One of my favorite practitioners is a guy from California named David Snyder (below). Now in his mid-fifties (I guess), he was one of the first guys to be a product of the original Bandler and Grinder protégés who came out of nowhere in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Snyder has managed to rack up more titles. in mental programming, reiki, tai I don’t know what, than any other living being on the planet.
He’s someone I’ve always found who works with his clients on a level. If you saw him walking down the street, you wouldn’t think there’s anything special about him, but then again, that’s what I like about this industry. We all look pretty ordinary, but we can do things that are as awesome as you can get.
He came up with the idea for Hypnothoughts, and has been running meet ups and courses all over the United States for several years. His approach is New American and for an honest Brit like me it’s easy to swallow and his methods timely.
Master in NLP
The founders of NLP, Messrs. Bandler and Grinder, back in the mid-1970s, proposed the term ‘neuro-linguistic programming’ for what we know today as ‘nervous system reprogramming’. His theories explored many elements of what the old school called ‘pop psychology’. It meant that everything from programming godfather Bob Proctor got the full diagnosis under the coolest supervision of America’s youth. In fact, what they found was so mind-blowing that it even cheered up two legal guys; Don Keenan and jury consultant David Ball, to write Reptile in 2009, which ended up being a must for the budding young American lawyer, but there was a man going back even further to 1961 who literally charted the way forward. he was going to think generation.
Bob Proctor spoke of Paradigms as the elements one needs to change in order to create the ‘life one wants’. The paradigms are the maps of the image that you have of yourself, and are generally determined between the ages of 0 and 5. They are, as he described, sets of habits or rules that we live by. They shape our self-image (what we generate as children) when we build our conscience that is determined by the beliefs and values that we are taught. He understood that 99% of all human behavior is habitual. All we have to do is change the habit and we can change our pattern. We change the pattern and thus we change our, if you will, destiny. It all sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? It goes against what the media has encouraged us to dismiss for decades as the “self-help business.”
There have been many fortune tellers over the years since then who have instilled in us that all we have to do is mold our confidence and we can do anything. Now, I’m not arguing that there have been human beings on this planet who have accomplished many wonderful things and made a much-needed contribution to the world out of sheer self-confidence in their ability to make something happen, but it must have been with the help from some other turn. If there is one thing NLP has taught us it is that willpower is temporary and will last only as long as concentration allows it, so how long is that? 12 minutes? Something like that.
Snyder, Protor, Robbins, and indeed every NLP practitioner, therapist, healer, motivator, and anyone else who might think they are making millions by changing people’s lives, all agree that what needs to change to make a difference difference in their lives is perception. There’s a wonderful little story that’s been coming from NLP whisperers for years about (ironically)
It begins with the phrase, ‘we cannot see anything that is not within our range of belief’. In other words, ‘if it’s not within our realms of perception, we won’t be able to see it literally’.
This is evident in the following story; When the founding fathers first traveled to the new world, the natives did not see the large number of ships on the horizon until the fathers launched their long boats into the water to reach land. What can we digest from this image? That the natives had vision problems? Well, yes, but the most interesting thing is that they couldn’t see the ships coming because they didn’t know what ships they were. They saw the long boats, or at least, they recognized the long boats, as they were part of their belief system. Once we have something in our belief system or as the saying goes, ‘within our grasp’, that’s when brilliant things start to happen!
It really is within our reach. We need to tune in to what we call the inner eyes. It is through this second sight that we can manipulate our feelings on demand. With simple NLP methods that really only take a few minutes to learn and do, we can change how we feel. You may be asking what is the point? The world still sucks, my life still sucks, nothing changes but it does, and with all great things, it takes a little practice.
Tony Robbins once had a guy call him and throw all the angry feelings at him. The plot was that the angry man came to see Robbins a couple of years earlier to pack up his lifelong smoking habit. The guy yelled at Robbins telling him that he worked for a while, but then he went back to smoking. The simple answer to this is that with everything you have to maintain. This is never a quick fix situation. The methods and practices that are taught have to continue to be handled over and over again. Repetition. As many NLP teachers and practitioners will say ‘wash, rinse, repeat’. Behaviors are habits, and habits only become habits when they are repeated regularly and frequently. All you have to do is change the habit, but not just remove the old habit, but replace it with a new one. Once the new one is polished, it is glued and not put on again.