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Review: Christina Hall's Video Series: Discover the Difference

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.

  1. Language as a Perceptual Tool
  2. Neurological Shifts and Temporal Perspectives
  3. Presuppositions and the Structure of Time
  4. Thinking Skills and Logical Levels 1
  5. Thinking Skills and Logical Levels 2
  6. Open Q&A Session on Language Patterns
  7. Universals and State Elicitation
  8. The Meta-Model as a System of Relations
  9. Chunking – Creating a Multi-Dimensional Network of Perspectives 1
  10. Chunking – Creating a Multi-Dimensional Network of Perspectives 2
  11. Building Intensity
  12. Guiding a Process of generalization
  13. Lost Performatives and Sorting Markers 1
  14. Lost Performatives and Sorting Markers 2
  15. Structuring Implications
  16. 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”.

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Blog Reviews

Review: The Definitive Book of Body Language

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.

  1. Understanding the Basics
  2. Hands
  3. Smiles and laughter
  4. Arm signals
  5. Cultural differences
  6. Hand and thumb gestures
  7. Evaluation and Deceit Signals
  8. Eye Signals
  9. Territories and Personal Space
  10. Legs
  11. Common Everyday Gestures
  12. Mirroring – how we build rapport
  13. Secret signals of cigarettes, glasses and makeup
  14. Body pointing
  15. Courtship displays and attraction signals
  16. Ownership, territory, and height signals
  17. Seating arrangements
  18. Interviews, power plays and office politics
  19. 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.

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Blog Reviews

Review: Dynamic Learning

Dynamic Learning
by Robert B. Dilts & Todd A. Epstein
Dynamic Learning CoverBecause 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.
 
 

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Blog Reviews

Review: Michael Hall's Secrets of Personal Mastery Videos

Recently I was watching a video by a well-known NLP trainer, Michael Hall, in which he was discussing the development of personal mastery. This, of course, raises the question: What is personal mastery? And as Hall points out, the answer is surely different for each person. To start the seminar, he gives his own examples of how he has achieved or is moving towards personal mastery in his own life. These are paraphrased below and provide good examples of what the video course is designed to achieve:

  1. the ability to be in control of my brain and to run it any way that I want to run it.
  2. the ability to manage my emotions, so that ‘I have them’, rather than ‘they have me’.
  3. being able to say what I want to say, having the flexibility to express myself in the way that gets the type of communication response that I want.
  4. getting the intentions from the back of my mind into the front of my life, so that I can do the things that I want to do.
  5. using my resources effectively to move in the world in a way that supports my relationships, my work and all my other activities.
  6. being congruent – being authentic – being able to take the ups and downs of life and bounce back

Unfortunately, the video and audio quality was a little poor which may have been the result of digitization of an old VHS video or other analogue format. Some tweaking with the equalizer helped the audio considerably (I recommend the ‘Live Music’ setting which worked very well in reducing the hiss and other noise!)
In the blurb for the video, the course is described as follows:

… a course that accesses and allows you to re-structure your
* mind and emotions
* self-sabotaging frames
* innate genius for personal and interpersonal development
* passion for the excellence of expertise
* languaging for empowering semantic states
* mind-muscle connection for greater congruency

