It’s all about cause and effect, isn’t it? Are you in charge of events or are events in charge of you? The co-founder of NLP, John Grinder, said that if you kick a ball you can pretty much predict what’s going to happen based on the laws of physics.
But what happens if you try to kick a cat? The cat might possibly get kicked the first time, but in future it is as just as likely to jump out of your way, dig its nails into your leg, or just avoid you–that cat is flexible enough to learn and to respond in different ways.
In NLP, we say that a person is at-cause or at-effect. If you are at-effect, you believe that others are responsible for your success and happiness. If you are at-cause, you take responsibility for your own actions and results–you can put traumas or phobias firmly into your past, proactively improve your communication and relationships, and carry out realistic personal and professional goals to build the type of life that you want for yourself. Or as the other co-founder of NLP, Richard Bandler wrote in a recent book, you “get over it … get through it … and get to it.”
Japan is facing many societal and economic challenges and things could easily get much worse before they get better, meaning that a lot of people may get kicked by events that are outside their control. Perhaps the important question is whether you play the role of a ball or of a cat. You will never be able to control external events, but you can learn to take control of your own thinking and communication to achieve the best results in your personal and working life.
Dr. Brian Cullen is holding introductory workshops to NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) in Chikusa, Nagoya on December 18, January 15, and March 11. The cost is 1,500 yen. Email info@standinginspirit.com for details.
Category: Blog
I consider myself very fortunate to have trained with Richard Bolstad for my NLP practitioner and master practitioner courses. Along with Judith DeLozier, he stands out for me as one of the most personally and professionally congruent people in the field of NLP. I got this audio program many years ago and got a whole new level of understanding by listening to it again after a gap of many years.
The audio program was produced by the NLP training institute, Transformations, which also included the trainers Margot Hamblett (Richard’s partner who passed away several years ago), Bryan Roads, and Lynn Timpany.
This audio program offers many of the best examples of using NLP to teach NLP that I have heard or seen. Richard is a powerful communicator who has thoroughly integrated the presuppositions, language patterns, and techniques of NLP into his own trainings. He introduces many of the techniques through multi-layered metaphors and nested loops and uses Milton language throughout to help students to learn at both a conscious and unconscious level. An indirect teaching through metaphor is always followed by step-by-step explanations to facilitate conscious learning of the process.
Richard and his partner, Margot, also use many memory devices such as memory pegs which are used to help the students quickly learn the patterns of the Meta Model. Richard trained with Tad James and while Tad James’ influence is still clearly evident, he has improved that already effective approach in many ways that have made his teaching very much his own.
The website describes the product as follows:
Sixteen 45 minute CDs recorded at the Transformations Practitioner course, as taught in New Zealand and Japan. Covers an introduction to NLP, rapport building, sensory system use, language patterns for clarification and influence, reframing, healing past trauma, conflicts, limiting beliefs, confusions and phobias, setting and achieving future goals, and much more.
Although it does indeed cover all of these processes and ideas in detail, this audio program can probably best be thought of as a follow-up and refresher for NLP practitioners, rather than as a complete program in itself. Of course, if you get the opportunity to supplement your listening with live training by Richard Bolstad, that is a very fine combination, indeed.
By chance, I listened to this series by Chris Howard right after I had watched Tad James Practitioner Course DVDs, and the similarities are enormous, right down to almost the same words in the same stories in many cases. I did a quick Google search and it looks like Christopher Howard trained with Tad James. However Christopher Howard has modelled Tad James so closely that the courses seem indistinguishable at many points. This is not necessecarily a criticism as Tad James’ courses are very well presented and chunked for easy learning, and Howard’s courses follow the same easily-digested format. It is rather amusing, however, to hear the stories about Howard’s clients which follow precisely the same words as Tad James’ clients, and perhaps ironic for a product that Chris Howard calls Creation Technologies. However, despite any ironies, this is a quality product that will be very useful for many people.
