MID SOUTH INSTITUTE OF NLP:

 

My Personal Experience with NLP-Clint

Greetings and Welcome to our adventure in Neuro linguistic Programming during the next nine months. Edna and I hope that you look forward to this time of togetherness as much as we. Our introduction to NLP was in the spring of 1979 when a member of my staff at Family Services Center returned from a Transactional Analysis Conference all filled with excitement and saying that we just must have Stephen Lankton do a presentation to us on a new modality that had just been developed. It had something do with the language of quick change, etc. I began immediately to make contact with Steve and within a few months he was in Huntsville teaching a week long workshop on NLP. At that time there were no books on NLP but some recent publications having to do with magic and instantaneous healing etc. Steven had a manuscript with him, publisher ready, called "Practical Magic" which I had the opportunity to peruse before its publication some months later. in it there is an interesting acknowledgment relating to Huntsville, Alabama.

While I found NLP interesting and even dared try it with some clients, it soon fell by the wayside as an ongoing intervention, perhaps because of insufficient depth on my part. perhaps because it was too great a departure from the acceptable therapeutic approaches, including TA and Gestalt. About a year later a young man, now a college freshman, returned home from school, called me requesting some more of the magic. He needed a recharge and was referring some college friends to me. I was somewhat taken aback and even was altogether uncertain of what he was asking for. He described a particular intervention, "Life Change History" that I had done with him that turned his life around. He had gone from a high school drop out to a freshman in college and doing well academically. I attempted to refresh myself on what I had learned and through serendipity received an announcement of a full NLP training program in Atlanta. I enrolled in 1981 and immediately discovered that NLP was something I had to share.

 Soon, as Family  Services Center Executive Director, I was presenting introductory NLP sessions to my Board of Directors and whomever volunteered to do some personal work, I eagerly obliged. I did NLP relaxation techniques, phobia treatments and allergy cures. More exciting was with a board member who had considerable negative feelings toward her father, a professor living in France. Both parents had moved to the United States following World War II. Father was unhappy here and decided to return to France. Mother chose to remain. Although that was a parental issue, the daughter felt abandoned and angry. I did some NLP trauma resolution work with her. Since she was already school age when the event happened, she claimed she did not remember a word in French and did not understand, surprisingly, my fractured French from college days. I led her through an NLP intervention, I don't remember what. When we were through she remembered her childhood French and dialogued with me as poorly as I spoke French. During the summer she visited her father and reported a great time. Other members on the Board never forgot this demonstration and later on one of the Board Members reminded me of it over and over and invited us to begin teaching NLP techniques at the UAH Academy for Lifelong Learning. 

I also presented to various Church and PTA groups. A teacher attending one of the PTA groups later, along with his wife, joined Edna and me in attending a National NLP Conference in New Orleans. A college professor from Oklahoma presented a paper on his use of NLP in the classroom and with working with children independently. Our local gentleman learned a great deal from the presentation and later integrated his learnings into his teaching at Huntsville High School. By now Edna was enthused and jointly we did a five week workshop on Saturday mornings at Faith Presbyterian Church. Although this was very rudimentary as I was still in the Practitioner training program, many counselors, teachers, therapists and clergy reported finding the skills they learned to be effective in their respective work.

My Practitioner level training was so exciting and enlivening that when I learned I could attend the training in Knoxville two weeks  later for free, I enrolled there, an entirely different group, and continued for the next two years taking and completing both the practitioner levels in both Atlanta and Knoxville. Then the first International NLP training was announced for London, and being mostly through my Master Practitioner training, I elected to participate in that. Edna went along to complete her practitioner training. Being somewhat advanced, I was able to assist in the training, being a consultant to small groups as they did assigned exercises. We met in the Chemistry Science building of the University of London and participated with our trainers, Ed and Maryann Reese, with Richard Bandler, Robert Dilts, Robert Orchard and with advanced students from the Southern Institute of NLP in Florida. Students came from throughout western Europe. We participated in two other European trainings, in Switzerland and Germany respectively. It was in the summer between those trainings that the Berlin wall came down and we had our first students from Eastern Europe and heard the many tales of sacrifice and deprivation they had encountered under communism.

We loved the Europeans and made many friends through the training programs there. We would very much like to have participated in all the training events there but due to finances and illness and eventual deaths of our parents this was impossible. 

We began our own training initially as the North Alabama NLP Center and later, upon realizing that we are located geographically in the mid south area of the U. S. we changed the name to the Mid South Institute of NLP. Through our training in Huntsville and Birmingham we have had very interesting feedback of the application of NLP in many diverse settings. Many have taken the training for personal growth and development. We have had attorneys, engineers, teachers, chiropractors, massage therapists, newspaper writers, a psychiatrist, psychologists, etc. All reported their careers and personal lives greatly enriched by the training.

Because of pressures as Executive Director of FSC and personal issues, our NLP training was neglected for a long time. Also, as a therapist it was essential that I learn some techniques that were recognized and accepted by the medical community and by insurance companies. Consequently I studied and became accredited in EMDR, learned several Energy Psychology approaches and am now happy to be in a position that I can re-involve myself in NLP. 

For the serious student in NLP I highly recommend learning from as many centers, teachers and institutes as you can afford and can attend. Edna and I both completed 28 days of NLP in Health and Healing and I continued one year additionally as a coach and Edna was coach and head coach for that particular training for a number of years. We both completed a Master level training with Robert Dilts and Todd Epstein on "Pragmagraphics and Sleight of Mouth Patterns" as well as their version of "Timeline". I did an additional Masters level with NLP Comprehensive, an institute in Boulder, Colorado, run by Steve and Connie Rae Andreas. It was there that I had an intensive study on "Submodalities and Timeline Therapy" and later went through Connie Rae's "Core Transformation Technique" which was so powerful that we later sponsored her coming to Huntsville to repeat the training here. I also studied two times with Tad James, "Timeline", and "Creating your Future". We both have attended, participated in and presented to innumerable conferences.

So what is NLP and what is it all about? A friend relates that one day in college while lunching with some friends, his roommate made a couple of comments to him that totally turned his life around. The comments were very casual on his part, and yet their effect has been responsible for his doing what he does today through his life's passion of "Rediscover the joy of Learning." That room mate literally affected Don's whole future, in a very positive way. Don is now recognized in the NLP and Education community throughout the world for his discovery and developing of techniques to work effectively with children and youth in overcoming learning blocks. He has demonstrated remarkable success with ADD and ADHD students. Don said he called his former room mate some years later and thanked him for changing his life. He was not aware of the incident.

Don's story reminded me of a similar incident I experienced in my sophomore year of college. Events and circumstances in my earlier life had left me something of a lost soul, low esteem, disbelief in my abilities to learn and achieve, vague plans with limited expectations for the future. I certainly doubted my ability to learn and could envision no accomplishments in my future. In one session with this teacher my belief apple cart was turned upside down, leaving me to do some deep thinking and introspection that in turn directed me into a lifetime journey of learning and growing and now that I ave reached the age of eighty, I envision years of continued learning and sharing through teaching subjects that I enjoy. 

According to Don, 'We all have had that particular teacher or special person who has said something to us and it changed our life! You know what I mean--the single comment that zips right into your heart and soul and affects you positively the rest of your life." The good news is that there is a structure and pattern to those comments. And they can be designed and delivered on purpose and with intentionality with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). And, YOU can learn how to do it!