How to Teach Parts Integration

Pre-requisite sessions

Before you teach this make sure you have covered:

• Rapport
• Chunking up
• The unconscious mind
• Reframing by separating intention from behaviour

I usually teach this towards the end of a Practitioner programme when the basic skills have been mastered and people are good at establishing sufficient rapport to achieve quite significant change and are comfortable enough with each other to address areas of incongruity.

Assuming that you use the 4-Mat system to design your training session:

Why?

Parts Integration is a way to resolve internal conflict and incongruity, both of which can be at the heart of ‘getting stuck’ or can be the cause of lack of progress on projects and goals.  Congruity is especially important for leaders because incongruity significantly reduces the ability to influence others.

What?

This is a very powerful technique that works by isolating the parts responsible for the conflict and addressing their highest purpose.  By reframing their behaviour in terms of this purpose, it is possible to create alignment and agreement between the parts to work towards a common purpose.

Internal conflict is a very common experience.  I like to share some everyday examples to get people thinking about their own areas of incongruity.  I want them to approach this technique as the solution to a common problem, rather than a rare occurrence.

If your group are interested in the psychological/clinical theory, then you can spend some time on the theory of parts.  With any other audience, I would focus on the practical use of this pattern.  After all, it’s still going to deliver huge benefits even if the incongruity isn’t strictly speaking driven by a parts conflict.

How?

As ever, the key to delivering the ‘how’ is a great demonstration of this pattern.  Choose a volunteer who has a clear conflict so that it will be easy to define the parts.   Someone who is a good hypnotic subject will give you a really impressive demonstration, but you could also use it as opportunity to help someone get better acquainted with the workings of their unconscious mind.

My preference is to do the demonstration and then talk through the step-by-step process.  If I have someone very procedural in the group I’ll suggest that they follow the process in the manual as I do it – and I check in with that person at the end and ask, ‘did I do it by the book?’

You can use the ‘keys to making it work’ to highlight the finer points.

If I’m using assistants with a big group, I’ll ask them to keep the coaches focusing on process and if a coach gets stuck to ask them ‘Where are you in the process?  The key skills I’ll be assessing during this exercise rapport, pacing, calibration and appropriate use of language.

What if?

Common questions are to do with the function of particular steps in the process and very often, ‘what do you do if the hands don’t come together?’

The answer to that is:  if you presuppose that the hands WILL come together once the parts have found a common purpose, then it’s clear that you must be sure that the parts really have got the same purpose.  Sometimes you might think it’s ‘near enough’ but it’s not.

If you’re sure that the parts now have the same purpose, you can ‘kick-start’ the hands coming together either by saying, ‘did you notice that your hands have started to move together?’ or by demonstrating the hands coming together with your own hands as you give the instruction again, ‘allow your hands to come together only as quickly as the two parts understand how to work together…’

The other common question is, ‘what if there are more than two parts involved?’  In this case, work with the part responsible for the problem behaviour plus the part that this one is most in conflict with.  If there are other parts involved you can come back to them and do a second intervention if necessary.