Phillip Holt's World

In the USA in the early 1970’s a young computer student was studying at the University of California in Santa Cruz, his name was Richard Bandler. He was studying mathematics, computing and later his interests turned to behavioral sciences.

Richard Bandler found accommodation with the founder of Gestalt Therapy, Fritz Perls. Perls had lots of books and transcripts in his library on psychology, which Bandler read avidly. In the same district was a lady by the name of Virginia Satir, the family therapist that broke the conventional way of thinking and treating people. She saw clients not as people with individual problems, but as people coming from a family, a whole unit, and she treated the whole unit with great success.

Bandler was asked to help Virginia Satir, to take her to venues etc, and he watched what she did, and noticed that she had certain ways of doing her work, her methods of treatment and talking to people. He also noticed that he could identify these and reproduce them to great effect. He realised that there was a problem, he did not quite understand the linguistics that she used. Bandler approached a lecturer at the university to help him understand the structure of the language. This linguist was John Grinder. Grinder was studying the works of the linguist Noam Chomsky.

Both John Grinder and Richard Bandler agreed to work together, Bandler observing the strategies the methods people were using to interact with their world, and Grinder supervising Bandler and analyzing the language patterns.

They began to draw around them a group of people who understood and wanted to participant what Bandler and Grinder were doing, as Richard ran and taught Gestalt Therapy classes at Kresge Collage within the University of California.

As they observed behaviors and strategies, they learnt how to reproduce the same for themselves, and then teach others. This is one of the cornerstones in NLP, that the strategy should be identifiable, to be reproduced and to be taught to others. 

Some of these people who gathered around Bandler and Grinder were, Judith Delozier, Leslie Camerin, Robert Dilts, Eric Robbie.

These people plus others would meet on a weekly basis with Bandler and Grinder leading, studying tapes of Perls and Satir, and mostly under the guidance of Bandler practiced and developed the Metal Model, Language Patterns, Deep and Surface Structures, The Map and Territory relationships, Reframing and more were developed.

Bandler had another neighbour, Gregory Bateson, who knew what work Bandler was achieving, and suggested that they visited and studied Milton H. Erikson of Phoenix, Arizona.

Milton Erikson is perhaps the best known hypnotist, hypnotherapist the world has ever known. His strategies for working with clients was mostly through stories, metaphors, which would send people into a trance very quickly, after which Milton would do his work.

It was here that reframing progressed and more work was done on the representational systems developed, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory, the whole story of how behavioural systems and accessing cues began coming together. 

Experiments were undertaken with hypnosis, hallucination and deep trance identification. These were especially important with deep trance identification with, Bateson, Satir, Perls and Erickson, they found that could understand these great people so much more. This was so great that they often felt as if they were the person.

Other work was studied and developed from the work of Ivan Pavlov and his experiments with dogs in Russia.  (see Svengali and The Manchurian Candidate blog, click). From this work came anchoring.

Word of NLP started to spread and from about 1976, people who had worked with Bandler started to do their own workshops and books on the subject were being published, The Structure of Magic I, and II, et al.

Although born around the therapeutic work of such people as Bateson, Satir, Perls and Erickson, NLP methodologies are equally applicable to the business world, politics, education, personal life, it has been employed by the military. NLP translates and crosses all boundaries.

Much has been said about Bandler and Grinder, do you believe everything you read in the newspapers? They both went their separate ways at the end of the 1970’s. I have worked with both and love them both for their kindness, knowledge and what they have given the world. 

Welcome to the world of NLP.

My journey along the pathway of learning and then becoming a Certified Trainer with the Society of NLP, has been regularly interrupted by the question, what is NLP? (Neuro-Linguistic Programming).

From the Society of NLP, (Richard Bandler), it is said that :-

NLP is an attitude to be able to find out what kinds of communication influences others, and to pursue this with the sense of curiosity desire and adventure, and to view life as an opportunity to learn. Or “the art and science of communication”. 

NLP is a methodology taking the presupposition that everything we do has a structure, and that this structure can be modeled, learned, taught to others, and changed, for ours and others needs as appropriate.

NLP is a technology which has grown and is evolving, that allows users or Practitioners to orgnise information, procedures and perceptions, such that they can achieve the inconceivable.

NLP is described as “the study of the structure of subjective experience”.

People have placed different meanings, their own meanings, as to what NLP is all about. I often asked Richard Bandler what NLP was, and each time I had a different answer. It was then I decided that NLP was anything that worked for you to achieve excellence in yourself and in others, to make the appropriate changes for this to happen. It was later in his book Modeling With NLP by Robert Dilts, that I read he too concluded that NLP is anything that works.

If you see someone who can achieve excellence, there is a presupposition that you can model, find out how they do it, and it is assumed that you too can achieve the same results.

You are working in a sales company, (or talking to people, teaching, what ever you do, we sell ourselves), and you notice another person achieving better results. Find out how that person does it, their thoughts, their strategies, and apply them to your own strategies, and if appropriate, you may find them better than those you were running before. Use them, you now have choice, and perhaps you can teach others.

Maybe you notice that there has been a time when you did something special. Would it not be great to be able to capture that time, that state, and to be able to reproduce it at will. You can with NLP.

