I have been mucking around with NLP since ... jeez, I don't know ... 1990? Before that I had an interest in hypnosis and bought a lot of crappy metaphysical meditation/hypnosis tapes and was reading books like "TNT: The Power Within You" which my dad gave me. The book was basically saying you can manifest what you visualize. Eh. Had limited results with all that.
NLP was the first thing that I used that actually had an immediate result with me, so I was hooked. While Tony Robbins represents a lot of things I don't like (using the techniques to make yourself match the status quo criteria for success and happiness), he introduced me to NLP in a brilliant fashion. So for that I am thankful. I basically now look at him as a bunch of empty rhetoric, seeing how much more can be done with the techniques.
I went to one of his seminars. After that I went to see Bandler for a three day seminar and had my head majorly ****ed with. A lot of good and bad stuff went on there. Then I went to a little two day NLP seminar with a local trainer in New Olreans. Then NLP Comprehensive for my Practitioner and then NLPU with Dilts and Delozier for my Master Practitioner.
Aside from that, I have made a personal investment in several seminars on tape by Bandler, Grinder, Stephen Gilligan, Rex Sikes and others.
I do not like Michael Hall one bit. He has a view much like that of traditional psychotherapy. That is, his focus seems to be on the diagnosis of pathology. I haven't looked much into his, what does he call it? Neuro-semantics? But it looks like BS to me. States about States about States. Seems like mental masturbation to me. The subject is much more elegantly handled by Tamara and Connirae Andreas in their Core Transformation technique.
Have you read Steve Andreas's critique of Whispering? It's on his website and is worth a read.
Are you talking about the example of the woman who needed her world turned upside down? I believe that is a powerful means of change and probably on of the most effective. He had the sensory acuity to perceive a message from her unconscious and instead of giving words, gave her actual experiences, multiple descriptions of what she requested. Simple but brilliant. That is bound to create a change, definitely. That is the sort of belief change process that I argue for. I think it is probably going to be the most profound and powerful type.
Beliefs are based, I think, upon experiences, and it takes experiences to shatter experiences. That is, a racist man who is dying but taken in an cared for by a chinese or black or east indian or whatever kind of family he is racist against and nursed caringly back to life ... how is he going to remain a racist with that powerful counter example in his life? It is possible, yes, but unlikely.
Belief change also starts, I think, with linguistic intervention. What really clinches it are the experiences we have after the linguistic intervention as a result of it. My guess.
Whispering is a very difficult read and unnecessarily so. I think Grinder has a big ego and he's trying to impress everyone with how obscure he can be. There are sentences in which the subject and object are way far apart, and there are misplaced modifiers ... so that you don't know which word in the sentence the modifier is supposed to modify. Maybe he did this on purpose for a reason other than arrogance, I don't know.
There is a lot of good in that book, but I haven't been willing to finish it. I had photoread it (fat lot of good that does, I have to consciously, slowly go over some paragraphs 3 or more times to understand them), skimmed it, etc. I have read maybe a littler more than the first quarter of the book slowly and deliberately. He makes some very good points and is very skeptical, which I like.
I like reading stuff that is based in experience, is logically sound, and doesn't require you to go out on a limb.
I think that Steve Andreas's critique are right on the mark, though. What the hell is a "content free" state, anyway? Is one really possible? Of course not. States involve some sort of content. I do appreciate his intention, though, which is, I think, to give the unconscious of the client free reign to make the appropriate changes with as little interference as possible.
A lot better and more respectful to the individual, IMHO.
With most change work, people are pushing some kind of philosophy. They have an agenda. The only person I have ever worked with who helped me in an "agenda free" (I know that everyone has *some* agenda, but the extent of the amount of control they try to have over your beliefs varies) was Robert Dilts.
I was having trouble with this exercise where you use values to solve a problem on a "lower" logical level. The way he helped me was very directly to get me to chunk up. I cannot really describe it, but he utilized my natural thinking to help me succeed in the exercise ... an exercise I had always had problems with. And I did it. It was one of the most respectful pieces of work I'd ever had done. I really knew that the way to do it was inside of me, not something outside of me being put in by someone else ... which is what a lot of NLP techniques (the term "installation" for example) feel like.
[This message has been edited by babayada (edited May 02, 2004).]