Anyway, Steve's psychology classes were more like Gestalt Groups and I heard that if you cried a lot you got a good grade. So the rumour went anyway. Steve had been together a short time with Connirae when we met, she was finishing up her Ph.D. I believe and doing research regarding couple counseling and the use of predicates.
Steve hired the services of Robert and hence me because I worked with Robert. We had our first gig on the road in Boulder Colorado where Steve was introduced to some of the basic building blocks of NLP and from there, he began following Richard and John from workshop to workshop taping them and then later, editing the transcripts which became the book Frogs into Princes. The first NLP book for the layman who knows nothing about psychology or therapy. This was a time of innovation, excitement as well as some confusion and crises.
Chapter Thirty One. This Town Is Too Small
This time period marked another choice point in the development of NLP for Richard and John. In the year of 1978, more tension began to develop between Richard and John and they realized that the stage was not big enough for both of them. For a variety of different reasons, some personal, some business, they decided to go their separate ways. Leslie also at this time was going thru an evolution in her personal life. Personal and business stress affected her and she ended up in hospital for a period of time. Shortly after that she filed for a divorce.
After a few exciting court dealings, Leslie went of with Michael Lebeau, who was later to become her husband, and David Gordon. They set up an organization in Larkspur, California called "Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Advanced Studies". Here the trio continued to promote and develop Leslie's own model of NLP.
The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming formally a partnership between Richard Bandler's company Not Limited and John Grinder's company Limited Unlimited continued to prosper with Richard's guidance. He continued to use the trade mark of the Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and eventually bought John out of the Society. They also made new arrangements regarding the publishing company Meta Publications. Richard continued to develop and teach NLP training programs and to be associated with the Society of which he later bought out John's share.
John formed Grinder DeLozier and Associates. With one of his associates Michael McMasters he coauthored a book titled Precision. John also formed a partnership with Genie Laborde and promoted several Precision workshops across the U.S. John concentrated on the business marketing side of NLP. He utilized his creativity in the refinement of the NLP model with an emphasis on Gregory Bateson's theories on evolutionary communication and Milton Erickson's hypnotic patterns of communication.
Richard on the other hand having the belief that people change thru confusion, continued his approach as teacher and developer of change patterns associated with belief models. This later developed in another evolution in NLP which was represented in two books, edited by Steve Andreas. One is called Using Your Brain For a Change and the second was from transcripts of therapy sessions into a book called Magic in Action.
Robert after his publication of NLP Volume 1, became more and more popular throughout the NLP circuit and began teaching NLP training programs with an emphasis on health models. He kept an association with both Richard Bandler and John Grinder, being a proper Machiavellian as he was.
Judith continued her relationship with John Grinder and they now live in Bonny Doon, just outside of Santa Cruz in the mountains and are continuing to promote and develop John's business.
One thing about NLP is that it was developed under the auspices of practicality, and doing what works. Also preparing people's sensory experience to respond to what was happening at any moment in time. We worked with survival patterns quite often as they are powerful resource states. NLP has been under criticism over the years because of some of the colorful and unscientific procedures that the developers Richard Bandler and John Grinder went thru to design the model. The genius of these two individuals allowed them to step out of the mainstream of what was a scientifically accepted approach.
NLP teaches the individual to respond to their sensory environment. Anything, can happen to anybody at any time in nowhere. I believe that Richard and John prepared for any eventuality. Most of us are well fed, have an income, a car and a stereo. The idea of extreme conflict or violence unless you worked in the CIA or came from the back streets of east San Jose or served in the Vietnam war, is not a normal perception that we grow up with. In some areas of the world the idea of extreme conflict or violence is normal activity from day to day, and people grow up and are taught to cope with this from very early ages. The point is, be prepared.
NLP teaches us the niceties of rapport as well as teaching us how to cope with things that are not so pleasant. More than a few of the workshop exercises that we participated in had to do with eliciting responses in people that had to do with survival or coping patterns, periods of violence, being able to deal with dangerous situations, and applying those resources in problematic situations, as resource anchors.
Chapter Thirty Two. Operationalising NLP
In 1978 and 1979, the patterns of NLP began to be applied to areas outside of the therapeutic framework. The application of the patterns of NLP was called "Operationalising NLP". Putting NLP patterns into a variety of different contexts to test the validity and success. On one occasion John Grinder referred a client, who was a millionaire from the midwest, to Robert and I. John gave us a task to determine if NLP could be applied on the community level in order to assist a person to change. Our task was to operationalise the NLP patterns in the context of the town of Santa Cruz.
We were to work with this individual who we will give the name of Morty, for twelve hours a day, for five days and to be able to teach him public speaking, assertiveness and generally build his self esteem. We devised a strategic plan to go about changing Morty the millionaire from a waddling duck to a boardroom supervisor of a hotel chain.
We began our work at 7.30 in the morning, with vigorous exercise, and then took him out on the town for a variety of tasks which took in the next twelve hours. Later on these exercises were called "Tasks on the Town" and became common place in NLP workshops.
Some of the tasks that we designed, were conducted in the following manner. For example, on one occasion Morty said that he had a fear of someone calling him a homosexual. So we set about having him go out and buy twenty four red roses and stand on the street corner and sell them to individuals. Sure enough some yahoo came up and called him a "fairy". His task was then to go about eliciting friendship from this individual.