Although Tad James’s courses are called ‘accelerated’, they are tortoises compared to the speeding hare that is Howard. The speed of delivery is very fast and I found this quite effective, but it might be difficult for beginners, or for people who want to take more time to carry out processes. However, doing the processes quickly does have the benefit that things are often moving faster than the conscious mind can keep up, and it is the unconscious mind that can make the changes. Another advantage of the high speed pace is that the total length of the course (78 tracks on 22 CDs) is only about 9 hour, thus allowing it to be listened to in its entirety several times in the time that it would take to listen to some other courses only once. Of course, this speed is a matter of personal preference, and some people will clearly find it too quick.
The course covers all the essential bases of NLP practitioner well including well-formed outcomes, anchoring, rapport, strategies, meta model, Milton model, and much more. I would highly recommend it for people who want to get a fast refresher on all the basics of NLP.
In CD13, Howard takes a sudden jump into talk about energy work and Huna. This is again presumably drawn at least partly from Tad James’ work, but Tad James makes the demarkation between NLP and Huna much clearer than Howard, and the sudden leap into energy work in the middle of the program right between Anchoring and Parts Integration is slightly disorientating!
Unlike many NLP audio courses which are recorded in a live setting, the audio is very well recorded and clear, and I particularly enjoyed Howard’s use of music throughout the program. It is very professionally produced and presented with great instrumentals linking the lessons and even providing background for doing the exercises. Howard’s voice also worked well for me in the inductions which were well designed and had nice timing, obviously a little slower than the high speed of the regular lessons!
This 16 disk DVD set is a professionally produced video presentation of parts of Tad James seven day NLP practitioner certification program. Each DVD is about 90 minutes, so there is a huge amount of material presented, especially since it is very well edited to leave out unnecessary segments and to add in commentary by the trainers on the processes. It is available at the nlpcoaching.com site.
It covers all the basic NLP processes comprehensively and effectively including sensory acuity, rapport, submodalities, and anchoring. The demonstrations with participants for each process are very smoothly carried out, and Tad James shows his long experience in training by following the script closely and only demonstrating what he explicitly intends to demonstrate.
The series also includes several DVDs on Time Line Therapy, a powerful change technique for which Tad James is probably best known. In fast-paced and effective demonstrations, the trainers use Time Line Therapy to remove negative emotions and limiting beliefs from participants. Then they take the whole group on a fast floating journey to remove any anxiety in the future. They also show how to place a future goal in the Time Line in a way that is likely to maximize its possibility of success. These are all very useful processes.
Tad James is presenting the course with his wife, Adriana James, who is equally proficient in the practice of NLP, although she is less well known than Tad. The two of them work well together throughout although some of the jokes and little stories seem somewhat contrived – presumably after being regurgitated in too many seminars. On the other hand, this huge amount of practice is very useful in the superb double inductions which feature in the hypnosis training section of the course. They are a fine team and in general come across as very genuine in their desire to empower people and to spread the useful skills of NLP.
This video series is probably most useful for people who have studied NLP elsewhere and want to get a new perspective, or of course, for people who actually took the course and want to get a review. For people who have not studied NLP before, it will certainly be useful, but the necessary lack of interactivity in a video series could give the viewer the congnitive concepts of NLP without the experiential learning that is necessary to make sense of it and to realize its true value.
For me, Tad James sometimes comes across as a little arrogrant, for example when he talks about Time Line Therapy as the greatest invention in the history of mankind, and his self-positioning as ‘the expert’ for values and metaprograms. From the demonstrations, he is clearly on top of his material and an extremely skillful user of hypnosis and NLP, so this self-promotion and self-positioning probably wasn’t necessary and in my eyes at least, actually had a negative impact.
One of the last DVDs was pretty much a commercial for the Master Practitioner program. In fact, throughout the last few DVDs, there were various references and suggestions to sign up for the Master Practitioner course. Personally, I felt that it was a little too much upselling of other products, but I’m sure that some people will be happy to get the addiitional information about the higher level material that is available.
