineer.

One of the differences is practice and experience. There’s no substitute for practice, getting good at something means putting in the time and effort. Another difference is training in new skills, learning deepens the perspective and expands the range of choices available to you.

In an NLP Practitioner course you learn the fundamentals. In an IntegrityNLP training we visit and revisit the skills needed for communicating effectively with ourselves and others. It’s a hundred and twenty hours of training and practice. That might sound like a lot of time but it’s only time to scratch the surface of what’s possibles with this material. We have to leave out a lot of stuff: working on beliefs and values, even more skillful use of language, modeling the success of others to name but a few.

In the IntegrityNLP Master Practitioner we take you way beyond the level of Practitioner – opening up your skills and understandings – If you thought you learned a lot on your NLP Practitioner training be prepared to go much further.

In January 2010 IntegrityNLP will be running it’s first six month NLP Master Practitioner Training.

This training, and only this training, will cost you just £500.

This will be the only one offered at this price. If you have an NLP Practitioner certificate and you want to take the next step. Click here.

Photo courtesy of Andreas Rueda

Last year I wrote a couple of articles – New Year’s Clarifications and Sorting the wheat from the chaff -  about clarifying values. What values are, why they are important and why it might be useful to work on them.

Here’s a reminder of why understanding and aligning our values is so important.

Because they are associated with worth, meaning and desire, values are a primary source of motivation in people’s lives. When peoples values are met or matched, they feel a sense of satisfaction, harmony or rapport. When  their values are not met, people often feel dissatisfied, incongruent or violated

Robert Dilts

Those articles described my first attempts to work with values in a systematic way. Since I wrote them  I have been lucky enough to attend a Values Intensive workshop with Steve Wells.  That workshop went way beyond the processes I suggested in those articles. Not only did we elicit our values, we resolved conflicts within and between them in a variety of ways using EFT.

I enjoyed and benefited so much from that workshop that I have have decided to run a course based on that event here on Tyneside.

Our values govern our behaviour and we are not usually aware of them. They play out in our behaviour or goals but are seldom examined. Lining up with our values is a great way to end the struggles with ourselves.

So ,if you wondered why you do the things you do, or find yourself pulled in different directions when you want to do some things. Now is a chance to find out why and, more importantly, how to do something about it.

The Aligning Your Values Workshop will help you find out what’s important to you, then show you how your values align and conflict and then how to change them. Clarifying your values is a hugely important step in clearing up your internal clutter, lining yourself up with what is important, and enjoying a purposeful life.

The two day workshop is split into 4 parts.

Part 1 – Identifying what is important to you

Part 2 – Resolving conflicts within values

Part 3 – Resolving conflicts between values

Part 4 – Lessening the power of those values or states we avoid

The workshop will be run at the Angel View Inn, Gateshead on Saturday February 6th & Sunday February 7th 2010.

Book now on the Aligning Your Values Workshop page or email andy@practicalwellbeing.co.uk for an application form or more information.

Note: You need to know some EFT to attend this workshop.

Why would anyone bother to take an NLP Practitioner Training? After all it’s a weird thing from California and it costs money. On one level it’s a completely understandable question, time and money can feel like scarce commodities. Why spend 10 weekends over 10 months learning personal and professional transformation skills?

Most people want to learn to drive and they spend a lot of time and money learning. They don’t even think about it. Driving is an obvious skill with obvious benefits and everyone else is doing it as well.

The benefits of an NLP training are not quite so obvious, but what you can learn on an NLP Practitioner training will certainly change your life in far more ways than learning to drive.

What if?

• You could change all those old unhelpful patterns of emotions, beliefs and behaviours you have picked up along your way through life. The ones that make life much harder than it needs to be. The ones that stop you doing what you would really like to do. Over 6 months you have a lot of opportunities to undo old patterns in ways that are surprisingly easy and gentle.
• You could put down all the old junk from the past and choose the kind of future you had always wanted. The memories of old disasters seem to carry around those old debilitating emotional reactions. It doesn’t have to be that way. There are ways of taking the charge out of old memories so that they become just memories. Free of old clutter it’s possible to move into a new future greater ease.
• There were ways you could get on with people. People are tricky aren’t they? If you could really connect with people in an honest and powerful way things would just get so much easier. You learn how to improve on this skill (you already have it to some degree or another) on the very first weekend.
• You could be far more influential than you had ever imagined possible. If you can connect with people in a direct and resourceful way then you can be so much more influential than you imagined. After all it’s just what the influential people you know are doing. They are human beings just like you. If they can do it, so can you.
• Other people’s behaviour and your reactions to it made sense, and better still could be changed? Once you understand that people’s behaviour is just an expression of a positive intention. Then it’s possible to find new ways to meet that intention and enjoy much greater success. This can include your apparently less than useful behaviour.
• You had far more resources than you had ever imagined. It’s funny how some people have boundless energy or confidence or happiness or courage or …. (what would be a very long list of resources). We all have these resources to one degree or another, some people seem to have them close at hand whenever they need them. What if you had ways to draw on (and amplify) your positive resources?

