By Joel P. Bowman, Ph.D.

For information about the author, see the following URL: http://spider.hcob.wmich.edu/bis/faculty/bowman/bowman.html.

The Setting

The 1997 Practitioner and Master Practitioner Programs conducted by Richard Bandler and John La Valle were held at the old Roosevelt Hotel (now a Clarion) in West Hollywood, essentially across the street (Hollywood Blvd.) from Mann's (formerly Grauman's) Chinese Theater. We were in the heart of tourist country.

Although the hotel and the neighborhood have seen better days, we had excellent Thai, good Mexican, and okay Chinese food (plus a variety of fast food establishments) within easy walking distance. New construction in the area will include a bookstore and additional restaurants, which will help increase the appeal of the area for future workshops that may be held there.

The workshops were attended by more than 80 people from across Canada and the United States and from around the world, including South Africa, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Japan, which made for an interestingly diverse training class. The ages, occupations, and educational backgrounds of the participants also varied greatly.

The Programs

The 13 day Master Practitioner Program, with an enrollment of about 25, started two days before the Practitioner track began. Those of us in the Master Practitioners' Program spent the first two days working on hypnotic inductions, trance phenomena, and the changes in attitude required for working with those enrolled in the Practitioners' track. Richard's philosophy is that the practioner should go first, that one should experience trance before inducing a trance in another and that the best way to make another feel good is to feel good first. For this reason, those in the Master Practitioner Program went first.

From the third day until the end of the workshops, the two programs were conducted simultaneously. Midway through the training, we had a "day off" to enjoy Southern California or to catch-up on sleep or our homework, of which there was plenty.

A typical day began at 10:00 a.m. with John La Valle demonstrating and leading us through one or more skill sets, installing the appropriate strategies, and then observing the participants as they worked on an exercise designed to complete the installation of the skill. The lunch break was usually from 1:00 until 3:00 p.m., when Richard took over. The dinner break was from about 5:00 until about 7:00, and then the evening sessions lasted until Richard was finished, which was anywhere from 9:30 until 10:45 p.m. except for two evenings that Richard let us out "early" to enjoy Los Angeles night life.

As is characteristic of Bandler's trainings, these programs were designed for maximum efficiency and elegance. Who but Richard would think to stack Practitioner and Master Practitioner programs in a way that allowed both groups to learn from each other? In my opinion, the stacking worked very well, in part because of the way Richard framed it at the outset, and, I suspect, in part because of the attitudes and behaviors he installed in those of us in the Master Practitioner Program during those first two days.

The Materials

Bandler and La Valle typically prepare and distribute a comprehensive package of materials containing a very wide variety of explanations, examples, and exercises. The materials for the courses they teach together are highly similar, regardless of whether the course being taught is Magic of Hypnosis, Trainers' Training, the Practitioner Program, or the Master Practitioner Program. Bandler and La Valle cover the concepts and exercises appropriate for the specific course being taught, allowing (often requiring) participants to read much of the material and to complete the exercises on their own.

The materials for both the Master Practitioner and Practitioner tracks contained 30 exercises covering the essentials of NLP, and participants in both programs were required to complete all of them, primarily as homework. The exercises covered such fundamentals as observing eye-accessing cues, establishing rapport, eliciting states, anchoring (including setting and using sliding anchors), using the Meta Model and the Milton model, inducing and utilizing trance, and the like.

The Training

Richard teaches NLP as an attitude rather than as a collection of techniques. This is an important difference between him and most of the others currently conducting NLP certification programs. The rationale for such an approach is that if you think of NLP as a set of techniques, when you run out of techniques, you run out of options. If you think of NLP as an attitude, however, you can never run out of options because you will think of something new to do.

For this reason, Richard spends a great deal of time carefully installing an attitude at the unconscious level. At the conscious level, he tells stories designed to induce specific states, which he anchors in sequence as he creates a mental propulsion machine that installs new attitudes and behaviors in the participants. The propulsion machine causes participants to move away from fear, hesitation, ignorance, and discrimination and toward courage, flexibility, knowing more, and having fun.

