Nick Kemp interviewed the co-creator of NLP, Dr. Richard
Bandler a few months back. You can download
the interview with Dr. Richard Bandler plus a whole range of free
interviews with the leading pioneers of NLP from NLPmp3.
Below you will find a transcript of the same interview.
Nick: This is Nick Kemp I would
like to welcome Dr Richard Bandler to NLP MP3 and start off by actually
asking you, what actually interests you these days, In general.
Richard: My grandson, when you say
what interests me, everything interests me, I’m just involved
in lots and lots of stuff, I’m developing a new light sound
machine, and were also, a new EEG, KEG machine that has pressure sensitive
things, where you don’t have to stick anything on yourself.
You can wear a baseball cap, or a construction helmet, and some of
the bigger companies were providing us networking to monitor the performance
or people using heavy machinery so they don’t hurt them selves.
I imagine that eventually we will use this with astronauts, and with
baseball players and football player, and all kinds of people, so
that we can start to monitor the difference between quality performance
and performance that isn’t quality. So we can move it in one
direction, that’s sort of been the theme of all the work that
I have ever done, to take the things that work and get people to do
them more often, and take the things that don’t work and get
them to stop it. Take the things that do work and make calculus from
them, and then come up with ways that people can do things that are
high performance that they have never done. My whole 35-year career
has been based on that principle. That’s what being able to
model and build calculus is all about. Originally NLP was about looking
at the few things I had seen people do that worked, then building
a way of representing them, and computing what else would work. Most
of the techniques we teach in NLP were never done by anyone, the truth
is that people are now better hypnotists and better therapists and
better communicators that the people I modelled originally. And that’s
a good thing, progress should make us all learn to be better than
the people we learn from, you know, by the time their dead. Its an
unfortunate thing that we get geniuses and then people try to emulate
them for centuries, instead of taking geniuses as the bottom line,
and getting everybody to be better. And I think I have done a very
good job of that over the years. Training people to be better communicators
than Virginia ever was, than Fritz ever was, than Milton ever was.
They kinds of techniques I have provided, both language techniques
and techniques in sub modalities, things that are in my books and
in my tapes and in my videos and in my DVD’s. All of those things
are designed to get people to be better communicators, and to be better
at what ever they do, whether its spelling, working a big tractor,
being a baseball player, it makes no difference to me. My job is to
increase performance, and to figure out things that people aren’t
doing from the good performances that they could be doing, that would
be as affective as what their doing now, but to a wider range of areas.
Nick: One of the questions that
I was asked by a college of mine, I know from training with you over
the years, you are constantly evolving and developing, you approaches
and what you do. What from the original model of NLP has been superseded
by your work in current years?
Richard: What hasn’t? That
would be the answer I would give, there is very little we used to
do that I would still consider worth doing, except for some of the
linguistic patterns. Every thing has become more precise, certainly
with the models in using your brain for a change and time for a change,
everything took a big evolutionary step, when we stopped looking at
sequences of representational systems so much and started looking
at more simultaneous models. Of course DHE is a giant leap forward,
because the way in which we are designing things gives us better things
than we could elicit from the public at random. It allows us to take
the machinery of the outside world and use it as a model for the inside
world. Last year I had a guy, couldn’t tell up from down. He
couldn’t drive because of that, its just the simple thing of
building a hallucinated bubble, inside of his head, so he has a reference
point, made it all disappear. I’m sure he doesn’t even
see it anymore but he can build in the kinestetics, his vistubular
system, which is actually a whole other sensory system, simply wasn’t
working right so we built him one. Recently I just worked with some
one where they had this neurological disease, where they lost their
balance, I mean literally, they had trouble standing or walking or
whatever. The medical model is to get them to accept their limitation
and walk with a walker for the rest of their life, all these terrible
things. But I extended out of his mind, hallucinations, just like
schizophrenics have only I put big long things that have buzzers on
them so if he started to tilt one way it would buzz and move him back.
But it literally, physically pulled him in the opposite direction.
Oddly enough in side of a month he was walking just fine. One of the
things, well of course everyone that I work with is pretty much people
that have been given up on, or professionals, that do good sometimes
and not others. I have had athletes as clients, I had a tennis player
that would play really good and then he’d play really shitty.
