Richard Bandler Interview with NNN

These are excerpts from an article by Bruce Felts and
published in the NLP Network News Vol. I No. 4
We wish to thank Bob Sandidge, of  The New IQ (formerly NLP Network News)
and Richard Bandler for their permission to reprint this interview on-line.


The New IQ
PO Box 333
Dundee, IL  60118
Ph:  1-708-428-6000
Fax: 1-708-428-9290 

"Bandler Unplugged"

NNN:  What is the difference between NLP(tm) and
Design Human Engineering(tm)?

RB: Well, structurally they're different.  When I first started out I broke
things down into small pieces, to make them learnable and then I put those
pieces together into formulas. One of the models that I built was called
strategy elicitation which is something that people confuse with modeling
to no end. They go out and elicit a strategy and they think they are
modeling but they don't ask the question, "Where did the strategy
eliciation model come from?" There are constraints inside this model since
it was built by reducing things down. The strategy elicitation model is
always looking for the most finite way of accomplishing a result. This
model is based on sequential elicitation and simultaneous installation. The
flip side of that is Design Human Engineering(tm), where you put the big
pieces together and build bigger chunks.  It also operates on a very
different model of instantaneous elicitation and sequential installation so
in essence the model is the opposite structurally, but it uses a lot of the
same elements.  It also answers the question about how well these little
pieces fit together because you're simultaneously working with things like
multiple timelines and building strategies which are instead of sequential
single strategies, there are multisimultaneous strategies. It sort of
knocks out of the box some of the more archaic things. One of the things
I've tried to do over the years is to always take the best things that we
already do and build on them.  In my opinion, evolution has to become a
conscious process, although some of it will always be unconscious.

NNN:  What's your opinion about the current state of
affairs in the NLP(tm) community?

RB: Most people's primary concern about NLP(tm) has to do with marketing
rights rather than the technology itself.  There is a real difference
between the techniques that the technology developed and the methodology
for producing them.  Like the Submodalities I created.  The model is a good
one for people who want to whip up techniques but there is a methodology
that produces that set of algorithms. Submodalities itself is a set of
algorithms with 64 nonlinear variables.  When you ask most "master
practitioners" about that their eyes go crossed and smoke comes out of
their ears and they look like a cartoon character. The set of algorithms
used in Design Human Engineering(tm) is as different in nature as geometry
is from calculus.  DHE(tm) is a completely different animal.  There really
are two major thrusts of Design Human Engineering(tm).  One is that we are
not trying to map down, we are trying to map up.  This is a big chunk.
This is not for people who do not do well with big steps.  NLP(tm) is good
for people who need little steps, or one step at a time.  Design Human
Engineering(tm) is for people who like big pieces and big strokes.  It also
grounds itself very firmly in becoming a high tech hypnosis. It also
requires that we be adventurous. Tesla is a good example of what we do in
DHE(tm).  He would build a reality which he wanted to create in his mind.
He then brought to this self created reality a set of accurate measuring
tools, the operative term here is tools.  Part of the thing that we are
trying to do is make it so that there is a bridge between those realities
so that when people do instantaneous elicitation, they have a set of very
precise positive hallucinations.  They can adjust it so that they know
where they are and where they want to go.  They can also precisely open up
new ranges and choices.  This is not for the domain of the belief limited.
This is not for people who like to talk the talk.  This is for people who
like to run the walk. For me, one of the nice things is that it really
opens up the domain which is outside of words and pictures.  We are looking
for not just motivation but for the kinds of things I found in the best of
people like Nichola Tesla, Virginia Satir, Gregory Bateson, and Moshe
Feldenkrais.  Their energy could almost reach out when you touched it like
static electricity and it would buzz all around the sides. NLP(tm) and
DHE(tm) have different purposes.  Design Human Engineering(tm) is more
about entering the domain of Tesla.  NLP(tm) is a very generative design
field but it has an almost remedial quality to it that is kind of flat.
This is like the flip side of it. NLP(tm) was built out of things like
elegance.  We wanted to build very elegant models so that they could be
used precisely.  In Design Human Engineering(tm), we wanted to build
precise measuring tools so that we can create wantonly.  That's the primary
difference.  The other thing that we really have been doing is mapping the
motor cortex and its relationship with the endocrine system.

