Therapy: The Elevator Pitch, what does a Behavioural Psychotherapist do?

The Elevator pitch:  

You’ve the time it takes for the elevator to reach her/his floor to describe what you do. 

The doors open, you walk into the elevator and have the time it takes to reach her/his floor to describe what you do. 

“so, tell me what you do,” he/she asks

“I’m a behavioural psychotherapist”, the doors close, the elevator bell dings, and off you go.

Floor 1

Our performance (how repeatedly well, or poorly, we do something) determines our results and our outcomes.  

Performance is the product of our capability (skill & experience) and our behaviour (how we act and react).

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Floor 2

Executives & business owners focus on performance.  Skills coaches, trainers and departmental managers focus on capabilities.  I do the behaviours; adjusting and developing how people and organisations act and react.

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 Floor 3

Our behaviour is the highly personalised, moment to moment result of a neurobiological process (a chemical and electrical process in the brain) that responds to current, anticipated and unexpected stimuli (what we see, hear, touch, taste & smell) and our situation(where we are, what we are doing and who else is involved).  

 This process dynamically adapts to the magnitude of a bomb blast or the subtlety of a raised eyebrow, 

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Floor 4

This neurobiological process provides us with an expansive and perpetual feed of Perception (a highly personalised interpretation of self and surroundings), Memory (to find a previous similarity, and forecast what will happen), Reference Frames (our available behaviours & resources) and Emotions (for activating our hormones, physiology and nervous system).  We use this data to pick out the most important thing(s) from the stimuli and situation.

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Floor 5

This is a 200-times-a-second 24/7 process.  It’s inconceivable for us to respond dynamically at that rate so we use a shortcut to select from memory a previous occurrence of this situation and apply the same behaviour as we did then.  

If we can’t find an exact situation match, we find the most similar situation we can and deploy that previous behaviour.  No, if’s, or but’s.  It’s the only thing we can do, we’re not quantum.  We are animals of reaction, rather than action.  We don’t have the time to work out if this chosen behaviour is the best one, as long as it’s our right one.

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Floor 6

If you extrapolate that backward, you’d conclude that your behaviour today must have an echo of your behaviours from the past.  All behaviour is in-fact learned behaviour; so, we truly are creatures of habit by default and by design. 

On the day you were born you had no behaviours, you knew how to eat, excrete and cry.  You didn’t know how to do happy or do sad, do good or do bad, do polite, do angry, do judgemental, do critical, do excited, do conflict, do compromise, do win, or do lose.  You had no content in your neurobiological process, no shortcuts, no behaviours.

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Floor 7

So, what do I do as a behavioural psychotherapist?  I start by carefully pinpointing the behaviours considered to be unhelpful.  Often these are perceived as over-there with him/her/them and not over-here within me.   

The first step is to get the problem over here instead of being over there.  It might be uncomfortable but identifying it as a self-problem makes it much more likely we can overcome whatever the problem is.  Doing this also marks the dawning of a new, liberating and empowering behaviour “the way we see the problem is the problem” (Covey).

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Floor 8

Then together, we decompose the unhelpful behaviours, identifying their source, amplifying the disadvantages, and unearthing the benefits (secondary gains) of them.  There are always secondary gains from unhelpful behaviour. 

This proven process provides not only a clear and likely first-time insight into the unhelpful behaviours but also the catalyst for change.  Then, by focussing on desired outcomes, instead of being at the mercy of past behaviour, we can define, enact, practice and thereby imprint the new preferred behavioural responses at the neurobiological level.  

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 Floor 9

I’m not a brain surgeon or Derren Brown so I don’t bring a scalpel, hats or rabbits with me.  I rely on a combination of well researched, safe, and proven techniques to achieve significant, and often very significant behavioural change.

In a nutshell, I help people to change the way they think, feel, act and react by changing the way they think feel act and react.  I help to heal the broken, repair the damaged, make the good great, and make the great even better. 

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Floor 10

The doors open.  I politely ask what she/he does for a living.  

“I’m the elevator operator, nice to meet you.  I help people get to where they want to be, just like you”

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Here’s a text which arrived out-of-the-blue from a former client yesterday.   A really lovely, and I mean really lovely guy, who was clearly very caring and compassionate with a huge heart and plenty of latent talent and unconscious awareness.

He wasn’t interested in my elevator pitch, what I do, or how I do it.

Like most clients, he just wanted me to help him to find an alternative to the behaviours of hiding at home all day, avoiding friends and family, having no job, no prospects, no money, no motivation, no hope and no self-belief.  

It appears my behavioural psychotherapy helped awaken and stimulate some new behaviours. The rest as they say was up to him.

To read more about our behaviour, neurology, psychology check my blog here.

Paul Roebuck
Behavioural Psychotherapist
PGCEE, FETC (A.Dip).
paulsroebuck@gmail.com
+44 7838 371155