Over the weekend, we had the honour of hosting the NLP connections 2013 event at my university, Nagoya Institute of technology. After months of preparation and  imagining the event, it was wonderful to see it actually coming into existence. We had participants from Nagoya, of course, we also had people coming from as far away as Tokyo and Chiba. As always, we first have to create something in our minds and then we can bring it into the world! Thanks to Yuko Yamamoto and so many others for helping to bring this NLP Connections Event into the world.
On Saturday November 23rd, we started the event with a lovely Introduction to NLP workshop. Some new faces, some familiar faces, and lots of great learning. As always, it’s great to see new folks becoming aware of how useful NLP can be.
Sunday morning (11/24) began with the Meet and Greet at Starbucks near the venue. We all picked up our caffeine for the day, introduced ourselves,and then headed across the road over to the university to begin the conference at 10 AM.
The first event of the day was a state management activity which was designed to help the participants get into a good state to stay in a good state for the entire day of learning. Sometimes caffeine just isn’t enough to keep people going throughout the day 🙂 And NLP recognizes that managing our own state is vital to ensure that we can keep learning. Brian Cullen and Yuko Yamamoto carried out the COACH process in both English and Japanese, simultaneously. The COACH process is a beautiful state management process which we learned from Robert Dilts at NLP University in Santa Cruz, California. Every morning at NLP you, Robert Dilts led us in the coach process and it was a beautiful way to start today to ensure that we were centered, open, aware, connected, and holding onto those resources all through the day. There is an audio version of the COACH state available if you would like to use it yourself. It’s currently only in English, and we will try to get a Japanese version up there soon.
Next, Yukari Horiguchi from the NLP Institute of Japan carried out a lovely session which focused on the characteristics of high-performing people. Yukari is a successful business coach and trainer, and she carries out executive training and coaching both in English and Japanese. Recently, she has been doing training in Canada as well as Japan. During her presentation, she did a live demonstration, working with of the participants and helping him through a coaching session. Later, she summarized the characteristics of highly performing people. One of the key points that I took away from Yukari’s presentation is that high-performing people have the ability for self acknowledgment. Of course, they are also open to external feedback and have highly developed sensory acuity and self-expression in Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic.  In addition, however high-performing people have a strong ability to recognize their own success and to self-acknowledge, without having to rely on external supportive feedback.
After lunch, Yuko Yamamoto from Tokyo talked to us about the use of NLP in the workplace. Yuko is a pharmacist, and she uses her NLP skills on a daily basis with co-workers and patients. Yuko led us in a very useful process for helping people in the company to come into alignment with the same purpose or goal. When people come into alignment, they can often discover that personal conflicts and friction are reduced as they recognize that they are moving towards the same goal.
The next session of the day went straight to the heart of NLP – modeling. Most of the session was led by Brad Deacon from Nanzan University, Nagoya. Brad did a great modeling session by asking one of the participants to come up as a volunteer. In the presentation, the experiential array was introduced as a tool for modeling. The experiential array is a tool developed by David Gordon, one of the members of the original group of NLP back in the early 1970s. Because the experiential array takes quite a long time to use in its complete version, the participants were offered four questions which concisely address the same areas as the entire experiential array. These four questions addressed four of the primary factors underlying a person’s performance: beliefs, emotions, strategies, and external behaviors. The participants had time to get into pairs and model an ability that one of the people was good at doing. In this way, participants were able to truly experience modeling, a core element of the NLP approach.
For a break and recreation of a good state, Brian Cullen then played us one of his NLP-based songs, My Friend John which had people beaming with its embedded Milton Language patterns and the suggestion to smile!
Finally, Ben Backwell from Nagoya City University introduced positive psychology and helped participants to explore connections between positive psychology and NLP. Â NLP has been described by Michael Hall as having originally arisen from the human potential movement, and it is wonderful to see that psychology is revisiting these ideas and has now begun to look at how humans can be happier and be more effective in the world, rather than simply focusing on their problems. Through Ben’s fascinating talk, we were able to understand how many of the ideas of NLP are now being reflected in positive psychology, and how these ideas are beginning to have a positive impact on millions of people’s lives.
At the end of the day, Brian Cullen and Yuko Yamamoto took a few minutes to thank everybody for the dissipating and to draw the threads of the day together. Everyone also had an opportunity to look forward to seeing how NLP connections could continue in the future to provide a space in the venue for sharing and expanding on the concepts of NLP on exploring how these useful ideas and techniques can be brought further and really be put into action in Japan and beyond.
NLP connections 2013 was a great success on many levels. It has provided an opportunity for us to share, it gave us all fresh inspiration, and it is the first step towards bringing NLP trainers in Japan together even more in order to put this powerful technology of NLP into effect in order to improve people’s personal and working lives.
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Looking forward to seeing you all again soon and at NLP Connections 2014!
Dr. Brian Cullen.
www.standinginspirit.com