JAMES TSAKALOS INTERVIEW – PART 2

We touch on Spiral Somatics this time, a fascinating and practical approach to interacting with people that takes the abstractions of Spiral Dynamics and turns them into skills. You don’t need to have done any NLP to train in Spiral Somatics, and the course comes with my highest recommendation.

What’s the biggest personal barrier you’ve broken through? Was NLP part of the solution, or part of the problem?

I think I broke through most of my really big personal barriers in my early to mid twenties, before I started learning NLP. But that’s the thing – I think that’s the case. It’s a little harder for me to track post-NLP barriers, because as you start getting good at doing this stuff, you can address a lot of things very quickly. The trick is developing a really good working relationship with your unconscious mind (to use that particular metaphor) and trusting that it knows all the ins and outs of how you work as a whole system much better than you think you do consciously.

One thing that does spring to mind though is taking the leap of booking myself into a practitioner course in the first place. That was a huge hurdle for me, as I was a full time student at the time. I had gone back to university to study comparative religion and was only working part time to support myself. So I wasn’t really loaded with bags of cash, if you know what I mean. I did prac and master prac back to back in the same financial year, and it cost me 60% of my income for that year. Can you even imagine that? It was nuts.

It was the best decision I ever made, but it was nuts. Rationally, it flat out didn’t add up – and I knew it. And to be perfectly frank, what got me over that hurdle was faith. And rain.

So it’s a Tuesday afternoon and I’ve just arrived at Mt Buller. My girlfriend and her brother are bringing me to the snow for my first time. Out of the blue I get a phone call. I had just suggested a friend get in touch with an NLP training company to ask about their business application courses. They sold him on prac, and were calling to offer me a discount if I came with him. But quite apart from anything else, the course was starting on Thursday night and I’d just arrived at the snow for a few days’ skiing.

So Carolyn, who called me, told me that she couldn’t explain why – but she felt strongly that this was my path and that I needed to be on this particular course … and although it was a extremely unlikely, if I somehow unexpectedly found myself back in Melbourne by Thursday night, would I call her to see if we could work something out?

Sure, I said. Why not. I mean, what are the odds, right?

The next day, I saw snow for the first time and spent the day falling over on a snowboard. I was buzzing, but my girlfriend and her brother thought the snow was crap and went to bed grumbling at the end of the day.

And overnight, it rained. A lot. So in the morning we packed up and set off back to Melbourne.

We get home, and it’s Thursday night. And I get a spooky shiver of something half way between fear and excitement running up and down my spine. And even though it still didn’t make sense, I just thought “Fuck it. It’s a sign.” – and took a leap of faith, trusting that the universe would look after me.

And it did. And the rest is history.

What new challenges are you facing dating someone who is a mother? What are the rewards?

You know, the first thing that comes to mind is that moment when you hear a four year old voice right next to your ear saying “Mummy, what are you and James doing?”

Seriously though, it feels a bit weird to be answering this question – and not just because of the occasional awkward moment. I’ve never had kids of my own, and I’ve never had a partner who was a parent until now, so this is all new to me. But lots of people have children or are in relationships with people who have children, so we’re not really talking about a rare experience here.

The challenges pretty much boil down to the fact that I live in a different world now, so there are a couple of new principles that require a bit of mindfulness. Like the delicate workings of sibling jealousy. Things that would be utterly trivial to you and I are inconceivably important to these kids. “He got a blue cup! Why did I only get a green cup!?” “It’s not fair! He watched the show I wanted to watch, but I don’t like the show he wants to watch!”

And keeping ‘kid-friendly’ in mind is another one. Can I bring a four year old here? Is this activity safe? Is this movie or show appropriate? And of course, whether it’s in a car or waiting for food at a restaurant, twenty minutes is FOREVER! But again, it’s really just a case of being mindful as a matter of course.

And the rewards have been sensational.

For one thing, kids can be hilarious in ways that adults just aren’t. And I love laughing, so that’s been great. Plus, every now and then they’ll ask a really simple question that gets you thinking about something in a new way – just because your grown-up brain would never have thought to ask that question.

