James Taylor

I published 'Get it, Understand it: Get ahead' in March 2012. This has an unusual amount of work for the reader to do, getting the reader to practise verbal tasks as they read. The only way to master a skill is to practise it, and this book will enable you to master many new skills, leaving you able to handle difficult people and able to charm those who need to be charmed. And because you will have done the hard work, the skill will simply fall into place when you need it most.

In the process of arriving at the finished article I published a number of other books - these are drafts, which are proving hard to delete!

'Get It' was written because I felt that the people skills and popular psychology library needed a book with a more inclusive approach. There are many books on conversation, sales, and influence, but there is so much more to gain by drawing links between these topics. Also, I felt that it was time for modern linguistics to be brought into mainstream pop psych literature in an easily readable form. The book had to be a fun read yet still go into enough detail to be of practical use.

When we seek to improve our communication skills, what we find frustrating is that so many fields need to be studied. My early interests in NLP and CBT revealed ways to alter mindset; my work as a personal trainer revealed that good posture is crucial if we need to command other people; my work in philosophy revealed how we use various argument strategies in everyday contexts; and so the list goes on, embracing voice training, lie detection, handling manipulators etc. Having worked through this long list of relevant items, I realised that although NLP was full of linguistic concepts, the field of linguistics itself was - and is - still in its infancy. Realising that Bandler and Grinder had applied the linguistic concepts of the 1970s to the work of the leading therapists at that time, I thought that a look at contemporary linguistics would offer more material; this led me to semantics and pragmatics, where I discovered many additional relevant linguistic concepts.

Having looked at many different areas, I thought that it would be a good idea to combine all of these elements in one book. Better still, a workbook. Even better still, a workbook that would present this essential information in a form that everyone could understand. After all, the people who need the book the most are unlikely to be therapists themselves, so each idea had to be presented from the bottom upwards in plain English. 'Get it' was on the way - a course covering all this material in the form of a workbook. The material is explained without any jargon, in plain English, to make it accessible to anyone.

I published three books along the way to 'Get it; Understand it: Get ahead', namely 'I want what they've got', 'How you can command respect' and 'Attraction, love, and relationships'. These are early attempts at assembling this book, and so in all honesty I would not recommend getting these.

But now we have the item I really wanted to produce. 'Get it: Understand it: Get ahead' looks at the complete picture in the form of a workbook. It contains lots of material, each idea being followed by exercises just to make sure that you know how to apply the knowledge you read. Skilful use of language is of the utmost importance for social success, linguists tell us that 'status is encoded in speech', so I have published a companion language workbook which examines relevant linguistic ideas.

Anybody who feels they lack control of their lives will benefit considerably from this information. This is the material that turned my life around.

JT