By Stever Robbins

I'm just back from Richard Bandler's 1996 residential Design Human Engineering™ and Trainer's Training. The bottom line: it was great fun, I learned new stuff, and got some substantial behavior change to boot. It was good. Take it. But persuade Richard to hold it somewhere else.

The "Opportunity for Learning": Toto, we're back in Kansas.

The workshops were both held in the rural Black Bear Casino and Hotel, near Carlton, Minnesota, about 30 minutes outside of Duluth. The hotel lost FAXes and phone messages repeatedly. Their high tech room keys demagnitized themselves daily. The front desk always had two or three people working, but somehow gave slower service than I'd ever experience before. The hotel itself is a triangle surrounding an indoor pool. It's a neat concept, but the pool is completely enclosed. So as the highly cholorinated water evaporates, it fills the interior atrium with vaporizd chlorine fumes. It took me three days to locate the stairs, during which time I had to use the one elevator to go between floors 2, 1, and 3. Fortunately, the gym had a stairmaster and a treadmill. Of course, the "gym" had only a stairmaster and a treadmill.

The two restaurants on the premises (and every other restaurant within quick driving distance) served red meat, deep fried dishes, things soaked in butter, and a token iceberg lettuce salad with chopped tomato for vegetarians. For those on low-fat, high fiber, or vegetarian diets, the locale was a nightmare. A nearby grocery store provided some relief in the form of fruit, but microwaves in the rooms without freezers made it hard to cook for ourselves.

But on to the good stuff...

A Word about Richard

If you've never experienced Richard before, his style is ... unique. He is the only NLP trainer I've trained with who uses anchoring, voice tone, metaphor, and covert rehearsal of strategies to a significant degree. He tells stories, leads the audience through trances, goes off on "irrelevant [NOT!]" tangents, and is entertaining enough to be worth seeing for the fun value alone.

I've walked out of every training I've taken with Richard, with demonstrable new skills and behaviors and no conscious knowledge of how they were acquired. Many NLP trainers say "Your unconscious mind is getting it" when asked questions. Richard is the only trainer I've worked with who can answer the questions:

• What, specifically, is my unconscious mind getting?
• How do you know that it's got it?
• What, specifically, did you do to cause my unconscious mind to "get it"?

As I've learned in his trainer's training, his "tangents" and stories are anything but random. They elicit and anchor emotional states and attitudes. They also lead audiences repeatedly through thought sequences ("strategies") which later become the foundation for the skills Richard is teaching. It's absolute proof that learning experiences can be very intense, teach huge amounts of information, and yet be as (more!) engrossing as anything we call entertainment.

If you've seen him before but not recently, Richard has been doing some of his best work to date in the last five years. Using some of his DHE™ tools, he is back to the metabolism and physique of a 22 year old rock musician (he's working on hypnotic hair restoration). His energy level is incredible, and his precision increases every time I see him.

Design Human Engineering™

One of the most wonderful things about the DHE™ workshop was its international flavor. Participants came from South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Venezuala, China, Japan, and Germany. The workshop also had more young people than I've ever seen at an NLP seminar. There were several college students, along with the usual mix of trainers, therapists, businesspeople, and the occasional white-robed, turban'd Sikh (who, I might add, blew us away by doing a standup routine as his trainer's training final presentation).

The workshop opened with a belief exercise, where we created beliefs about our selves and our skills that would enhance the rest of the workshop. Identifying and opening up limiting beliefs about what it's possible for us to do became a background theme for the rest of the workshop.

We then began learning precise control over our own internal states. With a combination of trance and group exercises, we designed mental "control panels" to use in rapidly and consciously shifting states of consciousness.

We also built mental toolkits. The idea is based on the strategies of one of the greatest inventors of all time, Nikola Tesla. Tesla was famous for his mental workshop, in which he could build machines, run them, and report wear and tear corresponding exactly to the real world. Using hypnotic positive hallucination, and checking our mental tools against the external, real world, we began constructing a few tools. Richard emphasized that this is an ongoing process: the point is to return from the workshop and continue building tools that will be useful.

