I have noticed that this connection can happen in very varied ways. Sometimes the connection happens spontaneously before we’ve even invited it. Sometimes we can make the direct connection ourselves, simply by saying “This is the same as that’. We can ask the client what is it about the experience of doing what you like that could be relevant to the problem so that they can make their own connection. The third way of helping the connection is to speak about learning. 

In a workshop years ago, a school teacher told me what she liked to do was, every summer vacation, to go to some part of the world that she’d never been to. She’d just arrive with no plans, no itinerary. She’d just arrive. And what she liked about that was the adventure, the not needing to know, the fun of exploring. 

She said she had a problem that she wanted to do something about. She was a school teacher in her early 50s and had reached a stage in her career where she didn't know what she should do. Should she just see her time out until retirement? Should she get further training in special approaches to teaching? Should she go to business school and learn about how to manage so that she could become a school principal? And she said, “I've never been in this situation before.”

It was just so delightful to see her face, having said she liked to travel with no plans and have a sense of adventure, to then hear herself say, “I haven’t been in this place before and I don’t know what to do.” And, just in saying that, you could see the cogs turning, the connections happening. She then said, “Okay. I’ll be all right now.” Her problem was completely resolved. She was delighted. And we didn’t really have an opportunity, there was no need for a hypnotic experience. Just looking at what she liked and what was missing in the problem, she was able to make her own connection spontaneously. 

Of course, this doesn’t happen every time. Sometimes, we need to do something else. 

“This is like that”

A young man in his 30s said that he liked riding horses. What he liked about riding horses was the way he felt connected to the horse, as if he and the horse were one. His problem was he was frightened of flying and there was a flight coming up that he felt compelled to take and was terrified. So we had a session in which I invited him to be on his horse, riding his horse, notice how it was to be riding it, to be connected with the horse, to be one with the horse, and to notice how that felt to be at one with the horse. 

I then asked him as he was noticing and allowing himself to experience how it was for him to be at one with the horse to sit with that, to soak it up so he could spent some time really connecting with it. And then I said to him, “This might seem like a rather strange thing for me to say, you might even think it’s psychotic, but I'm going to say it anyhow. Riding in a plane is like riding a horse.”

He had this huge smile on his face, looked so relieved, experiencing such a release. He opened his eyes and he said, “I feel so different now.” I heard subsequently that he had a very nice plane ride, enjoyed it a lot. He felt as if he was so connected with the plane, so connected with the pilot that it was very enjoyable. It wasn’t only that it wasn’t terrifying as it had been, it became enjoyable. 

“How is this like that?”

A third way that we can help someone to make this connection is  instead of us making the connection, as I did with that horse rider and flying, we can ask the client, “How could you connect them?” 

A woman told me that her favourite way of spending time was cooking. She loved to be in the kitchen, cooking for her family, making up all kinds of different dishes. She liked the fun of it, the creativity of it and the fact that she was nourishing her family. It was very satisfying. The problem was that she was that she was having some difficulty in her work. She was feeling stressed at work, too much pressure. She was wondering whether she was up to it, wondering whether it was too much for her. 

So we had an experience of being in her kitchen. Now, I’m no cook, but that doesn’t matter. She could cook. So she had a very nice time preparing some dishes and, while she was in the middle of preparing those dishes, while she was in the middle of cooking, knowing that she could taste it and she could add a bit more of this or a bit more of that or, if it wasn’t working, she could throw it out and start again. There was absolutely no problem that she had in the kitchen, just couldn’t. 

So I was then able to ask her, “What is it about being in the kitchen and cooking that could be helpful for you in your workplace?” And she looked thoughtful. She was silent for several minutes. And then she said, “I can turn down the heat. I don’t have to put so much chilli in. I can cool it. I can manage it. I can have fun with it. I can create it.” And she then said, “I'm having some difficulties with my children, but I see now that bringing up my children is like cooking.” She was able to use that connection not only with her work problem, but also with some family issues. All that she needed to do was to see and explore herself how the experience of doing what she liked, the cooking, could contribute to any area of life. 

Learning

Often the connection doesn’t happen spontaneously. Sometimes the connection doesn’t happen when we make it, “This is like that”. Sometimes  the connection doesn’t happen when we ask a client, “How is this like that?” - if we say, “What is it about what you like to do that would be helpful with the problem?” and the client says, “I can't see any way translating that. They're just so different.” And it just makes perfect sense that this will be the case sometimes because even if someone can see where they are and they can have a very clear picture, idea, experience of where they want to be, the distance between where they are and where they want to be can be like a huge chasm too big to jump, too big to traverse. So what we need is a bridge. 

We can create a bridge with a metaphor of learning. We can say that, “When you first learnt to ride a horse,” we could say, “When you first learnt to cook, you didn’t feel confident, you didn’t feel connected. It was very difficult. But somehow, as you learnt to ride a horse, somehow as you learnt to cook, you learnt various ways of dealing with that that are now so much a part of you that it’s not only not difficult, but you actually enjoy it. And, in the same way that you learnt how to ride a horse, in the same way that you learnt how to cook, in that same way, you could learn how to manage this,” whatever ‘this’ is. 

The beautiful thing about bringing learning in is that it translates an experience from a leap of faith into a process, so that it doesn’t have to happen instantly, permanently. Rather, like any learning process, it can come and go. You can get and lose it. You can be certain of it and then forget it. Of course, some things we learn and we’ve got them permanently, and there are other things that, when we learn them, it’s a process. And so, by introducing an experience, the possibility of learning, the pressure is taken off the client, and it is taken off us. I found learning to be a beautiful way of bridging what otherwise might seem an impossible chasm.

It hasn't happened YET

Sometimes a client still won't make the connection, and instead of feeling discouraged, we can simply invite them to be curious about how, when and where that connection might happen. It might happen tonight while you're eating your meal. It might happen in your dreams or while you're working tomorrow. I might not happen for a week or ten days and you probably won't know when it will happen until afterwards.

We’ve explored five different ways that can be helpful to connect the missing resource, which we can find in their lives are connected with the problem. 

1 It can happen spontaneously

2 We can speak the connection into existence

3 We can invite the client to make the connection

4 We can invite learning

5 It can happen later

There are probably more, but these are five that have found helpful so I am offering so you can play with them.