NNN:  I recall hearing a story about Tesla challenging someone to build a
machine in physical reality and Tesla would construct the same machine in
his mind.

RB:  It was actually an electric motor and they started the motor on the
outside exactly when he started it in his head and they stopped the motor
after a certain period of time.  Tesla disassembled the one in his head,
measured it with his tools in his head and the wear and tear was exactly
the same as the one in physical reality.  He made sure that everything he
built inside his head would rigorously fit the outside world which is one
of the things that the study of psychology has attempted to accomplish.
They just didn't realize it required tools to accomplish their goal. Your
mother may look at you a certain way and say something that you interpreted
as "mother hates me."  In reality, it was just your mother screwing her
face up to make pictures.  What growing up is all about is trying to get
things on the inside of your head to match the outside. Most people will
always be off one way or the other and especially when it comes to the
kinds of things such as controlling your emotions, your future or your
level of motivation.

NNN:  In your book Time For A Change I was fascinated by the chapter
entitled "Slow Time Pattern: Questions and Answers.

RB: Time distortion, even by a hypnotist, strangely enough, has been
treated as a very esoteric phenomenon.  That strikes me as ridiculous
because people go to the bank and they're waiting in line for twenty-five
minutes and they look at their watch and two minutes has gone by or they go
to a party and they're having a great time and five hours fly by.  This is
a learned phenomena.  It's not going on in the real world.  The world has
not actually changed time but all this transpires in people's minds.
People haven't learned to harness these things. I am a very fortunate
person.  I get on an airplane to fly to London and I close my eyes and open
them and I'm in London because I happen to feel the only way to fly is to
be unconscious, not only unconscious but in a state of time distortion.

People haven't learned enough to alter their own states, being able to slow
time down is incredibly important. I was hired to do a job for a baseball
team once.  They had the novel idea that if they had an approach to
training, their players might get better. In the field of baseball, it's
mostly practice or go hit some balls.  It's not as methodical as some other
sports where they measure the impact of the punch down to the tenth of an
ounce or something.  The first thing I did was to get a guy who could hit
the ball really well and find out what he did.  If you watch baseball
players, they walk up to the plate and go into an altered state otherwise
they wouldn't keep looking out at nothing, dilating their pupils and waving
their bat where there is no ball.  It's funny to listen to these guys,
whether they went to college or not.  They describe their experience so
much better than if they had training in NLP(tm).  It's amazing.  I asked
them what the difference was between a good day and a bad day and they
would tell me that on good days they're really seeing the ball.  Then I ask
them, "What do mean by "seeing the ball?" They reply, "Well, it's moving
slower and bigger." It's not bigger or slower, but for them it looks that
way.  It's not that you are actually moving faster, it's just that your
internal world speeds up so much that the rate that the outside world is
moving allows you to affect it profoundly. Any person in the field of
Design Human Engineering(tm) or NLP(tm) has to operate in slow time as far
as I'm concerned.  If your world isn't moving a hundred times faster than
your client, then you're not going to see the other person's patterns.  You
won't have the time to observe them or replay their behavior to detect
their patterns.  People who claim to teach NLP(tm) can't do installation
because their world is not moving fast enough.
   
NNN:  Can we expect any other new books in the near future?

RB: The other book I have ... is called The Adventures of Anybody which is
a very hypnotic fairytale.  It's designed for adults to read to children to
change the adults. It's really designed to be read out loud and if you like
Milton Patterns, this makes Milton Patterns look like nothing.  I worked on
it on and off for twenty years and it's . . . out. It's illustrated and
it's the perfect way to learn language patterns without having to go to a
class.

NNN:  You have a . . . book on Design Human Engineering(tm)?

RB:  I'm writing that . . . and we're half done with it.  I'm also writing
a book on applied neurodynamics but at the moment I write a little of this
and a little of that. We have our own newsletter that I've been writing a
lot of stuff for.  The major thing I'm working on is called, "The Brief
History of NLP(tm)".  I decided that there was a little bit too much
"changed history". So I'm writing an accurate history of NLP(tm) which can
be documented.  When you think about it, nobody else could write this
history since I was the only one there in the beginning.

NNN:  I would appreciate your thoughts on the business of certification.