You don’t have to take our word for it.

Reading about NLP led me to believe that there were many ways to change myself and others so that life would be ‘better’. What surprised me was how easy it was to change everyday habits and responses and it was the little changes rather than the deeper applications that really impressed me and I’ve never worn my socks in bed since !! The changes didn’t involve willpower and work just an NLP process and all of a sudden the habit was over.

Heather

I have begun to incorporate nlp methods into my every day life – without realizing it. I feel much more able to change states – particularly if I am in a sad mood – I visualise a bright cloud and step into it – or I think of sometime in the past when I was much happier and soon my mood lifts.

I notice the words and the language people use in everyday speech more, and I have started to be careful about my own choice of language. … But I think the biggest thing for me is using rapport skills – I do find myself practising down the local pub on some unassuming stranger – and I am always so amazed how it often leads to much more of a connection with the person that I am in rapport with.

Lisa

The next IntegrityNLP Practitioner Training starts in January 2010. If you are already an NLP Practitioner then you can always take the next step with our NLP Master Practitioner Training.

For a variety of reasons I’ve had to reschedule the EFT Level 1 Training that was to have been this Saturday 31st October. This training will now be on Saturday December 5th at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre

It’s still a bargain at £60 for a full day’s training.

EFT Cafe: Three sessions of working with your values

This summer I was lucky enough to attend a Values Intensive workshop with Steve Wells, psychologist and EFT expert in London. It was one of the best trainings I’ve ever been on: powerful, humane and very funny.*

The subject of the training was using EFT to work with our values. Values are the feelings or states that are important to us: those that we want to seek or to avoid.

‘Seek values’ might be love, freedom, challenge, doing good in the world. ‘Avoid values’ might include: conflict, failure, being judged. They are powerful drivers of behaviour, a lot of what we do or strive for is to meet these values.

There are many different values and combinations of values and we all have our own unique mix.

The problem with our values is that for the most part we didn’t consciously choose them. Most of our values are the result of our early experience, they were picked up along the way from our experiences and the values of other people who were important to us.

They may not serve us well in our current lives, some may be helpful, some not. For example: if two of your important values are challenge and safety you may have a great deal of difficulty taking up challenges, even if you want to, even if you know you should. The two values will conflict,  making taking action a very stressful process.

These values and the conflicts between them are often below concious awareness and are probably responsible for most procrastination, self-sabotage and indecision.

Fortunately there is something we can do with these values – we can tap on them. Using EFT we can:

• Get clear about our values
• Resolve conflicts within values
• Resolve conflicts between values

The next three meetings of the EFT Café will be a shortened version of the Values Intensive course. These sessions will focus on:

1. Finding out what’s important: Identifying the important values that drive our behaviour for good or ill.
2. Resolving conflicts within values: Releasing the ’stoppers’ that lurk within our values and stop you getting the feelings you want. This will let you feel the feelings you really want to feel.
3. Resolving conflicts between values: Reducing internal civil war to gain a deeper clarity and peace of mind so that you can make consistently better choices.

When you find out and align on your true values you will be able to choose what is deeply right for you and become someone who congruently walks their talk.

These special sessions of the EFT Café  are at 7pm on Wednesday October 14th, Wednesday November 11th and Wednesday December 9th. The cost is just £10 each.

IMPORTANT:  You will need to know how to do EFT and you will also need to attend the first session to attend the other two. You won’t be able to join the later sessions. Normal solo-sessions will be resumed in the new year.

*If you ever have the chance to attend a Steve Wells’ workshop I heartily recommend it.

Image courtesy of sophiea

Yes folks, there is going to be another ChangeCamp this year. Following the great success of the first ever ChangeCamp we are going to show the Autumn collection of presentations and workshops on Saturday 24th October 2009 at Gosforth High Schoool in Newcastle

If you were at the first ChangeCamp you will know the score: pay £10, sign up for the presentations that interest you, turn up with some food to share and have lots of fun while learning lots of useful stuff.

The presentations list will grow as we get closer to the day, One of the things I’d like to find out is just how much excellent learning and enjoyment can be packed into one day.

If you want to attend, great! Tell you friends all about it.

If you want to help, great! It’s a great way to take part. Let me know if you can.

If you want to present, great! It’s a great way to meet new people and share what you know. Let me know.

Look forward to seeing old friends and making new ones on October 24th.

To sign up visit: www.changecamp.co.uk

I’m running a new series of Beginner’s EFT sessions at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre as a simple introduction to EFT and a fundraiser for the hospice. It’s an excellent way to find out about EFT and give a worthwhile organisation a boost.

The dates for the new Beginner’s EFT sessions are:

• Monday 28th Sepember 2009 from 6pm to 9pm
• Tuesday 20th October 2009 from 6pm to 9pm
• Wednesday 25th November 2009 from 6pm to 9pm
• Thursday 17th December 2009 from 6pm to 9pm

The cost is just a £15 to the hospice. Visit the Beginner’s EFT page for more details.

Photo courtesy of  Geoff Penaluna