Apart from the problems with the audio, Michael Hall’s use of language is sometimes a barrier to understanding the material that he is presenting. He is clearly extremely proficient at NLP and very widely read, but his presentation style and language use is quite similar to John Grinder. The extensive use of academic-sounding language is sometimes useful for relating the ideas to other fields, but probably more often makes simple ideas more difficult to understand until the listener/viewer has managed to penetrate Hall’s terminology. As a researcher myself, I am very familiar with the necessity to use appropriate academic language in order to define terms clearly in a way that is understandable to all within the discourse community, yet like many conference presentations that I have attended the dense language used in the video was often off-putting.
Conversely, Hall demonstrates that he has a very good command of persuasive language in the many demonstrations in the videos. He also has excellent hypnosis skills and the videos include a lovely trance induction which he uses to let the participants get a recharging rest. While the trainer himself needs a break once in a while, it is nice to see this respectful atmosphere created for the seminar participants, and I would have liked to have some of these trance breaks in some of my trainings in the past! As well as helping the participants to relax, Hall is quite entertaining. He uses Peanuts cartoons (featuring Charlie Brown, Snoopy and all their friends) to explain metastates in a very fun way.
Another way that Hall explains the concept of metastates is through ‘outframing’. A higher state gives us a bigger frame in which to view the original situation. Hall also illustrates the concept by using the old Einstein quote that “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
The demonstrations of processes show Hall using very powerful language and creating effective change in a very short time. One example is Hall’s alignment process which is similar to the more widely known parts integration process. Rather than dealing with the common examples of two contradictory behaviors, the process searches for the higher intention or higher state of two contradictory states and then integrates them. In another process, he identifies and utilizes what he calls the ‘executive’ in the mind, a higher state that makes the decisions and guides the lower states. The idea of ‘executive’ is very useful terminology, and I can see that it would be very useful for NLP training in a business context, but throughout this process and others there is an awful lot of terminology hiding what appear to be relatively simple chunking up processes, or identifying the core state as in the core transformation process.
Hall also puts a strong focus on what he calls the mind-muscle connection (similar to bodywork or Dilt’s idea of somatic mind) and helps the participants to find the body postures that will best recall a powerful state. He also uses physical anchors in a  nice realization of an exercise in Grinder’s book, Whispering in the Wind–in the Commitment Process, he emphasizes the importance of creating clean states which are 100% available when required. He has the participant set up two very different states in different locations and adds resources to each to make it powerful. Then the participant practices moving from one state to another, in a totally clean manner, so that there is no contamination between the states. This is a very valuable exercise since our resourceful states do tend to get diluted or contaminated by other states. Hall reminds us that leaving a resourceful state fully and completely is just as important as accessing it.
Near the end of the videos, there is an interesting discussion of the differences between NLP and neurosemantics. Hall admits that the distinction is arbitrary but says that everything at ‘primary level’ is NLP, and those above it are Neurosemantics. As an example, he suggests that anchoring is at primary level and falls into the classical definition of NLP. The processes that he demonstrates in the videos which involve metastates would be considered as neurosemantics. For more information on neurosemantics, you can visit Michael Hall’s website.
Overall, I was a little disappointed by the video series. While it contains some very useful demonstrations and a new perspective on NLP, much of the material seemed to simply add a new level of terminology to the field without adding any substantial new ideas.

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Blog Hypnosis Reviews

Review: Richard Bandler DVD: Class of a Master


There is very little that I can say about this four-DVD set by Richard Bandler, except … get your hands on them, and watch the master in action. Bandler’s inductions get better and better, and faster and faster. I’ve watched the DVDs several times now and am still learning more and more from Bandler. As well as his astonishing non-verbal hypnosis abilities, these videos also provides a huge amount of material for those interested in Bandler’s rich use of language to produce rapid change.
The DVDs are very well created with professional camera work and perfect sound throughout. The cameramen zoom in to show us fluttering eyelids and other signs of trance and we can see all of Bandler’s smooth moves. And of course, we can also hear all the jokes and crazy stories that he tells. I’ve heard people debating about whether his stories are really true or not – is he truly outrageous enough to have cruxified the guy who thought he was Jesus, or to have waved an axe at the poor schizophrenic who thought he was John the Baptist. There’s surely lots of exaggeration going on, but it doesn’t matter at all. They are all metaphors which communicate on multiple levels, to both the conscious and unconscious mind of the volunteers on the stage and to the members of the audience who may not be talked to directly but are very much talked to on the unconscious level. And of course, the audience also extends to you if you decide to go ahead and get your hands on these DVDs. Bandler changes minds, beliefs, and lives very quickly – and while he is changing your mind and your life, you’ll also enjoy listening to a man who knows how to have fun.
Each DVD deals with a theme:
Volume 1: Instant Talent
Volume 2: Inner Beauty
Volume 3: Rapid Hypnotic Inductions
Volume 4: Fantastic Futures
I had previously seen Volume 3 which was included as a free DVD with a Bandler book that I bought a few years ago. It was well worth watching again (and again and again) to see how he brought six people on stage into trance in seconds, using a variety of techniques to demonstrate the possibilities that are available to people interested in hypnosis.
The other volumes were more focused on content (development of art, development of inner beauty, and creating a fantastic future), but through them all runs the amazing language of Bandler. More than any video of him that I have seen in the past, this set shows off his ideas and techniques at a very high level.
The DVDs are available here and probably elsewhere online.