RB:  Let me answer your question this way.  Neuro-Linguistic
Programming(tm) is the name of the expression of my ideas.  I spent
twenty-five years, millions of dollars and untold hours developing models
because I wanted people to use them.  Sometime ago, a group of people got
together and told me that they wanted to form a little organization so that
they could network with each other and do things.  They didn't say that
what they wanted to do was to undermine the expression that I had made to
the public.

When I started certification, even some of the people doing certification
now, laughed at me.  Some of them refused to participate in it. What these
people are doing is offering certificates and confusing the public. The
name of that is fraud.  Where I come from we call it stealing.  Stealing is
wrong. Everybody wants to make it a legal issue.  It's a moral issue.  What
right do these people have to offer certificates about my work without my
permission?  That seems to me to be wrong.  If these certificates were not
about Meta Model, the Milton Model, strategy elicitation, Metaprograms, all
models which I made up and which they can't even explain . . . They have no
idea of the foundation of these models and now they are out there
annointing each other as trainers.  They talk about marketing.  I'm talking
about right and wrong.  I think that some people, especially the people
that have attended their trainings, later realize that these people did not
make up these things.  The models that I created do not belong to them,
this information is not in the public domain.  This is my life's work and
to steal someone's life's work while they're still alive is horrible.

The situation is just wrong and that's all there is to it. And the real
loser in this is the public because I have no idea if these people, who are
teaching and passing credentials around left and right, are presenting my
work.

Think about this.  Out of the licensees that I do have, Tony Robbins is one
of them, yet he can use his own words.  He doesn't confuse the public about
what's his and what's mine and he remains a licensee.  That is someone who
has some ethics, some morals, and yet everybody says he's immoral.

NNN:  Why do you feel the network was formed?

RB: The people who initially formed the network for only one reason: so
that they could avoid dealing having to deal with me.  Some of these
people, who are giving away certificates, haven't had state-of-the-art
training in fifteen years.  There are models I developed that we don't use
anymore.  We don't use reframing because it's an antiquated model.  There
is no need for it.  It's inelegant and doesn't do a very good job but these
people say, "if you don't do reframing, you're not a neuro-linguistic
programmer".  Well the truth is that if you have to recapitulate my
personal history and include my mistakes, I haven't done anyone a service.
The point is for people to take the best of what we have right now and to
be able to provide the public with that information.

Books like Using Your Brain For a Change and Frogs into Princes have saved
people a lot of money.  I mean there are people who read Frogs into Princes
and got out of three or four years of therapy and took a vacation.  But now
I receive letters from someone who says I went to a practitioner course
from so and so and I've never heard of them.  How could somebody offer my
work for certification and I have never heard of them?  I could understand
if I were dead, but I'm still a young man.

These people don't want to learn the best of the state-of-the-art, they
just want a quick way to make some bucks and milk the public out of some
money.  One thing you can tell people, that they can always call us and we
will find someone as close by as possible that they can trust. This is not
saying that some of these people are not good but I have no way of knowing
whether they or good or not.

These people that are out there with their ethics and their networking
should get down and find out where their limits are in their own model and
step through them and then we'll talk.  They were the ones that wandered
off by themselves to begin with. The Society of Neuro-Linguistic
Programming(tm) has been here all along.  The Society was the first
organization, it's the largest and it's the strongest.  We primarily
provide a reference base for clients and issue certificates that are
representative of who it is that we consider to be competent.

By the way, accreditation was not started as a marketing phenomena. It was
started as a way for people to push themselves to the limits. The first
time I gave a credential test it was to get people to try things that I
didn't think they would try.  I knew that it was installed in them and that
they knew how to do it but I didn't think that they would do it when they
left. Even now, I don't have tests.  I have tournaments to get people to
try, not to get them to go through and do written metamodels, which by the
way is absolutely ludicrous.

NNN:  What motivates Richard Bandler to continue to do the work that he
does?

RB:  People have forgotten that the reason I do this and the reason that
most of the people I work with do this is because it feels right. It's not
because we couldn't make money doing something else, but that it feels
really right.  We designed our training to make it so that you're not
flying by the seat of your pants and when you are flying by the seat of
your pants, you'll know what to do about it. I have seen people who have
come into my trainings who have been "rigorously trained by other people"
and they don't even make it through the first sentence in the right
direction. They don't watch, they don't listen, and they don't know how to
get things amplified to know how easy it is to know what to do.  They are
not taught by these trainers that you can't do this work without being
first concerned with your own internal state.

