I’ll be hosting a one-day event with Michael Neill in September.
Building on the ideas in his best-selling book Supercoach, Michael will teach the fundamentals of Transformative Coaching at this one-day masterclass event in London.
The event is open to anyone.
Please visit www.transformativecoaching.co.uk for all the details.
There’s been a great response to my article Can NLP Be What It Has Become? Google Analytics shows that more than 4,000 people have read it over the last two days and there are dozens of comments, from many perspectives.
I’m very pleased to announce that John Grinder has agreed to do an interview with me to share his ideas about the past, present and future of NLP. Look out for that soon.
He’s also going to do an open evening event in August so you can meet him in person and ask your own questions. He’ll do a presentation about the early years of NLP, how it has evolved, his development of New Code NLP – with Carmen Bostic St Clair – and their vision for the future. Then there will also be lots of time for questions and answers.
It will be a three hour evening event on the 13th August 2009, in Brighton, UK, and tickets cost £45. We’ll fit in as many people as possible but it’s going to be a very popular event so please book early. You can get your ticket from John’s agent in the UK, founder of the NLP Academy, Michael Carroll. Call: 020 8686 9952 (+44 20 8686 9952).
The event is supported by NLP Connections.
There are more than 500 books about NLP on Amazon. Most of them have been written by people the original developers don’t know and don’t agree with. This article is to ask the question: can NLP be what it has become?
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is an unwieldy name for an innovative field. It is – or was – about the structure of human experience. How do we construct our experience? And, by extension, how can we influence how other people construct their experience?
The field originally grew out of a small study group at the University of California in the 1970s. The key players were a mathematician, Richard Bandler, and a linguistics professor, Dr John Grinder. They began to notice patterns and calculate “models” of how various people thought, behaved and communicated. They modelled the legendary hypnotherapist and father of Ericksonian Hypnosis, Milton H Erickson; the pioneering family therapist, Virginia Satir; and the founder of Gestalt Therapy, Fritz Perls. Non-therapists included some successful sales people and negotiators, as well as people around town who’d made significant changes in their own life. The Phobia Project, for example, involved Richard Bandler modelling a whole series of volunteers who used to have a phobia and no longer had it. He says he was interested in what they’d done to “lose” their phobia, and he found they’d all done more-or-less the same thing. Once he had a model of how they’d done it, he taught that to others and demonstrated that anyone could do the same thing and get the same results.
The key point here is that Richard turned his model into a technique. He called it the Fast Phobia Cure and taught it as part of his NLP training programs. He said: “NLP is an attitude and methodology that leaves behind a trail of techniques”. But quite early on there was already some confusion between a) NLP – studying the structure of experience, using the attitude and methodology of modelling, and b) Applications of NLP – using the “trail of techniques” to influence yourself and other people.
Nowadays there are techniques for almost everything. An average NLP practitioner course will teach you techniques for becoming more confident, motivated and determined; for changing beliefs, stopping pain, ending addictions, inducing hypnotic phenomena… and the list goes on and on. Some trainers say you can change your eye colour using their techniques. One guy I met even said he could induce hypnotic penis enlargements!
Paul McKenna famously modelled how naturally thin people think about food, and he turned that into a best-selling book, I Can Make You Thin. Then he modelled how extremely rich people think about money – including Richard Branson, Peter Jones, Sir Philip Green and Stelios Haji-Ioannou – and he turned that into another best-selling book, I Can Make You Rich. It’s a similar process: work out how people do something that others want to do, then use what you work out to create a simple technique/formula/set of rules that other people can use to get the same results. These techniques are obviously popular and commercially valuable. Paul McKenna and others have helped millions of people by sharing the techniques in easily-accessible formats.
It’s become really confusing though. As a brand, NLP is in chaos. Ask 100 certified practitioners what the field is about and you’ll probably get 100 different answers. Even the original developers of the field now disagree. Like most groups of young people, they fell in and out of love. Some of them got married to each other, and then divorced. 35 years on, most of them aren’t speaking. There have been several big fights and court cases. Now they’re going in different directions, each anointing layers of trainers, master trainers and apprentices to support them. And, inevitably, many of those people are going in their own direction now too. Christina Hall, for instance, Richard’s first apprentice, now has her own version of the Society of NLP and her trainer’s training is completely different to Richard’s. You could go to ten different trainings and learn ten different and contradictory things – all claiming to be NLP.
I think Bandler and Grinder’s pioneering work led to a paradigm shift that – like the development of positive psychology (studying people who are doing well rather than people who are unhappy or “mentally ill”) – has had a tremendous impact on the success of millions of people. I find their work very useful and I have learnt a lot from both of them, directly and indirectly. I love them both, they have my respect and I think they’re very talented, clever and original people.
But how have they been as leaders of their field?
“Follow me, I’m right behind you.”
I think they’re killing their legacy. They’ve certified lots of people for lots of money but most of them have had no more than a few days training, learning things like the Fast Phobia Cure in a class of 500+ other students. Often they’ve had no chance to practice with supervision or ask their teacher any questions.
