Wyatt Woodsmall, founder of the International NLP Trainers Association, experienced David Grove’s whirligig at the NLP Conference
“David Grove is like a mad scientist! It reminds me of the stuff Richard Bandler was doing in his earlier days, trying things other people might not be willing to try. I find I have as many questions as I have answers.
“A lot of NLP requires feedback from the client, whereas this technique is designed so that feedback is almost irrelevant. It’s like a mechanical thing – people go through the process and come out with changes.
“The advantage of that sort of technique is that you can train anybody to do it.
“With things like wars and disasters, people are going through traumas that can be overwhelming. What if he could set up a couple of these whirligigs somewhere like New Orleans? It’s an interesting idea. If he can take care of traumas, which he claims to do, the evidence would be pretty dramatic.
“Lawley and Tompkins have obviously done a good job in working with Clean Language and modelling that part of what David is doing. The whirligig, though, is a totally different ball game.
“If we could understand why these things work we might be able to come up with parallel techniques that don’t involve equipment.
“And I am interested in modelling how he figured out how to do this. What was the intellectual process that allowed him to generate this? What is going on in his mind?”
Phil Swallow has worked with David Grove over the last six years. He is currently working on a new Clean Language video.
“David is constantly evolving what he is thinking about. His attention shifts and goes to something that might be related or it might be very different.
“As long as you are prepared for a fairly white-knuckle ride you are going to get a lot as you go along. I don’t take every bit as seriously as every other bit, and I periodically step off the ride and say: “Which of these things were really important?”
“To people who are watching, whatever David is doing can seem terribly important. In fact once you have seen him do something like that a number of times, it’s like London buses, there will be another one along in a minute.
“There will still be good busses and they will take you to interesting places, but it’s not necessarily the best mode of transport. You may have to wait around quite a while.
“Clean Space is one of the major things – the least kind of intervention from the facilitator and yet gets the most out of the client.”
Wendy Sullivan is the UK’s biggest trainer of Clean Language
“I think that David is the most creative individual that I know. His track record gives plenty of evidence that he is able to tap into things that are core to what makes people tick.
“Working with him makes it clear how very different a thinking style rampant creativity requires, and it has also made me aware its probably not easily turned on and off. The wonderful aspect is all the new thoughts, new paradigms, advances in the field and so on. But there isn’t really space for the mundane things in life, which can be squeezed out.
“People like David, with a genius level of creativity, have different challenges in life from more mundane mortals, and if one is a more mundane mortal working with someone who is wonderfully creative then there are challenges, because the different thinking styles mismatch.
“When one hangs around him enough one starts to appreciate that he is just living life in a very different world.”
John Farrell of Holigral NLP has worked with David since June 2005
“I think this is actually going to change NLP. It’s not like Tony Robbins, where people get a shot in the arm and it wears off. With David’s stuff the changes stick. It makes a lasting difference.
“We are developing Authentic Leadership courses based on David’s stuff, and it’s blowing the business people away. We got absolutely amazing results from a pilot course we ran – we had seven couples on it and they all experienced absolutely amazing shifts.
“Weeks later you can see what’s changed, they are coming across differently and they can see people reacting to them differently.
“We did some work with him in early December and then took him to the airport to go back to New Zealand. A couple of weeks later he was there on the doorstep, and he was with us for a week over Christmas and New Year.
“The latest thing was doing was to reduce the questions down to just one: ‘Now I am asking my next question.’”
Judy Rees is a London-based journalist, Clean practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner, currently on a mission to “take NLP mainstream”. She can be contacted via www.purpleflash.co.uk
[...] Six Degrees of David Grove by Judy Rees, Resource Magazine, April 2006 [...]