― Isaac Newton,
We should all have mentors. People who have taught us the fundamental values of life, its meaning and its ways. Of course many of us will look directly to our parents and siblings for they give us the very structure and meaning to our early learning. Beyond that we all come into contact, sometimes without knowing, of great minds and inspirational folks.
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| Steve Andreas and Steve Towers, Colorado 2005 |
I have been privileged in my life to meet and spend time with truly extraordinary (and to me mind blowing people) in many walks of life, personal, business, family and trusted friends.
Today I want to link you with and share the thoughts of someone who I read, watched and subsequently met. An unsung hero to many he inspires us daily and I would say he his responsible for many of my thoughts and teachings on Successful Customer Outcomes and Outside In.
If you are looking for that extra insight, that thing that can move your soul I can heartily recommend Steve’s work. You will find personal and spiritual guidance that hopefully, like me, provides you with a constant source of ah-ah moments and helps you with others. Enjoy.
This is lifted directly from Steve’s blog – you can link to the full article here and after the introduction.
Oh, and PS. – for client read also organization!
Client Intervention Planning Exercise
Many approaches to therapy are purely, or mostly, reactive. The classic example is Freud’s analytic method of sitting behind the couch out of sight of the client, quietly listening, and only occasionally making interpretations about what the client says. Carl Rogers listened and reflected back the words and feelings that clients expressed, in what was called “non-directive listening,” or “active listening.” In many other current approaches, the therapist allows the client to talk freely, and responds to what they say. These approaches usually result in a wandering dialogue that may have little relevance to the client’s outcome — what Fritz Perls often called “free dissociation.”
However, master therapists such as Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir were very, very active in interrupting the client’s problem trance state. And they used injunctive language — “Do this,” “Try this” — to elicit alternate states and understandings that were more useful. Erickson used overt hypnosis to create alternate realities, while Satir used her personal expressiveness and role-plays to achieve similar effects without overt hypnosis — and she didn’t like hypnosis. However, an instruction such as, “Get down on your knees to show that you are little,” was a pretty explicit instruction for age regression, a classic hypnotic method. Perls used the “empty chair” to embody troublesome people and events from the client’s past, evoking not only age regression, but what is supposedly one of the most difficult of hypnotic phenomena, positive hallucination, simply by saying, “Put your mother in the chair; what would she say?”
These therapists also deliberately planned the sequence of what they expected to do in a session to reach the client’s outcome, while at the same time respecting, utilizing, and responding to whatever the client did in the session.
In this article I want to present a description of what a client presented to a therapist, ask you to pause to consider what you might do, and make a “treatment plan” outline of what you would do with him.
In a recent article in the Psychotherapy Networker magazine, “Living with the Devil You Know,” (January/February 2013) you can link to the full article here