John: Hello. Welcome to this week s podcast. My name is John Cassidy Rice and at the pleasure to be your host for this week. I came across a quote I really liked which was, You can just the success of somebody not by the size of their TV but the size of their library. And if you would like to predict somebody s success in the future, have a look at what books they are reading and also who they re hanging out with. And as we have a wonderful community starting to grow here at nlpcourses.com, we ve got that covered. So in this session, I would like to explore the essential books of NLP. So three books I think that are key if you ve been involved in NLP for any period of time, these are the books to read. So the first book to explore would be the Structure of Magic by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. I do recommend volume I and volume II but here I m talking about volume I. It is a classic book in NLP and I find you get the most from this book after the third reading which we will come back to you. This book introduces us to the Meta Model. Now, a Meta Model is based on how intuitively you use language with the idea being that we create maps of the world that we didn t operate through and we ve create this maps through the language and it s a process called deletion, generalizations and distortions. So we delete pretty much most of what s going on around us. We have to. We d go crazy if we didn t. But also, we distort information and a way to think about your beliefs are distortion because you make the world fit your reality and not the other way around. We also generalize information and it s very useful to generalize information because you don t want to have to learn how to use a chair every time you see a chair that s a different shape, different material or different fabric. Okay, so when creating this map of the world through language and what does the Meta-Model do for us? It challenges that map so that we can uncover those deletions, generalizations and distortions and essentially what this book is about is taking this intuitive ability we have when we listen to language and put in structure in how we process language and challenge people s maps of the world. Yes, you can see it through it s transformational grammar i.e. from John Grinder. So the highlights for this book would be for me the story in the preface it s called, The Price and the Magician now that s because the story is fun and it s playful and it carries a message and for me, NLP creates this space for you to be able to access your own truth. I also like to revisit Chapter 4, Incantations for Growth and Potential partly because it goes through a set of examples all designed to train you to heighten your intuitive ability hearing the structure of language and if that does not grab your interest and I can t understand why it wouldn t, maybe I m just weird, I love language stuff. I would also recommend the section causing tactic environment for identifying natural language presuppositions in English. Now, when you consider, when Chapter 6 is called On Becoming the Sorcerer s Apprentice. You can see in the one hand the book takes the subject seriously and at the same time, also in a light-hearted fashion. It was actually called Syntactic environments for
identifying natural language presupposition in English and I just like saying that title because it makes me sound intelligent because Richard Bandler once asked, why do you get such good results when you re working with your clients? And he said, Well, I put the secret in the back of the book, the structure of Magic, the presuppositions and this was the section he was talking about. Now, I would recommend reading this book after you ve taken an NLP practitioner. It will make a lot more sense. And also, like I said at the beginning of introducing this book to read it three times. Now, the first time you read it through let go of having to understand it. Have you noticed as adults we want to understand something immediately and we think that we should? Well, it doesn t work like that. Just read it through. Don t worry about understanding it. The second time you read it, you'll start to grasp some insights into it and then the third time, you really start to understand what underpins NLP and that comes from one of my favorite quote which is this, The second time you read a book and you find something new in the book is not that the book's changed, you ve changed. And whenever you can, if you really want to know something read or be involved in it at least three times. The Meta-Model came out of observing how Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls use language and they use language very precisely which John and Richard called the Meta-Model and publicly stated that all change work is to do about being very precise with your language then Gregory Bateson who is a fascinating guy in his own right said, you guys ought to go and meet Milton Erickson and they both said, we would love to meet Milton Erickson and Gregory said, well, I know him. Let me introduce you. So off they want to meet Milton Erickson who was awfully vague of his language and John and Richard went, oops, which leaves us neatly into our next book called Transformations by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. Now, the Milton language patents were covered in detail in a book by John and Richard called Patterns of Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. and I would highly recommend this book as well. So why did I pick transformations? Because it s the hypnosis in action. Now, this is a transcript of a live seminar John and Richard conducted on hypnosis and from this book, I think