If your schedule opened up and you can now attend this dynamic and unique NLP training for NLP Master Practitioners, here’s a last-minute reminder so that you can decide. Below is the information you need to know if this training is right for you.

If you have any questions we can answer, you can email AMT@toolsfortransforming.com or call Steve, Connirae, or Mark at home at 303-442-2902.

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An unprecedented opportunity for NLP Master Practitioners!

Here’s the info on…

Advanced Mastery Training 2010 (Aug. 1-7):
what you’ll learn, and how you’ll get to learn it…

This training is shaping up to be hands-down the most innovative training we know of in the field of NLP. It is an unparalleled opportunity to experience five of NLP’s most creative and skilled trainers and developers, all present for the full seven days.

Each of these trainers has a LOT to offer us individually, and being all together in the same room, this training is set to emerge as a synergistic shift in the way we can learn. This is also a unique opportunity to develop upon the leading-edge methods and thinking in NLP. It’s sure to be a fun-filled, inspiring, and generative community event.

Note: we’re not currently planning to professionally record, so the only way to be sure you have access to this all new material is to attend the live event.

Fun, Creativity, and Spontaneity

Sprinkled throughout the training will be outrageous and fun-filled exercises and “games” designed to keep us in an easy “up-time” natural learning mode. These games are a great way to connect with each other and tap into our inborn creativity and spontaneity while learning useful techniques that expand our capabilities. Here’s a glimpse into what you’ll get to participate in:

• Improv with Andy Austin: He’ll guide us in some of his favorite improv games, helping you become more creative and spontaneous with your clients…and in your life!
• Provocative Therapy Games with Nick Kemp: We could call these exercises, but they feel more like games! Learn humorous ways to help clients out of ruts, while also helping YOU out of YOUR communication ruts. With the laughter of practice (and the practice of laughter) it becomes easy to incorporate these techniques in a way that makes them our own.
• Impact Therapy with Danie Beaulieu: Learn more “exercises” that feel like fun, yet lead to serious change. Her exercises are designed for specific impact and change—yet in a way that easily bumps them out of “client” role and into a role of learning and openness to change.

Learn Powerful, In-Depth Changework Methods

This training isn’t just fun and games—we’ll also be learning powerful ways to facilitate change (even while we have fun). We don’t have space to list them all, but here are just a few to spark your interest:

• Lucas Derks: The Power of the Social Panorama
  How can we discover and reconstruct our social lives in a way that’s more in line with what we want? With Lucas Derks’ Social Panorama, we’ll discover how to resolve sticky relationships, self esteem issues, and experiences of unworthiness. We’ll also be exploring power dynamics and social exclusion, the social part of personality, and our ongoing experience of who we are.
• Nick Kemp: Seeding Suggestions for Later Listening
  Nick will share his well-honed strategy for giving clients CDs of each session to take home and listen to. He considers this an integral part of his level of success with clients. You’ll learn how to embed suggestions into the live session that improve impact in the moment, even though they’re really for the purpose of fostering change when the client re-listens later on.
• Danie Beaulieu: Making Metaphors Real
  How can we make our metaphors “real” and “concrete” for clients such that they really get it? With her Impact Therapy Danie Beaulieu is an artist and expert at using simple metaphors that aren’t just a verbal story or concept, but are in the room with us—a twenty dollar bill, a piece of paper, a glass of water. Danie will be teaching some of her most potent exercises, distilled out of hundreds.
• Andy Austin: Effective Pain Control and More Metaphors of Movement
  Effective ways to deal with pain and pain-control: For those of us who are coaches or therapists (or just human beings), pain is something many clients want help in dealing with, and often our methods fall short. Andrew Austin will be showing us how and why the usual ways of working with pain management often fall into some predictable traps. Also learn the next step of the Metaphors of Movement material! Andy Austin will be teaching a “status” direction, and how this can unconsciously confuse and thwart us in actually moving toward our goals.
• Steve Andreas: Escape the “Ego” Trap
  Steve will be teaching several new pieces, including one on ways to escape the “ego” trap, which is probably the greatest obstacle to a good life. Also a segment on logical fallacies in generalization, and one on utilizing someone’s idioms to redirect their attention and reframe their experience.

