Usually great summer deals are the province of furniture and car showrooms, but we have two of our own for you this summer.

You will need to get cracking, both deals finish at the end of July.

1st Great Deal: Extended Early Bird Discounts

We are extending the early bird booking date for Bill O’Hanlon’s Geography Of Possibilities Workshop in Newcastle and our September NLP Practitioner Trainings up until July 31st.

2nd Great Deal: £350 off NLP Practioner Training!

If you have been thinking about attending one of our NLP Practitioner trainings we have a very special deal for you.

Sign up for the Bill O’Hanlon Geography of Possibilies workshop before July 31st costing just £175 we will give you a discount of £350 off our full IntegrityNLP NLP Practitioner training starting in September.

That’s 22 days quality training for just £820!

Remember, you have to book your place on Bill O’Hanlon’s Geography Of Possibilites workshop before 31st July or you lose the discount.

Book Online

We have just finished our January 2010 NLP Practitioner training – here is a small sample of the feedback we got.

“Thank you all for such a great experience. I will miss the weekends.”
- Kath Lambton, Training and Development

“I will definitely be back for more training with IntegrityNLP. Trainers are fab. It’s light and fun, but you get so much more out of it that way”
- Leigh Davidson, Support Worker / Counsellor

“It was much more enjoyable than I had anticipated – great fun … the personalities of the trainers were so complimentary. Each of them made it so accessible in their own way.”
- Sharon Foster, Teacher

You can listen to an interview with two of the attendees here

Click here to find out more about the September 2010 IntegrityNLP Practitioner training

We have just finished our ten month NLP Practitioner training, which we started way back in September last year.As part of the celebration weekend we normally exchange feedback and hand out the well earned NLP Practitioner Certificates to the trainees. Before we were able to do that our trainees handed Nigel, Harry, Shirley and myself our certificates. You can see mine here.

This has never happened before and I am very touched by the gesture. I can’t think of many trainings where the trainees give certificates to the trainers.

Thank you Felicity, Mike, Karen, Christine, John, Billy, Keith, Lesley for making my day. It’s been a pleasure to work with you and I look forward to seeing you again

It’s that time of year when we start to think about those New Year’s Resolutions. All the things we want to do, have and be in this New Year – new car, exotic holiday, lose weight, a new career, etc.

Often we don’t realise consciously that what we want to have or achieve are just a means to an end. What we really want from our possessions and experiences is the feeling or emotion that it gives us.

Perhaps you want to have an exotic holiday. As you imagine the holiday of your dreams what feelings and emotions arise for you? Maybe you imagine feeling relaxed, excited, enthusiastic and happy. Have you ever spent time day dreaming about what your holiday is going to be like – enjoying the feelings you’ll have before you even get there. Or perhaps you want to lose weight. That might make you feel fit, healthy and attractive.

Advertisers figured this out a long time ago. It’s obvious from all the sofa adverts at this time of year that having a deluxe leather sofa with recliner options will give you a happy contented family or an appreciative and attractive partner. Or you could join an exclusive health club and become fit and attractive like the lithe young people in the advert (who obviously don’t need it).

The seductive voices of advertising tell us “just get this thing or take part in this activity and you will be rewarded with these feelings”. I think a sofa is not the only way to have a happy family. Joining a health club is not the only way to feel fit.

I think there is a more useful way to think about New Year resolutions that gives us a better chance of getting what we want and many more choices in how we get there.

How do you want to feel in 2010? What feelings, or emotions, would you like to feel more of?

How would your New Year resolutions be different if started by choosing the emotional states you wanted to experience?

If you knew how you wanted to feel then you would be able to plan as many different ways as you wanted to get the emotional states you wanted.

If you wanted to feel more relaxed you wouldn’t have to buy an expensive sofa to feel that. You might take up meditation or yoga, have a massage, enjoy a cup of tea and a good book. There are lots more possibilities when you have the end in mind. You might even, if you really wanted to, buy a sofa!

This is an example behavioural flexibility (one of the four pillars of NLP) having many different means at your disposal to achieve the outcome that you want.

Here’s a short process for choosing some new New Year’s resolutions

Step 1

Choose the feelings and emotions you would like to feel more of over the coming year. Make a list. Make it as long as you like, we’re going to refine it in the next step. If anything on the list is a an object or an experience cross it out and add the feelings/emotions having that object or experience will give you.

Note: It’s important to make a list of what’s important to you, rather than what other people think is important to you. This is your list not theirs.

Creating this list might take a bit of soul searching and head scratching, but knowing what is important to you is worth it’s weight in gold. This is being able to realise the feelings/emotions that are important to you

Choosing what you want, or setting outcomes, is another fundamental principle of NLP. An outcome is anything that you want, that could be a physical object (a sofa), an experience (exotic holiday), or an emotional state (relaxation). Setting an outcome is the first step in achieving it.

Here’s some feelings/emotions I want to feel more of in 2010:

• love
• energy
• enthusiasm
• fulfilment
• health
• relaxation
• determination
• satisfaction
• …

You’ll notice that these are all stated in the positive. If your list looks like this:

• less anxiety
• no more stress
• fewer aches and pains

Then you need to rework these feelings into the positive by asking yourself “If I didn’t have the ‘problem’ what would I have instead?”

• if I had less anxiety what would I have instead?
• if I had no more stress what would I be feeling?
• if I had fewer aches and pains how would I feel?

Substitute the answers to these questions into your list.

Now you should have a list of your feelings/emotions expressed in the positive.

