Interview with Richard Bandler co creator of NLP by Nick Kemp
Richard Bandler - I've always talked about NLP as an evolutionary tool. You know, because certainly at the bottom line, people do it to get rid of a phobia or they do it so that, you know, they can motivate themselves a little better. But as soon as you start thinking about your thinking, then you have a whole other level of consciousness that didn't exist. Because now, when you start making choices about which tone of voice you talk to yourself in and where this picture is, and if you have a belief you don't like, the fact that you can dissolve it... Cos if you can get rid of one fear with a phobia cure, you can get rid of five.
And then you have to do something else, because it's not enough to just take something away; you have to put something in its place. Which brings us to design human engineering and the swish pattern. And as soon as you start thinking about, 'Well, if I'm going to take this away, then I'm going to put this up,' you start building propulsion systems and, of course, what are propulsion systems? They're designer states of consciousness. And as soon as you design new states of consciousness, then you can have new thoughts and therefore people get more freedom.
You know. Ultimately when people first - Like this practitioner group that's going on downstairs. These people are - All the notes they give me are about, 'How do I get rid of this pain?' When you start getting to the Master Prac by the end of that, after people knock out most of their pain, then they start going, 'Well, what can I do that's good?' They start going: 'Well, I'm much smarter.' Cos like you said, where you could never conceive of being so successful as an NLP trainer. I remember when you started. You were not a man of confidence! [Laughter] You know. You were one of those guys that starts out that, you know, you got a lot of crappy messages when you were young and weren't so sure of yourself and stuff, but as soon as you start doing things that work, you start sitting up straighter. You start asking the question, 'Well,' you know, 'I didn't used to think I could do this and now I can.' And you start going, 'Well, how crazy could I get?' [Laughter] You know, you're on TV for 27 weeks, you got clients coming out of the wall, you got all this stuff... And it's not just you: this is going on all over the planet.
I grew up in the first age of information. As Gregory Bateson, you know, said to me once- You know, because when- All of his students obviously attacked me, because they didn't know Bateson and I were friends. And when the Structure of Magic was sent to people, even Jay Haley said, "No-one's going to be interested in this. And obviously you don't understand Bateson's work." And Bateson said, "We succeeded where they failed." It's in the introduction of the Structure of Magic. Because Bateson, [Laughs] unlike his students, wasn't attached to his theory. He looked at me and he said, "Why didn't I do this?" and I said, "You couldn't have, Gregory, because the mathematics hadn't been invented yet." There was no cybernetics; there was no information science. Given what he did in those years, it was absolutely a genius step. I mean, he was a brilliant man. He invented the field of heuristics. If it wasn't for him, I couldn't have come along. But the tools that I had at my disposal - the fact that I knew how to program and model human behaviour so a computer could do it - meant that I could model human behaviour so another human could do it. And, you know, coming from a scientific background instead of a psychological or a sociological background, I wasn't looking for causes. I was looking for solutions, and it's a totally different thing. Who cares why a computer can do something? It either can or it can't. And if it can't get to the end, it freaks. It just doesn't get to the end. It doesn't go to the end and lie to you and go, 'Well, it really is the right answer,' even though it's not working. It either works or it doesn't!
The rest of this transcript is available on
http://www.nickkemp.com/Nick_Kemp_definition-what-is-Neuro-linguistic-programming_NLP_NHR_DHE.phpThe audio download of this is available at
http://www.nlpmp3.com/
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