Recently, I saw a lovely demo of an NLP process by Yukari Horiguchi at the NLP Connections Japan meeting in Tokyo. Yukari used to work at Godiva Chocolate and it reminded me of an NLP Process that I occasionally use with clients called The Godiva Chocolate Process. I have found it very useful in helping clients to overcome procrastination. You can find one version of it here.
Like many NLP processes, the Godiva Chocolate process has the client associate into a problem situation, then find a resource in a dissociated situation, and apply the resource to the situation/trigger that used to be a problem until now.
In the process, the client thinks of a task or job that has to be done, but which he or she is procrastinating about, or isn’t really enjoying very much. And if the client has to the job, wouldn’t it be better to enjoy it, to have the same kind of compulsion and enjoyment towards the job as they might have towards something really nice like Godiva Chocolate.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be Godiva (any great chocolate will do, although I recommend European!) or indeed anything else that the client feels compelled towards.
The process is quite similar to the better-known Swish pattern. The client first associates into the problem situation and then opens up a hole in the picture to reveal themselves eating the Godiva chocolate behind. This is carried out enough times that it becomes an automatic response and the good feelings/compulsion attached to the chocolate become attached to the previously unenjoyed task.
Yukari raised a good question. This process is clearly aimed at visual people, but what about people with a strong auditory primary representational system? And indeed, it is not just this process, but many processes in NLP that address the primarily visual person.
In the recent book, Provocative Hypnosis (see review), the author points out that most NLP processes work best with people who have strong V-K synysthesia, and that these type of people are generally spotted by the trainers in workshops and used as workshop demo subjects.
In Part 2 of this article, I will take a look (or listen for!) some ways that we can adapt the Godiva Chocolate process for an auditory PRS and in more general terms, consider how we can make things ‘sound right’ or ‘resonate’ with these people in a way that they can ‘tune into’ the process and really use it to create ‘harmony’.
Category: Blog
Review: Innovations in NLP for Challenging Times
by L.Michael Hall & Shelle Rose Charvet
The field of NLP has been split pretty badly since Richard Bandler and John Grinder went their separate ways. Bandler and Grinder hold completely different standards for NLP Practitioner Certification and other qualifications, so the field naturally shows the same discrepancy in standards and abilities of practitioners.
Simultaneously, there have been numerous new developments in NLP over the last 20-30 years and sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether they are to be considered new areas of study/business or whether they are an extension of the basic concepts of NLP. To some degree, NLP is always going to suffer from this distinction because there is no clear distinction between the modelling that constitutes NLP and the techniques that it models and then later can incorporate into the NLP model itself. For example, many of the techniques modelled from Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson have become basic NLP techniques and concepts, although some NLP people might argue that what was important was the modelling process itself, and not the results.
A book like this, Innovations in NLP for Challenging Times, goes some way towards resolving both of these issues, and Michael Hall and Shelle Rose Charvet are to be greatly commended on the scope of their vision and the clean execution of a book that draws together ideas and concepts from a large number of very diverse thinkers in the field of NLP
Over the last 10 years, I have tried to keep abreast of what is happening in the field of NLP, and I wish that this book had been available for me. Rather than burrowing around on multiple websites and other books to find out about Metastates, provocative therapy, symbolic modelling and much much more, this book offers a large number of these ideas in a well-presented and highly readable style.
I recommend this book to anyone who has a good grounding of the traditional ideas of NLP and wants to see how the field has moved forward. The presentation of the ideas in this book is more coherent than the complex and rich real world of NLP, but a book like this offers a map, which is not the territory, but sure is useful in showing how the true potential of NLP could be realized.
This is a rather strange book, and that is probably to be expected from Richard Bandler. None of his books are what you would exactly call ‘ordinary’. This book is Bandler’s more open foray into the world of fantasy and metaphor. He says that after writing five books in quick succession, he opened up to his unconscious mind and wrote this book.
And it is best to read this with an open unconscious mind and to send your conscious mind off on a well-deserved holiday somewhere. It’s a short read at 110 pages. The story is about a prince who wants to find himself and finds himself in more ways and through more perspectives than he could ever have imagined. It’s a fun read although (probably deliberately) confusing in many places. It could be used as a bedtime story book for children or a nice break for an adult who needs to get a new perspective on the world.
The book is full of embedded metaphors, Ericksonian language patterns, and other NLP techniques. Well worth a read, and very different to most NLP-related books out there.
