Using Your Brain--for a Change

Book excerpt: Bandler covers a lot of ground in this book - in his unique style - and provides real insight into areas such as sub-modalities and multiple perspectives in a fairly short period (157 pages). The content is edited notes from a series of Bandler workshops (in a similar vein to Frogs into Princes and Trance-Formations). The book begins with an overview of NLP - making particular reference to the "new" submodality patterns (the book was written in 1985) and presenting these as a faster and more powerful way of creating personal change. Subsequent chapters provide a humorous exploration of many of the traditional approaches to personal change and outline many useful guiding principles (structure versus content etc) for the application of NLP to personal change. The author makes repeated reference to a number of epistemological issues underlying traditional psychological approaches that tend to focus on "what's wrong, when you broke, ... what broke you, ... and why you broke." He goes on to state that "psychologists have never been interested in how you broke, or how you continue to maintain the state of being broken." NLP on the other hand, Bandler asserts, assumes people work perfectly and that people are just doing something different from what we (or they) want to have happen. This provides a clear indication of the approach adopted in the remainder of the book, and suggests that the focus of NLP on subjective experience (as the study of subjective experience) is entirely valid and necessary. Bandler provides a convincing argument for tailoring all our change work to the individual - purely because each individual is unique. The book continues with a useful and insightful exploration of a number of techniques (including the fast phobia cure, contrastive analysis in belief change, integrated anchors and Swish,) as well as discussion of more general (and generative) strategies for learning and motivation.