By Jon McDonald

I attended Excellence Quest's NLP Practitioner & Hypnosis training from January to March. I first read about NLP in some books six months before taking the training. I found that even though I had read 15-20 books on NLP I was able to put very little of it into practice. The training was spread out over three months, meeting for three day weekends each month, 10-12 hours a day. The training was held at the Inn of Chicago. Since I have family in Chicago I stayed with them. The Inn is located in one of the best parts of Downtown Chicago, with plenty of restaurants and shopping.

The Trainer Barbara Stepp was the trainer for the entire course. Barbara's training is geared towards personal development. She constantly displayed her skill with NLP and Hypnosis during the training and outside of it. She always demonstrates control over her own state and an ability to pull people into more resourceful states. She is truly one of the most caring and honest people I have ever met. She made every effort to insure that her students got everything they wanted out of the training and more. She pays such attention to each of her students that it felt as if I was receiving a one on one training. I took every opportunity to pick her brain about NLP and hypnosis, and she eagerly answered all of my questions.

Skills Taught The NLP Attitude of Wanton Curiosity, Representational Systems, Submodalities, Well-Formed Outcomes, What is NLP, NLP Presuppositions, Anchoring, Sensory Acuity, Classical and Ericksonian Hypnosis, Self Hypnosis, gaining and maintaining Rapport, Changing and Directing Emotional States of Ourselves and Others, Deep Trance Phenomena, The Meta Model, The Milton Model, Timelines, Reframing, Eliciting Strategies, Metaprograms, Eye- Accessing Cues. Accelerated Learning Strategies.

The Training Experience The training was absolutely outstanding. I am truly amazed at the amount of information that we were able to absorb and use so intuitively during that time. Part of this was due to the holistic manner in which we were taught NLP. Our class was taught NLP not as a bunch of separate techniques but rather as an integrated technology.

The course involved allot of exercises (five or more everyday). The basic format for teaching is to give an explanation of the topic, do a demonstration, answer any questions, do an exercise, then discuss the results and answer any other questions that came up. This created an excellent feedback loop for our learning which allowed us to more fully integrate the material. Each topic and exercise seemed to flow naturally into the next. This allowed us to see and use NLP as an integrated system.

One thing that I noticed during the training was Barbara's tendency to pull her students outside of their comfort zones. For example, if someone were very left brained/logical in their thinking she may pace that aspect of them and then lead them into positions that require them to operate more intuitively in order to succeed. While it may be uncomfortable at first, this builds in the flexibility required to excel with NLP by giving us the opportunity to try different models of the world.

The training not only gave me the outcomes I was looking for, but also opened up limitless other areas in my life which I could use these skills. For instance, I had always been somewhat shy about dealing with women, and one of the reasons for taking the course was to improve my rapport skills. From the training, I not only learned a methodology that would allow me greater rapport with women, but more importantly, I was able to change those internal factors that were holding me back from my outcome.

This is only one of many examples of how I've helped myself and others with the skills I've learned in the training. The course has actually made finding different challenges in my life enjoyable because I now have fun using my NLP skills to overcome those challenges. I am currently trying to get all of my family to attend her training, and from the improvements they have seen in my life many of them plan on going. I highly recommend Excellence Quest's trainings to anyone desiring to create the life for themselves that they have dreamed about. If anyone has any other questions regarding my training experience please e- mail me.

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