Hi Michael
I have an on-going telephone coaching client and we met up for the first time last Tuesday for a face to face meeting. ‘X’ has mentioned thoughts and feelings of powerlessness with a number of situations at work and really wants to be more resourceful in dealing with them more often… blurr, blurr. blurr. Anyway, I asked X if they would be willing to try an technique I’d learnt from my NLP course, and they were. So I took X through the Sanctuary Exercise. It took a number of attempts to get from Sanctuary to the context as X kept accessing unsupportive inner dialogue.
I must admit, for a moment, I started to doubt my ability to take X through the exercise successfully. Anyway X did go through the exercise and it was really warming to observe X wandering around in the context, with a smile, at ease, breathing smooth and regular, and backbone straight with good posture, compared to the tension, upset, fear, amongst other things at the start of the exercise.
X wanted to tell me all about the context and go into the detail of the experience, which I discouraged, but the question remains, how will I know if the intervention worked? What could we discuss about the exercise without detracting from the sanctuary experience back in the ‘real world’?
Also, the next morning I woke up about 4am, anxious about some training I’m going to be doing with another trainer. After about 1 & half hours of unsuccessfully trying to go back to sleep, I got up and went through the Sanctuary exercise for myself. It was a bit strange trying to self calibrate as well as being in the moment as I walked towards my unresourceful state. I retreated back to sanctuary about 4 or 5 and I do think I achieved a shift. I was definitely able to go back to sleep and I do feel differently about the context. Do you have any comments?
Has anyone else used Sanctuary? What has been your experience?