Although the training style used by Bandler and La Valle is a lot of fun for participants, it is also a little disconcerting for compulsive notetakers. I used to be one--but no more. I have learned that, in Bandler's seminars in particular, paying attention is more important than taking notes. The changes in attitude and behavior that result from going along for the ride are of greater value than specific cognitive knowledge that might result from taking extensive notes.

Robert Anton Wilson, author of more than 30 books, including Prometheus Rising and the three volume Cosmic Trigger series, was a special guest lecturer for three of the afternoon sessions. The principal focus of his presentations was to increase our appreciation for multiple realities and for the infinite possibilites inherent in human language. Robert also proved an excellent hypnotist and did some nice group trance work with us.

The Outcomes

One of the reasons I elected to take the Master Practitioner Program with Richard is that I had trained with him and John La Valle previously (Trainers' Training and Patterns of Persuasion, which has since evolved into Persuasion Engineering) and was impressed by the changes in attitude and behavior I could observe in myself and others. The same proved true in the 1997 Master Practitioner and Practitioner programs: It was easy to see changes in myself and others as we moved from exercise to exercise.

Among the most useful exercises were the following:

• Changing beliefs about learning so that it will be easy and fun for the rest of our lives.
• Eliciting and modeling strategies for motivation and excellence, giving each of us not only our own strategy for motivation but also the strategies of those with whom we worked.
• Changing timelines to diminish the significance of unpleasant past events and to open the future to new possibilities, including adding new future timelines to increase the attractiveness of those things we most want to accomplish.
• Improving our effectiveness in using ambiguities and other advanced language patterns, tonality, and analog marking in hypnosis and ordinary conversation.
• Using timelines to eliminate limitations by moving through the modal operators of possibility, from can't, to could, to can, and then to will along our timelines in a way that brought will into the present.
• Using trance and mixed states to amplify and enhance experience for ourselves and others, including an excellent group induction by John La Valle on the next to the last day designed to help us recall and integrate everything we had learned.

My experiences in the workshop and thus far following it suggest that these exercises, along with the changes installed by Richard and John, have influenced my attitude and behavior in observable ways. As a group, we most certainly enjoyed learning. People in the hotel for other reasons frequently stuck their heads through the door of our training room to see what we were all laughing about. Throughout the training, our sensitivity to language continually improved in observable ways, and we became much more alert to the multiple meanings Richard's language often conveys. Our confidence in our skills improved in noticable ways over the course of the workshop as well.

The results of the most significant aspects of the workshops, however, can be tested only over time. Through both trance and other indirect communication, Richard led us back down the spiral staircase of our DNA to times in our youth when we felt our best and then brought us back up in a way that allowed us to recapture the cellular knowledge of those times so that we can look and feel younger and healthier. The degree to which this succeeded will become increasingly obvious over time.

Also, in an exercise reminiscent of experiments in parapsychology conducted at Duke University in the 1960s, Richard had us practice reading one another's visual constructs in a way that went far beyond mere calibration. My parterner for this exercise and I achieved a success rate about 4 times greater than chance, and we were not among the most successful. Some of the participants were able to read each others' visual constructs with almost 100 percent accuracy. This, too, is an outcome best tested over time, as it remains to be seen whether my relative success during the workshop will be replicated and enhanced with continued practice.

The Bottom Line

Would I train again with Richard Bandler and John La Valle? Most definitely. Richard and John have both improved since my last training with them, and I believe that they will continue to improve as time goes on. Richard is clearly one of the true geniuses of our time, and he is constantly developing and presenting new and better material. One of his tenents is that many other NLP trainers are stuck in a previous phase of his career and continue to use old techniques (such as Six-step Reframing) that he has long since abandoned in favor of faster, more elegant strategies.

Training with Bandler and La Valle is not cheap. The 13 day Master Practitioner Program was $3250 in advance or $3500 at the door. The 11 day Practitioner Program was $2750 in advance or $3000 at the door. Training with Richard, however, is an excellent value because it ensures that you will receive the latest and best of NLP.