In addition to having fun while learning powerful techniques for change, this training will also help you to bridge the gap from your NLP training to working with clients. Watch our five master trainers working with individual clients—people who have no previous background with NLP. You’ll also get to experience live modeling. Learn what these 5 experienced trainers see happening in each others’ sessions and be a part of this inside circle, participating in the synergy of ongoing modeling and observations.

We organize the Advanced Mastery Training because it is the training we are excited about attending—to inspire us and expand our own skills. This is truly a place where NLP Master Practitioners and Trainers can all “play” together, explore, and grow. We hope you’ll join us!

The excerpt below is from my just-published downloadable e-book, Help with Negative Self-talk, volume 2, (a sequel to volume one which was published last year). You can purchase the book here:
http://www.realpeoplepress.com/pages.php?page=selftalkebook

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Misunderstanding is the food of conflict; without it, conflict weakens and withers. Joining with a troublesome internal voice can be a first step toward understanding it and how it functions, and this can then be used to regain some control over what it says and does. This approach is something that very few people would ever think of doing on their own, but it has some very interesting consequences. The example below is from Douglas Flemons, a brief therapist in Florida:

Clients come for therapy because some chunk of their experience is happening outside their conscious control, and it’s driving them—and/or someone else—crazy. The brief therapy work I offer employs the logic and methods of hypnosis to invite a reunion between their conscious intention and an automatic and alienated part of the self.

Brian, a high-powered trial lawyer at the top of his game, was desperate about his insomnia. He got five to six hours of sleep on a good night; two to three—or none at all—on a bad one. And for the last few years, most nights had been bad. He’d tried everything, from warm milk and various medications, to relaxation tapes and hypnosis, but nothing had worked. When he’d lie down to try to go to sleep, a five-to-ten second auditory “loop” would form in his head—the chorus from a pop song, a snippet of conversation from earlier in the day, a snatch from a trial—and torture him for hours on end. Despite making formidable efforts, he could never get the loop to stop. After a couple of hours of tossing and turning, he would roam the house, looking for some magic location that might afford him some relief. But the longer sleep eluded him, the more agitated and strung out he’d become.

Brian had a reputation for being relentless. If purposeful effort could achieve a goal, he’d apply himself with the focus of a laser beam. But this skill, which worked so well in the courtroom, backfired when he tried to implement it at bedtime. He couldn’t make himself fall asleep and he couldn’t successfully will the loop in his head to stop. It wasn’t because he wasn’t trying hard enough, but because, given the nature of consciousness, he was trying too hard.

I asked him if he could get a loop started as he sat there in my office. Having never tried to create one on purpose, he was a little surprised at my suggestion, but he was willing to give it a shot. Within a few minutes, he had one going full tilt in his head, so I moved into hypnosis and offered the following suggestions:

“While that loop continues, repeating over and over, you can listen to it with the back of your mind, and to me with the front of your mind. Or you can follow the loop with the front of your mind, while the back of your mind monitors where I’m headed. It doesn’t really matter. You might even find them switching back and forth.

“This morning at breakfast, I told my 6-year-old daughter, Jenna, to quit dawdling. ‘Finish up your cereal, Honey,’ I said. She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said, matching my tone of voice, ‘Finish up your cereal, Honey.’ ‘Hey, what are you trying to pull?’ I joked, to which she replied, ‘Hey, what are you trying to pull?’”

“I complimented her on how well she was able to imitate not only my words, but also the tonal quality of my voice. She smiled at this, so I asked whether she could repeat what I was saying while I was saying it. As I said, ‘I hope you have a good day at school, Sweetheart,’ she looked intently at my mouth and managed to form each of the consonants and vowels of the words just a fraction of a second behind my articulating them. I found myself slowing way down as she spoke almost in unison with me, and at the end of the sentence we both burst out laughing.