When we look at modeling someone, (how they do), unlike other models or methodologies, we do not look at the content, how many eggs they put in the chocolate cake, how long it is left in the oven, we look inside the person to ask how do they know, what tells them it is time, that it is cooked.

NLP is content free.

Many years ago in California, a young student was riding home in his car. Back in those days, cigarettes seemed to take people places in their minds those of today do not, they were special and strong. This young man, a student, caught from the corner of his eye flashing lights, and thought to himself, that the tobacco was particularly strong that day.

It was not long before he realised that the flashing lights were in fact a police car behind, flagging him to stop. He stopped, not wanting to share his cigarette with the policeman, he stayed in the car.

The police man asked this student what was his job, and not wanting to say he was a student, he searched for an answer.

On the car seat by the side of him were three books. One book was on psychology, another he had borrowed on the English language, and the third was on his major he was studying at university, computing. He taught hard and then said, I am a neuro linguistic programmer.

Thus the birth of NLP. 

The word Neuro is about the nervous system. We send a large time understanding the working of the nervous system, the way we remember, we think, creating, pictures, visions, and all the cognitive processes are part of the programmes which run within the nervous system. Our whole experience of our world, our learning, our interaction with the word, is through our nervous system, vision, hearing and speaking, feeling, smelling and tasting.

The word Linguistics is the way we communicate with ourselves with our own internal language and how we interact with others. How we verbalise our goals, our desires, our wants, instructions.

The word Programming is how we learn, our memory, our creativity, how we process information to do particular actions things, the mental process.

Other methodologies from the field of pyschology over laps with NLP, because NLP borrows from cognitive sciences, neurology and linguistics.

When we model we find out how the brain is working (Neuro), listening to the language (Linguistic), verbal and non-verbal, and then strategise them step by step (Programming), so that we can reproduce or teach others.

I have many friends around the world, and I know many that perhaps, let us phrase it, do not appreciated the work I do.

I am never going to win everybody. I am never going to get everybody to like me. I am never going to please everybody in my style of training. I know this, it was a hard lesson to learn, but knowing this you can be prepared.

This is not to say you go out and plan for failure, no use outcome thinking (more on this in later writings), to plan for a positive outcome.

I have given major presentations, talks, courses, after diner speeches to various groups and professions, doctors, teachers, business people, students, politicians, sports people, a complete cross section of our community. The vast majority have a total success, one or two I have died.

Prior to all I do, I plan. Yes, I have a plan. I Mind Map my ideas, the structure, into my Mind Map book, and I center myself, taking with me my friends Antonio, Fred, and Mustapha.

Go for it, with a smile on your face, and happiness in your heart.

More often than not I have a translator (see my Turkish translators), to help me. These people I highly recommend, as they have a difficult task to do for me, and I know that over time I teach how to be your best, to be confident, powerful, to be in a good state. My language patterns are difficult sometimes to translate, and cannot be done so literally, but the message is put across and understood.

If I said “The cat sat on the mat”, the translated structure of the sentence may become, “mat, cat sat on”. 

Maybe, there is not such a word in the language of audience as mat. The translator has to find a word to say in it’s place. How many words are there for mat? According to Roget’s New Millennium(tm) Thesaurus there are 18 different English alternatives, OK, having contextual differences, but so it is in translation.

I as teach, I am calibrating between the translator and participants, getting feedback on the understanding of both parties, making adjustments, retelling the point I am giving until I know full comprehension is gained. It is at these times I see, on rare occasions, participants who have a knowledge of English creating their own internal dialog of translation, to then criticize that of the translator.

Who is correct?

And then you get the people who love to belittle others, to find fault in others, to pass the blame for their own inadequacies onto others.

I see them, lurking ready to strike like a cobra, but I am ready and waiting, like a mongoose. I prepare.

They are like a person going to battle, and their armaments are criticism, complaints.

But we have our arms, our shields, our defenses. Strength, confidence, power, positivity, Antonio, Fred, and Mustapha.

If we let our defenses down, then we let the enemy get at us, to dig into and erode the confidence, we must realise what the enemy is doing, and fightback, repel the pirate boarding party of Captain Hook.

Keep your shield of the smile on your face, and happiness in your heart, you will defeat the enemy within and without you knowing, everybody will love you.

After my awakening to stage hypnosis with Paul Goldin in Peterborough, I continued in my career in computing, spending nearly six years with Texas Instruments as software manager in the Middle East, based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was at the time of the real start of PC’s (Personal Computers), the early 1980’s. The first PC to land on my desk on a hot sunny day in Jeddah, early 1983, I said this thing will never catch on.

Having had learned that nothing is for life, all about us changes, and we too have to change, I returned to the UK, to continue my career. But nobody wanted me.

Nobody loved me.  

From being an expert who could do anything with a computer, being headhunted, to a situation where I was unemployed was a very hard time. I was too old. Computing is a young man’s business.

I found work, but it was not enjoyable. I joined the ever increasing band of consultants, self employed, ex computer boffins. I became an expert in the replacement window, doors, and flat glass industry for computer software, machine integration and optimisation. I had many small companies as clients that I ran their computer installations, buying computers, installing them, training staff, repairing.

