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Hi all,

You may already know about our Ascent adventure coaching experience (www.ascent-experience.com)

Well, a TV production company is making a series about people changing careers and since Ascent is about changing your life, they are interested in following people through Ascent and beyond to watch their career transition.

What we are therefore looking for is people to take part in Ascent of September 8th to 10th 2006 and be filmed for the program.

You might be thinking ''I'm a coach, why would I need to know about this?'' and the answer is that many coaches use Ascent as a tangible product that yields real and transformational results and enables them to shift their client relationships up a gear. Some coaches send their clients on Ascent by themselves, other coaches bring their clients along to work through the Ascent journey together.

Therefore, you might have a client who is considering a career change, is interested in having the adventure of a lifetime and who would like to take part in the TV series. Which might be good for you too.

This is what the TV company says about the series:

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Are you thinking of making the big move from your current job to something completely different?

If so, we would like to talk to you in confidence about a long-term documentary project for RTE 1.

Are you in the process of making one of the biggest decisions of your life - to move job from one career path to an entirely new one and do something you've always wanted to do.

So that's it. To find out more, visit www.ascent-experience.com and then let me know if you want to take part. Oh - of course there is a significant discount on the normal price of Ascent as an incentive to make a quick decision on this, probably around 50%.

The production company want to select people during August so I need to know if you are interested by August 1st.

The would prefer people from Ireland/NI but would consider the right person from anywhere.

regards

Pete

I found the following blog post a couple of days ago and thought it might be thought-provoking enough to share.

http://wongablog.co.uk/2006/06/02/li...d-by-nonsense/

Have you ever had to deal with a client, colleague or friend who thinks you've be enlisted into some Dianetics-type cult?

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

All the best//
W

Interesting Blog. Haven't had any bad experiences myself Wendy...but I am mainly Hypnotherapy, with a smattering of NLP. Controversial addition to the site though !?

Wendy,
a very interesting blog indeed!
Over the years, I have often had people tell me that they will avoid NLP because it is exploitative and manipulative.
I agree that it is a good thing they are staying away from NLP if that is the way they would put it into practice! Then I make the point that, in any arena, integrity is an optional extra; NLP can be useful for NLPers and NLPless alike.
The Life Coach story barely mentions NLP, in fact, and the author's scepticism seems, to me, to be more about metaphysics, reincarnation, quantum physics, etc. than NLP per se. In short, anything that lacks the seal of approval of the readily proven.
It seems to me that the blogger offers a number of clues that suggest a strong external authority reference, and, like most (?) people, is convinced that the answers to hir problems lie outside rather than in hir own resourcefulness.
More signficantly, the story seems to reveal a life coach who lacks a great deal of sensory acuity and calibration skills, who seems not to have checked the blogger's personal ecology, nor to have noticed the significance of a dependency personality who lives 'at effect'.
Given that we run on patterns much of the time, the blogger's relationships with future 'helpers' can probably be predicted, unless those helpers have the nous and the know-how to work with (rather than on) the client will probably prove disappointing.

Reading through the whole thread that followed the original complaint, it occured to me that books such as J Hillman's ''We've had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse!'' and Lauren Slater's ''Opening Skinner's Box'' might be useful for those who want to question some of their own assumptions and presuppositions about what is valid or what 'works' - though I don't know that it will be any of the bloggers - and I know that it won't be every NLPer!

Oh well - go well
M

Hi Wendy,

Thanks for link to this interesting blog entry. Hopefully someone will give this man some nice pharmaceuticals so that he can feel all scientifically treated. Of course, I jest here.

When people come to me with questions about how to do change work, I emphasize again and again that, in my thinking, it's important to get a feeling for what our clients are and are not comfortable with. If people are uncomfortable with a process or processes, I think that we are well served by really allowing ourselves to be open to to the possibility of using another tool or technique with them.

I have had religious clients who felt that hypnosis was 'of the devil'. Needless to say, I didn't use anything that smacked of hypnosis with them and I carefully calibrated each thing that I suggested or even hinted at to make sure that it was within their comfort zone.

Change workers, coaches and anyone who helps people by using these techniques have a responsibility to be constantly calibrating their clients and keep themselves 'in the know' about what's going on in their relationship with their clients at all times.