Those are the people who are now selling books on Amazon and using YouTube to promote their version of NLP. They’re the people who are presenting themselves as the best in the field. They’re the ambassadors.
Is it any wonder there’s so much scepticism?
Related article: No checks, just cheques
I love optical illusions. This is one of my favourites because it’s really hard to believe those horizontal lines are straight, even though I have measured them with a ruler several times!
This one below is another of my favourites. In fact, I love everything by Octavio Ocampo. I have several of his pictures around my house and office.
It’s an elusive obvious: most people I know want to be successful, yet very few have more than a vague idea about what being successful actually means to them.
So since I haven’t blogged for a while and since several people are bugging me about it, I thought I’d return with a cheery and uplifting message: you’re all gonna die.
It happens to us all in the end. Even Michael Jackson died. (Did you hear?)
So sometimes I think it’s interesting to think about success just one day at a time.
What would it mean to be successful today?
Because my guess is that’s how you become more and more successful. One day at a time.
Though what would be different if you knew it was your last year, your last week or your last day on earth? What would make the day successful then?
And – if that answer is different to today’s “I have no plans to die any time soon” answer – what does that tell us about the nature of success?
My friend Michael Neill has a great new idea – and you can get involved.
All you need is an “impossible” project. It can be anything from writing your first novel to losing 30lbs or earning £50,000.
Michael will coach you for 30 days. You’ll get an e-book to start things off, then an audio message from him each day. There will also be special “action days” where you can go online or join a group teleconference. And there’s a private forum too.
There are only two prerequisites for your project:
If you are a member of Michael’s Solutions Cafe or Steve Chandler’s Club Fearless, you can take part in this for free. If you are not a member of either, (why not???), you can still take part for only $99.
Go on… make the impossible possible!
This is one of my favourite George Carlin clips. I hope you like it too.
I was intrigued yesterday when a friend said she must introduce me to someone she knows… because he’s so intelligent, you’re bound to get on. Yeah, right. I rarely like anyone who’s so anything.
But it got me thinking – what’s the big deal about being intelligent, and how can we define or measure it? After all, our brains are all made of the same mushy stuff. Why are some people told they’re intelligent and others not so much?
So while I sit here on what must surely be the slowest train going into London today, I thought I’d splurge out my thoughts on the subject of intelligence. 
First, I really like the idea that comes from Success Intelligence - that there are four kinds of intelligence. Already that’s creating some useful distinctions. There’s traditional cleverness, which is what most people think of as intelligence, at least in this culture; the newly-fashionable Emotional Intelligence, about how smart you are with your feelings; and then also physical intelligence and spiritual intelligence. Robert Holden has written elequently on these distinctions – and his book is only 1p on Amazon – so I’ll add a link to that rather than repeat him here.
I’m also really into Eric Robbie’s finer distinctions and his work on the Levels of Internal Dialog. Recent MRI research is beginning to confirm what Eric started teaching two decades ago: there are at least seven ways of talking to yourself inside your head (seven levels of internal dialog) and each uses different parts of the brain.
Since I think internal dialog is mostly a fancy way of saying “thinking”, I would go even further than Eric and say he’s discovered seven different ways of thinking (processes), while the Success Intelligence people have created four different categories of thoughts (content).
So imagine a matrix. Someone might be good at remembering physical movements – like in a sport; they might be good at formulating ideas about concepts – like in science; and they might be good at wondering about their place in the universe – like in philosophy.
In other words, there’s a process and a context.
We’ve all met people who are extremely clever at some things but they can’t walk across the room without bumping into something – or they can’t remember birthdays, or they can’t connect with their children.
Saying people are intelligent or not intelligent therefore seems too simplistic. I’m interested in what processes people are good at and in which contexts they typically run those processes. Combining the models from Success Intelligence and Eric Robbie seems like a good way to think about that. And the idea of a matrix allows for easy cross-mapping, to develop intelligence.
I’ll be playing with that idea for a while.
I’m working on a new project that uses google maps. The more I look at the map, the more something seems really odd about it.
Because the world is round and maps are typically flat and rectangular, cartographers use a magic formula to represent 3d reality on a 2d page (or screen). The trouble is, it’s not magic enough. Do you realise the map we’re used to seeing all over the place is hugely distorted?
Africa, for example, appears to be roughly the same size as Greenland. In fact, Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland. Ooops!
South America appears roughly the same size as Europe – but South America is actually double the size of Europe. India appears roughly the same size as Scandinavia – but India is actually three times the size of Scandinavia. Ooops and ooops again!
From school books to newspaper articles, I’ve seen this bold representation of what our world looks like thousands of times – and it’s a mathematical illusion. It’s also politically sensitive. Many rich white countries are shown bigger than they really are while many poverty-stricken countries are reduced to a fraction of their true size.
As Count Alfred Korzypski said in 1931: the map is not the territory. Too right it’s not!
And yet… what a useful concept.
I think we’re all a bit like cartographers really. We can’t possibly represent the whole world inside our small heads, so we create a kind of internal map. And, like cartographers, our maps of the world are necessarily distorted. We delete some bits and generalise others. We focus tremendous attention on a few things and dismiss many other things as unimportant.