I didn’t enjoy the Huna section so much either. While the trainers emphasize that it isn’t NLP and are careful to differentiate it, I’m not sure that it sits well with the other videos and information and techniques presented in this series.
Overall, I highly recommend this video series to people who have studied NLP elsewhere. Tad James has a strong ability to condense a subject down to its essence and to present it easily in the form of small digestible chunks.
On YouTube recently, I came across a song that I remember very well from my childhood. It’s a great little song by Brendan Grace, an Irish singer, which tunefully taught us to cross the road safely. It’s also a lovely metaphor for creating rapport and raising your sensory acuity in NLP work. First, have a listen to the song (the lyrics are below the video):
And here are the lyrics:
Remember,
one, look for a safe place
two, don’t hurry, stop and wait,
three look all around and listen
before you cross the road,
remember,
four, let all the traffic pass you
five, then walking straight across you
six, keep watching,
that’s the safe cross code!!!!!
safe place, stop and wait
safe place, stop and wait
safe ground, look around, listen for a traffic sound
if traffic’s coming let it pass
until the road is clear at last
then walking straight across the road
keep watching, that’s the code.
remember,
one, look for a safe place
two, don’t hurry, stop and wait,
three look all around and listen
before you cross the road,
remember,
four, let all the traffic pass you
five, then walking straight across you
six, keep watching,
that’s the safe cross code
that’s the safe cross code
know the safe cross code
know the code!
—
Isn’t that a lovely metaphor for rapport? Set up a safe environment … don’t hurry … keep looking … keep listening. And let all the traffic pass you because there are a lot of things out there that can cause you to get off course from the client’s outcome. When you cross towards that outcome, you want to go straight across, as quickly and smoothly as possible.
And I wouldn’t like to suggest that the song goes around in your head until you’ve got it drilled into your unconscious behaviour – which is of course how I managed to survive past childhood and the crazy Irish drivers.
These coaching cards from Salad Ltd. are a resource that I come back to again and again. They were created by Jamie Smart who always does a very fine job of teaching NLP in his videos and other products. Previously, I have reviewed his excellent Ericksonian hypnosis cards, and this set reaches the same high quality.
These cards are mainly based around the linguistic patterns of the NLP Meta Model. The Meta Model was the first model devised by Bandler and Grinder and it still stands at the heart of NLP as the primary tool for helping people to re-access the experiences that have become encoded in the maps in their minds, to move back from the map to the territory in orcder to eventually create richer and more useful maps. While the Ericksonian cards aim to bring people into trance, these cards aim to chunk down, these cards aim to bring people back to reality and view it in fresh ways.
It is easy enough to learn the linguistic structures of the Meta Model, but it is only through enormous practice with a large number of examples that it is possible to get these patterns in the muscle to the extent that they flow naturally in a coaching situation. I have carried these cards on trains and planes and played with them for hours, sometimes just flicking through them as I thought of an issue in my own life, or sometimes playing card games either alone or with someone else. This is much much more fun and engaging than any other way that I have come across to learn and practice these patterns.
In addition to the cards, when you order a set from Salad, you also receive a link to a downloadable audio program in which Jamie Smart talks through the cards one by one, explaining each and giving examples taken from many different areas of life. I have often played this audio program several times in a row and it has helped me to absorb these language patterns at a much deeper level.
Salad also sells various DVD series featuring workshops by Jamie Smart and other people, and throughout the vidoes it is clear that Jamie is using the patterns effectively and congruently. I have no connection at all with Salad, but for anyone seriously interested in NLP coaching or related work, I highly recommend getting a set of these cards and a set of the Ericksonian hypnosis cards and allowing yourself the chance to have lots of fun as you take your language skills smoothly to the next level.
