The students turned white. They gasped. I could calibrate vertigo, panic, and hyperventilation. I had just used the word "exam" in front of a class of French NLP students. It was l985, and I was teaching my first practitioner certification in Paris.
What have I done? I asked myself. It must be something cultural. Maybe my fly is open? Did someone behind me just turn a Uzzi submachine gun on them? Had I missed a 6.7 Richter scale tremor in the room?
"It couldn't be that word 'exam'?" I said out loud. There! It happened again? What was going on with these people?
It took me some days to find out how examinations are generally given in Europe and especially in France. If you are a university student, you spend maybe a couple years flailing about in one big unsupervised party at a French college. And then you get one big exam: the test that will ordain your life. If you do not pass, you may not get another chance to take your baccalaureate (high school plus two years diploma), nor your bar or medical school exams. Often, in one big test, your life is settled for you.
So examinophobia is a popular condition in France. They spend the last trimester of nearly any academic sequence in panic-- cramming and prepping like shoveling grain down the necks of Perigourdine geese. But instead of blooming foie gras from their livers, French students bloat their fears of being tested.
Robert Dilts tells a story of visiting an overseas schoolmaster. He asks the educator if the students know the questions they will receive on their final exam. The teacher says, "Of course not. If we did that, then everyone would pass."
Most European kids graduate swearing never to take another test in their lives, if they can avoid it And they've anchored a host of hysterical associations to the simple act of evaluation. Feed-back? Forget it. They are locked into a limbic flight or fight response.
So I'm going to share a secret with you. I'd never publish this in France. It might spoil the surprise for my students. Here is certification format I have created in France. It was designed to make testing an enjoyable experience for the students. As a secondary benefit, my participants report they lose their fear of exams. I humbly present to you the Van der Horst Examinophobia Cure.
The first thing my students see when they arrive in the training room are festoons of garlands. You know, crepe paper flowers tied in long chains-- like the gymnasium decorations at your High School prom. Only here in France, they are anchors for New Years, Mardi Gras and birthdays. A cut glass ball hangs from the center of the room. A spotlight dances reflections around the room. Cheerful baroque music tinkles from a ghetto blaster. Got the picture?
The first exercise is called "The Gardian Angel." In this exercise, trios develop their outcomes for the exam. ("Is a sheepskin your outcome? What could be better than a certificate? What's the experience you could have that would make it all worth while?") In this exercise students are obliged to access at least nine resource states, and develop two tasks that will reaccess their desired outcome states at unexpected times during the certification weekend.
"The Gardian Angel"
Groups of Three: Practitioner, Subject, and Meta. Total time: 90 minutes.
In 15 minutes: The subject announces what he'd like to get out of the certification weekend. The practitioner aids the subject to define a well-formed outcome using the outcome strategy, while accessing resource states in the subject. The meta person observes practitioner and notes his utilization of rapport skills, the meta model, and the outcome strategy (our information-gathering model).
In 5 minutes: Meta gives feedback to practitioner, while accessing resource states.
In 5 minutes: The subject, who has been calibrating the meta during the previous step, gives feedback on how the meta gave feedback to the Practitioner, while accessing resource states in meta.
In 5 minutes: The practitioner and the meta confer in private, and conceive tasks for each other to perform during the weekend--at breaks and meal-times-- that will help the subject to attain his outcome, while simultaneously accessing resource states in both the tasker and the taskee. Each trio then switches roles two more times. Meta and practitioner write up the tasks they have independently created for each other and hand in to a trainer after each round-- who may then be able to refine or add other pleasant surprises to their taskings.
Then I give a series of written exercises on matching, translating and recognizing sensory-based language, presuppositions, meta and milton models, accessing cues, calibration, and other information-gathering and rapport skills. They are written to make people laugh, in colloquial French, with a lot of gags. So frequent giggles are heard during the pen and paper part of our testing.
As the students hand in each section, they receive a gift. Shopping for these gifts is one of my greatest pleasures. I visit a series of party and cotillion stores three times a year and buy armfuls of whistles, puzzles, noisemakers, paper streamers, and all the little handouts French kids get in their childhood at festive events.
By the time the morning is over, the room looks like a cross between the kindergarten from hell and Animal House after a graduation blow-out.
I emphasize in my trainings that I'm not big on memorization. I am big on knowing how to use the distinctions and techniques of NLP. Therefore, when the students have multiple-choice or diagramming questions to answer, as in the meta-model, for instance, they have a chart of the meta-model distinctions before them. Their job is to know how to use them. God gave us paper and pencils so we don't have to keep all that persiflage in our heads.
In this spirit, the first afternoon of the certification is dedicated to behavioral exercises: Round robins, in which a group of five meet to practice techniques. The setup is that everyone draws from a hat one of five categories of techniques to practice: either reframing, change history, v/k dissociation, strategies, or sub-modalities. These categories represent for me the major families of practitioner level interventions.
Each takes turn in being practitioner, subject, meta-meta model, meta-rapport skills, or meta-technique protocol. When it is a student's turn to be practitioner, his role is to demonstrate a protocol from the family of techniques he has chosen at random-- even if he doesn't think he knows it well. In reframing for instance, he could choose from six-step content or context reframes, from three variations of negotiation reframes, or the building a new part model.
The subject is asked to choose or role-play a problem appropriate for the technique selected. The metas' jobs are to keep the practitioner in a resourceful state, to give feedback at the end of each turn, and to serve as consultants during the demonstration-- in a very specific manner.
