Mindfulness-Based Inner RePatterning (MBIR™️) in Practice: An Interview with Will Thomas
Mindfulness-Based Inner RePatterning (MBIR™️) is a gentle approach I developed for working with the internal patterns that can influence our emotional responses, behaviour and experience of the world.
But what happens when MBIR™️ moves beyond the training room and into everyday professional practice?
In this interview, I talk with therapist and coach Will Thomas about his experience of incorporating MBIR™️ into his work. We discuss how he uses the approach with very different groups of people, including young people and senior leaders dealing with high-pressure situations.
Watch the full MBIR™️ interview with Will Thomas on YouTube
What Is Mindfulness-Based Inner RePatterning (MBIR™️)?
Mindfulness-Based Inner RePatterning (MBIR™️) is an approach I developed for working with the internal patterns that can sit beneath emotional and behavioural responses.
One of the distinctive aspects of MBIR™️ is that the process can involve relatively little verbal discussion of the problem.
People do not necessarily need to repeatedly tell their story, analyse everything that has happened or consciously understand every aspect of an issue before change can occur.
Instead, MBIR™️ can work much more directly with a person’s internal experience and the changes occurring within it.
This can be particularly useful when an experience is difficult to describe in words, when someone doesn’t want to discuss the details of what happened, or when repeatedly talking about a problem does not appear to be helping them move forward.
You can learn more about the methodology on the main Mindfulness-Based Inner RePatterning™ overview.
How Will Thomas Uses MBIR™️ in His Practice
During our conversation, Will discusses how he has incorporated MBIR™️ alongside other approaches within his professional work.
This is an important aspect of MBIR™️.
Practitioners do not necessarily have to abandon the skills and therapeutic approaches they already use. MBIR™️ can complement an existing professional framework and provide another way of working with what is happening for the person in front of them.
Will describes using MBIR™️ with very different groups of people, including senior leaders facing high-pressure situations and young people in school settings.
That diversity illustrates something important about the methodology: MBIR™️ can be adapted to the person and the context rather than requiring everyone to work in exactly the same way.
A Discreet Way of Working With Emotional Responses
One of the particularly interesting parts of our discussion concerns Will’s experience of using MBIR™️ with young people.
MBIR™️ can be remarkably discreet.
Will talks about one young person who referred to what they were doing simply as “daydreaming.”
I think this illustrates something important.
A person doesn’t necessarily have to visibly perform a therapeutic technique or explain to everyone around them what they are doing. Elements of MBIR™️ can be subtle and internally focused.
For some people, this may make the skills easier to use in everyday situations where they would not necessarily want others to know that they are actively managing an emotional response.
MBIR™️ and High-Pressure Situations
Will also discusses his experience of using MBIR™️ with senior leaders.
High-pressure situations can trigger powerful automatic responses.
Someone may consciously know exactly what they want to do. They may be highly experienced and extremely capable. Yet when pressure increases, their body and mind can begin responding very differently.
This is one of the reasons I am interested in approaches that go beyond simply trying to change our thoughts.
In the interview, Will and I discuss elements such as peripheral vision and soft focus and how these can be incorporated into MBIR™️.
Because these processes can be extremely subtle, they may be particularly useful in professional environments.
Someone preparing to speak publicly, attend an important meeting or navigate another demanding situation may be able to use elements of MBIR™️ without anyone around them being aware of what they are doing.
MBIR™️, EFT and NLP
Will and I also discuss MBIR™️ in relation to approaches such as Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).
Although these approaches can complement one another, MBIR™️ is its own methodology.
For practitioners who already have therapeutic or coaching experience, this distinction is important.
Learning MBIR™️ does not mean having to discard everything they already know. Instead, practitioners can explore where MBIR™️ may add another dimension to their existing work.
Different approaches can offer different ways of understanding and working with human experience.
Working Without Needing the Whole Story
One of the characteristics of MBIR™️ that can surprise people when they first encounter it is how little information the practitioner may need about the content of an issue.
In many traditional therapeutic conversations, the story can become central.
What happened?
When did it happen?
Why did it happen?
What does it mean?
These can all be valuable questions in the appropriate context.
MBIR™️, however, provides another possibility.
The practitioner can work with aspects of the person’s internal experience without necessarily requiring them to disclose or analyse everything associated with the problem.
This can create a very different therapeutic experience.
It also places considerable emphasis on observing the feedback coming from the person and allowing that feedback to guide the process.
For broader information about MBIR™️ principles, professional standards and the methodology, see MBIR™ International.
Why Practitioner Experience Matters
There is an important difference between describing how a methodology is intended to work and hearing from somebody who has taken that training into their own professional practice.
That is one of the reasons I wanted to record this conversation.
Will is not simply talking about learning MBIR™️.
He discusses how he subsequently began incorporating MBIR™️ into his professional work and describes some of the different environments in which he has used it.
His experience provides an interesting practitioner perspective on the flexibility of MBIR™️ and how its principles can translate into real-world settings.
Watch the Full MBIR™️ Interview
The full conversation is approximately 20 minutes long.
If you are a therapist, coach or practitioner interested in MBIR™️, I recommend watching the interview because it gives you the opportunity to hear directly from another professional about how he has incorporated the methodology into his work.
Interested in Learning MBIR™️?
Mindfulness-Based Inner RePatterning (MBIR™️) was created and developed by Tania A. Prince.
MBIR™ Practitioner Training provides practitioners with the opportunity to learn the methodology in greater depth, understand its underlying principles and develop the practical skills needed to begin integrating MBIR™️ appropriately into their professional work.
