In the past two weeks, I watched my four-month-old son learn to blow raspberries. Inspired by reading that this would be good for his language development (seriously!), and knowing that his mother can’t blow raspberries, I made the sacrifice and regularly blew raspberries at him. He was surprised at the start, then he started laughing. Then he started trying it out for himself. It took a while, and he ‘fell over’ a bunch of times. Even now, his raspberries are particularly sloppy. But he watched me and he did it – today, he can reliably exit a room and blow me a raspberry!

Interesting skills are usually the most difficult to transfer. We can learn Newton’s Laws, but it’s another story entirely to learn to think as Newton thought. Those tacit and almost invisible skills that sometimes leave behind traces of brilliance are the ones where we lack the language to teach the skills. Often we lack the explicit knowledge as to what is being done at all. Yet an infant can learn without language. They just look out at the world with eyes wide open and a willingness to explore, experiment and experience.

In NLP terms, we could call this modeling. Modeling is how Dr John Grinder learned to do Gestalt Therapy from Richard Bandler and Frank Pucelik, the process yielding what we now know as the “Meta Model”. Modeling was then applied by them, and the original study circle, to learn from Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson, Frank Farrelly and others, thereby creating the original foundations of NLP.

NLP Modeling (or NLP^Modeling) is more than just Strategies, and seems mostly taught explicitly and comprehensively as part of New Code NLP trainings.

There are three basic levels of NLP training.

The first basic level of training is “Practitioner”. An NLP Practitioner will typically have been exposed to between 7 and 18 days of NLP training, focused on learning the fundamental patterns, techniques and attitudes.

The second basic level is “Master Practitioner”. Building on the Practitioner, Master Practitioner usually involves an extra 6-18 days of training. Sometimes this is focused on learning additional “advanced” patterns, while other trainers will focus Master Practitioner on Modeling.

The third basic level is “Trainer”. NLP Trainers Trainings are usually conducted over about three weeks, and is less focused on improving “NLP skills” and more focused on how to present NLP material.

In a sense, the fourth level would be the Graduate Certificate of NLP. The GradCertNLP is government accredited as equivalent to a third of a Masters degree and so there is a much higher standard of quality control. This incorporates Practitioner and Master Practitioner trainings into a 40-day period of training. To me, the Graduate Certificate of NLP sounds great, though it is still very new… Nobody in China has completed this level of training yet.

Some NLP trainers call themselves “Master Trainers”. The term was first coined by Richard Bandler when he and John Grinder split up, some might say as a way to position some trainers as “better” (others might suggest to ‘recognize seniority or skill’). There are a few other fancy titles floating around too.

Now: Not all trainings are equal.

There are different lengths of training, different styles of training and vastly different content. In general:

• A longer training will be better.
  You’ll learn more, experience greater personal shifts and develop better skills.
• A smaller group of participants will be better.
  You’ll get more attention from the trainer, your peers will help you more since they’ll know you better, and the training can move along faster.
• A more highly trained trainer is better.
  There is so much more to being the right NLP Trainer for you than just whether the person is calling themselves one. How many days have they spent learning and growing in the past year? How are they applying their skills? What are they best at?

There are also different streams of NLP. There is the “Robert Dilts/NLPU” and “Richard Bandler” and “ABNLP/Tad James” or “Tony Robbins” and even a few with “John Grinder/New Code”. And more spin off and brand themselves each year. Some trainers will be stuck in one ‘way’ while others will have explored a number of streams in depth and be focused on communicating their own or a combination.

Perhaps the biggest difference between my NLP training and my time at university is that you can keep redoing your NLP training. The best practitioners and trainers that I have seen are those that have jumped back into the arena and remained perpetual students, never getting too attached to what they know to learn something new. So wherever you are at now, I hope that you can start moving towards where you want to be in NLP.

I couldn’t help but ask myself, “How?”

Rather than trying to reassure him that he wasn’t, or denying that he was a failure, I got curious and wondered how he could feel a failure after so much ’success’. And sure enough, the answers were clear too. For him,

“The goal of movie-making is to star in a film where your performance drives the film, and the film is either a soaring critical or commercial success, and I never had that.”

And although he starred in the 1990 action film The Hunt for Red October, which made more than $200m, it was successful because it was based on a popular Tom Clancy novel – not because of his performance.

