Dan, what I got was that everything I knew was wrong, and I knew a lot… There’s a phrase I like that Ken Wilber uses: “Evolution goes beyond what went before, but because it must embrace what went before, then its very nature is to transcend and include, and thus it has an inherent directionality, a secret impuls, toward increasing depth, increasing intrinsic value, increasing consciousness.”

It’s like you’re in an epistemological bubble and it goes pop, when that happens you don’t know what is what, but then you reorient and things re-sequence themselves from the perspective of having the new knowledge, which re-writes how you’ve encoded the old knowledge, so it’s not that it’s now wrong, it’s reinterpreted from the perspective of the new knowledge, so also becomes new. Like there are some books you can read and re-read, as when you re-read it’s different because of the prior ! reading, which is iterative.

More specifically what I got from Joseph was a teacher willing and able to teach, which is much rarer than you would think, and I make a point of looking… Which is why I’ve had the balls to call myself an apprentice on occasion as I get teachers like that want to teach to those who want to learn, who are also rarer than you would think as few are prepared to do the work, most want it in “a” course and once they’ve done that think they’ve got it, truly they need to be certified, and the majority might buy the book if it was marketed sufficiently well but they probably wouldn’t finish reading it.

Everthing I knew was wrong is a post by Michael William Roach from: Hero-Myth.com

He at first said neither, he was an NLP Trainer!!

So I pointed out that he was behaving like an academic. He had a deep interest and fascination with his subject matter, it was an area he read widely in, that he thought about consistently and that coloured his use of language. It was the filter for how he was sorting for information in the world. You may have heard the phrase: “Where you place you attention is where you’ll get your results”. 

I asked what different results would he get if he behaved more like an engineer?

The difference was that here he would be applying his knowledge, skills and ability to creating something. Which for him was a profound shift. I’ve noticed this tendency in a large number of people who train in NLP or Hypnosis or other personal development technologies or therapies that because they’ve focussed their attention on a particular domain that’s where their attention stays.

It’s the distinction between doing something for yourself and doing something for other people. So yes you need to develop yourself, but it’s in how you take that out and share it with others, with the rest of the world that’s where you can really make a difference. Success comes from how you successfully do that. Making a difference in the world.

If you can communicate the value you offer to others then they’ll buy your service. But only if that value relates to something they want. Your customer or client doesn’t care about you it’s always what’s in it for them. 

Are you an academic or an engineer? is a post by Michael William Roach from: Hero-Myth.com

I think NLP is an extraordinarily useful skill set to be learnt and hypnosis is fundamental for learning how to communicate more effectively.

What I’m critical of is the people who attend training’s, and once qualified then stop.

It’s like getting a black belt in a martial art. Anyone who does a martial recognises what this means is now you’re ready to start learning. 

The fact that you have a title or qualification, like Master Practitioner of Trainer doesn’t qualify you for anything. What counts is the difference you can make for your clients and the impact you have in the world. It’s all about taking action and your ability to successfully do that.

So what are you doing today to become more successful? What’s the next thing to be doing? How can you really make a difference for someone? 

Am I too critical of NLP/Hypnosis? is a post by Michael William Roach from: Hero-Myth.com

Here’s the blog post from Anastasia: “This morning I interviewed Dr. Robert Epstein, who I”ve blogged about before (and who commented on Ypulse) for the white paper I’m writing for New Paradigm. We got into a conversation about all of the recent brain research that basically argues that teen brains are different, or that the prefrontal cortex, which is also the “impulse control center,” is under construction, which is allegedly why teens are impulsive, risk-taking, and quick to anger. Epstein says hogwash, not true — he believes the brain scans being used in a lot of this research are being misinterpreted by researchers (and definitely by the media). He wrote an article for Scientific American Mind (.pdf) to debunk what he considers to be “The Myth of the Teen Brain.”