In so far as I could get him to pay attention, we were able to get
him to go into the state where he wins more often. But you know sometimes,
people get into the state where they get too cocky and then they stop
paying attention, the minute he did that he called me back on the
phone and said, I forgot what you told me to do. I said, no you haven’t
your just not doing it. If you do the things that work they will.
And that’s just pretty much, you know, I’ve methodically
gone back and taken every thing that we started out with and have
revamped it so that its easier and quicker, you know even the way
in which we used to work with phobias. I have a much better way of
doing it now, we used to start with a visual lead, now I use kinastetic
leads, I can get much quicker results, much faster and with a larger
percentage of people. All of these techniques, not that the old techniques
don’t work, and they are still worth learning, but its like
anything else. If you don’t come up with better ways, we would
still be driving model T’s, or we would still be in horse carriages
with square wheels. The object of everything is to improve it, and
just because something is better than what was doesn’t mean
there isn’t something better still and more pervasive.
Nick: How did you first meet Robert
Anton Wilson, and how did that arrangement come about?
Richard: Well my wife liked Robert
Anton’s books. She read one to me and it was brilliant, absolutely
brilliant. If she wanted something she would really just tell me about
it, and she said, we’ve really gotta meet this guy. At the time
I had a guy that worked for me named Braum, he’s no longer alive
anymore. We told him and he somehow or another found out that Robert
was doing something in San Jose. So I sent a note to him, I said we
have to meet. So they called on the phone and we had dinner at the
empress of chine in San Francisco, which is a perfect place, I found
out later, because it’s in one of his books. He thought I did
it deliberately but I just liked the empress of china. I didn’t
realise it was in one of his other books. We had dinner at the top
of the empress of china, over looking the Golden Gate Bridge, and
the whole bay. Beautiful view out there, and we sat and we talked,
actually mostly his wife and my wife talked, and we watched them talk.
We decided to do some things together. I think he’s a Brilliant
speaker, and I think he is one of the geniuses of our time. Without
a doubt, and he’s one of the few genius’ I know that’s
still alive. Which is nice, Robert is one of those people, he’s
probably written out, Jesus, thirty-five, thirty-six, forty books,
I don’t know, zillions of articles, and has an interest in everything.
Most of the really bright people I met did lots and lots of things,
real dabblers, Gregory Bateson, had his fingers in everything. They
all like to draw, write poetry, play a little music, dance, they studied
anthropology and sociology, and history and art. One-dimensional people
sometimes, I met a geneticist and that’s just about all he did,
and once he got stuck there was nothing to pry him out of it. I found
great solutions to things, by studying other things, every from architecture,
to the way in which they get metals, you know I have always found
answers to everything in chemistry, the more you study chemistry the
more it tells you about the basic building blocks of life. Especially
now that we have new things, with cat scans and pet scans and MRI’s
all this stuff is fascinating, Neuro Physiology has opened up worlds
upon worlds upon how things actually physically work, and how they
work at the neuro chemical level. One thing about Robert is that he’s
just the biggest wealth of information I have ever found anywhere,
you can ask Robert about anything, and he will know about it. He makes
the encyclopaedia look uninformed, he really does, sometimes I just
through something out, and I said to him once, thirteenth century
weird monk? And he went, oh Benedictine blah blah blah blah…
and named this monk and started telling me all about him, I just made
it up. I believe it was the monk that flew, and he would fly up to
the top of the monastery, and clean gust, and the pope sent two people
out because they thought he was possessed by the devil, but he promised
he only flew when he needed to clean something. A very odd story,
but Robert has such a fabulous memory for all this detail and he inputs
this information all the time. There was a pen mark on a table napkin,
and I started to write something and stopped, because somebody interrupted
me, and he looked down and said, that’s the symbol of blah blah
blah, and I went Huh!, it was actually just a scribble that got started
and I didn’t finish it, but he told me all about where it came
from and everything, and I looked it up and it was all accurate. So
that’s one of the fun things about Robert, so when I had him
giving lectures and seminars I was doing, one of the things is you
cant sit with Robert for three hours without getting smarter, its
just impossible. He’s a sweetheart, he’s just a wonderful
guy with a great sense of humour, I have met a lot of very famous
intellectuals, and they were a pain in the ass. A lot of them, they
may know a lot about something but they really weren’t livers
and lovers of life. Robert is, he’s a very special man, and
I think if people wanna get smarter, they should read his books.
