The following is an article on changing internal patterns with NLP by Andy Owen.
Hi, I’m Andy Owen and here are a few musings regarding NLP, roses and the inner harridan. I had a life changing week with a fantastic group of people in Brighton studying NLP with the excellent Terry Elston & Adam Sprackling.
For myself there was a large personal development component in learning about the NLP magic but also a desire to earn my living using the knowledge gained one day, maybe even soon. Right now I earn my way as a rose grafter, have been for more than 20 years. It took me 5 years and more than a million rose grafts to feel fully competent as a grafter although my work was always very good. Guess I’m back there with my NLP journey.
My labourer Charlie with the experience of 50,000 roses couldn’t possibly be expected to get every thing right (ehem) and me with the experience of 5 million or so knew not to expect it. So what happens is I’m aware of every tiny mistake and generally they result in my inner harridan making itself known. This is what I call a nagging negative voice that runs a commentary on my poor labourers mistakes, constantly questioning his methods, questioning why he’s doing his work in his chosen manner, asking myself why he’s not more efficient, keeping me company for large parts of the day with a horrible slant on a man doing his best and combining with the road noise to be quite a test.
Most days I tried changing my response with chunking, constantly asking myself for what purpose do I object to road noise, for what purpose the inner harridan. I recall being told repeatedly on the NLP course that intention was every thing and although i didn’t feel I was making coherent progress with road noise it simply stopped bothering me, even the almost daily trial of tractors crowding us never got the response it would of previously, difficult to enjoy but I did stay calm, that wouldn’t of always been the case.
Now the harridan was in place as part of the quality control process which was my responsibility and I soon knew its job. Couldn’t turn it off though. Eventually I had an awareness that the harridan was part of a strategy, a quality control strategy.So I remembered the TOTE mode, test, operate,test,exit. Test in this case being ” We’re at work, is he doing his job competently ?” Operate,check him out leading to cue the harridan, Test again, well actually I’m a bit of a perfectionist so my labourer was never going to pass the harridan test so there was no exit. That felt like a major break through, I’d sussed the harridan, couldn’t turn it off though, that was left to my NLP mentor to tackle when I got home, took only a few minutes.
Well quite a ramble this but quite a lot to tell as NLP has made my life so much easier, not only by turning off programmes or changing them to be more useful but giving me choice over my thinking and emoting. I feel so much more in control of me now, like the word congruent has molded itself to fit me and has helped align my desires with my actions. Life on a field is so much easier without being annoyed by outside events I have no control over, actually life every where is so much easier for this reason.
What a journey this is, all the better for not having the harridan along any more.
Thanks Andy for sharing a changing internal pattern with us!