He feels that his career is a failure not because it “is” – after all, how can we really define whether someone’s career is a success or a failure? But he feels that is is a failure because of how he defines success.

What do you want most? What drives you?

Success?

Happiness?

Joy?

Achievement?

Love?

Money?

Each of us have many things that drive us. Some things that pull us forward – that we want to experience something. And maybe there are other things that we desperately want to avoid.

We all want to experience different things. And that’s great – that’s one of the things that drives the rich and diverse world in which we live. Yet how well are we setting ourselves up to feel good? There are so many ways that we can find to feel bad. And there are so many things in the world today about which we could feel bad if we wanted.

But what could happen if you could feel better more and more often?

(from DanielSmith.info)

Richard and John worked together or “ran together” (as John phrases it) for about seven years at the start of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

More recently, Richard has branded his work as Design Human Engineering™ and Neuro Hypnotic Repatterning™, while John has channeled his focus into New Code NLP. While both might appear to be superficially different, each is in the pursuit of modeling excellence.

And if you look beyond the surface, they are remarkably similar. Let me give you an example…

Neuro Hypnotic Repatterning: In one exercise, you take a situation that isn’t working for you. A “problem state” if you will. Then you identify the feeling, noticing how the feelings move and change. After a short break, you then create a more resourceful state – a state of mind that feels better and that you believe helps you perform better. A “resource state”. Finally, you take the resourceful state with you while remembering the problem state.

New Code NLP: Take a “problem state”. Associate and connect with that state without trying to change anything: Just notice what happens in the situation. Then create a “content free high performance state” – while there are elaborate rituals within the New Code, this is basically a “resource state”. Finally, you take the “high performance state” into the “problem state”.

Of course, perhaps I am just confused and don’t understand all the subtleties…

Dan Smith

Dr John Grinder and Dr Richard Bandler developed NLP together through the 1970s. They discovered (and created?) many fantastic skills and opportunities for change, learning and growth.

After Grinder and Bandler started working independently from each other, each explored the field further in their own way. Bandler created Design Human Engineering and more recently Neuro Hypnotic Repatterning. Grinder developed New Code NLP, first with Judith DeLozier in Turtles All the Way Down and more recently with Carmen Bostic St Clair in Whispering in the Wind.

New Code NLP brings together the latest developments from NLP co-creator, Dr John Grinder, and his partner, Carmen Bostic St Clair, and includes powerful yet easy-to-use processes for NLP change work and personal evolution. Even if you are familiar with “NLP” as a field, you will likely want to experience the latest and best through New Code NLP.

Inspiritive quote Grinder and Bostic (2000) to say that New Code is:

A description of NLP which uses a systemic approach to demonstrate and teach the patterns by providing a series of contexts in which they manifest spontaneously. In the New Code of NLP the unconscious of the client is explicitly assigned the responsibility for the selection of the critical elements-the desired state, the resource, or new behaviour. The unconscious is explicitly involved in all steps. There are precise constraints placed upon the selection of new behaviour, more specifically, the new behaviour must satisfy the original positive intention(s) of the behaviour to be changed. The manipulation occurs at the level of state and intention as opposed to that of behaviour.

You can read more about New Code NLP at Inspiritive and at ITANLP.

It was great to have Elsie and Marc able to attend the session with Dr John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St Clair a few weeks ago, and I’m hoping to post a review from them here shortly.

The training was focused on “New Code”. While there are many forms and styles of NLP training in the world, New Code is the one most closely associated with NLP Co-Founder Dr John Grinder. As highlighted by this article from Michael Carroll (from NLP Academy in the UK), New Code focused more on personal congruence and the connection with your unconscious mind, developing “high performance states” and “content free” work. You can also find more information on New Code with Chris and Jules Collingwood’s Inspiritive in Australia.

We had a session in China NLP in January focused on New Code, but after reading Michael’s article, I thought it was worth mentioning again!

I just came across a set of classic Richard Bandler videos. 11-and-a-half-hours of Richard actually, recorded in a training with NLP Comprehensive in Colorado. With an array of topics covering layering responses, propulsion systems, attitudes, perceptual grids, nonverbal amplifications, playing with problems and weaving complexes, I really appreciate Bandler’s insights and the sheer entertainment value of his style.