Nick: Well this is a slightly odd
question, but somebody asked me, what is the strangest thing that’s
happened to you during a seminar?
Richard: How the wall exploded,
and an 8inch water main broke. Water came out of a painting of a waterfall.
Talk about phsycadellic. Another time, right after the movie starwars,
a six-foot guy, and it was actually the guy that played Darth Vader,
came in full costume and burst in to the seminar on reality strategies.
I was busy dissecting everybody’s reality strategies, and they
were all in this quasi-altered state, Miral Lynch was having some
kind of conference across the hall, with thousands and thousands of
insurance salesmen, and I guess they hired this guy. He came in with
twenty storm troopers, burst through the doors and started talking
like Darth Vader. Everybody looked, and then looked at me like, is
this really here? And it was just very funny. But he was in the wrong
room, he just burst through the wrong door. His timing was perfect,
they all looked at me, and I went, what? I acted like I didn’t
see it so they’re just a little nuttier than they already were.
There’s always fun things like that happen, crazy stuff, (Unknown
name) came on once to do a seminar, and he brought kind of an entourage
of people with turbans. I guess they meditate a lot, and somebody
asked me to demonstrate the hand shake interrupt, and I did a handshake
interrupt on this guy. He pushed one of his students up on stage,
the guy obviously had been in some deep trances cos I did the handshake
interrupt and the guy went over backwards. I grabbed him by the belt,
literally hanging over backwards, if I hadn’t got him by the
belt he would have hit the floor. I kinda shook him trying to make
him stiff, he was as limp as could be, and he fell over forwards,
felt like I had a rag doll. There is always funny stuff like that
happens, lots of things. There are good funny things, and sometimes
there are things I consider being fairly tragic, I had a psychiatrist
one time, jump up and throw a complete psychotic episode, about the
fact that what I was telling him about was a total lie, and fabrication.
I had been telling him about getting this guys pain to go away, he
had had surgery in his ear and had terrible tinitus and pain in his
ear. This was in Arizona, this guy was going on and on, this psychiatrist
was calling me a fraud and all the shit, when all of a sudden this
guy stands up in the back and says excuse me sir, that was me he was
talking about. I hadn’t seen this guy in 8 or 9 years, and I
had told the story lots of times and nobody had ever said anything
about it. You know, the earth coincidence control centre at work,
I didn’t even recognise him, he looked so different, cos he’d
been in pain, he was an architect and he had actually built the place
we were in, and that’s why he was there. When he found out I
was going to give a lecture in the building he built he thought cool,
timing is everything for stuff like that, and strange things happen,
and most of the time its good things, there are always silly things
that happen. I like those things, some things you couldn’t plan
if you tried. Most of the time things work out, we had a fire in a
hotel once, on the eighth floor, and all the sprinklers came on. Then
it kept draining down through all the floors, and all of a sudden
there were three hundred of us in a room and it just kept pouring
water on us through the ceiling. Flooded the room, ruined everybody’s
clothes, everything. At the time is doesn’t seem funny, but
when you look back at it, you know, I didn’t know what to so
I took that was in a separate building, moved everybody out of the
restaurant, took all the tables out in to the parking lot and started
on. The hotel comes over and says you can’t take our restaurant,
I said, to late I already have, I had all these poor people sitting
there, drenched in clothing that I didn’t wanna stop. The hotel
did pay for people, even the stuff they had in the rooms got ruined,
and there was no real fire, it was just smoke from a bed. Some guy
smoking in bed, fell asleep, and the smoke set off all these things,
and I guess the sprinklers had gone buzurk, firing off all over the
place. Ruined everything we had, clothing, the sound system, the PA
system, keyboards, everything went. Just terrible, its like any other
business, stuff is going to happen, that’s one thing you can
count on, on planet earth, Shit happens. I really believe the best
thing about the past, is that its over, and you have to treat it that
way. If you treat the past as if it’s still alive you make people
worse. This is why NLP is not a kind of therapy, when people call
it that I object to it, that’s an insult to me, I couldn’t
think of anything more insulting. Therapists are trying to find out
where people got screwed up and where they are still screwed up, and
fix it. I think people work perfectly, they just need to know more.
