If you haven’t heard about the NLP Festival 2015 yet, please check out the webpage. It’s going to be a really great event full of fun and learning. We have Martin Gustaffson, a master trainer of NLP, coming in from Sweden. There will be lessons in Self-hypnosis, workshops on state management, marketing NLP skills and more. And of course, on Saturday night, we will have the big social event with music, dancing, crystal bowls, and trancing. See you in Nagoya at the end of October.
Category: Blog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O318GJMnKo
Thanks to Richard Davies for interviewing me for his web program. It was a really fun interview in which we tried to define NLP and returned to the old Robert Dilts definition of “the study of the structure of Subjective Experience”. We also addressed the question of why NLP is not therapy, and how it can be used as a therapeutic tool. Lots of fun stuff here.
The Origins of NLP is a wonderful insight into the madness and chaos and genius of early NLP. I think that anyone who is serious about NLP would get a lot out of it.
In the past, I have written about MBTI (the Myers Briggs Type Indicator). This is a very commonly used test used to determine cognitive style and also called a ‘personality test’. The MBTI parameters are also used as the first four metaprograms in the field of NLP. In this post, I look at how MBTI can be used to understand and deal with problems like procrastination.
The Hypnotic Coach is an excellent book for people who want to understand the role of hypnosis in coaching.
Title: Heart of the Mind
Authors: Connirae Andreas and Steve Andreas
Published: 1989
For me, this is one of the classic NLP books, a beautifully written and very accessible book that explains so many of the key processes in NLP. It is full of real-life examples, and probably most importantly it has many transcripts of actual client sessions and the kind of change language that is assumed but not actually used in many NLP books.
Ben Backwell and I just completed a new textbook aimed at teaching goal-setting skills to university students in Japan. We are very happy with the way the book has turned out. It takes students on a semester-long journey starting with their dreams, changing these into actionable goals, and achieving each step through action plans. Along the way, students learn great skills like creating good habits, state management, and much more.
The book is due back from the printer next week, so I will be posting more details at that point.
Recently, I was doing a coaching session with the owner of a small language school. Very quickly, I saw that he was getting very confused and overwhelmed by the number of different things that he had to do in his work. Like many one-person businesses, on any particular day a huge range of different types of work can arise. For example in his case on a typical day, the lessons need to be prepared, the students need to be taught, the paperwork has to be completed, new projects need to be planned, the office needs to be cleaned, the telephone calls have to be made, the sales projections have to be planned …
Anyone who has run a small business, particularly a one-person business, knows exactly what I am talking about here.
We all have different goals that we want to achieve in our lives. And yet sometimes we find that months or even years go by and we seem to have made little progress on actually achieving them. What kinds of goals are actually achievable?
Parts of NLP, especially anchoring, can be seen as coming from the work of Pavlov and Skinner. This is an interesting article on the contributions and over-simplifications of Skinner. Skinner believed that our environment shapes us strongly. In terms of Dilts’ Logical Levels, we could view this kind of conditioning as happening only on the lowest levels, “Environment” and “Behaviour.” The work of Chomsky and the modern cognitive psychology movement has shown that there is a lot more controlling our behaviour than environmental variables (all the higher levels on the Logical Levels: Capabilities, Beliefs&Values, Identity etc.). Still, anchoring is such an effective technique that the work of Skinner is still highly relevant for NLP practitioners today. While we are not just a product of our environments, the anchors in our environment that we respond to on a daily basis have a huge influence on our behaviours. Luckily, NLP offers the tools to control how we respond to deliberate and accidental anchors.
http://io9.com/why-b-f-skinner-may-have-been-the-most-dangerous-psych-1548690441