Hi gang,

Well, I survived the weekend in Chichester! Great weekend, albeit getting utterly drowned on the way in on Sunday!
Anyway - here's my review from an excellent weekend by Andy Austin to do the IEMT Practitioner course. Enjoy!



Ok, so firstly, I had wanted to do the I.E.M.T. training for a loooong time.
In fact I went on one of the original workshops Andy put together to test course material and content and methods.
That was way back, more than a couple of years ago now (doesn't time fly when you have irregular arm catalepsy?).

In fact, this workshop was my first exposure to anything vaguely 'NLPish'. It was the day before I was due to start my NLP Practitioner Course, and have to say, it set the frame for what was to come by blowing my mind!

I just couldn't compute how what seemed to be little more than 'waving one's finger in front of someone's face' could potentially treat years of trauma, emotional upset, whatever.

Having done the Prac, what I particularly like about it is that it is a rapid, straightforward & elegant change method, and the fact that it has been developed by someone who has a positive wealth of real world therapeutic experience is a significant distinction for me.
The Training
In General
I'm very pleased to say that the whole weekend was liberally peppered with Andy's experiences with *interesting* clients, some of which may be in his book - The Rainbow Machine.
These served as brilliant metaphors and analogies for what we were required to learn - saying any more than that might untangle my metaphoric learnings so I'll hush!

There was a great deal of emphasis, as you can imagine, based on sensory calibration skills, which I found to be a great tune-up, as I noticed my own skills crank up a couple of notches over the weekend.
More specifically...
After arriving to the easy to find hotel in Chichester I settled in with the obligatory caffeine hit and took my usual left front row seat (who needs behavioural flexibility, right?).

The Hotel does pretty damn fine bar food (burgers, salads), tea & coffee was on time, hot and fresh with really scrummy biscuits
(OK maybe it’s only me who finds stuff like this important!) and the room itself was spacious and well lit with a good amount of natural light.
Andy kicked us off with running us through some basic Neurology before going into the parts specifically related to the IEMT approach.
Day one was spent learning the basic then complex patterns & algorithms, while also learning the 5 principles used and kept in mind when using IEMT with a client.
N.B. I have already found these to be extremely useful in my work and was completely unaware of before of some of the concepts before having them pointed out to me.
Before going on the course, I was genuinely expecting the associated IEMT linguistics portion (used for questioning and elicitation) to be drenched with the powerful linguistic patterns we know and love in NLP, but I was *really* surprised at how 'clean' the languaging was - and indeed I take this to be indicative of

how little need there is to guide the client into the experience the therapist would like them to have - as they end up doing it themselves.
My personal experience, when in the client role, was how just uncannily powerful (and damned fast) the changes happened, both for the remedial and generative models.
In fact, I had several genuine burst out laughing moments during the generative work - something which I *rarely* do!
It was my observation that there was an initial immediate big change, which then continued to 'mature' and develop over a period of 20 minutes or so (consciously at least).
I've seen some of the (also superb) Steve Andreas' EMI stuff and of course, while there are some obvious similarities, the IEMT processes were very different, and due to the large amount of testing and research Andy's put into the model, highly systematized.
The processes are logically sequential, and easy to remember - and coming from me that's saying something ;-).
We spent a good chunk of day one learning Andy's approach and discussing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the application of IEMT to such a client.
Day two
This consisted of learning the generative model.
We learnt lots about Identity and the often separate shards of identity that can exist in a person, and then how to apply the IEMT process to assist the integration to these. This lead onto doing somatic modelling and how to alter state by micro-somatic movements.
Looking back on these two days - and failing to not sound like a ‘K-Tel’ or ‘Ronco’ advert, there really was much, much more!
Ultimately, I would say this is an excellent set of powerful and easy to apply tools that every therapist, changeworker or coach should have in their toolbox.
And it’s just for such a reason that I’m hosting Andy in London this September. The dates are 26th & 27th of September, but I’ll post about that in the relevant forum of the site for that!
Hope this was useful for people – I loved the course and can't wait to rejig Neurologies asap!


Be a little weird, and swell.


Al

lol @ Thumbs down.

BTW Here's more info about Andy's model, Integral Eye Movement Therapy and the link to link to the London event is here >> I.E.M.T.

PM Me for more deets as you want 'em.

Cheers,

Al