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Blog Reviews

Review: From Coach to Awakener

From Coach to Awakener
by Robert Dilts

In this book, Robert Dilts uses his model of Neurological Levels as a comprehensive base for advice and exercises for personal and business coaches. The book is structured around this model, so I have shown a brief outline in the table below.

Chapter Title Neurological Level
 1  Caretaking and Guiding  Environment
 2  Coaching  Behaviours
 3  Teaching  Capabilities
 4  Mentoring  Beliefs and Values
 5  Sponsorship  Identity
 6  Awakening  Spirit

As can be seen from the rightmost column in the table, the book is structured completely around the neurological levels. While the model has been criticized by some as not being a true NLP model (e.g. Andrew Bradbury in this post and in various other articles on his site; also John Grinder in his book, Whispering in the Wind; also see Michael Hall’s article for more details on the tricky and rather sensitive area of ‘logical levels’), this does not detract from the fact that thousands of NLP practitioners use Dilts’ model very effectively in working with clients. Logically, I do agree with Bradbury and Grinder that the model does not follow the classical mathematical idea of sets and levels, but I have found it extremely useful in my own work. At the very least, the Neurological Levels model provides a series of valuable filters or maps with which to view the territory. More importantly for the purpose of this book, the model also provides a very useful way of analyzing the different ways that a coach can help a client. Or perhaps, I should say Coach with a capital ‘C’ because this is a useful distinction that Dilts maintains throughout the book. A ‘coach’ helps a client to improve at the level of behaviours, whereas a ‘Coach’ works with the client on all levels.

While there are useful exercises and advice for all of the Coach levels, the ones that stood out for me most were those at the level of Mentor (Beliefs and Values) and Awakener (Spirit). Having read quite a few of Dilts’ books recently, it seems to me that he is making the greatest contributions to NLP in the two areas of belief change (Mentor) and awakening people to the wider community of which they are a part (Awakener).

Chapter 4 (Mentoring) offers useful processes for role modelling, aligning values with vision and actions, and putting values into actions. It also supports the important idea that establishing good practices or habits is an important part of the formation of positive long term beliefs and values. This chapter also links coaching to important NLP techniques such as reframing and  uses this to introduce useful processes such as “Helping Critics to Be Advisors.”

Chapter 6 (Awakening) is a valuable contribution to Coaching. For Dilts, awakening is at the level of Spirit, a response to questions such as “what is bigger than you that you are part of” and he describes awakening in the following manner:

The results of awakening are frequently a renewed sense of purpose and meaning, expanded awareness, clear perception and emotional and physical revitalization…. Awakening frequently has to do with reconnecting with our motivations at the deepest level. Consequently, awakenings usually accompany significant transitions in our personal and professional lives.

He ties this idea well to older NLP ideas such as uptime and downtime and the importance of having good communication with the unconscious mind. Similarly, he uses Gregory Bateson’s idea of double binds to show how a Coach can set up positive double binds in which the client can move up to a higher level of learning. In a double bind, the client effectively receives a message such as “If you change, you are a good person… if you don’t change, you are a good person.” By setting up the positive double bind at the Identity level, the client tries to resolve the bind by moving to a higher level of learning and can thus solve their own problem. The chapter finishes with a nice exercise which walks through Bateson’s levels of learning (from Level 0 up to Level III, and Dilts’ additional Level IV).

In the conclusion to the book, there is also a fine exercise for the Coach himself or herself to develop and align their skills at all six levels.