On October 29, I will be doing a presentation at Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan which examines some of our recent research into the potential of NLP for education, in particularly language learning. The title of the presentation is: Identifying and Transferring Extra-Curricular Skills to Language Learning, and as can be identified from the title it draws on NLP ideas of modelling. The theme of the conference is “Realizing Autonomy” for language learners, and strategy development and NLP modelling are clearly powerful resources for understanding areas and helping learners to reach their full potential. You can download the handout for the presentation which draws on many of our learnings from presenting the same research at a conference earlier in the year. The handout is quite extensive (7 pages) as there will probably not be enough time within the presentation to explain the data completely and it is nice to allow the participants to read it later.
Discover the Difference Video Series
by Christina Hall
Christina Hall has been training NLP since 1977. She collaborated closely with Richard Bandler for many years and was also closely involved with the development of many important NLP innovations including Submodalities, The Swish Pattern, and The Compulsion Blowout Technique. She also reportedly wrote or co-wrote some of the early manuals for NLP training, the influence of which is still felt today in trainings around the world. She is also a licensed psychotherapist, a Certified Hypnotherapist, and holds a Doctorate in Psychology and Neuro-Semantic Linguistics.
Apart from these qualifications and her long association with NLP, what is most significant for this review is her reputation as ‘the language master’. Her knowledge and expertise with using language is the primary attraction of this video series.
The video series examines the Meta Model in more detail than I have ever seen elsewhere. The Meta Model still lies at the heart of NLP, allowing practitioners to help people move back from their maps of the world to real sensory experience. Our maps of the world get encoded in language and we label experience with such words as ‘depression’, ‘success’, and ‘problem’. All of these nominalizations take us further from the simple fact that life is a series of ongoing processes – things that happen in time, right now. The Meta Model allows us to recognize the distortions, generalizations, and deletions that we have made from original experience when we represent them in language and memories. By using the Meta Model to revisit the original experience or recode it in more useful terms, it is possible to change our perception of the experience, to update our map. Thus, the Meta Model is fundamental to all NLP processes – the link that allows us to move between map and territory, and this video series explores all of the linguistic patterns in amazing detail.
The contents of the video series is shown below. Keeping in mind that each video is 90 minutes or more in length, you can begin to understand the depth to which Christina is taking the participants in understanding and using the Meta Model.
- Language as a Perceptual Tool
- Neurological Shifts and Temporal Perspectives
- Presuppositions and the Structure of Time
- Thinking Skills and Logical Levels 1
- Thinking Skills and Logical Levels 2
- Open Q&A Session on Language Patterns
- Universals and State Elicitation
- The Meta-Model as a System of Relations
- Chunking – Creating a Multi-Dimensional Network of Perspectives 1
- Chunking – Creating a Multi-Dimensional Network of Perspectives 2
- Building Intensity
- Guiding a Process of generalization
- Lost Performatives and Sorting Markers 1
- Lost Performatives and Sorting Markers 2
- Structuring Implications
- Complex Equivalencies
I wish I had been at the workshops where these videos were made. It is clear that a huge amount of learning was achieved, but watching it on video does not achieve nearly as much. One of the great advantages of being a participant would have been the ability to ask questions, to interpret Christina’s talk in the context that it was presented, and to enjoy the flow of learning as it naturally emerged. That is, of course, one of the disadvantages in watching it on video because much of the context and the perspective of being a live participant is lost. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to think of the fourth NLP metaprogram: Perceiver vs Judger. Being in the workshop is like being a Perceiver – enjoying the flow as it emerges. Watching in on video makes me wish that it had be created with a Judger in mind because the emergent organization is often not clear on the video. I would love to see an edited book version of this series, or perhaps to listen to a properly recorded straightforward lecture series based on the same material. Christina Hall has an awful lot of useful stuff to say about the Meta Model and other linguistic tools used in NLP, but watching these videos is a poor substitute for being there in person. Apart from the lack of structure, the video quality is not high enough to show what is being written on the board, so it is difficult for the viewer to follow along with the examples. Christina Hall hasn’t published much in NLP. I see that there is a Japanese language version of a book based on her seminars in Japan. I’m going to pick up a copy of that in a while, and will eventually get around to writing a review. However, I read English a whole lot better than Japanese, so it may take a while.