Whether they are bad spellers, whether they’re depressed, whether
they are making bad decisions, or whether they are hallucinating daemons
of the night, its not that there is something wrong with them. Even
a fear of elevators is learned, you only have two natural fears when
you are born, fear or loud noises and a fear of falling. All the rest
is learnt and if you can learn one thing you can learn something else.
And learning how to sort information in your head so that you can
do what you wanna do is what NLP is all about, so you can be afraid
of things you should be, like cheating on your wife. And be excited
about things you should be, like having the freedom to get passed
things you were afraid of. Whether its public speaking, which is probably
the largest phobia there is. Or elevators of bugs or spiders, or snakes
or what ever it is. Some snakes you should be afraid of, and stay
away from. I watched this guy on TV that goes around the world and
keeps getting bitten by snakes. It’s a good thing he has a lot
of anti venom with him, jimoney crickets, these guys get bit all the
time. I think their mothers should have explained to them. I had a
client, who they made a film about, a guy who ski jumped. Put sticks
on his feet and slid down a mountain launched out thousands of yards,
but he was afraid to walk across the room and say hello to a woman.
To me when I try to figure out which one is dangerous ill tell you
jumping off the side of a mountain looks more dangerous to me, than
walking across the room to say hello. Some times people don’t
sort things out properly, not because of what happened in their childhood,
or even if it is, it doesn’t matter, because the cause effect
universe is gone. What ever your doing, your still doing, and you
can do something else, and all you have to do is learn a little bit
about how to use your brain differently.
Nick: What advice would you give
someone who wants to work with people on an individual basis?
Richard: Get a lot of good training,
and practice, practice, practice. The reasons we have the society
Websites is because we rank trainers by what they know. And I would
check to make sure their credentials are current. If people haven’t
had any training in a couple of years, in this field you’re
behind the times. If they are not interested enough to keep up their
own training, they shouldn’t be the person that trains you.
They should stay current with what’s going on, and they shouldn’t
just have a certificate, most of the people that are very good have
got a wall full of them. Five days of training isn’t enough,
six days of training may start you out as a practitioner but most
people who are very good at this have done if for a long time.
Nick: I no this my self, from working
with Tina Taylor training in Leeds, very much having used your inspiration
and approach its just, people who have come and done NLP elsewhere
before, in someway its completely unrecognisable, its just a very
intellectualised process.
Richard: There are idiots doing
everything on the earth, some dentist’s aren’t good dentists.
It’s the responsibility of the consumer to make sure they are
getting the right product and with the web that’s not hard to
do. If you don’t have the sense to find out if someone is a
qualified NLP trainer then you get what you deserve. And if it’s
not someone I approve of then don’t come and complain to me.
I make up lists of the people that I say are current as trainers,
and the institutes that are current, in terms of certification with
the society. Now there are lots of other people who have decided that
what I do is not NLP, because I’m not doing what I did 30 years
ago. There are people who are stuck at levels of my development, who
have trained other people who are stuck at levels or their development,
who have trained people who are stuck at levels of those people development
and then claim that their qualified to do something. But its not like
you can’t go to the source, you can go to purenlp.com you can
go to richardbandler.com, and the societyofnlp.com and .net and nlp.net.