“A funny thing happens when you have two or more people voicing the same thing at the same time. If you’re in a choir, holding a certain note, and everyone around you is singing the same note, then the boundary separating you and them dissolves, and your experience of yourself melts a little. You and the other singers blend together.

“I wonder what would happen if the front of your mind were to ‘pull a Jenna’ and start imitating, in unison, that back-of-your-mind loop? Instead of trying to stop it, it could create an exact replica, so you’d have two loops going, the automatic one that you can’t get to stop, and a deliberate one, giving you a stereo experience. Go ahead and try that, and let’s see what happens. Match the voice or voices in speed, articulation, accent, volume, and tone.

“When both are in unison, you may not be able to tell if the deliberate loop in the front of your mind is following the automatic one in the back of your mind, or if the automatic one has synced up with the deliberate one. Both can move together, in unison, around and around, giving you that stereo experience.”

I continued on in this vein for a while, and when I checked in with him, Brian told me that the loop had gradually faded out—something that had never happened before.

In asking Brian to initiate a loop, I helped him connect with something automatic that he’d always tried to eradicate. By helping him shift his intentionality, I helped relief and sleep to develop spontaneously. By inviting him to purposefully imitate it, I facilitated a dissolving of the boundary between his conscious intention and his symptom—a previously alienated part of his experience.

Later in the session, I taught him a self-hypnosis technique to use at night, and suggested that he practice “singing in unison” with whatever loops appeared at bedtime. He came back two weeks later, having slept well almost every night, and he no longer felt trapped by the automatic workings of his mind. He liked the irony, he said, of feeling empowered by not doing anything to the loops. We did some fine-tuning of his self-hypnosis, and he left, able to sleep and no longer at war with himself.

Douglas Flemons, http://www.contextconsultants.com/aboutus.htm

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Read more excerpts from this book (and/or volume 1) and to order:
http://www.realpeoplepress.com/pages.php?page=selftalkebook

An unprecedented opportunity for NLP Master Practitioners!

We sent out a post months ago, and now here’s all-new info on…

Advanced Mastery Training 2010 (Aug. 1-7):
what you’ll learn, and how you’ll get to learn it…

This training is shaping up to be hands-down the most innovative training we know of in the field of NLP. It is an unparalleled opportunity to experience five of NLP’s most creative and skilled trainers and developers, all present for the full seven days.

Each of these trainers has a LOT to offer us individually, and being all together in the same room, this training is set to emerge as a synergistic shift in the way we can learn. This is also a unique opportunity to develop upon the leading-edge methods and thinking in NLP. It’s sure to be a fun-filled, inspiring, and generative community event.

Note: we’re not currently planning to professionally record, so the only way to be sure you have access to this all new material is to attend the live event.

Fun, Creativity, and Spontaneity

Sprinkled throughout the training will be outrageous and fun-filled exercises and “games” designed to keep us in an easy “up-time” natural learning mode. These games are a great way to connect with each other and tap into our inborn creativity and spontaneity while learning useful techniques that expand our capabilities. Here’s a glimpse into what you’ll get to participate in:

• Improv with Andy Austin: He’ll guide us in some of his favorite improv games, helping you become more creative and spontaneous with your clients…and in your life!
• Provocative Therapy Games with Nick Kemp: We could call these exercises, but they feel more like games! Learn humorous ways to help clients out of ruts, while also helping YOU out of YOUR communication ruts. With the laughter of practice (and the practice of laughter) it becomes easy to incorporate these techniques in a way that makes them our own.
• Impact Therapy with Danie Beaulieu: Learn more “exercises” that feel like fun, yet lead to serious change. Her exercises are designed for specific impact and change—yet in a way that easily bumps them out of “client” role and into a role of learning and openness to change.