One of the things that always stands out to me when I spend time watching or listening to Richard is the deep similarities to John Grinder. It’s easy to get lost in the wonderful techniques, but despite their overt differences, Bandler and Grinder’s approach and focus on the underlying technology rather than the superficial techniques is remarkably similar.

Celine Dion’s song, “Because You Loved Me” seems to be about how the singer’s success depends upon their lover… a very common yet somehow unhealthy sentiment.

But it turns out that the song is about the love of a father.

Ah, context is everything. This hits home to me every time I hear the Céline Dion song, “Because You Loved Me.”

My initial reaction to the tune, when I first heard it a dozen years ago, went something like, “Ok, nice vocal performance and musical arrangement. But ENOUGH of these slavishly dependent love lyrics where someone’s very existence is contingent on a lover’s attention. ‘I’m everything I am because you loved me.’ Really! Is that a message you want to be sending out to a hundred million listeners, especially other women? How about believing in yourself no matter what he thinks?”

But a few years later I came across an interview with the writer of the song, Diane Warren, who explained that she wrote “Because You Loved Me” to thank her father for his unshakable belief in her—and especially his relentless support of her artistic aspirations. Wham! The song was instantly transformed before my very ears! A mawkish ballad became a paean to a father’s love. Instead of being annoyed, I was immediately inspired and even choked up by it. (After all, what parent would not die to hear that sentiment from a daughter?) The song itself didn’t change, but seen in a new light, the song could have a dramatically different effect.

This, of course, has applications to work life where we can feel slapped around by events daily that have unpleasant meanings for us. But an event itself doesn’t determine its meaning, we do. What matters is our interpretation of an event. And with a little thought and creativity we can find different interpretations to most things that happen to us. Such is the art of “reframing“—viewing an event through a new and deliberately chosen frame. We probably all do it at times—for instance, when we decide to view a misfortune (perhaps a career setback or a job loss) as a constructive opportunity (perhaps an occasion to take a new direction in our work or learn a new set of skills). The choice is up to us in how to interpret these events. And from our interpretation comes our response.

So it is that a pop tune on the radio can be heard as either a sappy report on helpless infatuation or as a timeless acknowledgment of a daughter’s enduring love for her father.

(John O’Leary posted this on 09/08/08 at TomPeters.com)

In the comments, there is also a reference by the author to Paul Watzlawick’s 1974 book, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution.

“Modeling” is the process of taking a complex event or series of events and breaking it into small enough chunks that it can be repeated in a manageable way. These pieces can be organized into step-by-step strategies or programs that anyone can learn. Through NLP, for example, the thinking processes of geniuses such as Albert Einstein. Walt Disney, Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Aristotle and others can be generalized and applied to health. Educates and organizational dynamics.

Robert has studied the mental processes used by highly creative people from many different fields. On the basis of this research, he has put together explicit maps of these processes and their applications which allow people to more fully develop their senses and mental capacities, achieve and retrigger states of creative excellence, use and direct unconscious processes, overcome blocks and resistance to creativity, and deal effectively with criticism.

At his November workshop in Guangzhou and drawing from the books Tools for Dreamers and Strategies of Genius, Robert will demonstrate how NLP tools may be used to:

• Model effective thinking processes
• Internalize powerful creativity strategies
• Establish beliefs that support creativity and innovation
• Identify and reframe limiting beliefs related to creativity and innovation
• Manage multi-level problem solving interventions

The structure the course will allow students not only to learn the powerful and creative thinking strategies used by some of history’s most important geniuses, but also to learn the tools and technologies by which such strategies can be identified, mapped and applied.

As an NLP developer, trainer and author, Robert has studied the mental processes used by highly creative people from many different fields. His past books, such as Belief: Pathways to Health and Well-Being, Tools for Dreamers, and Effective Presumption Skills, explore practical strategies and techniques for improving health, creativity and public speaking. His most recent works, Strategies of Genius. Vole I, Ⅱ&Ⅲ, apply the tools of NLP to model the thinking processes of important historical figures, including Aristotle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Walt Disney, Mozart, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla. These thinking processes have been put into practical and effective “strategies of genius” that may be easily learner and applied to many different contexts. Robert views his work on Strategies of Genius as part of a larger mission to extend the horizon of human capabilities and achievement.

A short bio of Robert B. Dilts

For more information about the course in Guangzhou, please contact us.