Tim Kenning: How is what you do different from everyone else claiming to do NLP?

Richard Bandler: Well, I think that’s fairly obvious. As time goes on I keep creating more and more things that get called NLP or DHE or whatever. I’m obviously more intimately involved with these things because I created them. And I created them out of needs I had to do things. There are lots of people who specialise in part of what I do and lots of people stuck at various levels of my development. The difference is I’m still burning the torch at both ends.

TFK: What kind of needs did you have?

RB: To me it’s never fast enough, quick enough or pervasive enough. So I’m always going back and finding new ways of coding and recoding information. I understand quite well that what I made up is not real. People say: “Where is NLP going?” – Well, It’s not alive! Primarily, it’s the sum total of the record of the things I’ve done. Other than me, Robert Dilts, John LaValle and Ed Reece have done pieces but the majority of it is really a record of the things I’ve done over the years.

TFK: So, In terms of other people trying to duplicate what you do and passing that off as NLP.

RB: Well, to begin with they can’t duplicate what I do – they’re not me. In terms of people taking techniques and using them: Some of them take credit for them. Some don’t. Some give me credit. I’m not really concerned about that. They are people that don’t understand the difference between the methodology that produces things and what it produces. It’s like knowing about milk but not knowing about cows.

TFK: What are some of the most common misconceptions about NLP?

RB: I think that would depend who was doing it. One of the most common misperceptions is that NLP is a form of diagnosis - that people are either visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. That’s very contextual because people will change in an instant if you put them in a different situation. People are capable of all of them and it just depends upon the situation. The question is what are they doing and where is it getting them. If it is working – fine. If it’s not then they need to go down a new branch. The other misconception of NLP is that you can understand it and do it without installation. In my seminars I do all the installation. Without having the right things installed in the unconscious your ability to use the skills is limited. It’s not something that you can get out of a book. It would be like having a cookbook and not all the ingredients. It’s just not going to work. You can only see and hear what you can see and hear. You can only lead people into having feelings if you are willing to try them. A lot of people think NLP is about therapy and its not, it’s an educational process. It’s about teaching people to use their neurology in a more sophisticated and deliberate way which I call thinking.

TFK: Is it right that the meta model is the basis of NLP?

RB: The meta model is not the basis of NLP -Its one of the tools that is used to create it. Its part of the methodology when used properly.

TFK: Do many people know how to use it properly?

RB: Many people know how to use it properly but they don’t know how to apply it so that it creates more of itself, because I don’t teach people to do that.

TFK: Is there a reason for that?

RB: Because that’s my job! I don’t ask people to do that. People want to know what comes out. They are the ones that are interested in doing things and changing their lives and changing their clients’ lives. It doesn’t necessarily mean they want the same tools that create a better way of training people to do pistol shooting and make a baseball player hit better. Then when new things come along you have to create new tools to deal with it. I’m always up against new challenges. For example, I have been asked to model people who do healing things. Now a lot of people think modelling is imitating – it is not. Modelling is where you get to the broad range of what somebody does, get rid of the extraneous and get down to the essential pieces. Then you build an algebra so you can actually do what they do and hopefully more. Most of the psychotherapists that I modelled could not do what I teach people to do in five days of training. But I have condensed it down so its easy to learn, they know what they pieces are and they can apply them. My job is to make it that way. Their job is to learn it and to apply as broadly as they can.

TFK: What set you in the direction of creating the meta model in the first place?

RB: I had started out modelling Fritz Perls’ language and using something called predicate calculus. It wasn’t complete nor was his work and Fritz didn’t get the kind of results that I was interested in. When I met John who knew transformational linguistics we applied that model. I came up with the examples of what worked and we crossed it over to Noam Chomsky’s work. We found the pieces that we needed and started looking at what other pieces there were and could we use them. If so, what would they do? We did that with predicate calculus, catastrophe theory, transformational linguistics and particle theory. You see any mathematics is about the brain. Not about the outside world. A brain made it up, so the brain knows how to do it. Math only works in the brain. It doesn’t work without it. But yet, it has a correlation to what we call reality.

TFK: Was this how The Structure of Magic came about?