If the practitioner gets lost, the metas are instructed not to give answers, but only to ask questions. For example, "What step are you on? What is your outcome in this step? How could you get it? How do you know you obtained it? If that doesn't work, how else could you get it?" This frame, which I learned from the Andreas' teaching, allows the practitioner to answer his own questions, and often to learn that he knows a lot more than he thinks he knows.
Another benefit is that this exercise helps install a meta-person part in the practitioner. For me, this is may be my last chance to encourage students to develop their capacities for self-evaluation.
One of my major outcomes in testing is that participants learn to evaluate and appreciate their concious and unconcious capabilities with a ruthless compassion. It's a fine mixture of outrageous permission and demanding affection, that usually takes having a lot of fun to embrace effectively.
So at the end of the first day, I hand out a lot of pea-shooters with colorful crepe ball ammunition. I put on a Desert Storm helmet and say it's their turn to give me some feedback. We have a psychedelic rainbow spit-ball fight. Everybody's laughing. We tell jokes, play body games inspired by such disciplines as the Alexander, Feldenkrais, and Aikido approaches; and amuse ourselves with slinkyies, smurf balls, yo-yos, frisbees, or whatever new toys are currently popular.
Day two begins with written exercises, mainly on strategies and interventions, sometimes with a video from which everyone notates, for instance, a decision strategy. More gifts. Remember, the room still looks like New Year's Eve. It is now 10:00 a.m.
For the next six hours, the participants have been carefully placed in practitioner/subject pairs. Their assignment: to do a complete piece of work.
This includes modeling the present state and desired state of a real problem, making extensive ecology checks, and designing the sequence of intervention(s) that will produce the desired outcome. At this point the practitioner presents the case to a trainer, before proceeding with an intervention. The trainer has a colleague to colleague conference with the student.
During these consultations, I will sometimes tell the participant to go ahead with his plan. Often I will ask the practitioner to gather more information about a given category-- internal states, contexts, or cause-effects, for instance.
Perhaps, if I feel the student is strong, I will ask him to stretch and try something he's never quite done before. But always, this is a intimate opportunity for the trainee to learn how I or the other trainers in the room think about applying NLP, and for me to understand how he or she thinks.
After this huddle with a trainer-- the practitioner goes ahead with at least the first step of his intervention plan, while being discreetly observed by the trainers, and then writes up the results and how he tested them.
Ideally, after the first three hours, we have a lunch break, and the dyads are re-arranged so that in the afternoon, the roles are switched and participants are not necessarily working with the same people with which they spent the morning.
Before embarking on this behavioral segment, I pull out a big box. Inside are a collection of party hats I have collected in the preceeding week. The French make great party hats. Napoleon coques , Egyptian headdresses, wizard cones, clown toques, knight helmets, bishop mitres, martian antennaes, unicorn heads-- a whole universe of mythologies. Then, as amulets of resource for the coming "whole piece of work" part, I ceremoniously give out a symbolic hat to each student with a special affirmation. It's Wizard of Oz time.
So off they go to NLPing like pros, and after their interventions are completed, we have a metaphor party. This last act of the certification allows everyone a chance to express their experience of the training.
The participants offer each other parables, anecdotes, and often rather complex Ericksonian metaphors. One of my favorites was the woman who said, "The training is like going to an Auberge Espanol. (The European equivalent of a pot-luck party.) You only eat what you bring. But you get to eat ALL that you bring."
Oh yes, of course, we all do this last part over many bottles of champagne and party snacks. This is France, after all.
We toast to each other's learnings, and bid each other au revoir. I go home and review my notes, grade their papers, and decide on a pass/no pass basis. Anyone who doesn't pass is invited to re-attend, free, any of the future practitioners and to re-take the certification until they do pass.
What are my criteria for certification? A miminal cognitive acquisition of NLP, a behavioral demonstation of competence with the techniques, and bascially an ability to live-- at least in class and during the exam-- the behavioral frames and presuppositions of NLP.
Overall, if a participant moves through the world toward their outcomes, oriented toward possibilites instead of limits, asking how as often as why, seeking feedback and taking it well, and being curious instead of resting emeshed in their own presuppositions, I feel he or she can probably invent NLP on their own.
At the end of each certification I generally say something like, "I want you to know that in a course like this, there is not just one trainer. There are 30 (or whatever is the population of the room) trainers here. I thank you for having been my trainers. And I want you to know you have taught me well."
Acknowlegements: Thanks always to Lynne Conwell, Leslie Cameron-Bandler, David Gordon, Michael Lebeau, Genie Laborde, Steve and Connierae Andreas for your teachings and inspirations.
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Brian Van der Horst has been a professional trainer for 15 years. For the past 8 years he has lived and worked in Paris as a director of Repere. Previously, he was a consultant with Stanford Research Institute in the Values and Lifestyles Program in the Strategic Environments Group, and director of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Center for Advanced Studies in San Francisco. He has worked in journalism as an editor for New Realities, Practical Psychology, Playboy, and The Village Voice. He has been an acquistions editor for J.P. Tarcher Books, Houghton-Mifflin, and had a television program in San Francisco. Before this time, he worked in the entertainment industry for 10 years, serving as Vice-President of the Cannon Group, and as Director of Advertising and Publicity for Atlantic Records.
February 23, 1998