Category: Blog

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
Blog Reviews

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.

Categories
Blog Other

What is Coaching?

When you are thinking of taking on a Coach, whether it is for personal or business reasons, it’s good to know just how that Coach can specifically help you to achieve your goals more successfully. At Standing in Spirit, we take this idea seriously, so we have discussed the idea of Coaching in this short article.
Most professional Coaches today use NLP as an integral part of their work because time and time again, NLP has been proven to support the coaching relationship and to achieve results. NLP focuses on how you communicate with others and with yourself  and how you can change and enrich this communication to achieve the results and goals you want in your life. And, of course, to go further and uncover the goals that you haven’t even recognized yet because when you work with a professional Coach, you can begin to open up new doors and new perspectives that will change your life in positive ways that you haven’t even yet considered.
The presuppositions of NLP are the foundation of the relationship between the Coach and the Client. The central presupposition of NLP is that the map is not the territory. In other words, the way that we represent the world in our minds is not the same as the world itself. Another way to think of this is to understand that events don’t have meanings – we attach meanings to events. For example, if two company executives look at the same recession, one might see disaster yet the other might see huge potential. The event (the territory) is the same, but the interpretation (the map) is different. By working with a NLP Coach, you can quickly begin to identify the parts of your own maps that are holding you back from the success that you can truly attain. The motto of Standing in Spirit is “Let it Flow”, and by that we mean that we can help you to remove the limitations in your own maps of the world and let success flow to you much more easily. We’re not saying that you don’t have to work hard – you do – we’re just saying that it’s really important to establish the best maps of the world for directing that hard work in exactly the appropriate ways to achieve your goals. Isn’t it time that you let your hard work move things in exactly the right way – the best path through the most appropriate map?
NLP offers many coaching tools to help you to create and use the most appropriate maps that will allow you to perform at your very best, to effectively access all the resources that are available, and to achieve your goals much more quickly than you could have imagined.  NLP is fundamentally interested in the modeling of excellence and the tools of techniques of NLP Coaching are appropriate for everyone who is interested in improving performance, in areas as diverse as personal development, therapy, medical professions, teaching, sports, business, relationships and much more.
One of the best definitions of Coaching based on an NLP perspective is the one posited by Robert Dilts on the back cover of his book, From Coach to Awakener.

Coaching is the process of helping people and teams to perform at the peak of their abilities. It involves drawing out people’s strengths, helping them to bypass personal barriers and limits in order to achieve their personal bests, and facilitating them to function more effectively as members of a team.
Historically, coaching has been focused towards achieving improvement with respect to a specific behavioral performance. This involves promoting the development of that person’s behavioral competence through careful observation and feedback.
In recent years, the notion of coaching has taken on a more generalized and expanded meaning. Personal coaching, executive coaching, and life coaching provide support on a number of different levels: behaviors, capabilities, beliefs,values, identity and even spiritual. These new and more comprehensive forms of coaching–executive coaching and life coaching–can be referred to as capital “C” Coaching. Large “C” Coaching involves helping people effectively achieve outcomes on a range of level. We guide people to learn about new environments, for instance; coach them to improve specific behavioral competencies; teach them new cognitive capabilities; mentor empowering beliefs and values; sponsor growth at the identity level; and awaken people’s awareness of the larger system or field.

As Dilts’ definition shows, one of the strengths of NLP Coaching is that it takes place at many levels, and you will find yourself recognizing new resources and possibilities as you see your work and life at each level with these new perspectives. Combined with the power and potential of NLP, Coaching can traverse all of these levels easily and take you much further much more quickly than you had previously thought.
Peter Wrycza also describes the strengths of NLP for Coaching in the journal AnchorPoint:

When people ask, ‘What’s NLP?’ I now say, “It’s the most sophisticated approach to coaching there is.” And if they need more detail, I can explain how it is so: because it offers a powerful methodology for uncovering the structure of subjective experience, thereby helping us to model excellence in any field. And it uses the fruits of that modeling to draw on more of our inner resources, so that our Performance and our Alignment become and remain best friends, as we grow and develop.

And at Standing in Spirit, that is our goal – to provide Coaching and training that will let your performance be aligned in exactly the directions that will bring you the greatest success in your personal and working life, no matter how you define that success. But at Standing in Spirit we like to say it a little more simply: Let it Flow.

Categories
Blog Hypnosis

Review: Better Sleep Sooner

Better Sleep Sooner
by Aaron McLoughlin
Published by Rapid Inspired Change. Available from the publisher’s website.

