Ed Peters

The sign of a real expert is the ability to simplify. Anné Linden distils her years of teaching NLP into an engaging and enlightening guide for anyone interested in NLP at any level.

The book’s impact comes from how it relates to our everyday experience. It has three major advantages. Firstly, its format: each section is based on a different presupposition, and each short chapter considers an outcome and shows us how to make it possible, each adding to the last. For example, in the section on “there is no failure, only feedback” the opening chapter defines failure, then is followed by learning from failure, and then turning failure into feedback through dissociation, then chunking.

Secondly, its variety: the book applies a skillful blend of well-crafted explanation, dialogue, case study and reflection that draws the reader into NLP with minimum distraction. Excerpts from coaching sessions show how clients respond and shape their own thoughts. The book allows the principles of NLP to stand on their own and each section ends with a story for us to work out.

Thirdly, its format and variety add up to a completely fluent experience, where everything makes sense in relation to everything else. It is refreshing to come across a guide that does not get bogged down in what “N” stands for, and so on. The lack of over-complex diagrams and of almost all illustrations allows the reader to stay focused.

The book is an invitation to review your experiences: at the end of each chapter we are offered a few exercises: these, too, avoid asking us to go out of our way: instead, gentle suggestions to “imagine”, “remember” or “choose” ease us into thoughts and recollections, in which we are guided to look for new meanings.

We know that we create our own reality, built on how we interpret the world through our beliefs and experiences. Here, Lucas Derks explores the notion that we possess an unconscious landscape, across which the people, issues and relationships of our lives are distributed:
“…everything a person believes, wants, values or fears plays a role in the shapes their mental images take”.
The location of another person, event or image within the client’s mental space, his Social Panorama, indicates its relative importance or influence, and determines its emotional quality and impact on the client’s life. The therapist supports the client to notice and interpret where and how people, events or images appear: are they directly in front or to one side, close or distant, at ground level of floating, static or in motion?
The coaching consideration is whether people in the client’s Social Panorama (“Personifications”) are positioned in a way that assists or obstructs them. Where would the client prefer a domineering boss or a loving parent to be? How are groups, teams, families or indeed a spiritual dimension or non-human personification represented?
The power in Derks’ model is in the way the client can be supported to move Personifications to a place that creates new feelings and a new structure to the client’s perception. This process is, however one that must be undertaken with sensitivity and skill by the therapist, since all our representations are part of us, and the Personification cannot be removed entirely,
Lucas Derks makes comparisons with and draws upon several NLP core techniques such as parts integration, sub-modalities, perceptual positions, timelines, and associated/dissociated states. In addition to considerable depth of research and insight through many years of direct experience, Lucas Derks also provides many practical techniques to introduce Social Panorama work to practitioners.

This is a useful handbook, which considers how new models and approaches are finding their way into NLP practice, and how NLP thinking is being recognised as a valuable resource within professional disciplines. It invites practitioners to describe the modern benefits of known and valued approaches, such as the LAB Profile, the RESOLVE Model and jobEQ, but also recognises that the contexts and applications for NLP have changed, which can affect how NLP is defined and presented.

What comes across is how NLP makes a real difference in situations where traditional practices have not always yielded results. For example, in a programme about drug dependency, where anchoring fixes what the client wants more than the substances (Richard M Gray). Elsewhere the Well-Formed Outcome is adapted to create the Well-Formed Problem for business change, tackling the major issue of the poorly-defined problem (Martin Roberts). In Japan, NLP training in hospitals has enabled staff with calibration skills to help patients deal better with their illness (Bokura-Shafe, Kono and Tamaki).

In the explanation of the LAB Profile (Shelle Rose Charvet), core NLP principles include the focus on behaviour over personality; Social Panoramas highlight where a change in location within our imaginary landscape changes our relationship to a feature – an adaptation of Time Line Model. (Lucas Derks). Symbolic Modelling explores limitations of metaphors are considered (James Lawley, Penny Tompkins).Success Factor Modelling (Robert Dilts) emphasises the importance of vision to bring out purpose. The ability of Provocative Change to interrupt and challenge the client, often with humour, shows that how creative patterns can provoke insight. (Nick Kemp).

What comes across through these and other short explorations is that NLP has shown its robustness and flexibility in a widening range of modern situations.

This is a practical guide to newly-qualified practitioners, but its value goes much further than that. In fact, a practitioner hoping to lift some handy guidelines effortlessly from the book might well be disappointed. However she would be far more delighted to be given a real insight in the book into the richness of the hypnotherapeutic relationship using NLP techniques.

The authors, though do not shrink from the layers of difficulty that can undermine this relationship: whether these come from clients who choose to end their sessions just when there seems to be progress, or from moments when the authors recognize that their own experiences could impede their approach, or from occasions where the two authors disagree about the way they would manage a particular situation or moment.

This layering of the therapeutic relationship is reflected in the format of the book, which refuses to be one kind of narrative alone: it is part background to the session, part transcript, part reflection by the therapist, part interjection and comment by the co-author, and each session ends with an update of what happened next.

Both hypnosis and NLP aim to give the client greater choice: the book explores traditional and creative techniques of hypnosis, such as regression techniques in order to build a new, protective relationship between an adult self and a damaged child self. The authors also adopt NLP techniques within hypnotherapy in a way that makes complete sense to the therapist’s aim and enhances the client’s experience of the session. Whichever way the authors choose to build their sessions, they remain aligned to their aim of exploring not “what to do” with the client, but “how to be” with the client, in order to create purpose and meaning within the session.

Not a handbook, but something altogether more useful.

We know that we create our own reality, built on how we interpret the world through our beliefs and experiences. Here, Lucas Derks explores the notion that we possess an unconscious landscape, across which the people, issues and relationships of our lives are distributed:
“…everything a person believes, wants, values or fears plays a role in the shapes their mental images take”.
The location of another person, event or image within the client’s mental space, (Social Panorama), indicates its relative importance or influence, and determines its emotional quality and impact on the client. The therapist supports the client to notice and interpret where and how people, events or images appear: are they directly in front or to one side, close or distant, at ground level or floating above them, static or in motion?
The coaching consideration is whether people in the client’s Social Panorama (“Personifications”) are positioned in a way that assists or obstructs them. Where would the client prefer a domineering boss or a loving parent to be? How are groups, teams, families or indeed a spiritual dimension or non-human personification represented?
The power in Derks’ model is that the client can be supported to move Personifications to a place that creates new feelings and a new structure to the client’s perception. This process is, however one that must be undertaken with sensitivity and skill by the therapist, since our representations are part of us.
Lucas Derks makes comparisons with and draws upon several NLP core techniques such as parts integration, sub-modalities, perceptual positions, timelines, and associated/dissociated states. In addition to considerable depth of research and many years’ experience, Lucas Derks also provides practical techniques to introduce Social Panorama work to practitioners.