No, I’ve never met Richard Bandler. And having never met him I’ll refrain from commenting on him as a person. I’ve heard the stories and he doesn’t figure on my list of heroes.
As for what I pick up from his work… I have issues with his sloganeering approach, which I believe lacks wisdom and balance. I believe that there is such a thing as legitimate suffering which should be experienced on its own terms, a belief which seems at odds with his writing. Many practitioners seem to advocate NLP for every difficulty you might encounter, whereas I strongly resist using it anywhere near that much. There are some things that you learn only in times of extraordinary pain. That’s not the extent of the issues I have with some of his published material, but it’s certainly my most important objection.
I really like a lot of the technique he’s helped create, and I find some of his precepts to be compassionate and effective. NLP has moved on from his work, and it doesn’t have the monopoly on interesting developments in communication and psychology. I guess that’s another problem I have with a lot of people’s approach to NLP: once they’ve modelled something, they seek to tag it with the NLP brand, co-opting it into the existing mass of ideas and methods. This strikes me as appropriation and does a disservice to the intricacies of other methods and models.
I’m sure that Bandler is a fascinating speaker, particularly on the subject of hypnosis. He’s clever and skilled, you’ll probably get something out of it even if you don’t take to him as a person. Just be prepared to disagree with him on a few things.
John Grinder’s supposed to be a lovely bloke, and I can personally vouch that Robert Dilts is the shit. He’s kind, wise, a fascinating and engaging speaker, and very approachable. Suzi Smith is fab, she became like everyone’s granny on our Master Practitioner course. Tim Hallbom and Ian McDermott are both extremely precise and elegant in their skills, but I didn’t really get a sense of them as people. |
