The purpose of this page is to provide a place for current and ongoing noteworthy information, whether about upcoming events, workshops, books, movies, TV shows, or other items of interest to those involved in holistic therapies.

For your item to be posted here, send email to Joel, providing appropriate details and any relevant contact information. If your information is dated, be sure to provide the necessary times and dates. Comments about any of the postings may be sent to The SCS Discussion List. If you are not yet a member of the discussion list, subscribe by sending email to scs-discussion-subscribe@scs-matters.com.

Unless otherwise noted, the Notes posted here are Joel’s Observations, Opinions, and Suggestions.

Books—Mostly NLP

As those of you who know me already know, I read a lot of books. It has been a while since I updated this page, and some of the books I have been reading lately are definitely worth sharing. In general, the books fall into what might be called an NLP Category in that they were written by people associated with NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming), but they are really more about Life and “doing” it better than they are about NLP.

Conversations: Freedom is Everything & Love Is All the Rest

The authors of Conversations are Richard Bandler and Owen Fitzpatrick, so you may already know that this book has its roots in NLP. Richard was, of course, one of the two principal co-developers of NLP, and Owen has been a Master Practitioner and Master Trainer for quite a while now. For a more traditional review of Conversations, see my comments about the book elsewhere on the SCS Website. My mentioning the book here is based on its ability to influence the way readers (perhaps even you) think about life and living it well.

Conversations is a big book in a lot of ways. It is physically larger than most books published in the U.S., and it covers a lot of territory—in more than one way. The book follows the structure of the myth of the hero, with Owen cast in the role of Hero and Richard cast in the role of Guide or Magician.

The “story” is fun to read. Throughout, the reader wants to know what will happen next. It is, however, not the kind of book often called a page-turner. The Hero's journey is, after all, serious business, and Conversations takes that business seriously. In following Owen’s internal and external journeys, readers participate in their own mythic journeys. In reading about Owen’s conversations with Richard, the reader enjoys the benefits of the wisdom of the mythic Guide or Magician.

If you are new to NLP, Conversations will provide an wonderfully entertaining introduction. If you’re an old hand, you will appreciate the book that much more. This is a life-changing book, and everyone—s life—perhaps even yours—can be better.

Transforming Your Self: Becoming Who You Want to Be

Transforming Your Self was written by Steve Andreas, another well-known name in NLP circles. It was published in 2002 (Moab, UT: Real People Press), and I discovered it by accident. I went shopping for his new book, Six Blind Elephants, and Amazon.com told me that people who had ordered it often ordered Transforming Your Self. It seemed like a good idea to order both at the same time.

That proved correct. The book is about how we create, maintain, and change our self-concept. We all have one, of course, even if we are not always sure where it came from or how we might change it. In Transforming Your Self, Steve Andreas takes readers through the process of discovering their databases of examples that support the various qualities present in their self-concept. If you think of yourself as honest, for example, you will have internal representations (whether visual, auditory, or kinesthetic) that support the quality of “honesty.”

The book takes you through the process of changing your internal images or representations to strengthen qualities you desire and to diminish and perhaps eliminate qualities you would prefer not to have in your self-concept. One of the things that happens, of course, is that what we believe to be true about ourselves has a pervasive impact on our attitude and behavior. If you really believe that you are healthy and happy, for example, you are more likely to be healthy and happy in both attitude and behavior—than if you don’t believe it. When you believe that you are healthy and happy, being healthy and happy are part of your self-concept, which influences what you are manifesting in your life.

Transforming Your Self is well-worth reading, and, ideally, read it before you read Six Blind Elephants. Although “Elephants” can stand on their own, Transforming Your Self provides an excellent foundation for the next book.