Learn Powerful, In-Depth Changework Methods

This training isn’t just fun and games—we’ll also be learning powerful ways to facilitate change (even while we have fun). We don’t have space to list them all, but here are just a few to spark your interest:

• Lucas Derks: The Power of the Social Panorama
  How can we discover and reconstruct our social lives in a way that’s more in line with what we want? With Lucas Derks’ Social Panorama, we’ll discover how to resolve sticky relationships, self esteem issues, and experiences of unworthiness. We’ll also be exploring power dynamics and social exclusion, the social part of personality, and our ongoing experience of who we are.
• Nick Kemp: Seeding Suggestions for Later Listening
  Nick will share his well-honed strategy for giving clients CDs of each session to take home and listen to. He considers this an integral part of his level of success with clients. You’ll learn how to embed suggestions into the live session that improve impact in the moment, even though they’re really for the purpose of fostering change when the client re-listens later on.
• Danie Beaulieu: Making Metaphors Real
  How can we make our metaphors “real” and “concrete” for clients such that they really get it? With her Impact Therapy Danie Beaulieu is an artist and expert at using simple metaphors that aren’t just a verbal story or concept, but are in the room with us—a twenty dollar bill, a piece of paper, a glass of water. Danie will be teaching some of her most potent exercises, distilled out of hundreds.
• Andy Austin: Effective Pain Control and More Metaphors of Movement
  Effective ways to deal with pain and pain-control: For those of us who are coaches or therapists (or just human beings), pain is something many clients want help in dealing with, and often our methods fall short. Andrew Austin will be showing us how and why the usual ways of working with pain management often fall into some predictable traps. Also learn the next step of the Metaphors of Movement material! Andy Austin will be teaching a “status” direction, and how this can unconsciously confuse and thwart us in actually moving toward our goals.
• Steve Andreas: Escape the “Ego” Trap
  Steve will be teaching several new pieces, including one on ways to escape the “ego” trap, which is probably the greatest obstacle to a good life. Also a segment on logical fallacies in generalization, and one on utilizing someone’s idioms to redirect their attention and reframe their experience.

In addition to having fun while learning powerful techniques for change, this training will also help you to bridge the gap from your NLP training to working with clients. Watch our five master trainers working with individual clients—people who have no previous background with NLP. You’ll also get to experience live modeling. Learn what these 5 experienced trainers see happening in each others’ sessions and be a part of this inside circle, participating in the synergy of ongoing modeling and observations.

We organize the Advanced Mastery Training because it is the training we are excited about attending—to inspire us and expand our own skills. This is truly a place where NLP Master Practitioners and Trainers can all “play” together, explore, and grow. We hope you’ll join us!

“The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer.”
—motto used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (”Seabees”)
during World War II

George Dantzig describes an event when he was a graduate student in his first year of PhD study in mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley:

“I arrived late one day at one of Jerzy Neyman’s classes. On the blackboard there were two problems that I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework; the problems seemed to be a little harder than usual. I asked him if he still wanted it. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever.

“About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o’clock, my wife Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: ‘I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.’ For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about.

To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard that I had solved—thinking they were homework—were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.”

College Mathematics Journal, 1986, recounted on Snopes.com
http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp

When I work with a client who has a problem or a desired outcome, I assume that it has a structure, and that rapid change is possible for them if I can determine what that structure is—in contrast to working with the content of the structure, or the history of the structure. Some problems are much simpler than others, and have structures and solutions that have been described in sufficient detail by NLP that they can be resolved very quickly with “off the shelf” software. For instance, if someone has a phobia, it doesn’t matter what the content is—whether they are afraid of heights, dogs—or of not seeing their feet, or of stuffed olives (my all-time favorites!). What matters is that they are remembering a traumatic event in a particular way. When they learn how to recall it in a different way—something that everyone can easily do—they no longer feel afraid.

A bit over 25 years ago, I cured a woman’s intense phobia of bees on camera in less than 7 minutes—from “Lori, I haven’t spoken to you at all,” to “OK, that’s all there is to it.” A verbatim transcript of this session is available in chapter 7 of our book Heart of the Mind, and a video of the session itself is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtUatMghbHg

A 25-year follow-up interview with Lori can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjjCzhrYJDQ

Of course, sometimes a phobia has a different structure, requiring a different kind of intervention. Once it took me something like 3 hours to cure a man’s phobia, also of bees; the next day he reported comfortably dreaming that he was sleeping with bees in his bed, and that they were like warm fuzzy teddy bears—quite a different response from the somewhat paranoid fear that he had before; he had previously really thought that bees were “out to get him!”

