Hey everybody, this is Steve. In today's
video I want to talk about another old
NLP book. You might remember a short
while ago I looked at a book called
Frogs into Princes. Today I want to talk
about a book which comes from a similar
period which is also based on NLP
seminars, Neuro Linguistic Programming,
that were happening around 1979, 1980, and
that book is Trance-formations also by
Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Now you
might be wondering why am I talking
about a 40 year old NLP book when my
thing is coaching professional people to
enjoy success with wellness! Well first
of all NLP is one of the really powerful
fields that I work with. I'm an Advanced
Master Practitioner and Trainer of Neuro
Linguistic Programming or NLP and I
think the NLP is still one of the great
sources of ideas, skills and models for
professional people who are looking to
succeed with greater wellness. I don't
think it's the only field but I
certainly think it's one of the fields
that's very interesting,
and while Trance-formations is ostensibly
a book for therapists who want to learn
how to use hypnosis, it's also a book
about how we access personal resources
that can help us with our confidence and
our creativity and our clear thinking.
I'm going to give four reasons why this
book is still very interesting 40 years
on. I'm gonna give two caveats that you
should bear in mind if you do read it
and I'm gonna point out one specific
thing that I like about this book in
particular. And by the way if you have
any experience with NLP or indeed if
you've read the book Trance-formations or
any further books related to that field
they'll let me know in the comments, and
let me know what you got out of it. I'm
gonna start with the four caveats. Caveat
number one is as I mentioned, this book
is nearly 40 years old, it's not quite 40
but nearly, and NLP has moved on a lot in
that time period. The developers behind
this book, Richard Bandler and John
Grinder, are constantly evolving and
revised
their work and of course they haven't
worked together for many years so their
developments have gone in different
directions. Other developers have come in
to the field and taken their
developments in different directions, and
so NLP today has moved on quite a lot
from where it was when the seminars took
place that these books were based on. For
instance what this book talks about in
terms of reframing, which is from page
137 of this particular edition, is not
something that Richard would teach
anymore because he's replaced it with
better and more efficient methods, and
they're what he teaches today. That said, a
lot of the content of this book is still
being taught today. The second caveat is
something I've already mentioned, which
is that it is ostensibly written as a
book for therapists who want to learn to
use hypnosis in therapy. Well, that's
probably not you in all fairness, but all
that really means is that some parts of
the book are not really aimed at you, but
generally speaking though this book is
about unlocking the potential of the
unconscious mind and that is potentially
of interest to everybody. Now for the
four reasons I still find this book
really interesting even though it is 40
years old, and that's quite apart from
the fact that actually I do quite like
old books! First, like I said in my
video about Frogs into Princes, the books
from around this time from the seminars
taking place around this time convey
more of what I consider to be the true
spirit of NLP than the later books seem
to do, and that's a spirit of discovery,
of curiosity, of experimentation, of
trying things out and seeing what's
possible, and utilizing what does prove
to be possible.
Most modern books don't really convey
that. What most modern books do is they
reduce Neuro Linguistic Programming into
bullet points, and stepwise techniques,
and just-so ideas, and presented as if it
is a fixed, closed and just-so body of
knowledge, and they don't really bring
across this spirit of experimentation.
I think these old books do, and secondly,
the book is ultimately about thinking
and states of resourcefulness and how we
access those.
Now that's something that is potentially
of interest to anybody who wants to
think more clearly, who wants to access
greater personal resourcefulness.
For instance the book talks about
generating new behavior, it also talks
about a specialized hypnotic technique
called
role model identification, which is where
we effectively role model ourselves into
somebody who's got more experience got
more knowledge, so that we can access and
intuit some of their intuitive knowledge.
The third thing I like about this book
is, well, it is ultimately about trance
states. Now most people think about
trance as a special state, but there's
another way of looking at it, which is
we're always in some kind of a trance,
the only question is which one! The
driving trance, the walking trance, the
working trance, the relaxing trance, could
be any of them. And when I think about
trance states I also think about
meditative states, which assists with
clear thinking, and the thing is you can't
read this book without experiencing some
of that, because it's not an academic
book, because it's an anecdotal book,
because it's a transcript of a live
seminar, you get into the experience, and
that's not just therapeutic, it's
also clarifying. The fourth thing I find
interesting about this book is that
again while it is ostensibly a manual
for therapists who are looking to use
hypnosis, the models which are actually
applied here are the same basic models
used in influential communication skills
training, such as building deep rapport
with other people, and using language
patterns that elicit certain responses,
pacing and leading, and even the
structure of basic negotiation is
actually covered in this book. It's
actually a quaint 40 year old window
into skills which are still taught for
communication skills today! Basically
it's a bit of a trippy communication
skills book! Now the particular thing I
wanted to point out actually starts on
page 213 of this particular edition, and
that is self hypnosis, which can be a
very useful resource for professional
people who are looking to succeed with
wellness, because again whether you think
about it as trance states or as meditative states,
I don't see them as being especially
different, the book here talks about how
it can access those states for our own
clarity. Now in fairness you don't have
to get this exact book for that, you can
get that in any number of books, it's
just that for all the other things that
I find interesting about that book, that
is one of the really useful resources
for professional people, so that quite
apart from my personal liking to delve
into slightly old books and slightly
antiquated books, is why I find this book
particularly interesting. And if you do
think about studying any kind of
Neuro-Linguistic Programming as part of
your professional journey please do look
at the more modern books to get what's
being taught today, but also do look at
these, they do give a perspective that's
really missing from a lot of the modern
books.