you can easily pick up the excitement of those early days of NLP where new insights took us deeper and deeper into the understanding of how we as humans produce excellence and can take control of what s going on between our ears. Now, as soon as we say hypnosis, you ought to get a really strong response from somebody and you get a response ranging from hypnosis is everything to hypnosis is a hoax. It s all inside your head and yes, that s right, it is all inside your head. Now, this book is really about trance hence the name transformations. Trance is so natural. It s a part of us as being human and you can see references to trance throughout the centuries that s often this magical, unexplainable phenomena. So let s have a working definition of trance. Anytime you go inside your head is a form of trance. That is right. You have just gone into trance if you went inside your head and said to yourself, yeah, that s right. You also see people have the car trance. You might have experienced this. When you get into your car, you arrive at a destination and you don t remember the journey or the lift trance. People come into this little box, nobody wants to talk to each other and what they did, they look at these numbers and as they look at the numbers the numbers are going 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 and the doors open and someone walks out in this trance state and realizes then on the floor they intended to be on so turns around quickly and moves back into the lift. So trance is not just for making people act like chickens. That s the stage hypnosis stuff and that s not really what we re talking about here because trance has many applications. Now, as you start to notice this natural phenomena that would call in trance, you will see everywhere from great sales people, parents, teachers, trainers, politician, caregivers, all utilizes trance and to take it quite directly from the book we re talking about, if you think of hypnosis as altering somebody s state of consciousness then any effective communication is hypnosis. Now, the potential of the applications of understanding hypnosis goes far beyond the therapeutic process that it brings. So I think the goal of the book is to help us think like Milton Erickson and the way that he unconsciously responded to what was going on around him. So this book explores not only just the language but it goes into the details of what to observe the words and the thinking processes and how well this fits together to produce a result.
Now, as a trainer, from my point of view, I loved how easily John and Richard led the group into a trance through language. It was very elegant. So if you re involved in teaching and training, I would highly recommend reading a book to notice the flow of trance as we go through. Now, some highlights from the book for me would include Chapter 2. On page 35, there s something called the verbal pacing and leading exercise. This exercise really shows how easy it is to produce trance without a script using a simple feedback loop and it takes the mystery out of trance and quite simply we call this in NLP pacing, pacing, leading. So you start off pacing what s happening at the moment for the person and then you lead them to notice what s happening inside them. So let s have another quote from the book as they demonstrate this pace, pace, lead. And I m working with somebody called Bob, now, if you re driving or you re operating a machinery, you will stay alert and safe. You can do this with your eyes opened or close. So implied choice, pacing what they can do whichever one is more comfortable. Again, in polite choice as you sit there that s pacing. You can fill the support that the chair offers you along your lower back, pace, pace and can fill the place where the rungs are supporting your feet just in front of your heels, pacing. And you can notice as you sit there starting to walk away into lead but still pacing as you sit there. The warmth of your hands are resting on your legs and thighs and a sense of growing comfort. Now, this is where they starting to lead. It s also called a form of mind reading. And the next time that your eyes begin to close, still pacing, simply allow them to stay there leading and enjoy this growing sense of comfort internally. So notice what they ve done, they started from the outer world and gently pace the outer world and started to lead that person into the inner experience. Simple and elegant. And then they move in to some of the deeper trance work. So example, they start to introduce ideas like I d like your unconscious mind to make a choice about giving you a sense of refreshments and renewal as you sit there listening to the sound of my voice, going back to pacing. Wonderful. Very simple little exercise that you could go and do today. You could find somebody who would be open to this and just a little tip, if you ever want to practice anything hypnotic or any technique, if you say to somebody I just want to practice this, could you pretend to go into trance for me? It really helps because they ll say yes and in their pretending they ll genuinely move into a trance and what you do is just pace, pace, pace and start to lead them into this inner awareness. Great. So this exercise is a great primer for understanding how our language affects awareness and in Chapter 2, that book really builds on that theme so Chapter 2 is a fundamental understanding hypnosis. Now in Chapter 5, we introduce something that s called reframing within trance which is a great chapter. I really enjoyed that chapter. Now, reframing in NLP means we change the meaning of a situation or thought. For example, it s not the unloosened hair, I