Trance Formations

I’ve been reminded of a story… not one of my own, but one that crops up again and again in NLP circles. A nice little story about a ship that had called into harbour to deliver some cargo. Once the cargo had been unloaded, the captain gave orders to set sail, but the engines wouldn’t start.

When the captain asked how long it would take to make the repairs, the crew said they were working on it.

Many hours later the engines still would not start, and the captain was desperate to leave the harbour as he was losing money moored to the harbour wall, and he had heard that there was a highly experienced engineer visiting the area, so he asked this engineer to look at the ship’s engines.

The engineer took a little work bag down into the engine room, listened to the engines as they tried to start, reached into the little bag and took out a little hammer.

With this little hammer, the engineer tapped a pipe, tried the engines, and they started immediately.

The captain was very happy, and he asked the engineer for the invoice.

When the captain saw the invoice he was shocked and angry. It came to £10,001! This seemed waaayyy too much for tapping a pipe.

When the captain challenged the engineer why it came to so much, she replied.

“For tapping the pipe I charged you £1… for knowing where to tap the pipe, £10,000.”