The Peanut Is Unknowable Until There’s A Crack In The Shell - Grasshopper

How well do you know someone? You will be in the dark until you get a peek inside.

Dr. Milton Erickson was a legendary hypnotherapist who was one of the original case studies for the body of work known as NLP (neuro-linguistic programming).

The founders of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder were looking for models of excellence to study and happened upon Dr. Erickson who was getting amazing results with his patients.

They sat in on sessions and watched him work and noticed language patterns and hand and body gestures that he used when interacting with clients. These were subtle things he said or did that were registering with the clients outside of their awareness. Bandler and Grinder noticed there were clues coming back from the client indicating they were learning something, but the client didn’t know it yet, consciously. It was pure magic they were observing. In fact, one of their books was called, “The Structure of Magic.”

They wrote many books on NLP and held many workshops passing this information on to people who wanted to learn about the process of change so they could apply it with themselves and their clients.

I remember that John Grinder wrote in one of his later books that Dr. Erickson said something like this of him and Richard Bandler: “They think they have me all figured out. They may have the shell but they don’t have the nut.”

We may have someone’s personality all figured out, but that only gives us an outside look. They and we have many deeper parts that most of us have not witnessed yet. When you do, that’s when the magic of transformation happens.

It’s easy to get caught up in someone’s personality and think that’s all there is, but we miss a lot when we do that. We are deeper than our personality, but to witness that depth, we have to crack the shell.

Reminds me of a story . . . I was having lunch with an old friend and couldn’t help noticing all of her entertaining, personality traits. They were right there in plain view and easy to witness for anyone who was willing to pay attention. Somewhere during our conversation, I had to switch off my personality radar in order to experience parts of this person I had never witnessed before.

Any assessments or judgements I was having had to go away in order for me to go deeper with her. When that happened, the conversation changed and it was a much fuller interaction than we had ever had in the past.

I recommend that you try this the next time you are in casual conversation with someone. Suspend your outside assessments and judgements and just notice what shows up. You will be pleasantly surprised. The shell will start to open and you’ll have access to the meatiness of what’s inside.

One prescription for going deeper is this: Stop dwelling on the shell.

All the best,

John

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