As the title suggests, the purpose of this book is to help people to get a better quality of sleep in their lives. The author, Aaron McLoughlin, is from New Zealand and has worked in the field of hypnosis and NLP since 1996, experience that is clearly evident in this well-crafted book. The book offers a series of strategies over 8 chapters, and although it is quite a short read at 168 pages, McLoughlin has managed to squeeze in an awful lot of good ideas in a very clear way that will certainly help to achieve his aim of helping people to get better sleep sooner.
90% of adults experience insomnia at some point in their lives, but some get it chronically and it goes beyond being a nuisance to become a major disruption to a happy productive life. McLoughlin was a long-time member of that 90% and he draws strongly on his own personal experience in overcoming sleeplessness which he describes as follows:

The nights seemed never-ending. Lying in bed for what seemed like the entire night, fretting and worrying about sleep. Anxiety was the nightly ritual. Lying awake imagining the next day and how exhausted I would be having had no sleep. Imagining all the sleep I had missed. Horrendous anxiety feeding upon itself and generating more and more sleeplessness and intermittent feelings of depression.

If you see yourself in that description, then perhaps you need to read no further and can just go ahead and order the book, but for the sake of interest of the 10% of folks who always sleep perfectly I’ll give some more details of the book below!
Much of the book is written in rich hypnotic language and as you turn the pages, you may occasionally find yourself drifting off into a mild trance or even into that sleep that may have been eluding you until now. While this hypnotic language is present throughout, it is most obvious in the stoems which appear at the end of the chapter – texts which read like poetry and act as a way of learning the concepts of the chapter through hypnosis at an even deeper level. Here is a part of one of the stoems at the end of Chapter 2.

As I am reading
these comfortable words
that’s right…
I can continue to consider…
that the problem I have been having
is just a behaviour
which means of course
that as I continue to read effortlessly now
that’s right…
I can take a deep breath…

These stoems are an excellent way of presenting hypnotic inductions in written form. The formatting of these texts as poetry means that the reader naturally parses each line separately and gives it more time to sink in than would normally be given to prose. This style of presentation also accommodates the language of spoken hypnotic inductions including embedded suggestions, long or unfinished sentences connected by simple conjunctions, implied causatives, generalizations which must be completed appropriately by the reader, occasional non-grammatical clauses, and even clauses that appear illogical to the conscious mind yet act effectively on the unconscious mind. Stoems are by far the best way that I have seen of presenting hypnotic language on the written page, and the author has done an excellent job of using this form to reteach the material of each chapter to the unconscious mind.
After an introduction to the book in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 provides a classic NLP reframe, changing ‘insomnia’ from a nominalization back into a process – something that we do. The reader is shown that sleeplessness is not something that is being done to them, but rather something that they are doing themselves. Similarly, a reframe is used to separate identity from behaviour; the person is not an ‘insomniac’, rather they are doing something that is not helping them to sleep at an optimal level.
Chapter 3 continues in the mode of reframing and McLouglin also introduces what he calls the Fascination Principle: all symptoms can be seen as messages from the unconscious mind that we can interact with – if we maintain an open attitude of curiosity and are willing to respond appropriately to the message. It reminds me of one of my own favourite metaphors: a symptom is like a telephone call from the unconscious mind – you can let it keep ringing and annoying you, or you can listen to the message on the telephone and respond appropriately.
Chapter 4  explores emotions related to sleeplessness and notes that

Changing your mental state or perception with respect to your emotions is an important first step in resolving any emotion that may be fueling the sleeping problem.

It offers several useful techniques for gaining control of emotions including the Fascination Principle, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Self-Hypnosis, and Rewind the Day – all of which I tried out using the instructions specified in the book and found to be highly effective. In particular, if (like me) you are not yet familiar with EFT, McLouglin’s concise but complete instructions provide a  excellent primer.
Chapter 5 is the longest chapter in the book and contains eight useful reframes including my favourite one – “sleep is not the problem, rest is the key.” This chapter also makes nice subtle use of future pacing by having the reader imagine the time 15 minutes after they wake up, feeling fully rested. This refocusing from the problem to the solution is a perfect example of the NLP outcome frame. Like so many other problems that people face, when they can move beyond the problem to visualizing the possible solution, the unconscious mind starts marshalling the resources to make that future image come into reality.
Chapter 6 brings us to the core of the book and offers some more valuable strategies as well as a long well-constructed stoem. Chapter 7 brings us back from trance and chunks right down into the concrete details of the environment and behaviours that will support good sleep patterns. Chapter 8 completes the main body of the book with several long stoems that are again well-constructed. The appendices offer some very practical instructions on carrying out EFT, self-hypnosis, and power-napping. Any of these could have been easily expanded into whole chapters, but the author has wisely chosen instead to keep the book brief and to get to the points quickly – after all that leaves more time for the reader to just relax and sleep, doesn’t it?
Better Sleep Sooner is highly recommended for people who want to improve the quality of their sleep – and who doesn’t? Even for people who already sleep very well, that lucky 10%, they are likely to find this book useful in sleeping deeper and relaxing more in their waking lives. If one thing could be added to the book, I would suggest that the stoems could be recorded and included as a CD, or even as an mp3 download from the website. However, I am certainly willing to wait for that as I head off to drift into a deep deep sleep.
——————————-
©2011 by Dr. Brian Cullen