I’m going to grossly over simplify his arguments (you should read the article), but in a nutshell, he believes that most of the brain changes that have been observed in teenagers are part of a continuum of changes that happen throughout our lives. He also believes the current research is “correlational” vs. “causal” and does not show that what is being observed in the brain scans causes the problems we see in teens — it’s just associated with certain behaviors and emotions.

The heart of his argument and big question is whether the brain causes turmoil or whether turmoil alters the brain? Epstein believes much of the turmoil is caused by how the culture treats teenagers. By creating a separate teen culture through our educational system (high school), marketing and entertainment (MTV, teen movies/TV, etc.), and now with technology where teens are literally in their own digital worlds as well as imposing endless rules and restrictions on teens (according to his research, they have twice as many rules as active marines), we have created teen turmoil. He says it doesn’t exist in non-western cultures where teens are more integrated with adults and treated as such, and that it’s this separate culture where peers simply take cues from each other that leads to such poor decision making and emotional “teen” angst.

Finally — he thinks the reason this research is being so warmly embraced and accepted is because:

The drug companies have a strong incentive to convince public policymakers, researchers, media professionals and the general public that faulty brains underlie all our problems — and, of course, that pharmaceuticals can fix those problems. Researchers, in turn, have a strong incentive to convince the public and various funding agencies that their research helps to “explain” important social phenomena.

I agree with the need to treat teens more like adults and that teens and adults need more contact with each other. I’m consistently impressed and amazed with the teens I get to interact with through my work. But the Ypulse in me still loves teen culture — heck, we all do or it wouldn’t be dominating our entire popular culture. It’s hard for me to get down on John Hughes movies or Degrassi and blame this stuff for teen angst…And really, isn’t it more of a reflection of teen life vs. creating it? If we abolished high school back in the 60s, there would be no “Breakfast Club” or “Fast Times.” I would love to here what readers think of all this — both the science and culture around being a teenager. I just have a hard time thinking that the time teens spend hanging out together without adults is completely worthless or all bad as is the culture that reflects this…

P.S. You can take Epstein’s test to find out if you’re really ready to be an adult…”

The Myth of the Teen Brain is a post by Michael William Roach from: Hero-Myth.com

A little over ten years ago I was working for what is arguably the most prestigious art college in the world (I say arguably as there’s a US college that likes to think it is) and part of what I was doing was finding people to come in and do I.T. training. At some point we agreed that we just couldn’t find the people to do the job in the way we wanted the job done. So as I had the technical skills I went out to find some training that would get me to be ok about standing up in front of groups. I found NLP, which led me to hypnosis, and then to the Mythogenic Self process. Now I spend most of my time standing in front of groups

In other words I’ve spent a LOT of time helping non-technical people to do technical stuff. And what makes the difference in successfully doing this is not better technology, even though I may like Apple’s Keynote software more than Microsoft’s PowerPoint. It’s not the NLP techniques and tricks. It is the ability to drop away the artificial, the barriers that prevent connection, to be transparent that really makes the difference.

I’m one of the few (the majority have fallen for the NLP trick of: “we can do it faster”) who can hear Obi Wan’s voice saying to Luke: “Just let go, trust your feelings”… (Important note: by that time they were educated or trained feelings).

Trust your feelings is a post by Michael William Roach from: Hero-Myth.com

Because I work from the positive bias, I’m asking people about what works. And I’m interested in if they’ve done any personal development type stuff.

What I notice about NLP’ers is how quite often they’re doing a bad impersonation of Paul McKenna or Richard Bandler. Seldom is it conversational, and in a business context I’ve met quite a few people who’ve been annoyed by being asked to do ‘technique’ they’ve described as inane or stupid, or been told metaphorical stories that have just repulsed. I’ve met this so much that I’m likely never to mention that I’m a qualified NLP Trainer. Which I feel is a shame, as I think NLP is an extraordinarily valuable skill-set.

