Orlando (19 July 2010)
Richard Bandler started the session on Thursday, 15 July, by discussing the differences between repairing and optimizing, providing several examples of physical items, such as automobiles, that can be repaired when broken, but would be much better if their mechanics and appearance were optimized. The same concept also applies to the strategies people use to do everything they do. Most people (and you may be one of them) have strategies that are either inefficient or don't actually help you accomplish your goals. Some people (and you may be one of them) would do well to reverse the steps in your strategy so that you begin with happiness instead of making that the goal or result of the strategy.
What can't you do? Or, what is even more common, what do you hesitate doing that you really need to do? If you have things that fall into this category, remember that it probably isn't your fault. Hesitation and the inability to develop and use efficient, effective strategies for doing important things are typically the result of bad hypnotic suggestions by parents and other relatives, teachers, religious leaders, and members of the medical profession. Unless you learned to question authority early in life, you will have received countless bad hypnotic suggestions by the time you are an adult.
Richard also pointed out that if you can do one thing well, you can adapt the strategy you use to do that one thing to everything else you do. When time permits, now think about something you do exquisitely well, whatever that might be, and ask yourself what motivates you to initiate that behavior. What comes next in the sequence? Notice each step that follows and how you get from step to step. How do you know when the strategy is complete and you have achieved your desired outcome? When you have identified all the steps in your strategy for excellence, you can begin to plan a "strategy for strategies" that will allow you to make all your strategies exquisite.
John La Valle took the group for the afternoon session, and we went back to work on Timelines. Because time is a mental construct, it doesn't really exist in the way we think it does. We have memories of what we consider the past, and we have memories for what we think of as our future. Because we have no real language for envisioning time, we use the metaphor of space: the distant past; far in the future.
If you are not already familiar with your timeline, take a minute to think of several things from your past, and think about where you have stored your memories of those things. When you have located the direction of those memories, think about your memories for the future, and locate where you store those. When you talk about things that happened in the past or you expect to happen in the future, where do you gesture? In Western culture, past memories are typically stored on the left or behind the individual, and memories for the future are typically stored on the right or in front of the individual. Your timeline may be different, and that's OK. The most important thing is that you are aware of how you have organized your timeline.
John discussed the ways that timelines can be used to facilitate desired change. Resources and desired states may be anchored to the timeline using tag questions (can't they...). John then demonstrated the use of timelines in a process he called the "Karma Clean," based on a technique Richard Bandler had developed called "The Decision Destroyer." John's "Karma Clean" included both the "Guilt Eradicator" and a "Change Decision" process. Following each of the demonstrations, workshop participants had the opportunity to work through the process. Both processes include steps to ensure that the important learnings from the guilt-producing events and bad decisions are retained and influence future behavior.
We all left with cleaner karmas....
The workshop ended on Sunday, 18 July. The last day began with a truly remarkable trance by John La Valle, which helped set the tone and attitude for the main even of the morning: the test, which was designed to measure how much participants had learned during the course of the seminar. The test required both individual and team performance and covered a wide variety of NLP concepts and terminology. And we all did very well.
After lunch, it was Richard's turn to address the group and to conduct the "graduation" exercise. His principal message for us was to use our skills in Bandler Technologies "to make the world a better place."
It is a goal Debra and I share.
