By Carol Mitchell

From October to December 1996, I attended NLP Practitioner Certification Class with Barbara Stepp of Excellence Quest Institute. The classes met for one 3-day weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) each month for the three months.

The skills taught:

Increase Sensory Acuity, NLP defined, Basic Assumptions of the NLP Model, Understanding Language & Behavior, NLP Process for Change, Well-formed Goals-What they are, how to get them, Representational Systems-defined, how to determine primary, Eye Accessing Cues-Identification & Interpretation, Rapport-how it is created, identified, Anchoring: Installing and Accessing, Meta Model-how to gather information, language patterns, Milton Model-Indirect Elicitation Patterns and how to use them, Strategies of Change-General System Model, TOTE Model, Submodalities-Kinesthetic, Auditory, Visual, Olfactory/Gustatory, Analog/Digital

The exercises taught:

Formal 6-Step Reframing, Visual Squash, Changing Personal History, Sorting for Meta Programs, Eliciting Submodalities, Eliciting Convictions, Changing Beliefs, Inducing Trance, Inducing Catalepsy, Eliminating a Limiting Decision Using Timeline, Eliciting Decision Strategy, Submodality Comparisons, Spelling Strategy, Inducing Glove Anesthesia, Installing a Post Hypnotic Suggestion, Fast Phobia Cure, Making Powerful Anchors, Changing Emotional States.

The homework:

Make up several sentences using hypnotic language patterns.

Barbara Stepp taught the entire class. She has several years experience as a corporate trainer, and her presentation skills are excellent. She explained each exercise clearly. Barb and her interns were readily available to help during the practice exercises.

Barb designed her own manual for the training. Her writing style is clear and concise, though a bit brief for my tastes. The manual is sturdy and designed to last.

The training was help at a rented training room near Water Tower Place in Chicago. We met for 12 hours each day for a long weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) once a month for 3 months. There were 9 days of instruction.

I stayed at home during the training, so I have no hotel information to offer. However, I enjoyed a variety of good restaurants within walking distance of the training site.

I had done some personal work with Barb prior to the class. My impression of her was that she is both kind and insightful. She seems consistent in that her public persona is the same as her private one. I had hoped to gain better communication skills from this training, but I had no idea just how much I could use these skills to change my life. I went to the class with the expectation of learning excellent sales skills for the business I was starting in order to finance what would have been my divorce. It never occurred to me that I could also learn how to create an honestly happy relationship with my husband.

We began the first weekend with what was to become a familiar pattern of Barb teaching a skill and us practicing the skill on each other. I was baffled by the seeming simplicity of such drills as "Enhancing Your Sensory Acuity." Since Barb is also a teacher of hypnosis, she taught us how to induce a trance that weekend as well. I learned that you need to watch for changes in your client's breathing in order to pace a trance, and my new sensory acuity skills were put to use almost immediately for that task. I was a little daunted at first by the thought of 12-hour days of class until I actually got there and found that with 5 or more new exercises each day, plus frequent breaks, I was able to stay focused the whole time. As I think back on that first weekend, I realize that Barb does everything she can to accommodate people's special needs. I was nursing my fourth child at the time, and she arranged private space for me to pump milk for my child while I was at class.

I received a rude shock in the form of an exercise called "Well-formed Goals." Briefly, a goal is a good (well-formed) goal only if it is, among other things, initiated and maintained by the person with the goal. A big problem I had had up until that first weekend of the training is that I had had goals that depended on other people, and I wasn't even aware of it. Now that I know how to make a good goal, I meet my goals much more often because they depend on me rather than on what other people do. A side benefit is that my family no longer feels the pressure of my having goals for them.