RB: The Structure of Magic was my dissertation. When it was done we sent copies of it to people like Jay Haley and Bateson’s students. They actually wrote back and said that no one would find it interesting, therapists wouldn’t like it and obviously we hadn’t read Gregory Bateson.  However, Gregory understood the power of what we had done and wrote in the introduction that we had succeeded where he had failed.  The only real reason for that is that we had tools that were available where they didn’t. Transformational grammar hadn’t been developed and the whole idea of cybernetics hadn’t come into being. Gregory is really the founder of the field of heuristics – being able to study communication in terms of its form and its impact as opposed to its content. Gregory was way ahead of his time. If Gregory had been born 30 years later he probably would have done most of what I did.

TFK: Had you not met Fritz Perls, Virginnia Satir, and Gregory Bateson would you have developed NLP anyway because of who you are?

RB: That’s a pretty iffy question. I did meet them. And anybody else I decided I wanted to. If I wanted to meet somebody I just went and met them. I’m kinda pushy that way. Even Milton Erickson arranged for an appointment two months down the road. And I went straight to the airport and got on a plane. I’m not a patient man by nature and I have always found a way to get my foot I the door. Because typically when I start talking to people not only do I find out what they know they end up knowing more about what they know than they knew. I also think that people who shine are drawn together.

TFK: When you look at humanity…

RB: I don’t do that. I don’t look at humanity as an object. I take it one person at a time. That’s really my way. I’m piecemeal guy. I don’t look at society I look at the people in it.

TFK: Eric Robbie came up with submodality eye accessing cues…has anyone else come up with something since…

RB: In terms of something different Ed Reece does some interesting things. I don’t always go to other people’s workshops so I don’t always hear about it. I’m not always the best one to ask about those kind of things. John LaValle has come up with some interesting things using kinaesthetics and using language. How people missed accessing cues for years just amazes me because it’s everywhere. Once you point it out to people then they can see it. And before they didn’t know it was there. To me one of the most powerful things about accessing cues is that when people learn about it, it teaches them that there was something they didn’t notice. There must be more. And I’m assuming there are all kinds of things out there. You have to tramp around the outside of your own model of the world. Otherwise you have to live inside it.

TFK: What are your plans for the future?

RB: My plans for the future are to keep developing things, and keep finding better ways to teach people as well. That’s an important part of it. Is trying to produce higher quality students in less time. The faster you train people to do things the better it will stick in their mind. They’ll get out and use them.

TFK: This September you are going to be doing a Practitioner in a different venue with a much bigger group of people.

RB: We do new things every time we do it. It’s not like its out of the ordinary. Its not like we’re going to revamp it from the ground up. But certainly every time we do it we do different things. I know I do.  And I know I’m always telling them to do different things and they look at me and go ‘you want me to do what?’ just do it. I know I’m always pushing people harder and harder but I really believe that if people throw themselves into things they will know so much more unconsciously than they give themselves credit for. They spend time arguing between their unconscious and their conscious instead of just finding out. When you make mistakes the only trick is to notice them. Then you can do something else. It’s a simple formula.

TFK: Tell me about your apprenticeship program.

RB: People become apprentices because I think they should be. I just think that they should spend time with each other and with me over an extended period of time so they get to the point where they stop just listening as part of the audience and start to pay attention to what I am doing. Its one thing to have it hit you it’s another to see where it is coming from. And have them try things and then they do things with each other. Then they wander off and explore. The domain in which my apprentices work is different from what I teach workshops about because I don’t have the same limitations on it. There are just things I don’t talk about in workshops it wouldn’t be appropriate.

TFK: As well as the big public seminars you also do something called Personal Enhancement where you personally work with a small group of people.

RB: That’s one of my fun workshops.

TFK: What are some of the smartest things people have asked for?

RB: People ask for very intelligent things - the really practical things. To me it’s an intelligent thing to say ‘I need to get this clutter out of my head and focus my direction.’ There are a lot of people who have had too much therapy and they come talking about low self esteem. They’re constantly measuring themselves and they don’t live up to the standards they set for themselves. Usually what people ask for on the first day changes on the second day.  As I go through I make fun about some of this stuff…because if people can laugh they can start to change...I mean they want everything in the world to be perfect. Then there are some people that give me sixteen pages of stuff and it really always boils down to the same thing. They don’t focus on anything enough to get anything done. That’s why its sixteen pages…

TFK: So, what one thing would you say to your students about changing their lives?

RB: Get on with it.