People Building

Over the weekend I attended an advanced NLP training course where Richard Bandler and John La Valle were both teaching.

Lots of the course was made up of content previously at Practitioner and Master Practitioner level, but it was well worth attending just for the snippets of NLP gold that effortlessly fall from Richard Bandlers lips.

I’m also pleased to report that Dr Bandler was looking happier and healthier than he was when I saw him just before Christmas last year. This, he attributes to his new wife who is clearly taking good care of him. Thank goodness I decided to give him a second shot- after last year I thought he was a bit of a grumpy old man, but he was full of mischief and fun at the weekend and shared some very good metaphors and anecdotes from therapy.

I would recommend the advanced NLP training course to anyone who feels they need a refresher of the linguistic elements of their NLP training. However it is also useful to simply reconnect with others who have a similar interest to explore the many different ways each individual interprets and uses NLP.

Throughout the weekend, I wrote limited notes as my linguistics are pretty good and I remember most of the Meta and Milton model off the top of my head. The notes I did take were more key points, or useful phrases.

One such useful phrase was “feel some “Never again.”” Dr Bandler used this with a couple of ladies who were up on the stage, having volunteered when asked if there was some thought that they spent time thinking of each day, that made them feel bad.

Dr Bandler had them both in trance and adjusted the submodalities of the pictures they were creating by shrinking down the image of the old event and flickering from colour to black and white. He also played some silly circus music to get the women into a more giggly resourceful state.

It’s also important to note that before beginning any work with them, he asked them how much time they were spending on the bad thought each day. Then he multiplied that by 10 years and told them how much time they would have wasted- basically it was great leverage. He asked the women what else they could consider doing with the thousands of hours they’d wasted on feeling bad. (Gets them planning for the future and in a more resourceful state.)

Then towards the end of his work with them, he asked them to feel some “never again.” Never again is the feeling that explains the saying “the grain of straw that broke the camels back.” It’s the feeling you had when you realised that you were too old to have hangovers anymore and so you would no longer mix your drinks on a night out. It’s the feeling you have after being treated badly and suddenly decide to walk away or face up to what ever it is that you have been allowing yourself to feel bad about.

Then when you tap into that feeling, you can apply it to whatever problem you want to stop spending your time and energy on. Voila! Problem solved- What problem?