Meet The Delegates 7: Mary Beech - by Matthew Wingett

Name: Mary Beech
Age: 46
Job: Organisational Lead, GP Specialty and Prescribed Training
NLP Context: Employment, Personal Life
NLP LIFE TRAINING courses attended: Licensed NLP Practitioner, Licensed NLP Master Practitioner and Hypnotic Pracitioner, London, October 2009
Home Country: Wales

Excellent, brilliant... I really enjoyed it!  I sort of knew what to expect because my boss - who encouraged me to come here - came on this course a few years ago.  So I thought I knew what to expect... but equally there have been lots of surprising things.  I think especially about some revelations about myself.  Some quite profound things about the way I think about myself and my abilities.

- How will you use your NLP?

I work at Cardiff University, managing a team involved with training people to become General Practitioners. Nno-one below me in my team is a doctor, and everyone above me is a doctor.  So, I have a "leg in each camp".  This means I spend a lot of time with doctors, interpreting what they're saying. The language work this week will be very useful for me.  The work around language and eliciting information from people is invaluable. Changing my style of language to suit particular individuals - that is something I will be very aware of.  I'll be more aware about the way that others communicate, so that will be really valuable, too.

- Do you think you can use NLP in your personal life?

Yes, it will be useful for that as well.  I think that has probably been the biggest surprise for me.  I have had to challenge some of my own beliefs that have been perhaps a bit unhealthy. It has been a transforming process.

Going on an NLP course with Richard Bandler isn't like going on other seminars.  It's not like when you go on a time management course and you hear the trainer say "Now you do that, now you do this" and you say "Okay", but you don't really take on board any change. 

It has been a journey for me. Even though I felt a little bit uncomfortable initially about the hypnosis trancey stuff - I can see that those doubts were really coloured by popular images of some mad entertainer on stage getting a person to behave like a chicken.  What I've learned is that it's not about that at all.  It's about getting you into a place where your brain is able to locate the parts in your thoughts that are less valuable - and then lets you switch them off.  And it's the unconscious that's working for you.  All those kind of lies that you believe about yourself and the world are kind of pushed to one side so that you can focus on what you want. 

The other thing I really like about this training it is that it's very pragmatic and it doesn't feel like a hard sell.  This afternoon John La Valle talked about being careful about evaluating any decisions you're going to make - not leaving here and saying "I'm going to become an arctic explorer" or something - but actually evaluate what you're going to do.  And I like the way in this course that Richard has said: "Don't take this stuff too seriously - after all - I made it up myself - but it is a really useful tool."  It kind of grounds it and I like that. And that for me has been very refreshing, because I am a deeply cynical person at heart.  I think for people who are feeling cautious about it and are quite interested but have their reservations that they're going to be in some way "converted" - well, it's quite reassuring. That's the pragmatism of it all I guess.  So, in all, a great course!

- Mary Beech, thank you!