There is an awful lot of material in this book and although I have tried many of the exercises, there is much much more to be returned to, and this book would make a good reference book on the shelf of any coach – a volume to be returned to occasionally when a client’s issue was proving difficult to resolve. By using Dilts Neurological Levels model, it is possible to understand what ‘level’ the issue is stuck at, and to possibly use some of the processes in the book or variants of them to achieve a breakthrough at that level and beyond.

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Review: NLP II – The Next Generation

NLP II: The Next Generation
Enriching the Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience
by Robert Dilts and Judith DeLozier with Deborah Bacon Dilts

It has been a long time since NLP Volume 1 was published back in 1980 with its wonderful subtitle: the study of the structure of subjective experience. That’s 30 years in the development of NLP. Volume 1 is still one of the most prized NLP books that I have on my shelves and is the one that I took to have signed by the authors, Robert Dilts and Judith DeLozier, when I trained with them in Santa Cruz. The original volume was also authored by the two founders of NLP, John Grinder and Richard Bandler, and their absence from Volume II is as good a sign as any of the fragmentation that has taken place in the field of NLP since its founding. More than almost anyone else in the field, however, Robert Dilts has tried to keep the field of NLP coherent and up-to-date through his work at NLPU and his constant development and refinement of traditional NLP processes.
However, there is also no doubt that the absence of Grinder and Bandler is significant. As far as I understand, since the development of New Code Grinder  has placed the primary focus of NLP on modelling, particularly on unconscious modelling, and Bandler has led NLP and other techologies such as DHE much much deeper into hypnosis and into the use of submodalities at a very rich level. I am sure that others may have a better understanding than me of the current work of Grinder and Bandler, but what is clear is that NLP Volume II is the fullest statement and development of Robert Dilts’ and also Judith DeLozier’s ideas to date.
Dilts and DeLozier worked together on the Encylopedia of Sytemic NLP and NLP New Coding and after all the time and development on this project and others such as the trainings at NLPU, they note that

… the time had come to finally complete our commitment to a second volume. In our view, there was clearly something new to say. This book NLP II: The Next Generation is a result of that decision.

I have read a lot of Robert Dilts’ books recently and I have found this one to be among the best, certainly the most completete statement of his thinking especially his conception of NLP as focusing on three minds: cognitive, somatic, and field. His ability to generate models and back them up with processes is superb, and in this book he and the other authors have presented the broadest, most systemic, and possibly most explanatory view of NLP–one that could possibly eventually become the most influential model in the field of NLP, the study of the structure of subjective experience.

Cognitive Mind

Chapter 1 of the book examines the cognitive mind, in particular the new ways of thinking about the structure of subjective experience that have been elaborated since the first volume in 1980. These include Timelines, Perceptual Positions, and probably the best explanation to date of Dilts’ Neurological Levels model. However, what really stands out in Chapter 1 is the so-called Unified Field Model. This is a superb achievement in creating a powerful model which unifies different aspects of NLP such as timelines, perceptual positions, neurological levels, and metaprograms. Just these 28 pages which describe this model in detail would make the cost of this whole book worthwhile. The Unified Field Theory provides a way of understanding many older processes in NLP such as Change Personal History, New Behaviour Generator, and Reimprinting. It’s not necessary to know about this new theory to make the old processes work–it simply creates a much better understanding of exactly what is happening in the client’s subjective reality. The authors also call this model (or the total spaces in time and perspective that the model covers) the NLP Jungle Gym, and this is an apt name because it provides a remarkable three-dimensional virtual space in which a huge number of perspectives can be taken on any situation. The core presupposition of NLP is that the map is not the territory, and the NLP Jungle Gym provides us with one of the richest sets of maps that has yet been made available. This map is also shown to be highly useful in Generative NLP, where instead of the traditional approach of helping someone to solve a problematic issue, the NLP practitioner helps someone to really enrich something that they are already doing well.