Since we are the professionals, it is, I think, our responsibility to build the rapport and maintain that rapport. We are also responsible for managing our clients expectations and making sure that they not only make steady progress but are consciously aware of that progress.

At some point, when I have more time, I'll do a point by point refutation of the NLP article in the skeptic's dictionary. I think that it's important that NLPers understand the criticisms of the field and are capable of answering our critics. If we can't answer questions about what we do, acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses and refute the misconceptions and logical fallacies that are often used against us, then we will be ill-prepared for the day when some idiot on Wikipedia 'helps' your client to undo all the progress that they've done because they are now convinced that you've been teaching them Scientology.

Wendy, thanks again for that story!

Be Well,

Michael Perez

Yes, time and again I hear it referred to (online) as repackaged dianetics. Quite how they come to that conclusion I don't know.// From what I know of Scientology they're nothing like one another! //

Hi Wendy,

As to the connections between Scientology and NLP, in my view, they're pretty tenuous. To me, it's a good example of the lengths that people will go to in order to discredit something that they don't like for whatever reason.

So the argument goes, the first link between NLP and Scientology is Fritz Perls. In the 1960s, he was quoted as saying that Dianetics had some good ideas in it. From there, people have gone on to assume all kinds of links between Gestalt therapy and Dianetics.

It should also be noted that L. Ron Hubbard originally conceived to Dianetics as a form of therapy and only later created a church around it. To the best of my knowledge, at the time that Perls made his comment, Hubbard had not yet embarked upon his religious endeavor.

Since Perls was one of the people modeled for NLP and since Perls once had something nice to say about Dianetics once, this automatically, in the minds of some, makes NLP an offshoot of Dianetics.

In a similar way, my mother once went into a bookstore and bought a book that was written by a guy who once quoted as saying something about Hitler at least making the trains run on time. I'm pretty sure that this makes her a Nazi bent on the extermination of the lesser peoples, although I have not confronted her with this as I am afraid that she would yell at me and refuse to make me a nice lasagna for my next birthday. I'm willing to sacrifice a lot for principal, but there are limits...

The next point of similarity for Scientology phobics is that former Scientologist Werner Erhard, creator of EST and the Landmark Foundation, developed his work at roughly the same time as Bandler and Grinder were developing the basis of NLP and Erhard lived nearby and went to some of the same parties. Damning evidence indeed!

This again seems to me to be a rather tenuous link, but when you're looking for something that isn't really there, sometimes you have to take what you can get, I guess.

The final link(?) and the real clincher for the tinfoil hats crowd seems to be that some NLP authors have used the word engram. A quick look at the holy Grail of 'NLP is Scientology' thinking, Wikipedia, reveals an interesting thing about engrams... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram

It seems that Dianetics makes use of the term and so do some NLPers. An interesting thing to me is that the word engram is also a commonly used term in neuropsychology. Does this mean that neuropsychology is NLP or vice versa?

Whilst I have yet to have an explanation for why it is that NLP is Scientology because it uses this word and yet, somehow, neuropsychology is not, I would have to assume it is because the leading lights of neuropsychology have never lived next to a Scientologist and would, of course, be expected to shoot them down on sight should ever see one. Sort of like Mormons in Texas during the 1800s.

There are other points of similarity that are not often pointed out by critics but are clear correlations between NLP and Scientology...

* Almost all NLPers and Scientologists are Homo Sapiens!

* NLP and Scientology developed not only on the same planet but on the same continent as one another and within the same century! A coincidence? I think not!

* Scientologists vibrate their vocal cords while manipulating their tongue and pallets in a certain way to produce a phenomenon known as speech. Oddly enough, NLPers seem to do the same thing and in fact share almost all of the consonants, vowels and glottal stops used by Scientologists!

I could go on with other similarities (they both wear shoes much of the time!) but I think the evidence speaks for itself...

Be Well,

Michael Perez

As a postscript, I should mention that I grew up in Tampa, Florida. Tampa is just a few miles away from Clearwater, which is the international headquarters of the Church of Scientology. Obviously, as a result of the proximity between Tampa and Clearwater, all Tampans must be considered Scientologists. Ain't this kind of logic(!) fun?