That’s why I think the best kind of therapeutic changework happens when you rearrange “reality tunnels”. When I work with clients, I carefully and deliberately distort their internal maps to emphasise the beliefs and values that are going to be most useful for them to get where they want to be.
When I consult for political campaigns, we utilise similar principles. In essence: you change reality by changing people’s representations of reality. It’s all about what you get people to focus on and what patterns you can build between their representations.
That’s why it bothers me that Africa is shown on the map so much smaller than it really is. For every one person living in Greenland, there are 1,500 living in Africa – many of them without clean water. Don’t they at least deserve to be represented on the map fairly?
Here’s an alternative map known as The Peter’s Projection. It was unveiled by Arno Peters in 1973 and he described it as “an area accurate map”.
Welcome to planet earth!
One of the upsides/downsides* of running NLP Connections, (* depending on my mood), is that I get sent a lot of business proposals. Having the largest mailing list in the field as well as the most-visited website seems to make me quite popular. And they say size doesn’t matter!
For me, a successful project is based on four things: vision, relationships, tasks and passion – and in most cases I think they’re all equally important. A good partnership is about creating balance. You won’t get far if you share out the labour (the tasks) but don’t plan on succeeding with the other three major components.
The history of NLP is littered with partnerships that collapsed because even the “communication experts” focussed on sharing the work but failed to collaborate on a shared vision. I think lasting partnerships are built on strong relationships and mutual passion for becoming more successful together than you could each be individually. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been interested in magic since my mum gave me a set of magic tricks to impress the other kids with. There’s a sense of wonder that comes from magic, and many kids – and especially geeky kids – absolutely revel in it. As above, so below. As an adult, I’ve continued to explore the sense of wonder that we can achieve with what I consider true magick to be – the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will.
It’s been almost a year now since the most surreal week of my life. It began with a sudden and rather odd obsession Read the rest of this entry »
Mobile broadband is so very liberating. Yesterday my “office” was in Richmond Park – today I am at Stonehenge. I can do most of my work anywhere, anytime. Love it!
I had a client this morning who tried to convince me he was addicted to cocaine. I convinced him that he isn’t.
Addictions are a funny thing because people usually believe they’re addicted to the drug – or the activity – when in fact it’s the familiarity they crave.
I asked him – would you be ok to have twice as much drug every day?
No way – that would mess everything up!
Human beings like what’s familiar. We’re creatures of habit.
Richard Bandler often tells the story of when Virginia Satir asked him what is the greatest instinct of human beings. “Survival?”, he suggested. And oddly that’s not right in most cases, because – as Virginia pointed out – many people will commit suicide rather than confront the unknown.
The “secret” of effective therapy is to make the old problem seem unfamiliar and the new direction seem familiar.
The people who successfully give up drugs are the ones who embrace something new and focus on that. It’s not about stopping one thing but starting another.
When you make your life about what you really want, that’s when you can get it really easily.
Right now I really want some Cherry Coke. But I’m not addicted, honest. It’s just a habit.
I spoke briefly with former deputy prime minister John Prescott. He’s been caught up in the expenses row like so many MPs, and it was interesting to hear his perspective. Politicians on the telly often seem so distant – and they are. But when one of them makes eye contact and tells you what life’s like for them, it’s like that moment when you first realised your parents are only human too.
The story with John is that he claimed for two toilet seats. Of all the stories going round, this one would be insignificant if it wasn’t so funny to picture John sitting on the toilet and the poor toilet collapsing under the pressure.
What really happened is he bought a toilet seat (which he paid for himself), and while a plumber was there anyway, to fix his taps, he asked him to fit the seat too. Unfortunately it wasn’t a good fit (because John had bought the wrong size seat!) and when he next had a plumber in again for something else, he asked him to tighten the seat.
Only in media land could this translate to “Prezza claims for two toilet seats in two years”.
I think we actually get better politicians than we deserve. When I worked in Parliament, I was amazed by how dedicated and caring most MPs are. The so-called gravy train is pathetic compared to what most of them could earn in other walks of life. The greedy politician is mostly a media invention.
I couldn’t help but laugh at the image of John destroying a succession of toilets. But I think he deserves better, and I think we all deserve better than to be represented by people we turn into figures of fun. Satire is good for democracy; disdain isn’t.
Congratulations to John for rising above it – and also for becoming a grandfather this week.
I’ve found a delightful little site. Steve Chandler’s Club Fearless offers awesome value for anybody who wants to live an inspired life without fear.
Michael Neill told me about it. Steve offers so much value, it’s wonderful. So far I’ve been a member for two months and already he’s posted me two books and three CDs, as well as delivering hours worth of online content, including several e-books and downloadable audiobooks, his success journal and his reports on who is fearless in the world.
The cornerstone of the club is a live teleclass every month, and you get a CD of that posted to you – anywhere in the world.
All this for $19 a month.
Everyone else seems to have a blog, and now I have one too. Welcome to my world. Enjoy!