Real life sessions for CPD learning

There’s an old music hall joke where a presenter asks

“I need a volunteer from the audience for my next trick”

A guy in the audience immediately puts up his hand

The presenter says

“Now, sir, you’ve never seen me before, have you?”

The volunteer replies

“No dad…”

The point of this story is that real-life client sessions differ from what often happens at training events.

The PCW Dev/CPD programme and keeping it real

We just started the PCW Dev/CPD programme, and a big part of that is showing real-life client sessions and deconstructing how the model is being used. I am deliberately choosing difficult client problems and showing the footage unedited for attendees. This is real learning, and in my experience this doesn’t often happen in personal change trainings.

I’ve always advocated creating real-life learning situations. I remember talking to the president of one NLP organisation and telling him that, during my courses, on the final day I would task attendees with going out into the city and working with members of the public. My assisting team would handle all of this. He looked totally horrified at the prospect, and clearly this was not standard practice,

I also remember buying a DVD product from one of the co-creators of NLP described as “a master class in client work”. The suggestion was that the demo subjects were members of the public, but a quick inspection revealed that wasn’t really the case. The trainer had known at least one of the demo subjects for many years. This reminded me of the original music hall joke I referenced at the start of this article!

PCW is all about real-life results. The model is now recognised as a stand-alone modality, and PCW practitioners can get professional insurance for working with clients.

Deconstructing client sessions

In the PCW CPD/Dev training, we cover the following when deconstructing client sessions.

How to use the client to identify how the client is creating and maintaining the problem

Psychoeducation in setting up the session

Use of direct, indirect and random approaches

Determining “the ingredients” that create the issue

Time-framing the session and incorporating trance work

Using expression and “punch statements” to change client thinking

Identifying and challenging client generalisations

Only working in the here and now