And grown-up brains are very different from kid brains. And seven year old brains are very different from four year old brains. Linguistic sophistication, perception of time, perception of causal relationships and systemic relationships, ability to make sense of abstract concepts – all that stuff is very different between a four year old, a seven year old and an adult. And that determines what spiffy NLP stuff works really well, what doesn’t work so well – and what doesn’t work at all – for kids at different ages.

One thing that really stands out though, is the degree to which kids demonstrate so obviously how much state drives perception and behaviour. Change their state and everything changes – it’s such a dramatic shift. It’s like being in a movie and having the reel change to a totally different movie in the space of a single frame. So of course I make use of this.

And I’m loving teaching Felix, who just turned four, how to read. I’m using a method of my own devising, based on principles from NLP and from the Michel Thomas method of language acquisition, as well as some other bits and pieces. So far, we’ve done five sessions together, of between ten and twenty minutes apiece. Before we started, Felix was able to recognise four words. Now he can read things like “I want to play lego with Sebby because lego is cool, but Sebby has to go to school when Mummy goes to work, so James said I can play inside with Trixie because me and Sebby will want to watch TV when Sebby and Mummy come home.”

I want to see where we are in a few months, and I’d like to test the same approach with a few other kids, but I’m pretty happy so far. For an hour and a half’s worth of work, I think we’re doing pretty well.

Your work in Spiral Somatics presents a fluid approach to interaction that is lacking for many people who’ve taken NLP too seriously. Where immature NLPers often come from a place of how the practitioner seeks to bend others to their will, Spiral Somatics accepts others as participants in a dance that’s gone on for centuries, and will continue perhaps ever more. How does that strike you as a description coming from someone with a little experience of you and what you do?

Golly. Well if anything, I think that strikes me as an intriguing description of your personal impressions of a range of things that you have experienced in your time. And there’s quite a bit in there that is of interest to me.

The majority of people out there teaching NLP come from a place where these crazy mechanistic metaphors flourish. You know the deal – brains are like computers, so you can program them, rewire them, install things, etc. Gimme a break. You’re not a machine. You’re a living being experiencing a constant and ongoing process of growth and change as you adapt organically to the world around you. And the result of any interaction between people is whatever emerges organically from the system that is created from the interplay between you.

This may seem like a new and revolutionary way of thinking for someone with a background in NLP … but only if that background was limited to a particular slice of the NLP world. Mechanistic metaphors and their central themes of power and control are rare among people with a primary background in New Code (Grinder, et al) or Systemic NLP (Dilts, et al), for example. They tend instead to be perpetuated by Bandler devotees, old school INLPTA trainers and the various MacDonalds style presenters who try to pass off a week of NLP as a practitioner training. You want a contrast to the power/control frame for NLP? Talk to Robert Dilts about the role and importance of ‘sponsorship’ in working with others.

But you were asking about Spiral Somatics. And I think a key point in the description you offer boils down to a single, four word slice of that description: ‘Spiral Somatics accepts people.’

So … what do you do when you travel? I know someone who spent several months in China as part of his degree. In Australia, he divided his time between being on campus, eating and studying at MacDonalds, and playing at a local pool hall. Then he went to China to study at a university there. Only he was freaked out by people telling him about the potential dangers of not knowing what he was eating, so while he was there, he only ate MacDonalds. And on his first day, he discovered a pool hall on campus …

His body went to China for several months, but he never really left his home town.

And that’s what most people do in their interactions with others.

Because people don’t just live in different countries – they live in different worlds. And just because someone is sitting three feet away from you, that doesn’t mean you live in the same world that they do. So you have a choice whenever you interact with someone. You can try and get them to come to your world. Or you can stay in your own world, looking at the little you can see of theirs from the outside. Or you can try to push a piece of your world into theirs – so you can deal with them without letting go of any of your security blankets.

Or … you can just set your security blankets aside and immerse yourself in their world, so that you can connect with them and engage them from the inside.

And that, to me, is what Spiral Somatics is really about. It’s about providing people with a way both to recognise, and to travel to and between, the different worlds people live in.

James is bringing the training over to the UK pretty soon – check out the details here. If you’re looking for innovative material from a trainer who walks his talk, then do what you can to be there.