Clean Language – Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds
by Wendy Sullivan & Judy Rees
This is a beautiful little book which is well-written and full of useful insights. Clean language consists entirely of questions and it is intended to offer a new way of thinking about how people’s minds actually work. It also helps people to explore their internal metaphors and enriching these metaphors in a way that can lead to an enrichment of their external lives. It is also well illustrated with lots of little cartoons which help to explain the text very quickly.
Clean Language was developed by David Grove. It consists of very simple but powerful questions which go further even than NLP in focusing solely on process and leaving the content entirely up to the client. The twelve basic Clean Language questions are shown below in three groups.
Developing Questions
- (and) what kind of X (is that X)?
- (and) is there anything else about X?
- (and) where is X? or (and) whereabouts is X?
- (and) is there a relationship between X and Y?
- (and) when X, what happens to Y?
- (and) that’s X like what? [used for eliciting a metaphor]
Sequence and Source Questions
- (and) then what happens? or (and) what happens next?
- (and) what happens just before X?
- (and) where could X come from?
Intention Questions
- (and) what would X like to have happen?
- (and) what needs to happen for X?
- (and) can X (happen)?
These questions are all that is used in most Clean Language sessions, often using the same question several times in a row to get the client to explore their internal representations more fully.
It takes a while to get used to the questions and asking them in exactly the form that they are given can be challenging at first. When I thought about using them, I sometimes felt that they were too constraining and that I wanted more freedom. However, when I talked to a friend about a difficult issue that he was working through, I primarily used these questions and despite the strange syntax at times they caused no confusion and were very helpful in getting him to sort out his own internal issues and to enrich his metaphors for how to move forward.
I’ll be coming back to Clean Language and a related topic, Symbolic Modelling, over the next few months as this is such an interesting area that I have signed up for an online course with a British training school. I’m looking forward to that and in the meantime, I’m planning to enjoy using Clean questions when I want to focus entirely on process and leave the content entirely to the client.
This video series by Gerald Kein (Omni Hypnosis Training Center) is an impressive hypnosis training consisting of 18 videos of about two hours each which take the viewer from basics up to a very competent level of hypnosis and its applications. The first 12 videos make up the Beginner-Intermediate section of the course. It starts from the history of hypnosis and moves into induction techniques and utilization of trance for therapeutic purposes. The remaining six videos make up the Advanced section and teach rapid/instant induction techniques, regression, addiction treatment, direct suggestion, recreational regressionand much more in great detail.
Perhaps what will be most useful to many NLP practitioners are the induction techniques which are introduced including the Dave Elman techniques. Ericksonian hypnosis primarily focuses on indirect suggestion, and the more direct techniques in this series will be of great value to many practitioners who want to induce trance more quickly, or who are working with people who are less responsive to indirect techniques.
Some of the other gems in this series are a good section on pendulum use showing how it can not just be a great hypnosis tool, but also a useful marketing tool! There is also an excellent section on self-hypnosis and how to improve your skills at entering a trance quickly.
Kein’s presentation is humourous and entertaining. He engages very well with the people on the course and his methods of creating rapport are another thing that we can learn from. The explanations and demonstrations are extremely practical and Kein is obviously highly experienced. He tells many anecdotes about his own experiences with patients over many years while he ran a large hypnosis practice. He gets to the important points quickly and comes across as genuinely interested in getting hypnosis more widely accepted as a highly effective technique in achieving positive change in people’s lives.
I would recommend this series as a very good addition to the skill set of any NLP practitioner. NLP has been so influenced by Ericksonian hypnosis that practitioners often do not get sufficient exposure to other forms of hypnosis, especially the Dave Ellman techniques which are so powerful. The length of this course may be offputting to some, but this is all highly useful learning material. It is available from Omni Hypnosis Training Center.
The Trainer’s Collection
Tad James
I have written previously about my admiration for Tad James’ ability to chunk NLP concepts appropriately to match the knowledge and experience of his readers/audience. He achieves the same result in this series of Audio programs which are based on his NLP Trainers Training program.
Tad James is probably the most influential trainer in NLP today apart from the original group of NLP people such as Grinder, Bandler, Dilts, Delozier etc. A search on the Internet for NLP processes will turn up many sites which present a process in the exact way that it is presented in Tad James’ training manuals. Much of this influence can be attributed to the long-term consistency and usefulness of his trainers’ training program, and allowing the trainers from his school to re-use his training materials. Of course, much of his wide-spread influence on thinking in NLP can also be attributed to his selling and marketing skills. He has a good product and he uses all of his knowledge and expertise in NLP and hypnosis to sell it effectively.