I was not happy. Nobody loved me.

I came to believe in Synchronicity, a  word that Jung used to describe the “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” Events that links mind and matter. If something will happen it will happen. More will be discussed later.

I hardly ever buy the British newspaper the Daily Mail to read, but on this one rare occasion, I did and the pages opened-up to an advertisement, Learn Hypnosis in Depth.

Why did the newspaper open at that page? Why were my eyes drawn to the advertisement? Synchronicity?

Not only that, but one of the named trainers was a TV personality from stage hypnosis, Paul McKenna. 

I had to do this course.

During this course I had many doubts as to my ability to enter into trance, I was good at hypnotising, but I decided to sit back for the ride and learn.

I listened. I watched. I practiced. I experienced.

I noticed that the trainers were using a different language pattern in English that I had up until then never used, a different tonality, and it seemed to work. I asked what this was, what were they doing, and was told that it was NLP. I had never heard of NLP, but my background in investigating systems made me curious, I needed to find more out.

Paul was in the following weeks giving an NLP Practitioner course, co-training with Michael Breen and the co-founder of NLP, Dr Richard Bandler.

The seeds had been set, and were beginning to sprout, to blossom into a mighty oak.

I stated my journey, a new road of discovery, which has had many twists ad turns, lumps and humps, but I have kept my foot down, and enjoyed every moment, meeting may people especially the originators, great thinkers of our time.

Join me on my journey, I have plenty of room.

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see previous, to be continued day by day

So by 15th February 1971, we had reprogrammed all our customers, and there had been no telephones or problems. We RELAXED.

So happy and impressed were the management and directors of NCR with the smooth decimalisation process, that they called us all down to the UK headquarters near Baker Street, (famous for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson) in London.

I this big hall we sat looking up expectantly for the arrival of out esteemed leaders on the stage. They walked in, and took one look at us, and called for doctors, to examine us.

Due to the long hours, the stress, worry, the responsibility, we were diagnosed with depression, anxiety, fatigue, you name it we all had it, and the doctors asked us to open our mouths and we were feed, the Prozac, the uppers the downers, and we were sent away to our own doctors for treatment.

I hate using drugs, as happened yesterday with my migraine (see article). I saw an advertisement for a hypnotherapist practicing in my then home town of Nottingham. This surely is the better way.

I lay out on the couch in his third floor “office”, and closed my eyes as he talked to me and ramble on and on, saying nothing of any importance. 

What was going on?

Why was I not with Peter Pan in Never Never Land? 

Why hadn’t the lights gone out?

Surely I should have gone asleep, to be awakened “cured”?

Why did I know that the bus going passed three floors below was the number 19 to Mansfield with 6 passengers on board?

I was disappointed. This stuff cannot work surely? I did not go back.

Strange thing was, I did not need any tablets after that visit.

My mind was awakened to the power of hypnosis. (see web www.c4hypnosis.com)

To be continued.

For more than 35 years, I had been in a profession that perhaps was not the perfect one for me. I had worked with computer manufacturers, NCR, Sperry Univac, Texas Instruments, in a presales postsales role. This meant going into a potential customer, advising what the requirements are, recommending a solution, then creating or programming that solution, installing the computer hardware and software, training the customer, and looking after them after the installation.

I also worked for end users on their computers systems, redesigning and implementing new changes in software and hardware. Companies such as Associated Tyre Specialists (ATS), Peter Pan Playthings, The National Coal Board.

What ever needed to be done, I would do it.

It occurred to me that as I was designing the computer system, I was emulating what human being was doing. As they would write down an invoice amount in the ledger books, so I would have to do the same. I would follow a process, the strategy/s of the company’s employee, how they thought, how they processed information in their brain, how they worked.

On 15th February 1971, (is Phillip 94?), the UK went decimalised, they introduced decimalisation. Prior to this date, the UK had a very logical currency system. There were:-

      Pounds, Shillings and Pence
         
            12 Pennies equaled a Shilling
            20 Shillings equaled a Pound

      so there where 240 Pennies in a Pound.

The British understood the system, the same as we understand feet, inches and miles, pounds and ounces, and we drive on the correct side of the road.

In these early days of computers, there were no packages to run an application such as MS Word, Excel, Explorer, accounting, payrolls, etc. Each individual computer had its’ own programs written for it specific to the requirements, the way the individual company did things, their strategy. It was my job to do the writing of the programs. There were only a few people in the world, like me, who had the capability and knowledge.

The changeover on 15th February 1971, decimalisation, meant that each and every computer program had to be modified to:-

      100 New Pence to the Pound 

Not only that, but the existing values, balances held, would have to be converted :-

      £1.10.6d     equals      £1. 52.5 New Pence

and we had to be correct, any errors could bring a company down, finish them.

My fellow programmers at the computer manufacturer NCR, worked like Trojans, 48 hours a day.
 
At midnight of Saturday the 14th February, the converstion programs were run, and companies tested and ran their new programs.

All Sunday, we stood by our telephones, waiting for calls asking for help. But, nothing. We had done it.

To be continued.