International Teaching Seminars Blog

Ian McDermott, founder and director of International Teaching Seminars (ITS), offers practitcal tools for personal, business and clinical success in this three part article.

“I just want things to be like they were before I got ill.”

Working with people I have heard this sentiment expressed many times over the years. But of course if this really could be achieved; if things really were just the same as before this person got ill, guess what? Other things being equal, we might reasonably expect a repeat of what happened before. In other words they’d get ill all over again.

I think many practitioners have heard clients or patients say similar things; they want a return to what for them feels normal. Too often though normality is confused with the familiar. For most of us the familiar is deeply reassuring.

However, if that familiar way of functioning has got you to a place where things aren’t working for you, then it’s going to be necessary to do something different. And that probably means you’ll be doing something that feels unfamiliar. In NLP there’s a famous dictum which says, if what you’re doing isn’t working – do something different! This may sound pretty obvious advice but when we’re feeling stuck, by definition, we are not at our most innovative. Indeed we often fall back on our old familiar ways of being and doing.

There’s a danger that the more stuck or helpless we feel the more likely we are to just do more of the same but with more effort – this is what I know how to do so I’ll just try harder doing what doesn’t work. As one client said to me when they realised the need for change “doing virtually anything different could lead to an improvement for me if only because it would shake up my old routine.”

Motivating Clients

This is true in any area of our life but the implications of this for health practitioners and clients are particularly significant. Very often how effective we’re going to be depends on how able we are to motivate a client so that they can see the value of stepping outside their old patterns and doing what may feel unfamiliar. Much of my work in NLP has been focused on developing ways to ensure this really happens and many of my trainings are designed to teach this as a learnable skill.

I’ve found building such motivation easier to do when I can provoke a reassessment and some new thinking on the part of the client. I want to explore with clients what would need to be different so that a better life might be possible. But first I need to get their attention. I mean really get their attention. And that’s how I came to develop different ways of responding to what they said. To take the example above:

Client: “I just want things to be like they were before I got ill.”
IM: “What! You want to be ill again?!”

Of course that’s the last thing that either of us wants. What they want is for things to be different and better. But whenever we want things to be different and better it means some things are really going to have to change. So what specifically will that mean for this particular person? Together we need to get clear on what change will mean and how we’ll know if it’s happening.