20 MINUTES TO MASTER ... NLP. Carol Harris

first group consisted of 30 people, many of them therapists, and as well as the weekend training, everyone went to a weekly study group. Early trainers on the programme included Gene Early, Barbara Witney, David Gaster, David Gordon and Robert Dilts. Charlotte Bretto and Dave Dobson were also early trainers. Later, master’s programmes were offered, as well as speciality workshops given by visiting trainers from overseas.

      By 1987, David Gaster had moved on and Gene Early and Graham Dawes felt it time to hand over the reins. Dudley and Regan Masters, trainers who had graduated from the UKTC, were given the Centre. Eileen was still keen to continue, but decided to ‘let go of [her] baby’. The UKTC only lasted for two further years and was then wound up. Dudley and Regan Masters have not been seen on the NLP scene since and word has it that they became born-again Christians. David Gaster, sadly, died a few years ago. Eileen, in conjunction with Clive Digby-Jones (now her husband), founded and ran the Ravenscroft Centre in London. Graham Dawes continues his activities in NLP, as does Gene Early. Both are respected figures in their communities.

      Several early graduates of the UKTC subsequently set up their own training centres in the UK. Some of the earliest ones were PACE, John Seymour Associates, NLP Training Program, Pace Personal Development and Sensory Systems, as well as associated bodies such as British Hypnosis Research and the Proudfoot School of Hypnosis.

      Currently there is a high number of UK training organizations and although it is increasingly difficult to pinpoint individuals or individual organizations as ‘leading edge’, there are many innovative steps being taken which contribute to the development, and professionalism, of NLP in the UK.

      In addition to the training organizations, numerous networking and practice groups have sprung up throughout the UK and these provide an opportunity for people at all levels of experience to meet, exchange ideas and work on their own personal and professional development. The most prominent of these started life as the Paddington Group, meeting near Paddington station in central London in the 1990s.This group introduced a wide range of people to NLP and acted as a forum for prominent practitioners from the UK and outside.

      THE ASSOCIATION FOR NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING (ANLP)

      Formed in 1985 as a non-profit making organization, the Association for Neuro-Linguistic Programming was initially a registered educational charity, recognized internationally as probably the leading association for those interested in, and using, NLP. Originally set up by Eileen Whicker following an inaugural meeting at the London Business School on 8 May 1985, it was envisaged as an umbrella organization for the development of NLP; in Eileen’s words, ‘setting core standards for training and practice, being a basis for exchanging information and experience, creating links with other NLP bodies, setting standards and ethics, promoting research, keeping abreast of legislation and representing NLP in a professional capacity to Government and serving on the Steering Committees then being set up’.

      The preparatory meeting held to form the Association was attended by Eileen Whicker, Eileen Watkins Seymour, Basil Jones, Dudley Masters, Valerie Beeby and Surya and John Watson. Support was also obtained from Eric Robbie and Willie Monteiro as well as Gene Early. A steering committee was then set up, consisting of Eileen Whicker, Nigel Gowland, Eileen Watkins Seymour and Roy Johnson, and the first meeting, on 12 April 1985, resulted in an open invitation being sent to other interested people.

      The inaugural meeting was held at the London Business School on 8 May 1985 and around 60 people participated. The first executive committee consisted of: Chair: Eileen Whicker, Vice Chair: Peter Rust, Treasurer: Roy Johnson, Secretary: Regan Masters, Membership Secretary: Paul Clarke. Eric Robbie helped to prepare the Association’s first newsletter and Frank Kevlin, later to become Chair, helped set up and print the first issue of Rapport, which became a quarterly magazine of international reputation.

      From these beginnings, ANLP expanded to around 1,000 members in the late 1990s, worldwide, in all walks of life. After Eileen, Chairs of the Association were Frank Kevlin (who died very tragically at a young age), Sue Burke, Peter Child, Carol Harris and Derek Jackson. In 1996, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Section (PCS), which had existed for several years, became a wholly owned subsidiary company of ANLP, catering for those involved in therapeutic applications and leaving the main body of ANLP covering those in business, personal development work and a myriad of other activities, with its main activities being public information, recognition of training organizations, conference organization and magazine production.

      Later, PCS separated from ANLP and it became an information and networking organization rather than a professional body.

      PEOPLE

      Let us now turn to some other people who were involved in NLP’s development, contributed ideas which were seminal to its progress, or helped popularize and promote it as a field of activity.

      RICHARD BANDLER AND JOHN GRINDER

      As mentioned above, these two men are recognized as NLP’s major co-founders. Although they are generally credited with ‘creating NLP’, many of its ideas and principles had come from earlier thinkers, or been based on their ideas and writings.

      FRANK PUCELIK

      Frank is an international business trainer and author, living in Ukraine. He has been a professor at Oklahoma City University, spent time in Vietnam and worked with disaffected and drug-addicted youngsters. He studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he and Bandler started a Gestalt group.

      ALFRED KORZYBSKI

      Recognized as the founding father of general semantics, Count Korzybski had a major effect on the development of NLP and, in particular, the ‘Meta-Model’ (see Chapter 3).

      Born in Warsaw in 1879, Korzybski trained as an engineer. He served in the First World War, attached to the General Staff Intelligence Department of the Second Russian Army, and later served in the US and Canadian military services, remaining in the USA from 1921. He developed his theory of time-binding around 1921 and published his first book, Manhood of Humanity, in 1921 and his most famous work, Science and Sanity, in 1933.

      Korzybski was founder and Director of the Institute of General Semantics, which was established in 1938 as a centre for training in his work. One of its aims was ‘neuro-linguistic’ research and education. Korzybski was the first person to use the term ‘neuro-linguistic’ and it appeared in Science and Sanity; he continued to write and lecture until his death in 1950.

      NOAM CHOMSKY

      Chomsky was a professor of linguistics whose work, based on Korzybski’s earlier ideas, was key to much of the development of NLP. Now a revolutionary figure prominent in US politics, he became very anti-establishment at the time of the Vietnam War. Chomsky’s work on general semantics first appeared in a range of published papers and culminated in the 1957 publication Syntactic Structures (now out of print). This work established the transformational model of language, with its concepts of deep structure and surface structure, elements which feature heavily in NLP’s approach to precision in language. Chomsky’s 1965 book Aspects of Theory and Syntax, published by MIT Press, is an easier publication for the general reader.

      GREGORY BATESON

      Bateson was a British anthropologist and author who influenced several of NLP’s leading proponents. His father, a geneticist who coined the word ‘genetics’, named him after the famous Russian geneticist Gregor Mendel.

      Bateson wrote on a range of topics including communications, systems theory/cybernetics, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, biological evolution and genetics. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his first attempts to synthesize cybernetic ideas with anthropological data. He was ‘ethnologist’ at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Palo Alto from 1949 until1962. At the time he was married