Complaints aside, this is an amazing resource for people who want to understand the Meta Model at a deeper level. It is definitely not for beginners in NLP. Not just Christian Hall, but also the participants in workshop are obviously extremely familiar with the linguistic distinctions and tools of NLP. If you are willing to take the time to watch the entirety of this series, and perhaps to watch it again and again, there is a wealth of material here that can benefit your NLP work. For me, I think it will probably be quicker to read the book in Japanese, and hopefully Christina or her publisher will get around to producing an English version one of these days that gets her great knowledge out to a wider audience. And one of these years, I’m going to take a few days off and listen to the whole thing again. This is worthwhile material.
The DVD series can be purchased here.
Here is a good summary of the topics covered from Christina’s website.
Tape 1: Opening: Language As A Perceptual Tool
A lot has been written in NLP about teaching to the unconscious. This tape shows a master of this valued skill at work. I counted four sets of embedded loops (with three to four stories each), three embedded trances, and nine spatial anchors, just to set up the seminar. And I’m sure I missed some. If you want to take your presentations to a new level, this tape is a must.
Tape 2: Neuro-Logical Shifts and Temporal Perspectives
Chris explains some of the primary Submodality differences among various parts of speech and temporal (time) sorts. This facilitates a change in the organization of a perceived “problem, ” setting a new orientation without necessarily having to do a formal NLP technique. She also shows how changes in language, even subtle ones, can enrich the traditional NLP Outcome Frame.
Tape 3: Presuppositions & the Structure of Time
Chris focuses on phonological ambiguities and gives a number of specific examples of common questions that can be improved. She also begins discussion on how certain words trigger Meta-Programs.
Tape 4 & 5: Thinking Skills and Logical Levels
Chris shows how prefixes and suffixes set the direction in someone’s thinking. She also uses them to form double and triple nominalizations.
Tape 6: An Open Session With Questions & Answers: Language Patterns
Chris answers questions including such topics as Lost Performatives, Modal Operators, Tag Questions, Meta-Programs, Polya patterns, implications and chunk size.
Tape 7: Universals and State Elicitation
If your idea of state elicitation is “Think of a time… ” you will be amazed at the information on this tape. Chris demonstrates how eliciting and pacing universal experiences are powerful tools of change.
Tape 8: The Meta-Model as a System of Relations
Most of us leaned the Meta-Model as a set of challenges to “violations”. Chris takes the Meta Model to a whole new level of utilization in demonstrating its reflexive and nested structure as an underlying matrix of patterning. With a touch of genius, Chris has transformed and redefined the Meta-Model beyond a mere information-gathering tool into an understandable and vastly more useful organizing skill.
Tape 9 & 10: Chunking: Creating a Multi-Dimensional Network of Perspectives.
Every person categorizes their experience to make sense of and organize the events of their life. Chris demonstrates how guiding an individual to change the ways in which they perceive and internally organize an event can access freedom to think more resourcefully.
Tapes 11: Building Intensity
Chris shows how to find the strategy that an individual already uses to build intensity to set a different direction creating and developing resources using the person’s own strategy.
Tape 12: Guiding the Process of Generalization
Chris uses backtracking and the art of questioning thereby opening up choices where someone thought there were none. She demonstrates how the Meta-Model questions you ask set a direction for any context.
Tape 13 & 14: Lost Performatives and Sorting Markers
Chris explores the interplay of Lost Performatives and Meta-Programs to track a person’s strategy. She also talks about the impact that Modal Operators and temporal markers play in the creation of Generalizations.
Tape 15: Structuring Implications
Chris leads an in-depth exploration of the power of implication through presupposition… a nested structure of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd order which support the universals in all languages.
Tape 16: Complex Equivalencies
Generalizations that map across logical levels, creating semantic confusion and resulting in unresourceful “behavior-to-identity” equivalents are a major source of what Korzybski refers to as “unsanity.” Here you will find tools to identify, unlock and render powerless those previously limited “realities”.