In this lengthy audio set, James covers a wide range of highly useful material including use of group trances, choosing demonstration subjects, making demonstrations, marketing of programs, using embedded multiple metaphors to engage the unconscious mind, and much much more. He teaches all of these concepts to both the conscious mind (through well-organized sequence of materials) and to the unconscious mind through trance, embedded suggestions, and embedded metaphors.
The series is recommended for anyone training NLP or thinking of doing so in the future. It is a long long listen that you will probably come back to more than once. It is available from this website.
I was working with my students today to help them develop better presentations and came up with the PRESENT model which incorporates a lot of important NLP ideas and presentation tips in an easy-to-remember mnemonic. Below, I have given a simple initial description of this model. Later, I hope to develop it in more detail and to use it as the basis for helping students and other people to make more effective presentations.
Perceptual Positions
As you practice and carry out the presentation, think of it as you see the audience and room out of your own eyes (first position). Also, think of how your audience perceives you (second position). Finally, imagine that you are standing at the side of the room watching both yourself and the audience (third position). Notice what you learn from each position that can help you to make a better presentation.
Rapport with the audience
Create strong rapport with your audience right from the beginning. Creating rapport with a group can be done in several ways. You could mingle with the group members and do an activity with the group in which you are taking part as a participant. Or if this is not feasible, try to identify the rapport leaders in each section of the audience and mirror/match their behaviour. All groups have natural rapport leaders that other people unconsciously follow. If you can create rapport with these rapport leaders, then the whole audience will come into rapport with you. You can test whether you have created solid rapport by trying to lead the audience in some way. For some example, when you nod your head, do they all nod along with you?
Express in VAK
This is the biggest item in the list. Of course, the words that you use should appeal to people in the audience no matter what their representational system is. So, you can use visual language such as ‘picture’, auditory language such as ‘listen’, and kinesthetic language such as ‘feel’.
You should also consider all representational systems in the non-verbal behaviours of your presentation. For visual, be sure that you are suitably dressed and that you are using clear pictures or graphs or similar. For auditory, talk in a clear loud voice at an appropriate speed. Vary your voice to match and enhance the content of your talk. For Kinesthetic, use gestures to organize the space around your body in ways that match your content. For example, you could anchor concept 1 on your left hand and anchor concept 2 on your right hand. You can also set up spatial anchors in the room to anchor states such as curiosity, agreement, etc.
You may also like to use the charisma pattern (starting in K, moving to A, and then moving to V) which will ensure that you reach all of the audience effectively.
Stories
Stories are a great way to liven up a presentation. People are interested in your personal stories and it can be a great way to get their attention right from the beginning. You can use metaphors to support or exemplify the content of your presentation or to induce appropriate states in the audience. You can also use split stories (embedded metaphors) to embed your content within a story or to create a trance state in the listeners if that is appropriate.
Eyes Up
As you walk onto the stage, the audience is already watching you. Be sure that you have your eyes up and are watching the audience from the moment they can see you. Then walk confidently out onto the stage, take a pause, look around at the audience, ensure you have their attention, and only then say your initial greeting. Unless you are specifically trying to get another effect by using your eyes, keeping your eyes up throughout the presentation can be the most effective.
Notes
Too many presenters read from a script or even from their own slides on the screen. Make sure that you have made simple notes that you can speak from to reproduce your presentation. Practice with these notes until your presentation is perfect. This will make your presentation far more natural and spontaneous, and you will also feel much more confident.
Your notes don’t have to actually be ‘notes’ in the traditional sense. While keywords or a list of phrases might be most appropriate for one presenter, another presenter ‘notes’ could also perhaps mean physical anchors used as memory aides or perhaps visual anchors in the form of pictures, graphs, a mindmap, and so on. One advantage of visual notes is that a lot of complex information or relationships or large amounts of information can be shown more concisely than using words. Try different kinds of notes to learn what is best for you.
Timing
Make sure that your presentation fits into the allotted time period by practicing with a stopwatch or timer in advance. If there is a questions and answers section after your presentation, be sure to have included that in your timing.
***
This is just a brief introduction to the PRESENT model. Feedback is welcome! And here it is again:
Perceptual Positions
Rapport
Express in VAK
Stories
Eyes Up
Notes
Timing
—
©Copyright by Dr. Brian Cullen 2011
The Wild Days: NLP 1972-1981
Terrence McClendon
What a fun little book and a great read for anyone who has taken NLP training and wonders where it all came from. McClendon was there right from the beginning days of NLP when Bandler and Grinder were carrying out all that crazy stuff in Santa Cruz. This is the best historical account of that period and although it is relatively brief (about 130 pages), it contains a huge amount of interesting and useful information about the development of the concepts of NLP and the interaction between the developers.
