Recently I was watching a video by a well-known NLP trainer, Michael Hall, in which he was discussing the development of personal mastery. This, of course, raises the question: What is personal mastery? And as Hall points out, the answer is surely different for each person. To start the seminar, he gives his own examples of how he has achieved or is moving towards personal mastery in his own life. These are paraphrased below and provide good examples of what the video course is designed to achieve:
- the ability to be in control of my brain and to run it any way that I want to run it.
- the ability to manage my emotions, so that ‘I have them’, rather than ‘they have me’.
- being able to say what I want to say, having the flexibility to express myself in the way that gets the type of communication response that I want.
- getting the intentions from the back of my mind into the front of my life, so that I can do the things that I want to do.
- using my resources effectively to move in the world in a way that supports my relationships, my work and all my other activities.
- being congruent – being authentic – being able to take the ups and downs of life and bounce back
Unfortunately, the video and audio quality was a little poor which may have been the result of digitization of an old VHS video or other analogue format. Some tweaking with the equalizer helped the audio considerably (I recommend the ‘Live Music’ setting which worked very well in reducing the hiss and other noise!)
In the blurb for the video, the course is described as follows:
… a course that accesses and allows you to re-structure your
* mind and emotions
* self-sabotaging frames
* innate genius for personal and interpersonal development
* passion for the excellence of expertise
* languaging for empowering semantic states
* mind-muscle connection for greater congruency
Apart from the problems with the audio, Michael Hall’s use of language is sometimes a barrier to understanding the material that he is presenting. He is clearly extremely proficient at NLP and very widely read, but his presentation style and language use is quite similar to John Grinder. The extensive use of academic-sounding language is sometimes useful for relating the ideas to other fields, but probably more often makes simple ideas more difficult to understand until the listener/viewer has managed to penetrate Hall’s terminology. As a researcher myself, I am very familiar with the necessity to use appropriate academic language in order to define terms clearly in a way that is understandable to all within the discourse community, yet like many conference presentations that I have attended the dense language used in the video was often off-putting.
Conversely, Hall demonstrates that he has a very good command of persuasive language in the many demonstrations in the videos. He also has excellent hypnosis skills and the videos include a lovely trance induction which he uses to let the participants get a recharging rest. While the trainer himself needs a break once in a while, it is nice to see this respectful atmosphere created for the seminar participants, and I would have liked to have some of these trance breaks in some of my trainings in the past! As well as helping the participants to relax, Hall is quite entertaining. He uses Peanuts cartoons (featuring Charlie Brown, Snoopy and all their friends) to explain metastates in a very fun way.
Another way that Hall explains the concept of metastates is through ‘outframing’. A higher state gives us a bigger frame in which to view the original situation. Hall also illustrates the concept by using the old Einstein quote that “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
The demonstrations of processes show Hall using very powerful language and creating effective change in a very short time. One example is Hall’s alignment process which is similar to the more widely known parts integration process. Rather than dealing with the common examples of two contradictory behaviors, the process searches for the higher intention or higher state of two contradictory states and then integrates them. In another process, he identifies and utilizes what he calls the ‘executive’ in the mind, a higher state that makes the decisions and guides the lower states. The idea of ‘executive’ is very useful terminology, and I can see that it would be very useful for NLP training in a business context, but throughout this process and others there is an awful lot of terminology hiding what appear to be relatively simple chunking up processes, or identifying the core state as in the core transformation process.
Hall also puts a strong focus on what he calls the mind-muscle connection (similar to bodywork or Dilt’s idea of somatic mind) and helps the participants to find the body postures that will best recall a powerful state. He also uses physical anchors in a nice realization of an exercise in Grinder’s book, Whispering in the Wind–in the Commitment Process, he emphasizes the importance of creating clean states which are 100% available when required. He has the participant set up two very different states in different locations and adds resources to each to make it powerful. Then the participant practices moving from one state to another, in a totally clean manner, so that there is no contamination between the states. This is a very valuable exercise since our resourceful states do tend to get diluted or contaminated by other states. Hall reminds us that leaving a resourceful state fully and completely is just as important as accessing it.
Near the end of the videos, there is an interesting discussion of the differences between NLP and neurosemantics. Hall admits that the distinction is arbitrary but says that everything at ‘primary level’ is NLP, and those above it are Neurosemantics. As an example, he suggests that anchoring is at primary level and falls into the classical definition of NLP. The processes that he demonstrates in the videos which involve metastates would be considered as neurosemantics. For more information on neurosemantics, you can visit Michael Hall’s website.
Overall, I was a little disappointed by the video series. While it contains some very useful demonstrations and a new perspective on NLP, much of the material seemed to simply add a new level of terminology to the field without adding any substantial new ideas.