Contents
Leonid Krol thinks in images, speaks in metaphors and often struggles with inertia. He himself changes the direction of movement and comes up with new ways to change the lives of the participants in his trainings.
Psychologies: “Near magic” – this is how the name of your new project Incantico can be translated from Italian. What did you mean?
Leonid Krol: I will answer with an example. There is a well-known logical problem: how to add four triangles from six matches. And this problem is fundamentally not solved while you lay out the matches on the plane. Until you think of translating it into 3D and building a “hut” of three more matches over a flat triangle. This is what magic is for me. And that’s what I try to do: play on surprise, on a simple solution that is always there, but that no one can find, because everyone lives by inertia. My idea is to help people get rid of the automatism of small habits that often determine their way of thinking and acting – from the way a person sits, looks, breathes, and ending with the way he puts together phrases and thinks. And give him space for creativity, a space where everything can be done differently.
Are you talking about space in a literal sense?
OK.: Yes, Incantico is 15 hectares of amazingly beautiful nature in the Italian Umbria, where, it seems to me, everything is there to make discoveries. So that guests can learn something important about themselves and about the issues they are trying to solve. This is a very special space that allows you to get closer to the magic.
But psychotherapy traditionally gets by with a couch or chair, table and chair. What is 15 hectares for?
OK.: I do not practice psychotherapy per se. In the classical version, therapy is a long process. It can be shortened, but somehow it is a process where projections are built, where the movement is relatively slow. And I conduct group trainings, which can rather be considered coaching. They make it possible to quickly identify internal requests that the client himself cannot formulate. And answer them. Psychotherapy for more than a hundred years has developed different approaches and techniques, coaching, of course, has less of them. And he is forced to invent beautiful labels, marketing moves, loud slogans like all these American refrains: “be a leader”, “take a shovel, grab more – throw more.” Moreover, they can be correct as advice. But they just don’t work on their own. For them to work, for someone to recognize them as their own tasks, and you need to get into the magic.
Read more:
- Leonid Krol “Islands of Psychotherapy”
What are the ways to get there?
OK.: You know, when I was a young neuropathologist and some pretentious patient came to me, in order to remove this social pathos, I checked his abdominal reflexes. Here he is kneeling on a chair, all disheveled, his feet hanging down – and I’m checking his abdominal reflexes. And no matter how big a person he was, at that moment he was experiencing a state of regression. I felt a little like a child. This is an unusual state of affairs. But this is a justified oddity: he came to the doctor. And this is how he got rid of the excess of sociality, which really interfered: for him to tell what was happening to him, and for me to make the correct diagnosis.
Read more:
- Life on autopilot: can it be changed?
I try to reproduce the same tricks in Incantico. The idea is that people can suddenly feel in a new way – and overcome inertia. For example, there I have a triclinium – a place for feasts. It is known that the ancient Romans did not sit at the tables, but lay. The tables were low, they were placed on the couch facing each other – and they talked, ate, drank wine. And I have a real triclinium: made of marble slabs, under three oaks. And here is a guest who has come for a therapeutic session, reclining there. Maybe it even makes sense to put on some kind of hoodie like a Roman toga. It’s already a violation of many habits: sitting in formal clothes, looking straight ahead and calculating: “Yeah, he said this, but he really meant that.” This is where it all goes away. We think with the body. And then the beauty of nature, the breeze rustling in the foliage, the surprise of posture and clothes, the opportunity to fall apart … All this is already a small miracle.
Or another example: I once read how the biologist Timofeev-Resovsky, once conducting a seminar during a terrible heat wave, led all the students into a pond. And so everyone stood chest-deep in water – and had scientific conversations. After 40 years, prominent scientists who have attended hundreds of various conferences excitedly told about this story. This has never happened to them! And it’s a very simple step. By the way, Incantico also has a lake where you can stand and talk. And many other things that help to achieve the goal – to overcome inertia, get off the circle and add four triangles out of six matches.
Is your project designed for group work?
OK.: Yes, because the group itself is another opportunity to enter the magic. When the process goes well in it, the grains of the meaning needed by each participant crystallize by themselves. And this golden sand is much more valuable than trying to logically order and formulate everything. This magic of the group leads to the fact that its members unexpectedly find direct and fast paths to the desired solution. Even in my youth, I was struck by the effectiveness of working with stutterers, when they are not only engaged in speech, but they are given the opportunity to communicate – including non-verbally: change position, dangle your legs, use some kind of awkward, vernacular turns. And the attempts of a speech therapist to put a speech according to the model often do not give any results. Because a stutterer is cited as a model of impeccably correct speech. Instead, you just need to give freedom to speak. Tickle, if you like, make them forget about the models, remove this control. Since then, this has been guiding me: I have been looking everywhere for an opportunity to move away from “written speech”, from codification, from how it should be and how it is right. And translate it all into a game plan.
Read more:
- L. Krol “10 faces in 100 mirrors. PowerMoneyLove»
Do band members always discover something about themselves that they didn’t know about before?
OK.: You know, there is always a problem with good work: it is very difficult to say in a nutshell what has been achieved. Either you do business with the aim of writing a report on the results, or you pick up a ball of threads sticking out in all directions and begin to unravel them little by little. But then it is not clear what you did in the end: put this thread into this loop, and then pulled it out from there? Group members may remember such work generally as a dream. Because understanding is not the same as solving the problem. We have two “legs” – “understood” and “felt”, awareness and image. And you have to rely on both.
“When we work on ourselves, the scale changes. We are getting bigger and our problems are getting smaller.”
How effective is group work?
OK.: In my experience, about 10% of participants are usually dissatisfied. As a rule, these are those who do not really like to show their inner world. They come to learn, to learn some secret, to get knowledge, concrete and ready for use. But I can not give it and do not pretend to be. The group is needed in order to get to knowledge together. And if we talk about corporate trainings – when company employees conduct a brainstorming session with my help, a strategic session, or solve some other specific problem – then such groups most often turn out to be very successful. But if they fail, then with a bang! Because there are groups in which initially everything is implied. And it is necessary that the chief speaks first, then the deputy, the only dissent is silent, and the rest merge into a common unanimous chorus. And it is impossible to get them out of this, because this is the basis of their existence, they have been building it for years, and then some bastard begins to shake the foundations. In fact, they hire me only to confirm the correctness and inviolability of their structure.
After such failures, there is no desire to change jobs?
OK.: No. When I do my job, I still become more interesting – even to myself. And in general, when we do something, we always become more interesting, livelier. And more. After all, we often suffer from the fact that the problem is big, and we ourselves are small. And even knowing this, we can’t cope. And when we grow internally, we open ourselves from different sides, which we didn’t even know about, the scale changes. And we ourselves are becoming larger, and our problems are smaller.