Lockpicking

I have sometimes criticised myself for taking liberties with rhetoric, allowing myself to dance like nobody is reading on the rhythm of the language.

And yet I rather enjoy receiving new ideas in this way. Prefer it even. It's just more... colourful.

And having taken to it in my daily consultation work for a number of years, I know that it is meaningful to other people as well. Because life is drama as an insurance ad or ITV promo might have claimed.

Of course only me and my secure hostage that get the full force because there is usually a 6 inch steel door holding back the throng of students and spectators and supporters.

I know it's important. But it's not taught. It's not part of our model.

Even the most detailed model of consultation in healthcare (and believe me they get very detailed - the ridiculous mess known as Cambridge-Calgary has 77 different particular performance points to be covered in one short consultation). Clowns and Cambridge Calgary sharing a lack of realism.

But the inspirational moment is missing from their model.

The most important thing of all. Missing by committee.

So I've decided to stop dissing (get me!) myself for the use of this delivered language. I say delivered but not practised because there's no script and very few stock phrases. There's one or two repeated anecdotes but largely we are in improvisational territory. It's a two-hander.

I didn't find this approach deliberately. I stumbled across it as a means to an end, though an accumulation of specific techniques, a peculiar set of interests,a particular set of skills and a desire for a successful endgame. It's been organic.

But now I think it's fully grown, with wings but perhaps to unfold, stretch and test their span.

This has become a personalised consultation model delivered with improvisational thrust at the intersection of a world temporarily shared by two individuals.

That's not just a description of what I am doing. I'd take it as a pretty good description of what we should all be aiming for. 

So I'm happy with it. There is no reason to cheapen it with the words on my internal dialogue dumbing it down to "just rhetoric" - an idea that sings of manipulative political bullshitters. It's not. It's better than that.

Because those improvisational moments of inspirational rhetoric are where change lives. They are the hair trigger to change, simple to remember and the briefest of loops to install. 

You may read similar ideas in books perhaps.

But in life we are the movie. The directors, the producers, the lead and the supporting player.

You are editor. 

You are the entire experience.

You can see your audience and make it real for them. You can deliver the message to their ears, their eyes and their gut. You can make the best skin vibrate with the tone of your voice and make their clarity chime with yours. You can install your thinking onto a part of their brain that you have prepped - ready for the dropping of your I-bomb.

You can send the message right at them at the level of any and every organ in their body. You don't even need to warn them it's coming.

Not everybody will change but they will have to put up resistance that takes too much strength. 

It needs to be easier to go with it. People follow the lines of least resistance. 

Do it well enough and they would require almost delusional resistance to change to defeat you. Some will have even that. That's why we have risperidone, quetiapine and locked high security wards. 

The only way they could forever resist the repeated battalion of my strongest rhetorical weapons is to be already broken beyond repair. To be thinking their daily thoughts on a landscape that is a nuclear winter or the sort of drug haze that can't lay down a new memory or new idea. 

Because with every flicker of resistance, every new argument against change, I'm going to adjust my aim. 

I'm going to file the edges of my newly tooled key, and I'm going to get in.

And when I do, hold on if you can. 

Because change is coming with me.