Six Blind Elephants: Understanding Ourselves and Each Other

Six Blind Elephants, also by Steve Andreas (2006, Moab, UT: Real People Press) is in two volumes, Fundamental Principles of Scope and Category and Applications and Exploration of Scope and Category. The volumes are substantial in terms of content. Neither is excessively long—both are about 300 pages—and are “deep” rather than “wide.” The word scope is essentially what is called chunk size or frame size in NLP. Scope indicates the extent of experience in either time or space. If you go to a party, for example, and you have a wonderful time until you are ready to leave, when bump into someone and spill red wine all over her, yourself, and your hosts’ white carpet, it would be easy to narrow your scope to that one event. But, once you learn about changing your scope, you learn that you can choose how you view the experience and have a fuller, richer memory of the evening.

Both short (narrow) and long (wide) scopes have advantages and disadvantages. If your scope is narrowly on the present, you may forget about learning from previous experience and fail to plan for the future. If your scope is too broad, you may spend too much time regretting the past or worrying about the future to enjoy the present.

Bundles of scopes are categories. Categories result from the generalizations we make about our experience. We group things and events according to the ways in which we think of them as similar. If we concluded that spilling the wine was “clumsy,” for example, we might put it in our clumsy category, along with other events that “prove” that we are clumsy. As you have probably surmised from having read about Transforming Your Self, bringing the categories of bundles of scope into conscious awareness affords us the opportunity to change both the scope with which we view things and events and the categories into which we have placed them.

The two volumes provide numerous examples to help readers understand the pervasive influence of scope and category and to recongize language patterns that presuppose certain scopes and/or categories. These are books well-worth studying—spend some time increasing your sensitivity to the unconscious presuppositions present in every metaphor.

From Coach to Awakener

Robert Dilts, author of From Coach to Awakener (2003, Capitola, CA: Meta Publications) is another well-known NLP practitioner, trainer, and author. As its title implies, this book is basically about interventions—when and how to intervene to achieve the desired results.

What isn’t obvious from the title unless you are sufficiently versed in NLP to know that Dilts has been roundly criticized for his concept of logical levels, an idea borrowed from Gregory Bateson, Bertrand Russell, and others. The criticism is essentially that the logical levels as described by Dilts are neither logical nor levels.

• Environment
• Behavior
• Capability
• Belief
• Identity
• Spirituality

Several writers have pointed out that Identity, for example, is actually a collection of beliefs about the self, so it should be a subcategory of Belief rather than a category that supercedes Belief. In terms of interventions, however, the cluster of beliefs that form an identity are more inclusive than most beliefs a person might have about the external environment. A person might have a belief that elevators are dangerous and be afraid to get on them. If that is his or her only irrational fear, the Fast Phobia Cure would probably be sufficient to eliminate it. If he or she has a wide variety of fears—is a fearful person—an intervention at the level of Identity would probably be more effective.

Debra and I have always felt that, whether they are true or not, Dilts’s logical levels are useful guides to points of intervention. From Coach to Awakener demonstrates the utility of the logical levels as one moves from Coach (environment, behavior, and capabilities) to Awakener (identity and spirituality).

The book contains numerous examples of interventions at each of the levels, and regardless of whether you find Dilts’s justification for the logical levels persuasive, you’ll doubless discover new ways to make distinctions about where and how to intervene in a way to leverage desirable changes, not only for your clients, but also for yourself.

Stumbling on Happiness: "Think You Know What Makes You Happy?"

Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness is not based on NLP, but it supports and confirms a lot of the major and minor presupositions explicit or implied in NLP. Gilbert is Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and Stumbling on Happiness is based on a good deal of research, both brain-based and behavioral.

Gilbert presents the evidence that demonstrates how and why we delete, distort, and generalize sensory-based information (present) and memories (past) and anticipations (future). The book provides a research-based foundation for the truth of much of what NLP has typically presupposed to be useful rather than true. The book is written for a general audience, and Gilbert has done a pretty good job presenting difficult concepts in a way that makes for easy reading. If he has a fault as an author, it is that he works a bit too hard at being clever (he doesn’t sip wine, for example; he sips Châteu Cheval Blanc '47).

If nothing else, this book will persuade you that your conscious mind doesn’t always know what it’s doing and that, far more than we realize, the unconscious is running the show.