Cooking Up Some Clean NLP

So, I am back in the land of the living after my first week of NLP Master Practitioner (new code).

I never realised how different my experience would be this time around. I’m not sure if is the trainer and group I am with, which are both very good; or whether it is the whole ‘new code’ thing.

I have been asked “what I did on my training” since being back and I simply can’t explain it quite just yet - words are very restricting in that sense and that has been amplified for me last week in my heightened state of awareness.

I have answered to friends that “I have unlearned a lot of what I had previously learned”, which to me is an answer that fits perfectly. Unfortunately I have found that it doesn’t translate well.

It reminded me of a quote I used on a project years ago from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”

I guess the main thing I have taken so far is that some of the processes get in the way for me and I have now been empowered with my NLP. I learned NLP reading from scripts and having some fixed ‘codings’ to work from. Of course, these are fixed codings of natural processes.

What I have taken from my week so far is that I have so much more flexibility than that and this is the difference that makes the difference for me. Like cooking a roast dinner.

When I first started cooking them, I needed a recipe. Yes, my mum had cooked dinners for me in the past and I can still smell those roast dinner smells wafting through the house as I came down the stairs on a Sunday morning in the 70’s, The Stylistics playing in the background (no doubt I had flares flapping against my ankles).

So, as an adult, when I cooked my first roast dinner, I consulted my mum. I also consulted my recipe book. I followed the book to the letter and I got an okay roast dinner.

And, after a few goes of cooking, I was competent at delivering a roast. The more cooking a roast came up in conversation, the more ideas I had to try out. Some worked, some didn’t and after a while I developed a “Craig’s Roast Dinner”. I had peaked.

On Sunday recently, I went to cook my usual roast potatoes and realised I didn’t have any rosemary. Stop. What would I do?

It was then, out the corner of my eye, I saw a jar of fennel seeds… would that work? The recipe was different, the flavour was different, but the result was the same… a gorgeous roast dinner. Now, I could stick to the two options I have created, or, I could even create more…

Sometimes, the ingredients are different, sometimes I over-season things, and sometimes I just go wild in the kitchen and get it spot on. I could write down the recipe, and I know that it’s only a guide because even if I did follow it word-for-word, conditions are always such that something would be different - even if the difference is ever so slight.

So. I won’t throw away my recipe books, and I will refer to them from time to time, but, I intend to cook more on intuition… for want of a better word.

Cooking Up Some Clean NLP

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