Change Your Mind ? and Keep the Change

This advanced NLP book builds on the foundation established in Heart of the Mind, by the Andreases, and Using Your Brain—for a CHANGE, by Richard Bandler. Presented in "live seminar" format, this book offers rich information and specific examples of how to work successfully in helping people change. Specific methods are presented for changing habits, for congruently finally saying "no" when that is appropriate, eliminating compulsions, building self-concept, becoming more self-referenced and less vulnerable to others' opinions, utilization of timelines and time frames for planning and motivation, shifting the relative importance of criteria/values, and much more.

(from the Introduction) We have presented the patterns in this book as explicitly and systematically as we can, in order to make it easy for you to learn them. Like a road map, these directions will only be useful if you take the time to actually follow them, and use your senses to experience the actual territory that they lead you to. We have presented them in great detail, and warned you about all the mistakes we and others have made with them, to make it hard for you to use them inappropriately. Once you have taken the time to learn these methods thoroughly, you can become more flexible and artistic in utilizing them with clients, with confidence that your behavior will remain systematic and effective.

Many people accuse NLP of being technological, with the implication that it is cold and unfeeling. However, those same people are happy to use the technology of central heating to help their houses warm, instead of the smoky fire used by their ancestors. They also use antibiotics and immunization to keep their children healthy without thinking about the incredibly complex technology behind it.

Months of warm feelings won't help a child who is a poor speller, or release him from the resulting ridicule, feelings of failure and self-criticism; an hour or two of NLP technology can teach him how to spell and provide him with a sense of accomplishment and self-worth. All the empathy in the world won't help a phobic; a half-hour of NLP technology can release her from a life punctuated with terror. Holding the hand of a dying friend may ease his passing; appropriate medical technology may save his life.

Of course any technology can be misused by delivering it in a cold, unfeeling way. We have listened to nurses whose "bedside manner" must have been learned from a tape recording of Lucretia Borgia, and therapists who speak in the tonality of Adolph Hitler. This book is more technological than most, because we know that detailed technology gets results, and that the "coldest" technology can be delivered with humanity and respect.

We learned much of the material in this book directly from Richard Bandler in a small seminar in early 1984. In that seminar he taught us a number of specific patterns, most of which are included in this book. But more important, he demonstrated the tools of the trade: how to use fine distinctions, specific questions, and procedures for further exploration and discovery. Richard also often demonstrated without explaining, described events cryptically, or dropped tantalizing hints. Although this was often frustrating, it also whetted our curiosity and motivated us to explore further. Since then, we have been using the tools he taught us to follow up some of those tantalizing hints and develop specific patterns in sufficient detail that they can be more easily learned by others.

For over three years now we have been teaching this material in our Advanced Submodality Trainings. Much of this book has been edited from transcripts drawn from many different trainings. These segments have been woven together and presented as if they occurred in one training, both for your ease in reading, and to retain the conversational style and format of the live teaching. Other parts we have written without referring to tapes of transcripts. Most of the time we do not indicate which of us is speaking; after months of editing by both of us, we often don't know, and it doesn't matter anyway. We do identify ourselves in transcripts of demonstrations which are also available on videotape.

In many ways, this book is a continuation of Richard Bandler's book, Using Your Brain--for a CHANGE, which we edited two years ago. As we were writing this book we have presupposed that readers will have read Using Your Brain, and will have a background understanding of basic submodality patterns. If you don't have that background, we strongly recommend that you acquire it before reading this book, in order to get full value from the patterns in this book.

We also strongly recommend that you read the chapters in this book in order. Sequence, or syntax, of experience is a major organizing principle in NLP, and the sequence of chapters in this book has been carefully thought out. Many of the later chapters presuppose that ;you have already read and understood earlier chapters. If you read a later chapter without the background provided by earlier chapters and Using Your Brain, it will be more difficult for you to understand the material completely and thoroughly.

There is an old joke about the human brain being "the only self-maintaining all-purpose computer that can be created by unskilled labor." However, it's also a computer without an owner's manual. The patterns developed by NLP are essentially human "software"--ways to organize your experience that can be learned, a cultural/social resource, like all the other products of human creativity and inventiveness. The material we present here explores the mental patterning that makes us who we are, and provide tools that you can use to quickly change how you respond. This book joins over 30 NLP books that have been published since the first one was published by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in 1975. And this is only the beginning . . .