The Definitive Book of Body Language
by Allan and Barbara Pease (2004)
Now, this is a great book for anyone interested in body language, how we communicate non-verbally by the way we sit, move, and set up our surroundings. While it is written in a very readable, often humourous style, every single page is full of useful observations and generalizations about how to interpret body language.
The authors describe many of their own experiments. For example, by using namecards they rearranged the seating in training rooms and moved all the previously keen learners from the front to the back and sides of the room. This had the effect of reducing their learning and interest in what the trainer said. Conversely, the people who were moved into the front and center had a big increase in both learning and motivation. Along with their own research, they have explored the major research by Paul Eckman and many other body language researchers, and the back of the book contains a rather impressive seven pages of tightly typed references. What the authors have achieved is to summarize this research into highly useful and readable chunks that are accessible to the everyday reader.
In every one of the 19 chapters, there were moments when I just had to stop and go “wow, so that’s what was happening in that situation – if only I had known.” Maybe that’s simply because I’m a man, and men are notoriously worse at noticing body language than women. The female brain is organized for multi-tracking, to identify different conversational tones easily, and to subconsiously read the body language of other women and men. The promise of this book is that men can learn to achieve this through consciously reading the signals, and that everyone can learn to do it much much better.
The authors cover a huge range of topics which are shown below, and even the shorter chapters are packed full of useful information. This is a long-term reference book as well as a good read.
- Understanding the Basics
- Hands
- Smiles and laughter
- Arm signals
- Cultural differences
- Hand and thumb gestures
- Evaluation and Deceit Signals
- Eye Signals
- Territories and Personal Space
- Legs
- Common Everyday Gestures
- Mirroring – how we build rapport
- Secret signals of cigarettes, glasses and makeup
- Body pointing
- Courtship displays and attraction signals
- Ownership, territory, and height signals
- Seating arrangements
- Interviews, power plays and office politics
- Putting it all together
For NLP work, it is useful to ask: Does it work? There is no doubt that much of body language is common and can be judged relatively accurately using the information in this book. This is supported by the research by Ekman, the authors, and others. However, what is important is to always calibrate – the person in front of you is the most important person to be dealing with, and it is quite possible that they will deviate in some systematic ways from the information in this book. The key word here is ‘systematic’ – you still need to calibrate the person who is sitting in front of you to understand what any particular gesture or cluster of gestures means for that person. The greatest value in books of this type is that they raise our awareness of the sensory distinctions that we can use to improve our own sensory acuity. This book is a very fine map of the world of body language and highly recommended for anyone involved in NLP, but it is also useful to keep in mind that the map is still not the territory.
Dynamic Learning
by Robert B. Dilts & Todd A. Epstein
Because I have been a teacher for almost 20 years, Dynamic Learning is an NLP book that I have been meaning to read for a long time. Such a great title! That’s exactly what every teacher wants to see in their own classroom – dynamic learning happening as the students are engaged and learning content and strategies that will enrich their lives. Like many NLP books, Dynamic Learning is the transcript of a seminar and while this does add a certain sense that the reader can experience the ‘feeling’ of the seminar, this is one book that I felt could have done with a lot of editing. In some sections, the demonstrations seem to go on far longer than useful and they were clearly more useful in the shared physical space than they appear on the written page.
The blurb on the back of the book says that “The authors describe a multitude of ways to make learning fun, easy, and effective.” That’s a big goal and while the authors have provided some extremely useful advice in some areas, the book would have benefited from some more background information and statistical support as well as cutting down of the long demonstration transcripts.
Chapter 1 (The Fundamentals of Dynamic Learning) is essentially a short summary of NLP from the authors’ perspective including Dilts’ neurological levels model, a good introduction to strategies, and a kinesthetic approach to creating good learning states in the classroom through posture, gestures, and eye movements. For people already familiar with NLP, it seems brief, but undoubtedly it will be not enough for people who are not familiar with NLP, highlighting one of the difficulties of targeting an NLP-based book at a more generally area such as education.