Somatic Mind

Chapter 2 of the book focuses on the Somatic Mind, the representation of intelligence throughout the body (rather than the more traditional view of intelligence being located only in the brain). Recent research into neuroscience, children’s education, and psychology are all indicating strongly that the old maxim, a healthy mind in a healthy body, is excellent advice. The original formulation of NLP was primarily cognitive. Others in the field have already drawn close attention to the importance of the body (e.g. work on State Management by Bandler and Grinder’s work  in NLP New Code), but DeLozier and Dilts have taken it considerably further, noting that the body acts as a representational system and including motion in most NLP processes. They attempt to develop this idea of a body representational system through ideas such as somatic syntax, biofeedback, the representation of the body within the brain, and the presence of very significant clusters of neurons in both the human stomach and heart. There is no single model for Chapter 2 with the explanatory and exploratory power of the Unified Field Model presented in Chapter 1 for the Cognitive Mind, but the explanation of Somatic Mind in this book can potentially open up many possibilities and provide a useful framework for further research and development in the field of NLP.

Field Mind

Chapter 3 of the book examines what the authors call Field Mind which is defined as

a type of space or energy produced by relationships and interactions within a system of individuals. Central to this idea is the idea that relationship itself is a “third entity” generated between those involved, similar to the way that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to produce the third entity of water. The relationship becomes a container tha holds, processes, and evolves the thoughts, emotions and experiences of those involved.

The concept of Field Mind draws heavily on aikido, energy work, and the work of Stephen Gilligan in Generative Trance. While many of these concepts are not widely accepted and may be considered as pseudo-science by many, the authors do emphasize that the concept of Field is a ‘subjective’ understanding and does not need to be taken literally. In other words, if an experience in a person’s life can be improved in some way through the subjective perception of a field, then it does not necessarily matter whether that field can be measured in any ‘objective’ way. Chapter 3 does offer many convincing descriptions and exercises which help to show the value of the notion of Field, and while it is unlikely to become accepted as easily as the concept of Somatic Mind, it is a valuable idea that will be useful to many practitioners and their clients.

Applying Next Generation NLP

Chapter 4 completes the book with guidelines and exercises on how to interpret and apply the ideas in the first three chapters. It offers some very useful suggestions for NLP coaches, especially at the level of Identity. This brings the authors to the idea that Identity can be usefully seen to consist of two components, the ego and the soul. The ego focuses on survival, self-benefit, and ambition. The soul focuses on awakening, service, and connection. This idea is used to tie the ideas of the book together in a rather artistic and touching conclusion:

When our body (somatic mind) and our intellect (cognitive mind) connect like two dancers responding to the music of life (the field), then the soul has a vehicle for expression and we find ourselves more alive, with greater joy, more intuition, and we feel more at home in the world. Charisma, passion and presence emerge naturally when these two forces (ego and soul; vision and ambition) are aligned. Optimum performance comes when the ego is in the service of the soul.

Final Comments

This is one of the best Robert Dilts’ books in a long time and a good description of his current thinking, a systemic view of NLP which is recommended for reading and consideration by all serious NLP practitioners and researchers. It offers some very strong models which many people may not accept but which could potentially have a strong long-term influence on the future of NLP. By expressing these strong and sometimes controversial ideas in clear terms, this volume puts NLP on a more solid footing and provides a framework for future research and practice.

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Blog Reviews

Review: Using Your Brain ­- For a Change

Using Your Brain ­ – For a Change
by Richard Bandler
Edited by Steve Andreas and Connirae Andreas
 