NNN:  You mentioned earlier that some people seem more interested in
marketing than in the quality of their training.

RB:  I keep telling people, it's not how much money you spend on your
brochure, it's how well you do the job.  There are famous surgeons that
don't do a very good job. I'm always interested in talking to anyone who is
an expert on anything but I also want to talk to their clients. Take
Feldenkrais, for example. You heard nothing but good things from his
ex-clients but these other people don't want to tell you the names of their
ex-clients.

NNN:  What, then, is wrong with the way other trainings are conducted?

RB:  The problem is that they don't install the right strategies.  This is
not the way most people make it out.  Most people go in and learn these
questions and do them by rote over and over again and then they are
supposed to instinctively know how to ask the right questions.  It's funny
that even the people that have the strategies installed in them and can do
it, but they can't teach it.  This is one of the reasons why for the past
(over) twenty years I have conducted a trainers training.  Primarily the
trainers training is installing in people the how in teaching this
information at the right level.  It amazes me that with all of the
brainstorming and networking these people continue to distort my material.

NNN:  Were you surprised by how NLP(tm) has grown into an international
phenomena?

RB:  I set out to do really a few small things for myself and this whole
thing has blustered into a major international thing.  Just the fact that
people in Germany are arguing over the same things we've been talking
about, pleases me to no end, even if half of them are stealing from me and
half of them are not stealing from me.  I never thought NLP(tm) would leave
the little town of San Francisco in the first place.

NNN:  A lot of people have a certain impression of you as the wild man in
NLP(tm).

RB:  That was the impression painted by who?  I was the guy in the
laboratory.  They were the ones telling stories.  I can be wild because I
will do what it takes to get things done, and because I don't really like
to be pestered.  The fact is that I have more behavioral flexibility than
they do.  They always talk about me being intimidating.  Then the question
would be intimidating whom and when?  I don't intimidate anyone who doesn't
steal from me or pester me for no reason, or worse, yet, try to fool around
with someone I'm using as a demonstration subject, which I find to be the
most immoral thing a person can do in a group.

NNN:  Someone once told me that not only does Richard care about people but
he sometimes cares too much.

RB: That sounds like a therapeutic thing to say. Care too much for what or
for whom?  Well, if I'm as ruthless as them, I could be a
multi-millionaire.  I have spent my time developing things.  Worse, yet,
I've spent my money developing things rather than giving it to them.  I
care too much about what I'm doing.  I like my work. I have the best job in
the whole world.  I get to learn what every expert does and most of the
time I get paid for it.  I get to increase the quality of my life
internally to degrees that they will never even suspect.  Part of the thing
that really intimidates them is that I enjoy life so much.  They know how
to talk about it but they don't know how to do it.

NNN:  Maybe it's your sense of freedom that intimidates them.

RB:  When you say "freedom" to me it doesn't feel that way.  I have to do
what I do. It's not just a choice.  They don't know where these things come
from because they haven't spent the time to learn how to do this.  Going to
a few courses where I teach people techniques doesn't teach you what I do.
NLP(tm) has made an immense difference, as far as I can tell.  To some
degree NLP(tm) is in every school system, and every major corporation.
That's pretty good for a (45) year old kid.  So why don't they stop talking
about me and get down and start doing something themselves.  They are
trying to steal what they don't know and confusing the public in the
process.

NNN:  I recently interviewed Tom Peters and he felt the information age was
making a transition into the age of creativity, especially in business.

RB:  Well I would agree with that.  Information will be the currency of the
future.  The one thing that distinguishes who is going to enter this age
and who isn't is their ability to still have the sense of wonder.  We don't
even know how electricity works, yet!!  We haven't explored sound or
electromagnetic spectrum.  There are worlds upon worlds out there.  This is
the age to become an adventurer.  There is more knowledge to be discovered.
The one thing I'd like to tell people is that God's work isn't done, yet.
This could not be the peak perfection of His work.  The evolution isn't
over.  We are the experience that the universe is having.