I think both Paul and Richard are exquisite performers. I helped out at Paul’s stage shows years ago, what most impressed me and what lifted it above his competitors was the quality of his performance, even though the show was formulaic, I would have paid to go purely for the quality of his entertaining presentation.

Because working with the Mythoself is so conversational AND you’re being transparent, the client doesn’t feel like you’re doing something to them, ‘cos you’re not, you’re leading from one step behind. There’s a difference between adumbration and assumption. Assumption is a hallucination about the future (can dogs hallucinate? I know they can think and dream) adumbration is based on data in the system, the system being the intersubjective experience. It becomes predictive because you’re in the somatic experience before thought arises, and what is said is formulated out of the somatic expression. Dog owners know this best of all when the dogs ‘talk’ to you without barking

FREE Jargon FREE jargon FREE is a post by Michael William Roach from: Hero-Myth.com

My good friend Charlie, whose teacher was Koichi Tohei said he always learnt the most by fucking up, sometimes life just slams you on to the mat. And if you’ve ever been thrown by a really good martial artist it’s well worth the experience… And eventually you learn how to roll.

I am eternal thankful to Richard Bandler for setting me on the path, and I totally believed everything he said about Shamanic Human Engineering. So I went looking for magick and found an enormous amount of dross, but also some pure gold.

It is interesting (at least to me) that so many people do the complex equivalence of ‘this is like that’. I haven’t decided whether it’s better than the ‘moan complain moan’ of ‘it’s just too complex, make it simpler’ or just as loathsome, but it does give me a marketing idea for ‘pre-chewed food’, and can you get more ‘instant’ and simple than that? (Actually I don’t think want an answer to that, please!! 

Most people are happy to do their 7 days or 9 days or 10 days or 20 days or whatever amount of time they need to serve to get their certificate. Because being certified means they are qualified to do whatever it was they were certified in… And we’re back to complex equivalence again.

What happened to apprenticeship?

In Aikido they have the idea of the 20 year throw because of the infinitude of nuances to it’s proper execution.

I’ve decided to get my next hamburger by planting the grass as seeds and watering and nurturing it, selecting the Buffalo to graze on that verdant pasture, stalking, hunting and killing that magnificent beast with my bare hands. Then roasting the meat over an open fire and finally all I need is the special sauce that my squaw will provide… Uh oh… To find the squaw I will…

Sigh… The sacrifices necessary to live an aesthetic life.

But what a life. Walking the path with heart each step is like dancing, each breath is like breathing intoxicating musky perfume, each act a work of art.

Things are as simple as they are and no simpler…

In praise of the ‘art of falling’ is a post by Michael William Roach from: Hero-Myth.com

And to remind you of your science history Einstein’s ‘quantum’ paradigm overturned the Newtonian way of thinking (just a few years ago!!)

Yet isn’t it fascinating how so many people still think they think in cause = effect.

When I see a client, I don’t know what I’m going to do with them. I don’t have the arrogance to put my model of the world on top of theirs. What I do is adumbrate (predictively calibrate) based on what we talk about. So the starting point for that conversation is all important. If you’re starting with the problem you’ll get more understanding of what that problem is. Most people are under the delusion of wanting to understand, when it’s just something to relieve the cognitive dissonance. It’s more useful to be in not knowing, to hold the space so the resonant signal emerges from the noise. When the client has shown you what they want, then you need to be able to give that to them.

So if the clients talking about their problems, just remember they can’t get to where they want from there.

When I have a ‘conversation’ with a client to them we just have a conversation about stuff and it doesn’t make sense to them in that there is no obvious directionality.

Also when I work with clients who are also therapists who are interested in the process that I’m using, in their case I’m meta-commenting about the work I’m doing with them. So while they are learning piece by piece, there is also no obvious directionality.

And we end up with the result of what it is that they want. And usually it’s necessary to point this out to the client, as we have arrived at the destination and it seems like there hasn’t been the process of ‘making progress’ to get there. So I ask the client can they do what it is that they wanted to do and weren’t able to do before. And the answer is ‘well of course’. It’s not been an epistemological journey it’s been an ontological journey. Or to use a Dune reference, we’ve folded space.