Categories
Blog Other

Any comments on logos?

Recently, a designer did a couple of simple logo ideas for the new Standing in Spirit website. These are still rough, and all suggestions are welcome. Or if you have a good idea that captures the name of the company and the statement “Let it Flow”, please just let that creativity flow and share with us!

Categories
Blog Other

Not Enough Time to Get Things Done – Think Again!

Years ago, I carried out my doctoral research into the songwriting process, in particular looking at how songwriters move from that first spark into a complete song. It was a whole lot of fun working with the songwriters (particularly for the first five years of the research!), and through interviews and workshops, I learned a whole lot about the process.
Every songwriter is different, of course, but one important lesson that emerged from the research is that spending a long time on writing does not necessarily produce a better result. In fact, it was almost the exact opposite. Songwriters who wrote quickly were the ones who were both happiest with their songs and also the ones who had the most success and favourable response in both live shows and recordings.
This slightly counter-intuitive result is probably due to a couple of factors. First, writers who write slowly tend to be critical about their work as they are writing. These writers question every line to the extent that they get in the way of their own creative processes and either fail to finish the song or over-analyze it so much that it has lost that initial spark that made it interesting. When a writer works very quickly or with a time limit, the critical filter becomes suspended, and often amazing things can happen. When we let the unconscious mind really loose, creativity can really flow. It is always possible to edit a song later, but applying the critical filter too early can mean that a song will never be finished.Second, songwriters who write slowly end up writing far fewer songs – simply because each song takes so long to write. And another important finding in the research was that good songwriters are the ones who have the experience of writing many songs. It is through songwriting that a songwriter develops his craft, and the writer who writes 100 songs will be far more flexible and creative than the writer who has written only 5. Writing more songs also increases the chances of writing really great songs. Like any other area of creativity, songwriters who write a lot may have more bad ideas but they are also much more likely to have more good ideas, too.
An Australian songwriter, Leon, was one of the faster writers and although he had little time available for songwriting or recording, he managed to use that limited time extremely effectively. Leon was working two jobs and raising young children. He said that he would write a song in his spare ten minutes in the morning, often while he was shaving or doing something else. Then he would rush into his garage studio and record a basic track on guitar and vocal. In the evening when he came home, he again had about 10 minutes before he had to rush out to his second job, so he would rush into the studio and add a keyboard part and a backing vocal. While his recordings were not perfect by any means, he very successfully wrote many great songs and produced good’sounding demos in this way. I asked Leon how things would be if he had a full day to write songs. “Oh, if I had a whole day, I’d do nothing – I’d probably sit around and watch TV or just chill out.”
I have had similar experiences myself. I had months and months to write six songs for a children’ education project. I worked slowly on demo after demo and nothing was really working. It was only on the day that the producer emailed me and said, “we need to talk”, that I realized how serious things had become. I knew that I was about to be fired if I didn’t do something. Once again, a time limit was a wonderful thing. I went into my studio at 8am, worked until midnight with hardly a break. By the end of the session, I had written six new songs, recorded all the tracks, added the vocals, and uploaded them to an online server for the producer. When he called me from New York at 3am, he said “where did these songs come from – I love them!”. Where did they come from indeed – good question because I hardly remember the day at all. I was working in a trance-like state with far far greater efficiency than my normal capabilities.  The time limit focused my mind, let my critical filter and conscious mind take a break, and let my unconscious mind do what it is good at – creating stuff quickly and efficiently.
So often, people say that they don’t have the time to get things done. Yet sometimes, a deadline or limited time is exactly what is needed to get things done. There’s an old saying that if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. So if you’re a busy person already, maybe you’re exactly the right person to do that special thing that you have been putting off.

Categories
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.
 
Categories
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.