Even when I can’t help a client quickly, I still assume that their problem has a structure, that it is possible to figure out what it is, and that once I know the structure, that knowledge will tell me what I need to do.

Sometimes I can determine the structure of a problem, and I know exactly what to do to resolve it, but the client won’t accept what needs to be done. Some years ago in my book, Transforming Your Self I modeled the structure of paranoia and narcissism, and described appropriate interventions. What I haven’t yet figured out is how to get permission from a paranoid or narcissist to do it. Their self-concept is much too fragile and fearful, and since they see their problems as being a result of others’ actions (not their own) of course they don’t seek help—or accept it when it is offered.

Last year I worked with a woman with “night terrors,” something I had never even heard of. When I searched online, I found that people with night terrors wake up screaming at the top of their lungs, (a real treat for a spouse sleeping with them!) may not awaken fully, and rarely recall what they are screaming about—very different from waking from a nightmare—and that while drugs can reduce their intensity, there is no known treatment or cure. The solution for this woman was actually fairly simple; but I had to dodge several red herrings to find it. One was that she thought she might have had some childhood sexual abuse that she couldn’t remember. One session ended her night terrors, replacing it with comfortable, restful sleep.

One result of working with the structure of a problem is that it doesn’t matter at all how long that structure has been in place. My night terrors client had been experiencing them for 24 years, since before she was 13. “Tons of conventional therapy” over the years, “enough for several trips to Hawaii” had made no change, yet a single session resolved it. (You can watch a sample from this session or purchase this video for immediate download here: http://www.realpeoplepress.com/client-session-resolving-night-terrors-p-70.html.)

Another woman “froze up” during sex because it reminded her of her paranoid schizophrenic father’s repeated sexual abuse from infancy up to the age of 9 years, when it was discovered. Most people would think that resolving this issue would take years of therapy; however a simple intervention in one session freed her to enjoy sex with her partner without freezing. (You can watch a sample clip or purchase this video here: http://www.realpeoplepress.com/client-session-resolving-sexual-inhibition-p-77.html.)

A professional pianist had intense performance anxiety both before and during her performances. After one session, at her next concert, she enjoyed each of the performances that came before hers, and then played comfortably when it was her turn. She only recalled her previous anxiety after someone commented on how calm she looked. She also taught the same process to one of her students to resolve her performance anxiety. (You can watch a sample clip or purchase this video here: http://www.realpeoplepress.com/client-session-resolving-music-performance-anxiety-p-71.html.)

This points out that what is often called “psychotherapy” really should be called psychoeducation—teaching people how to use their minds better. If this were more widely understood, it would remove the stigma that many people now associate with seeking help for personal problems. It is not that any of us are defective, damaged, or bad; it’s just that we have learned mental processes that don’t work well, and we need to learn something more effective. NLP still has a long way to go—and there are plenty of problems we can’t solve quickly—but artfully used, it can resolve many problems in one session.

“The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer.”

Every two years the Institute for the Advancement of Studies in Health (IASH) holds the only NLP conference in the US, a mellow and friendly event where a wide variety of NLPers present, network, and generally have a good time. This year the conference is scheduled for October 29-31, 2010, with one-day institutes preceding and following the conference (October 28 and November 1) in San Francisco near the airport. Real People Press is happy to be a sponsor.

It is a great opportunity to sample a variety of trainers and programs in one location. The next IASH conference will be in the Netherlands in 2012, so this may be your last chance to attend in the US during the next four years.

I have attended in the past, and found attendees to be a mellow bunch, and eager to learn, discuss, shmooze, and network. I won’t be going this year because of a conflicting commitment, but I highly recommend the conference, both for “newbies” to NLP, and “old hands” who want to find out what others in the field are doing.

For complete information, and to sign up for the conference, go to:
http://www.nlpiash.org/2010Conference/tabid/330/Default.aspx