As we have been fortunate to be able to do each year since we began working with one another, we included training with Richard Bandler and John La Valle in our professional development schedule. This year the workshops we elected to attend were “Persuasion Engineering®” and “Meditation, Magick, & Change™.”

To avoid an early-morning dash to the Detroit airport, we elected to stay at a Park & Fly close to the airport the night before our flight to Orlando. The weather in Michigan had been cold but was supposed to warm up. It didn’t. When we got up in the morning, the temperature had dropped, and the wind was blowing at near gale force. It was cold. After a quick breakfast, we took the shuttle to the airport. Our flight was delayed about 40 minutes. Taking off in a stiff crosswind was an experience we would not choose to repeat. Right after we landed,he guy who had been in the seat in front of us called his therapist and we heard him say, “I thought I was going to die....”

In spite of our delayed departure, we arrived in Orlando on schedule and were soon settled into the motel. The Bandler/La Valle workshops in Orlando are usually held at the Sheraton on International Drive. Because of the cost savings and convenience, we had elected to stay at the nearby La Quinta Inn, where we had good accommodations and generally excellent service.

We called it a night early. The next morning we completed the registration process for “Persuasion Engineering®.” While we were waiting for the workshop to begin, we had the opportunity to reconnect with people we had met at previous Bandler/La Valle workshops and to meet new people. The participants numbered about 130, and approximately 50 of them were from the same Swedish company—Hästens, makers of the best beds in the world.

We had a good group of fellow participants, including three people who had trained with us in SW Michigan: Melody Kirby, Joe Willmeng, and Sarah Stocker. Most of the participants had had some previous experience with NLP, which made understanding and completing the exercises easier. Among other things, we practiced anchoring and using language patterns to elicit information and to influence in appropriate ways.

The three-day workshop covered a lot of territory, from “cold calls” to addressing customer/client concerns, to closing the sale. The approach to sales and negotiations offered by Bandler and La Valle differs from most sales training programs in its emphasis on attitude, flexibility, and outcome. The NLP attitude is based on the psychological and emotional states of happiness and desire. One of the tenets is that if you don’t feel good about the product or service you are selling, find a new product or service to sell. Flexibility is based on the ability to recognize the real needs of your clients or customers and to meet those needs even when you need to direct them to someone else’s product or service.

Persuasion Engineering® is a stand-alone workshop in that participants do not need a background in NLP to benefit from the concepts and exercises. As long as you are familiar with your product(s) or service(s) and/or understand situations and audiences where you would like to have greater influence, Persuasion Engineering® would be a good investment—and a good introduction or addition to your understanding of “Bandler Technologies.”

We spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (23 - 25 February) in Persuasion Engineering® and then had a day off on Monday, most of which we spent catching up on sleep and planning ways to incorporate what we had learned into our desires for SCS. “Meditation, Magick & Change™” started on Tuesday, the 27th of February. This latter workshop focused on what might be called self-improvement or “personal enhancement.” It is designed to eliminate old beliefs that no longer serve your purposes and to install new beliefs that automatically lead to incremental improvement, not only for yourself, but also for others. As was true in “Persuasion Engineering®,” Richard Bandler was usually on stage in the mornings, and John La Valle took the afternoons. Also as usual, Richard’s principal focus was on telling stories—metaphors—designed to install the beliefs that change is not only possible, but also easy and that infinite options and possibilities are available for you when you open yourself to them now.

One of the most interesting things about Richard’s use of teaching stories is the way many of the participants in the workshop misunderstand his purpose in telling them. During the breaks, several people said something to us about Richard’s telling interesting stories, and then asked when he was going to start “teaching.” During the workshop itself, one person actually asked him when he was going to finish the story about “the woman in the kitchen.” Those of us who understood Richard’s use of looping as a teaching strategy laughed out loud. Richard said, “That isn’t how this works. I’ll get back to her ... and to you....”

Many of the exercises in this workshop were designed to teach participants how to go into a meditative trance state quickly and easily. The theme was that magic happens when you use the power of trance to eliminate limiting beliefs and expand your options and ability to enjoy the varieties of daily experience. The old spelling, “Magick,” is used to emphasize the alchemical nature of trance. To celebrate the possibilities of creating new and wonderful options, Richard and John sponsored a night of magic, complete with cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and a magic show featuring an exceptionally talented magician.

Debra was the demonstration subject for the last exercise of the workshop. John La Valle used her to demonstrate how you can use your timeline to move resources from the future into the past so that they can help you achieve your desired objectives in the present. One of the things that sets NLP—and all the “Bandler Technologies”—apart from traditional approaches to psychological and motivational strategies is the way they work quickly and easily by combining both conscious and unconscious resources.

Bottom line: These were wonderful and wonderfully effective workshops, and you may want to put them on your calendar for next year.