Provocative Change Works™ by Nick Kemp for Effective Client Change

The Provocative Change Works™ approach was developed from working with thousands of clients in my private practice and from my 26 consecutive weeks of guest appearances on BBC Radio, working with different phobics live “on the air”.  My interactions with my good friend and professional colleague, Frank Farrelly, inspired this work, and his generosity and assistance in studying his Provocative Therapy for many years. Studies of Milton Erickson’s work also form the basis of this approach’s hypnosis component. PCW is also greatly influenced by my work as a musician, and I use music, especially changing rhythms of thought, to produce better emotional and mental states powerfully.

Nick Kemp: An International Perspective on Provocative Change Works from Nick Kemp on Vimeo.

Provocative Change Works™ is a conversational way of working that requires the practitioner to pay close attention to client responses whilst simultaneously maintaining excellent state control.

These three elements that underpin this method

• Provoking or stimulating client responses through verbal and non-verbal interactions
• Using non-specific or indirect Hypnosis to create “fluid states” for the client
• Time Framing – Promoting new ways of moving through time and space

The practitioner deliberately provokes (calls forth responses from) the client by adopting different discrete perceptual. positions, which stimulate the client into new ways of thinking and feeling.  The practitioner seeks out resistances in the client, then approaches most of what the client seeks to avoid in the discussion, and identifies the client’s “blind spots”, using a great deal of humour and working in an improvised manner. Great use is made of “sensory rich language”, and the full expression of this, to engage the client, and thus take them on a journey outside their existing beliefs and experience, to a new sense of freedom. The practitioner works in a multi-layered way, without the limitations of some conventions found in many talk therapy approaches (such as removing the therapist as much as possible from the interaction), and crucially, always with an attitude of warmth, as if chatting to an old friend.

PCW Exercises and International Recognition for this Approach

Provocative Change Works™ also includes several specific bespoke exercises which incorporate hypnosis and provocative communication to help shift client “stuck states”. Many of these are excellent for treating anxiety states, which I specialise in in private practice. These exercises include “The Voice Tempo Exercise,” which was published in Steve Andreas’s book “Help with Negative Self Talk Volume 1.” To date, I have used this approach with over 1800 clients with complete success. This is one of the exercises used on the recent 4 DVD “Provocative Change Works™ for Anxiety set, which also includes real client sessions and includes step-by-step video narration from me.

All client sessions are recorded on CD, and the client is given a copy to listen back to as part of the session. When working with clients, I deliberately frame the communication so that when they listen back to the recording, it’s as if they are listening in “the here and now.”

A typical example of how aspects of hypnosis are framed in these sessions is “As you are now listening back to this, you can continue to discover…”  Another example showing the time framing element is “As you are now listening notice which single smallest step comes to mind that will be useful for you to move through time and space with greater ease” As well as running a very busy private practice I am delighted to be running Provocative Change Works™ trainings in London, Warsaw, New York, San Francisco, Denver Vienna, Tokyo, Geneva, Valencia, Bangalore, Austin Texas and many other cities.

Nick Kemp – Creator of Provocative Change Works™ and Frank Farrelly-approved Provocative Therapy Trainer