A students view of the 2010 masters

Email Received 19/1/2010 from Clare Dimond, Amsterdam 

This is a message to all those who have done their Practitioner course. "You ain't seen nothing yet."

Practitioner is amazing of course. You experience what would be fair to describe as miraculous changes in yourself and your fellow attendees. You get how easy and joyous life can be. Great. That should be enough. Shouldn't it...?

Well, if Practitioner created or awakened or reinforced your interest in the human experience, then Master Practitioner will turn everything that you believed was real upside down and inside out.

Last week I was in snowy Harpenden for the first week of the NLP Master Practitioner course. I did my Practitioner course in 2006 so I was rusty on the basics.  It didn't matter - there were still lots of exercises and opportunities to practice the techniques, working in groups of two to make changes.

We'd been asked before coming to write a list of anything at all we wanted to change and the exercises worked through that list. My list covered two sides of A4 and included everything from the minor ‘don't know what to do with my life' through to the major ‘wish my desk was tidier'. For each exercise we worked on a different issue.

It was quite startling how quickly we whizzed through the list. At one stage I found myself slightly panicking because I didn't have any issues left...

It felt a real privilege to be working through issues with people who have done practitioner, TLT and hypnosis and in some cases gone on to work professionally with clients. The results we were getting were solid and far-reaching.  Thanks to my different partners I have:

elicited my current values - (moving people, wealth, being loved, excitement, flexibility, oneness, power and connection) and realised that I can realign my life accordingly found out my major meta programmes and realised why I love working from hometurned my residual issue with public speaking into: an image of an audience enjoying what I say, a mental note to myself that ‘this is cool', a feeling of excitement and a note to myself that ‘I can do this'...very powerfully turned procrastination into motivation using images with the 4 step swish - chaining anchors with images. (Since I have been back I have been unstoppable!)

I could go on and on. But Master Practitioner is about infinitely more than dealing with issues.

It is about getting to the space behind the issues. On Master Practitioner you will get to the heart of what NLP is all about, the real philosophy behind it.

Bruce said that NLP is the 'process of spirituality' and that makes so much more sense to me now.

Through Master Practitioner I have understood that NLP provides the building blocks that allow us to create our own reality and recover the connection between ourselves and others.

Take the very basic, straightforward technique of building rapport. In Practitioner we do this as a way of creating a good relationship and as a demonstration of how we can make therapy sessions or business meetings more effective. In Master Practitioner you understand the real context for rapport, that it is evidence of what quantum physics has already proven, that we are all connected or even that we are all just one being.

In the first ten minutes of the first day, Bruce told us to move into rapport with our partner and then ask them to, with eyes closed and in silence, simply remember an extremely significant, positive moment in their lives.

My partner told me that he saw me going on a short journey, full of anticipation and when I arrived I was overcome with joy and also a sense of calmness. My memory was of being taken on a hospital trolley down the corridors after waking from general anaesthetic to see my new born daughter for the first time and of the realisation that even though she was 6 weeks early she would be fine.

Rapport is about more than a great sales technique.

Master Practitioner covers a lot of linguistic work and for maybe the first time I actually 'got it' - that reality is a construct - our perception of an event or circumstance. Our filters already act to distance our perception from the actual event.

The reconstruction of that event into language distances it even further.

If language is the framework for conveying reality then by opening up the language, rocking the assumptions that create the foundation we can start to shake the reality that is being conveyed. I think this might be the reason why at the end of Day 3 I had a real dip. I was adrift - all the things that I had felt to be solid and true and permanent had turned to water that could slip through the tiniest hole. 

Perhaps this ‘seasickness' was an indication of the magnitude of the journey. The next day I started to see the enormous possibility and scope that this offers - the chance to construct everything in your life, to make it exactly as you want it to be.

Language is everything and nothing. Through the week we talked a lot about ‘blowing the boundaries' of a problem or an interpretation and the first week of Master Practitioner blasted its way through all my neat beliefs. 

The exercise on Prime Concerns which gets to the deepest part of the deepest linguistic structure of meaning was revelatory as was a presentation from Kim (who literally glows with well-being) on Huna and energy.

So in summary, if you want to hang on to a familiar model of the world which deep inside you know isn't all there is but it's got you to where you are now and that's fine, then don't go anywhere near Master Practitioner. If, however, you want to have your beliefs blown out of the window and your innate curiosity rewarded with a realisation that you can actually get to the secret of yourself and the universe, then...  

Email received from Clare after the completion of week 2 of her Masters

Calling all practitioners who have ever even slightly considered that they might one day think about the possibility of doing Master Practitioner. Don't waste another minute. Get on the course. 

On Saturday morning in not-as-snowy-as-it-was Harpendon a group of shining new people stood up to collect their certificates.

I have no doubt that every single one of those people would urge you to sign up for the two week roller-coaster that will be the start of your new life.

And it's a new start in the most profound way because, put simply, through Master Prac you can change everything - the way you think, speak, act.

You can ditch every limiting belief you ever had. You can find the most elegant way to achieve excellence. You can easily take on responsibility for your relationships and in doing so you can make those relationships as close, loving and valuable as you want them to be.

Above all you become responsible at every level for yourself - and what amazing power and possibility there is in that. 

This was our second week of the Master course after a 4 week break. It was great to see everyone again and we could see in each others faces that changes had been put into practice. In fact I'm starting to think that anyone who wants to become really good looking is infinitely better off with NLP than plastic surgery.

These changes we make on the inside shine out and can last forever. Master Prac - more effective than Creme de la Mer...

We did in-depth Master courses on Time Line Therapy and Hypnosis, and the many opportunities to practice with partners, equipped us to use these techniques at a totally new level. We spent a whole afternoon on the 'Values Inventory' - this was revelatory.

Once we understand what values we are drawn to and what we reject we can become infinitely more flexible and efficient in how we work with ourselves and with others. 

On Thursday and Friday we worked with a single partner on Break Through Sessions. These are immensely valuable in two important ways. Firstly we made undreamt of breakthroughs in any area of life that we chose.

Secondly we realised that though combining an excellent process with our amazing skills, we can sensitively and powerfully facilitate anyone making their own changes. 

On the final day we learned how modelling is the secret of learning any new skill easily and effortlessly. In the previous few weeks, everyone had modelled an expert doing what he or she did best and then taught that skill to the group. Ballet, tai chi, swahili, massage, golf even butterfly stroke. You name it we learned it in minutes.  

I could do a long concluding paragraph here but I think its enough to simply ask: for what purpose were you waiting?