Richard Bandler is a remarkable individual, with simple ideas that he develops in very interesting ways, and Using Your Brain is one of his best books. This book is completely based on the simple idea of submodalities, the idea that we can represent the world usefully in terms of our five senses (modalities) and that by changing the parameters of these modalities (submodalities), we can radically alter our subjective experience of the world. From this simple starting point, this classic NLP book shows how phobias can be cured, motivation can be used generated, beliefs can be changed, and much much more. If Bandler can written nothing else in his career, this book alone, with its deep exploration of the potential of submodalities, would have been a massive contribution to our understanding of how the human brain can be run more effectively.
When I say ‘written’, this is a bit of a misnomer, because like many books in the field of NLP, Using Your Brain is an edited transcript of a workshop or series of workshops. While this transcript format does not always work well, it does work well in this case, due to Bandler’s skill in oral presentation and the fine editing of Steve and Connirae Andreas. The book allows the reader to participate in the seminar virtually and to gradually deepen his or her understanding of the possibilities of submodalities in a natural and effective way. Questions from the audience answer many of the questions which I had myself, and the demonstrations provide excellent examples of how these techniques can be used to promote change in other people in counselling or coaching situations.
Submodalities are nothing new; it is in the exploration of the concept in such depth that Bandler’s contribution lies. In everyday language, people say things like “She has a bright future”, or “She has a colourful past.” While these are generally seen as metaphors, Bandler suggests that they are precise descriptions of the speaker’s internal thinking, and that changing these internal descriptions is the key to effective change, learning, or communication. For example, if you think of a pleasant memory and notice the picture that you see, what happens when you make that picture brighter? Or change the location of that picture? You will probably notice that these changes produce an instantaneous change in the type and depth of feelings that are attached to this memory. Even with this simple example, you can probably already think of ways that you can make other memories even more pleasant, or reduce any bad feelings associated with other memories. These simple submodality shifts are just the beginning of the possibilities that Bandler presents in this book.
Some of the vital NLP concepts that Bandler introduces in this book are Submodality shifts (Chapter II), associated versus dissociated perspectives (Chapter III), strategy redesign (Chapter IV), motivation strategies (Chapter V), changing state using submodalities (Chapter VI), removing limiting beliefs (Chapter VII), learning strategies (Chapter VIII), and The Swish process (Chapter IX). If you are interested in the field of NLP and haven’t read this book, get a copy as soon as possible. Even though it was published way back in 1985, I believe that there is still no clearer explanation of submodalities available, and apart from the important ideas in the book, the richness of Bandler’s language is highly useful for any NLP practitioner who aims to produce change in the most rapid elegant ways.
 
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Blog Reviews

Review: Conversations with Richard Bandler

Conversations with Richard Bandler
by Richard Bandler and Owen Fitzpatrick
The title of this book might be considered to be slightly misleading, or perhaps it was just my own expectations of the entire book being transcripts of conversations with Bandler. The back cover does describe the content of the book more accurately: “Conversations with Richard Bandler recounts Owen Fitzpatrick’s journey to discover the true nature of personal freedom and what is possible for the human spirit.” While the book does feature short extracts of conversations with Bandler on many topics, the majority of the book is written by Owen Fitzpatrick as a contextualization of Bandler’s ideas in terms of his own life.
This personal journey covers many different aspects of Fitzpatrick’s life and he does a good job of showing how Bandler’s NLP techniques have helped him immensely in taking control of his own feelings, working with his own clients, financial success, relationships, and spirituality. The personalized content took a while for me to get into, but by the end of the book I generally appreciated his anecdotes and descriptions of how NLP had helped him to achieve his goals.
The front cover of the book also gives the subtitle: “Two NLP Masters Reveal the Secrets to Successful Living”, and it is clear that Fitzpatrick (or perhaps his publisher) is using his association with Bandler to boost his own status in the NLP world. While I didn’t enjoy all of Fitzpatrick’s long clarifications and reiterations of Bandler’s ideas, it is evident from the book that he has a very strong mastery of the concepts of NLP and has successfully modelled Bandler’s methods of change-work and training. According to the book, Fitzpatrick became the youngest master trainer of NLP in the world at the age of 23 and if he can find his own voice a little more clearly, he is likely to go far beyond Bandler’s ideas and to bring positive change to a huge number of people.
Fitzpatrick frames the book using the metaphor of “chains of the free.” At the beginning of the book, he tells a story of a group of people who were “constantly criticized about what they did …. made to feel horrible each time they made a mistake …. victimized and given so many conflicting messages that they became insecure and unsure of who they were and what they could do.” After further description of these horrible living conditions, he reveals that the group of people are the human race and that their captors are their own minds. It is a powerful metaphor and one that will resound with anyone who has had a critical voice in their own head at some time telling them that something is impossible or wrong, i.e., every one of us. This metaphor underlies the whole book and all the techniques in the book are presented as increasing our personal freedom, taking responsibility for our own freedom, and giving us tools to achieve that freedom. Readers who follow the exercises will certainly achieve much in this direction.
In terms of NLP techniques, there is little new presented in this book for people who are familiar with Bandler’s work, but it is an extremely valuable contribution for NLPers who wish to understand Bandler’s way of thinking and his underlying presuppositions more deeply. For people who are unfamiliar with NLP, the techniques presented can probably best be supplemented by reading another of Bandler’s books such as Using Your Brain for a Change. I wish that the book had featured longer extracts from Bandler’s side of the conversation, but Fitzpatrick has had close access to Bandler for many years and his close modelling of his mentor does certainly allow him to act as a reasonable proxy. One minor criticism of the formatting of the book is that it is not immediately clear when the ‘conversation’ has finished and where Fitzpatrick takes over in commentary. This may have been a publisher decision, but I felt that clearer formatting would have been helpful to separate the conversations from the commentary. Overall, however this book provides a much closer look into the thinking of Bandler than has been available to date.
Postscript
This book was published in 2005, and since then Fitzpatrick has continued his close collaboration with Bandler, editing some of his talks into books.
 
