I met Michael Colgrass when he took on the role of a trainer at our NLP course at NLPU in Santa Cruz this summer. I say that he took on the role because Michael is a fascinating and inspirational man who takes on many roles throughout his life. From a very young age, he fell in love with the drums and went on to become a professional jazz drummer. Later, he studied composition and wrote extensively for drums. Along the way, he became a clown and many other things besides. Also, along the way, he met John Grinder who decided to model him which led to Michael’s long-term interest in NLP.
My Lessons with Kumi is the ultimate expression of this interest in NLP by a person who has truly lived the spirit of NLP and the striving for excellence in his own life. Michael is a highly congruent person and the same inspirational spirit comes to his audience whether he is talking, standing on his head, dancing, playing the drums, or taking on the role of an author in this book.
My Lessons with Kumi is very different to most NLP books. Rather than being a straightforward description of the presuppositions, concepts, and processes of NLP, the book is written as a fictional account of Nick who is having problems in his work, relationships, and health and who has decided to find answers. In the book, the character Kumi is clearly helping Nick to naturally develop the concepts of NLP through exercises and raising of self-awareness, but the word NLP never actually occurs within its pages.
As we read about Nick’s growth at Kumi’s cabin in the mountains and later in New York City, people who have undergone their own development through NLP will recognize many of their own experiences, but in a very readable style almost completely absent of the terminology of NLP that can sometimes be off-putting and sound pseudo-scientific.
In this easy-to-follow narrative, Kumi guides Nick through standard NLP techniques and concepts such as submodalities, anchoring of resourceful states, modelling and role-models, somatic syntax, logical levels and much more. Colgrass also draws on his other life experiences as a performer to include important areas such as voice projection, tuning the human instrument, and silent performing.
For those who are already familiar with NLP, this book offers a new perspective in which to explore it, as well as a different form of metaphor which can be used to explain it to others. For readers who are not familiar with NLP, this book will be an interesting introduction to the subject which can teach at an unconscious level as well as a conscious level.
The book is divided into two parts a) the narrative of Kumi and Nick and b) Nick’s notes on the exercises. Part b at the back of the book provides a completely different perspective on the narrative and an additional way to use the book. In each case, Nick has transformed his experience with Kumi into an exercise. In other words, he has recreated many NLP exercises through modelling of the experiences that he went through with Kumi. This model of modelling provides a pathway to the very core of NLP and is a fine example of how NLP is ultimately the pursuit of the structure of excellence and of ways in which we allow others to replicate that excellence.
I highly recommend getting a copy of My Lessons With Kumi, a book that lives up to its two subtitles: “How I learned to perform with confidence in life and in work” and “…enlightens as it entertains.”
Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
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NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com