The journey doesn’t make sense to the client as they are thinking ‘cause-effect’ and I’m working teleologically.

So when I’m working with a client I’m ‘leading from one step behind’, the interaction is as Richard Bandler described ‘simultaneous elicitation and installation’. Or as I prefer to think of it in the mediated space between us. I know where I’m going as the client has explicitly shown me in both their somatic and semantic responses and I’ve built the capacity over the years of doing this work to be sufficiently in-time to notice their responses and respond in-time..

So does that make sense?

I’ll write some more tomorrow…

Are you stuck in Cause = Effect or The PROBLEM with NLP (a practical explanation of teleology) is a post by Michael William Roach from: Hero-Myth.com

The obvious example here is NLP. There have been a number of NLP wars over the years where you have faction fighting faction as to who created what and therefore who owns what. If you’ve ever been to a NLP conference where there’s an AGM it is astounding to realise there’s a room full of supposed ‘communication experts’ who can’t communicate with each other. If you’re on any of the NLP lists (See Yahoo Groups), so often it’s the tiresome argument about who’s right.

This of course is the story of people operating in an epistemological model (NLP) and arguing which of them has the right model when they’ve forgotten one of the foundational tenets that the map is not the territory.

You’ll notice by contrast on the MythoSelf Yahoo Group list you have people operating from an ontological model. So you have people sorting aesthetically and things aren’t so black and white where I’m right and you’re wrong but people appreciate the beauty inherent in the difference in peoples responses. Even people like Robert Johansson who deliberately provokes only gets pounced on when he is deliberately misrepresenting that he is speaking from a MythoSelf viewpoint when he has virtually no training in this area of expertise. Most people aspire to what I would suggest is Joseph’s attitude of allowing Robert the freedom to learn from participating in this group. Though it is necessary to sometimes clean up his shit, as you would for any young child. I’m reminded of the Zen story of the teacher continuing to pour tea into the students cup, and pour and pour and pour.

There is no reference to the MythoSelf process in the Dune books. Joseph references his reading and interpretation of the Dune books in MythoSelf training. As I said the MythoSelf is an experiential process, so you NEED to go and have the experience. If you are going to talk about it you need to find suitable metaphors to point to the experience. Joseph Campbell pointed to the underlying structure to the worlds mythologies which he called the monomyth. There’s many different ways to explain the experience, BUT that’s not the same as having the experience. See my Hot News link for details of how YOU can have the experience of your life.

the MythoSelf Process and Frank Herbert’s Dune is a post by Michael William Roach from: Hero-Myth.com

OK, so I’ve been there and done that which is how I know what I’m talking about… But I also think it is sad when I observe people who are working as ‘therapists’ of whatever variety, particularly when they are selling themselves as ‘qualified’ and ‘expert’ and ‘highly trained’ when they are clumsily violating their clients reality.

For me the big wake up was when I attended a workshop with David Grove, probably about 7 or 8 years ago, and I remember thinking watching the demo he was doing, why hasn’t he referenced this REALLY obvious thing the client has just done, he’s just continuing to work and ignoring the really obvious stuff. It was only a couple of hours later when other information became apparent and the client had an extraordinarily more ecological and better for them resolution than I would have ever thought possible. That I got there was a big difference between someone who is a master in what they do and a neophyte.

Referencing Joseph’s post on Trajectories, I’ve utilised a clients timescape by noting the repeated visual references they make (looking for a pattern) and have referenced that in a variety of ways, most usually also by visual access and analogue mark. And yes this does produce an altered state result. I also notice how much clients access, more than I can currently track, so mostly I’m just looking for patterns. If I may ask is anyone else thinking in terms of, or using timescapes… and Joseph any more you would like to say on the subject would be more than interesting. 

Trajectories is a post by Michael William Roach from: Hero-Myth.com