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Blog Hypnosis Reviews

Review: Time Line Therapy and the Basis of Personality

Time Line Therapy and the Basis of Personality
by Tad James & Wyatt Woodsmall

I have long been a fan of Time Line Therapy and find it to be one of the most powerful techniques in the field of NLP. In this book from 1988, James and Wyatt give a very clear description of Time Line Therapy including how to elicit the Time Line, release a limiting decision or trauma, remove anxiety, or set a goal in the future Time Line. All of these are explained with clear language and easy-to-follow steps. For this alone, this book is well worth having, but it offers much much more.
In Section I, the authors explain the NLP Communication Model and the filters which we use as we process the world around us. At their best, these filters delete, distort, and generalize experience so that we can function effectively in the world. When they are optimal, they limit our options and cause problems in our lives. These filters are the substance of the NLP expression: The Map is Not the Territory. In other words, the way that we represent the world in our heads is not the same as the world itself.
The filters include: Metaprograms, Values, Beliefs, Attitudes, Memories and Decisions. The authors postulate that these form the basis of our personalities, and after the excellent description of Time Line Therapy in Section II, Section III explores Meta Programs in great detail and Section IV explores the formation, evolution, and changing of values.
The description of meta programs in Section III is divided into simple meta programs and complex meta programs. Simple meta programs are based on Jung’s work into human archetypes and also form the basis of the Myers Briggs personality testing system. These are Introvert/Extravert, Intuitor/Sensor, Thinker/Feeler, and Judger/Perceiver. In another post, I described the complex meta programs discussed in this book. Many different NLP trainers and researchers have explored a variety of Meta Programs, but the description and means of elicitation described in this book are among the best to be found.
Section IV is a very valuable discussion of Values. James and Woodsmall give a nice metaphor for values and beliefs. If beliefs are considered to be cups, then values can be considered to be the cup holders onto which they hook. In other words, beliefs are supported by values. The authors also make the suggestion that beliefs are generally conscious, whereas values are more embedded in the unconscious mind. In particular, core values can be completely invisible to the conscious mind unless we explicitly explore them in some way. Even more unconscious are meta programs which are the unconscious strategies by which we live our lives. This section also includes an excellent exercise for eliciting values and shows how the hierarchy/order of values can be changed by altering the submodalities.
The book finishes with a long transcript of a therapy session with a cocaine addict which illustrates many of the concepts of the book very well and shows how personality can potentially be changed in positive and practical ways in order to help people to live happier lives.
Much of the material in this book has found its way into NLP practitioner courses around the world, but returning to the original source is always valuable and highly recommended for anyone interested in either Time Line therapy or the nature of human personality.