Much of the other work was on voice and language. Voice tone and inflection is one of the most powerful communication tools. This is true not only for talking to others, but also for designing your own internal dialog. We played with voice tone, and spent several exercises exploring ambiguities and using them to help move between mental states.

Michael Breen, a Master Trainer from England, ran one of the evening sessions, helping us with tempo and tonal quality. His energy and sense of presence is absolutely delightful, though I'd love to see him loosen up a bit. He's probably perfect for Great Britain, but British trainers always seem to bring up a mischevous desire in me to take them out drinking and find out what they're like when they let their hair down...

John LaValle was Richard's main co-trainer. I've known John for ten years, as both fellow participant and trainer. He was absolutely great this year. In past trainings, I've thought that he had a ways to go, but since my last workshop with him (two years ago), He Has Arrived. He is entertaining, informational, and quite good at weaving his material into the anecdotal/covert installation style that typifies Richard's workshops. Other than occasionally spending too much time playing with anchors he'd set up, he was excellent. And as soon as he reads this, he'll undoubtedly get even better grin.

The writer Robert Anton Wilson spent two afternoons entrancing us, late in the week. His knowledge's breadth and depth is astounding. He went from Chaos Theory to conspiracies to General Semantics. The material was very interesting, but two days was a bit overwhelming. Listening certainly tranced me out, but by his second visit I got restless. I would have preferred to trade one of Robert's afternoons for another with Richard.

It's hard to know what else to say about the seminar. Since it's about learning to run your own brain, most of the time is spent in one trance or another. One thrust of DHE™ is learning to motivate yourself with degrees of good feeling, rather than the critical motivation that many people use. After a week of deep trance, creating all kinds of new (good!) feelings, it's hard to know what more is relevant to say.

Trainer's Training

If DHE™ is about internal experience, the trainer's training is about external experience. We had a very large group (90 people), including 23 Japanese students and an interpreter.

The trainer's training is about the micro and microskills needed to give good presentations. Three times during the week, we ran everyone up on stage, so we could put our developing skills into use.

Like DHE™, the trainer's training began with some self-work to enhance the rest of the seminar. We went through and eliminated any lurking public speaking phobias, and then built resourceful, alert states to use when on stage. We then anchored the positive states to being on stage.

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were spent on state building, how to use tempo, rhythm, body posture, and gestures to bring an audience into rapport and create a powerful presence.

Robert Anton Wilson spoke again, the first two afternoons. His talks overlapped with his material from the previous week. This time, I was very confused as to how his material related to the substance of the workshop. I was probably biased by the overlap between his DHE™ talks; while most of the participants were different, I was one of the 40 or so who were present both weeks.

Richard and John LaValle taught the rest of the seminar. John would do exercises with us in the morning. Richard would come in for afternoon or evening sessions.

The content was intense and very fast paced. This was not my first trainer's training with Richard, and remarkably, we seemed to cover as much in the first two days, as we'd done in entire past trainings.

Over the course of the week, we did more consciously than I would have expected to be able to cover: We elicited emotional states in audiences. We anchored things. We use tangents and stories precisely. We built internal states which heightened our senses. We learned ways of using those heightened senses. We chose demonstration subjects based on their nonverbal behavior in the audience. We worked covertly with individuals while presenting to a group. We used our breathing, voice tempo, and tone to affect the audience in various ways. We dealt with hecklers. We developed the resources to recover from mistakes on stage. We discussed how to take Q&A, and handle hecklers. It was very good.

Having 23 non-English speakers in the audience was great. It forced me learn to elicit emotional states directly with my voice tone and body. For those of us who had replied in the past on telling people to "think of a time when you felt...", it was a tremendous stretch.

The Administration

The logistics and registration were handled by Richard's assistant Brahm von Heume, Kathleen LaValle, Jay Bandler, and a friend of Jay's whose name escapes me. They did a great job of keeping things running smoothly, despite about 20 drop-ins the first week.

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