Each chapter takes us forward chronologically from 1972 when it began up to 1981 when Grinder and Bandler went separate ways and NLP broke into numerous strands. McClendon describes the beginnings in Gestalt Therapy, the initial classes and workshops by Bandler at the University of California in Santa Cruz, the beginning of the collaboration with Grinder, and the long crazy party-like workshops that went on through the night usually involving deep trance. From these beginnings, NLP moved onto modelling Virginia Satir’s work in Family Therapy and Milton Erickson’s work in hypnosis. There is much much more here that will be of interest and entertainment value for people involved in NLP today.
This is a short read, presented in simple straightforward prose. I read it from cover to cover in about 90 minutes. The illustrations by the author are rough sketches of various scenes from the history of NLP and they add to the intimate feeling of the text.
Persuasion Engineering: Sales & Business Language & Behavior
©1996 by Richard Bandler & John LaValle
Meta Publications
In the past, I had heard the audio of the Persuasion Engineering seminar and this book seems to be a pretty close transcript of that seminar. Richard Bandler is a master of voice use and much of this is inevitably lost in the format of the written word. The embedded metaphors, too, which Bandler uses extensively in his training are not as effective in the book as they are in the audio. Without the appropriate auditory cues and silences, this book is often difficult to follow and confusing. Of course, Bandler does use confusion deliberately as a trance-induction techniques, but there were many points in this book where I felt confused only as I tried to figure out what on earth he was talking about. I have no doubt that the authors deliberately meant to keep these confusing sections intact, so that they could achieve more direct communication with the unconscious mind, but for me personally this communication worked far better in the audio format. Another read through it would surely reveal much more and help greater understanding.
The book is aimed at sales people and is presents many of the standard concepts of NLP in that context, including representational systems, eye patterns, anchoring, meta model, milton model, and timeline work. This is not an appropriate book to learn all of these things for the first time because they are only presented partially and in an ad hoc manner as they are useful for each demonstration or explanation or story. However, for a reader who is already familiar with all of the basic NLP techniques, this book will provide many rich examples of how they can be applied highly effectively in the sales process.
Bandler’s stories run throughout the book, often entertaining, always sounding considerably exaggerated, and often revealing their deeper metaphoric meaning on a second or third reading. For me, I found the audio more useful, but even just this book will certainly give the reader some powerful insights into how NLP can be used in practical ways in selling.
The Persuasion Engineering series is available as a book or on DVD from The NLP Store.
This audio course is designed for people who are intending to take Tad James’ NLP Practitioner Course, but it also stands alone as an excellent course about the basic concepts of NLP and Time Therapy and how to apply them in the areas of Business, Education, and Therapy.
The most important difference between James’ course and similar audio programs by Richard Bandler is probably the focus on the conscious mind as well as learning through the unconscious mind. In Bandler’s work, he uses powerful metaphor to teach to the unconscious mind, but some people can walk away from his seminars not really knowing or being able to verbalize what they have learned. Although James does use metaphor, too, he uses it sparingly and focuses much more on a succinct presentation of the techniques and tools of NLP to the conscious mind. Personally, I find James to be much more accessible as teaching materials, and Bandler to be much more artistic, creative, and entertaining in his use of NLP. James is a good teacher – he chunks the material very well into digestible chunks and helps the learner through repetition and well-ordered content. He also does reviews and previews which are very helpful.
James is also a fine hypnotist and makes good use of guided trances, especially future time line therapy, to help the listener internalize the concepts. Apart from the trance sequences, James is using Milton language and well-designed repetition throughout the audio programs to help the listener to learn.
This is a long audio program, more than 18 hours, and James covers all the basic NLP material very well. People who listen to this program a few times before attending his practitioner course in person will without a doubt be on very solid ground in their learning.
Some of the final segments in the audio program look at the use of NLP in sales very closely and James previous work in sales stands to him very strongly in this area. He also talks about the applications for education and the use of NLP with kids in detail.
Tad James website (http://www.nlpcoaching.com) describes this collection as follows:
This is a 20 CD set of all the Practitioner info you need to attend the Training. Recorded in Digital Audio this collection is designed specifically as a pre-study collection so you can prepare to attend the NLP Practitioner Training. Included are all the techniques of the NLP Practitioner training and the mind-set to prepare you to be the best practitioner you can be. And if you are already a Practitioner of NLP – it’s a great resource to have!
Overall, this is an excellent audio program, produced by a fine teacher and a fine businessman, as well as a fine NLP master. This program is highly recommended for beginners or for people who want a refresher in NLP.