All these places are out there, its not that hard to find out. Jesus
you go on the web and my name is on half a million Websites but there’s
only a couple that are mine. So just because somebody sticks my name
on a Websites just so you get sucked over there doesn’t mean
you should be stupid. The smart thing to do it go to the source and
find out, that’s what I always did. I didn’t just pick
an hypnotist to learn from, I found out who was the best and learnt
from him. I found the best family therapist in the world I learnt
from her, if you get junk its just garbage in, garbage out…
its that simple, quality in quality out. And anybody, who thinks that
NLP is an intellectual process, doesn’t know the person who
made it up. I can do more theoretical and analytical stuff than any
intellectual, but don’t. I’m a better mathematician than
most, I can do group theory, I can do the hard math, but its not going
to make you good at this stuff. What makes you good at this stuff
is behavioural and its understanding about what people need and what
they don’t have mostly I’m looking for what’s missing,
so I know what to teach them. All the diagrams in the world aren’t
going to accomplish that, I’m the guy that says put your notebooks
down and step away from them. Use your senses; use your eyes use your
ears. The kinds of calculus that I made up are so you can compute
things. That’s for you, not your clients. Your clients don’t
need to know eye-accessing cues, you do. It increases the range of
what you can see and what you can respond to. The more you can detect
with your senses the more you can influence with your behaviour. And
yeah, there are lots of clowns who say they are Neuro Linguistic Programmers,
but they’re not my problem. Consumers have a responsibility
to get the quality of things. If you don’t check out a car before
you buy it, you will be disappointed. If you order food just by lowering
your hand on the menu, you’ll end up with something your supposed
to clean your hands with. Its just one of those things, people are
constantly coming up to me and saying, this trainer said… blah,
blah, blah. And I say, well if you don’t care whom you learn
from, then you are going to be deceived. A big word that pops in to
my mind is refund. If people aren’t teaching you how you use
these things, wisely and currently, then I would go get your money
back. Bring a 2x4 I find it helps.
Nick: And finally, are there any
books or DVD’s on the way?
Richard: I just made 4 new DVD’s,
in the studio here in London, Riverside Studio. One on rapid induction’s,
one on increasing artistic installations and strategies to do art,
and strategies to do music. I don’t know what the others are
about, its been more than a few days, its in the past, the past is
over… and one on not giving up, I think that’s one of
the most important things, as somebody in this profession. I don’t
think people talk about it enough, most of my career, I have worked
on people that everybody had given up on. Everything from catatonia
to comas, to kids that were learning disabled, to paralysed people
to schizophrenics, these were all chronic, these were all, well there’s
nothing you can do about it. And that’s primarily why no one
cared if I tried, because they all believed I couldn’t do anything.
They gave me their case files, some of them we six, seven inches thick.
All that was, was a list of the things that hadn’t worked. TO
me you have to try new things to get new results. And the technologies,
its amazing how resistant people were to using hypnotic skills, even
the hypnotists are resistant to using hypnotic skills. I use hypnosis
to teach hypnosis and they say that’s to paradoxical, well I’m
afraid it’s not, what works, works. I have trained more people
to do really good hypnosis over the past 30 years, than anybody ever
has. I make it a part and a part of everything, so the hypnotic processes
and altered state is, if you don’t alter your state you can’t
do now things. Its juts that simple. You’ve gotta get unconscious
processes and conscious processes lined up, so that your moving in
the same direction. John just released one on nested loops, and there
is all kinds of new stuff out. Go to the NLP store, they’ve
always got the new things there. And paulmckenna.com, oh I have a
new book coming out, I think, I got a hand gesture from across the
room. I forget everything, I have a new book coming out next week
actually. Its called conversations, I wrote it with Owen Fitzpatrick,
its really got lots and lots of stuff in it. Its different from most
of the books that I have written, in that its very conversational,
conversations between me and him, and lots of exercises and lots of
clients and photographs and all kinds of stuff. Owen went back to
India and retraced my steps through India, met a lot of the same people
and took pictures and it’s very nice. The first edition is going
to hit the streets in about 7 days.
Nick: And where will we be able
to get it from?
Richard: You can get it from the
NLP bookstore, paulmckenna.com those are the two big places I know
about. I’m going to sell the paperback rights, a couple of big
publishers interested. In the mean while I put out the first edition
through a small company in Ireland. Most of the copies have been bought
up by the NLP institutes, so that’s probably the best place
to get them.
Nick: I’ll talk to Owen then.
Richard: Well Owen would be a good
place to get them, he has one of those institutes. I think I am the
only one now who doesn’t have an institute. I gave mine away,
I’m not into running companies anymore, I’ve done so much
of that over the years I am to old for that kinda crap. I’m
into things like building pirate ships now.
Nick: On that note I would like
to thank you very much for agreeing to have an interview with us.
To give you more of a learning experience we have also
included some nlp and hypnosis games and exercises for you to play with.
Visit the resources section above and navigate to 'Free Exercises' or
you can click the titles as follows: IMPROVING
VISUAL ACUITY, PIVOT
GRAMMAR, MAGNETIC
HYPNOSIS OR SELF
HYPNOSIS. We are constantly updating our resources so always check
back.