m gaining face. That would be a form of reframing. Then in Chapter 6 which is called Pacific Utilization Technique, this is where we take all the learnings that we ve learned throughout the book and put them into action and we will introduce the concepts like the new behavior generator, pain control and recovering personal history. Great. Now, I love this book. As you may have picked up from my enthusiasm and I have to say my copy of the book is actually falling apart so I might need to get myself a new copy because I use it so much. Now, I m talking about the original book here, transformations and not the new book transformations by Mr. Bandler which is a good book about NLP. I m referring to the original that was published in 1981. The 80s. Big hair and big shoulder pads. So let s have another look at a book that was published in 1985 keeping with this 80s theme. Again, it s a transcript from a live seminar this time conducted by Richard Bandler. It s called Using Your Brain-- For a Change and it s edited by Connie Andreas and Steve Andreas. In this book, we are introduced to submodalities and if you ve listened to any of my other podcast, you d know I think submodalities are one of the most powerful applications within NLP. So in this book, Using Your Brain For a Change is where we really saw the NLP moving away from therapeutic thinking and to thinking about NLP as an educational process. So another way to think about that. So instead of people are broken, thinking in terms of what can we do to help enjoy their own bus which is what Chapter 1 is called Who s Driving the Bus? Your brain is always running and if you don t get this amazing brain something to process, it will process anything. It will even start to generate its own stuff which we call hallucinations. So if you ve ever heard of sensory deprivation where the brains get a no, no stimulus at all, it just spontaneously stops to hallucinate
information. So what if we could actively take control of our brain to deliberately to set direction? So instead of being a prisoner of your brain, you can be self-directed and drive your own bus and this is what the book is about. This book gives you the rule tools to be able to start to programming and give direction and control your thinking processes through what s called submodalities. Again, this book gives you that experience of the early days of NLP that excitement and that s one of the reasons I always highly recommend reading this book. I d also recommend reading this book after you ve taken some live NLP training yet there is no substitute for live training. Books, podcast, videos, all part of a whole learning system and they work together with elegance. So there s many things I like about this book. So I m going to quickly give you an overview of each of the chapters. Now, we covered 1 Who s Driving the Bus? So let s move on to Chapter 2, Running Your Own Brain. So this is talking about the fundamental principles of submodalities. The size, shape, smell, colors and all those wonderful things which we covered in other podcast so that s a really good refresher. Now, as we move into Chapter 3 of this book Points of View. This is exploring association and disassociations on how they can impact us in different areas of life and in the book that goes into using this in traumatic situations and phobias, etcetera. Now, number IV Chapter 4 is titled Going Wrong and this is really about how we often replacing ours in our head to make them worse than they are rather than using this ability we have to program our mind for success before the event. Then as we move into Chapter 5, this is about motivating ourselves using how tone of language affects how we respond and how we can create feelings of motivation and number VI, Understanding Confusion. Confusion is wonderful. It s a great tool and this is where we re starting to move into learning. How do you organize your thoughts for understanding? Then we move into Chapter 7 which is called Beyond Beliefs. How do you know you believe something? How do you know you disbelieve something? Do you suspect it s how you think about it? And this is what this chapter is about. Then we move into Chapter 8 which has all to do with Learning. And this chapter really stresses it s not so much about facts just because you know a bunch of facts don t mean you learn it. It s about understanding how we learn and if you can understand how you learn, it gives you the freedom which comes back to that old saying, Give someone a fish, they have a nice supper. Teach him to fish, and they d be out to feed themselves for a lifetime and that really as we move into the last Chapter 9 which is about the Swish Pattern and the Swish Pattern is a really powerful tool for changing habits. You can see there s so much in this book. Highly recommend it and like I said, I recommend it after you ve taken some live training. I hope you found this review of some of the books that I really enjoy in NLP useful and if you would like to have more books reviewed and recommended, please let me know and also I m kind of thinking about maybe starting an NLP book club or we can discuss ideas and bounce ideas around and if there s enough of us who want to do that, I m happy to facilitate that. So in the resource section of this podcast, I ll put links to the three books that we ve talked about. If you got any questions, if I can serve you in anyway, if you would like to book on to one of our live trainings, please do contact me. Until next week, all the best. Thank you and we will talk soon. Take your NLP training to the next level Click here for the NLP Practitioner
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