Chapter 2 (Remembering Names) and Chapter 3 (Memory Strategies) offer some useful strategies, but they could have been greatly reduced in length. On the other hand, the long elicitation of these strategies given in the transcripts of the demonstrations may be interesting to NLP modellers or even teachers who are interested in modelling other skills important in learning. Chapter 4 explores how people can improve their senses (Visual, auditory, and kinesthetic) through simple exercises and also briefly examines submodalities.
Chapter 5 provides one of the better ideas in this book. It details how effective strategies can be transferred between two people. For example, two teachers or two students may have different strategies for achieving a task. By eliciting and sharing the goals of each person, and looking at their evidence procedures and operations, it potentially becomes possible to learn a strategy from a more effective learner. Combined with the sensory distinctions of NLP, this simple idea is very powerful.
Chapter 6 is an overly long account of the spelling strategy. The long transcriptions which bring the chapter to 57 pages (!) would have been better presented in the form of standard prose. Perhaps the core question that I kept asking myself is whether this book is about modelling or about the sharing of the results of modelling. From the point of view of the teacher who wants to use the spelling strategy, all the detail is unnecessary. For the dedicated NLP modeller, it certainly provides insight, but still seems far overpresented. The book seems to wander between modelling (which can be seen to be the core of NLP) and presenting useful things for teachers (the trail of techniques which results from this modelling).
As a language teacher and language learner, I was particularly interested in Chapter 7 (Learning Language). It introduces the NLP idea of second position modelling, stepping into the shoes of an expert speaker of the language and beginning to take on their gestures, beliefs and eventually language. In my own classrooms in Japan, this is something that would be very beneficial to students since their own highly-defined (if unconscious) Japanese identity is so strong that it tends to stop students from modelling non-Japanese. I found the rest of the chapter to be less useful. The obstacle course and other activities can be viewed as a repackaging of the classic TPR (total physical response) methodology introduced by Asher in the 1970s. The activities are useful, but this chapter adds little new to language teaching.
Chapter 8 provides some useful tips for increasing reading speed including the use of peripheral vision and the reduction of subvocalization.
Chapter 9 (Creative Writing) was my favourite in the book, and it provides some excellent ideas for using connectives (e.g. because, therefore, after, while …) as prompts for writing. On page 308, the authors do something that I always see as one of Robert Dilts’ great strengths – they combine several tools to create a more powerful tool or model. In the table below, they combine connectives with perceptual positions, representational systems and time frames to create a series of prompts that will help any stalled creative writer, or even an already active writer!
| Connective | Perspective | Representational System & Time Frame | |
|---|---|---|---|
| because | I | see – saw – will see | that |
| therefore | we | hear – heard- will hear | like |
| after | you | feel – felt – will feel | how |
| so that | They | touch – touched – will touch | as if |
For example, the writer can start off with any sentence such as:
I read a book today.
and then use one item from each column to continue something like the following:
I read a book today because I saw that it was raining outside. Therefore, we heard the sound of the mice as they ran through the ceiling like little robots gone haywire. After they had sufficiently un-nerved us, you turned to me and felt my heart, how it was beating much too fast. etc.
Chapter 10 offers some useful tips on assessment and how to deal with ‘resistance to learning’. The book also has some appendices which offer worksheets and some more background on Dilts’ neurological levels model and how it relates to Batesons’ levels of learning. This latter material could probably have been usefully presented at the beginning of the book to frame the authors’ important underlying idea that the most important thing is to learn is ‘how to learn’. When students can learn to learn and to take control of that learning, that is when we could truly get Dynamic Learning. While this book has some good ideas, there may be too much unessential material and too little signalling for the average busy teacher to get much out of it, and someday I would like to see a new Robert Dilts book where he refines the ideas of this book for an audience of teachers who could really use it to create dynamic learning in their classrooms and beyond.