Step 2

Work through your list sorting them in order of importance. What are the most important feelings for you to experience? Don’t be suprised if this task is not quite as easy as it seems. For some people sorting these feelings in order of importance in this way can be quite challenging.

Here’s (part of) my sorted list of feeling/emotional states

• love
• health
• energy
• fulfilment
• relaxation
• …

If you had a list of a hundred different items it would be difficult to find time to fulfill all of them so choose the most important. With a sorted list I can choose the top five as the states I want to work towards.

Step 3

For each of those feelings/emotions think of at least three different ways of experiencing them or enhancing them if you already have them.

For example here are some of my options for greater health

• Resume running
• Eat more carefully
• Go back to the yoga class I used to belong to
• Do more hillwalking

I like all those ideas and they fit in with my desire to feel more healthy. (OK, the eating carefully might be a challenge – but I can handle it). They can also overlap with some of my other goals, if I’m with my partner for some of these, my love aspirations are served. If I go to yoga some of my relaxation needs are served.

If you have more than three ways for each feeling that gives you a choice in how you are going to achieve them, if one way doesn’t work then you have another means at your disposal to get what you want. So if the sofa doesn’t bring you domestic bliss there are at least two other things you can do.

The emotional states that are important to us are also known as our values. Our values are very important to us the give us both direction and motivation. To enhance your motivation you might like to take each of your top five states and imagine already having realised them. Take a few moments to enjoy having those feelings and when you have them reflect on what else having these feelings or emotions will bring for you.

If I imagine being fitter and more healthy for a moment, lots of extra possibilities arise in my mind – all of them very enjoyable – and all of them very motivating to me.

Step 4

Now you have a list of things to do and feelings to experience. Get started! Enjoy!

This process has used many of the elements of our NLP Practitioner trainings: well formed outcomes, emotional states, values, motivation, mental rehearsal, visualisation and more.

Special Offer

To learn how to use these skills and perspectives book on our January 2010 NLP Practitioner Training in Newcastle and get a second place for free.

That’s right book now for yourself and a partner, colleague or friend can attend free.

Book now – click here.

Image by randihausken via Flickr

NLP New Year Practitioner Training – Beginning January 2010. Nine places remaining.

You know New year is often the time to start a new chapter in your life. Time to have taken stock of your life and identifying what is missing as well as realising what you really do want. What you want in terms of the experiences and values in your life, now and into the future.

New Year is a time for you and your partner or with your close friends to connect more deeply and make the moves to live the kind of life you dream about. It is time to go beyond talking and to act to make and create the kind of life you honestly really want.

This New Year is a time for change and new beginnings. Your time for change and your time for new beginning. In my experience, the most effective and practically based way to get more of what you want in your life is Neuro Linguistic Programming or NLP.

Why is NLP so effective? It is because you learn to run your own brain, identify and change the behaviours that have stopped you fully achieving and actualising the kind of life you want. It is also about understanding other people’s points of view ( which are just as valid as yours ) and finding ways of working together to achieve much more.

Our next NLP Practitioner Training begins this month, January 22nd.

• Understand and apply powerful NLP change processes.
• Break free from problem behaviours.
• Change limiting beliefs to empower your life.
• To notice and use non-verbal communication.
• You will be able to set realistic outcomes by learning the secrets of well balanced goals.
• How to acquire new skills and abilities and enhance your existing ones.
• Use powerful communication skills.
• Ethically influence others.
• Discover real personal development.
• How to learn.
• Organise your time effectively.
• Understand and utilise your own motivations as well as others.

Book on our January 2010 NLP Practitioner Training in Newcastle and get a second place for free. Book onto this course, change your life and invite your partner or a friend to do the same and so share this life changing journey with you.

“much more than my expectations were met, I experienced discovering different layers within myself and therefore different potential for helping. The training was was helpful because it was experiential, non-judgemental, safe and supported and I can put this to use in my work as a coach and facilitator and in personal life“

Judith – Coach and Training Facilitator

Why are we making this offer? Well of course it is great business sense for us. More people get to learn NLP and tell their friends and colleagues … great for all concerned yet for us this is not the heart and soul of what we have chosen to do.

One of the guiding principles of both Communicating Excellence and Integrity NLP is to continue to change the world in really positive and connecting ways by sharing the skills, tools and techniques for individual and group change. Quite simply with more people at out trainings, we are achieving our goals even more quickly.

January 22nd .. Act Now … Click Here.

The Fast Phobia Cure is one of the best known and often least understood NLP processes for changing the meaning of traumatic or debilitating experiences from a persons past personal history.

Our Newcastle and Northumberland NLP Practitioner training and Clinical Hypnotherapy training course teaches practitioners and clinical hypnotherapists to use this process in a variety of ways to assist clients and yourself to be able to become free from unwanted and limiting past experiences.

NLP therapeutic interventions essentially take two forms. It is possible to change the problem state by either changing the internal representations that accompany the state or we can change the physiology, the body positions and breathing that accompany the state.

This video demonstration with Nigel Hetherington on a NLP Practitioner training in Newcastle of the Fast Phobia Cure uses both changing physiology and changing internal representations.

Image by The Veiled Chamber [Gone Once More] via Flickr

Our next NLP Practitioner training begins September 12th.You can become a fully qualified and competent NLP Practitioner by June 2010.

The ten month fully certified training begins September. Training is certified by The Professional Guild Of NLP with optional additional Society of NLP certification.

If you want to embark on this Life changing journey beginning Saturday 12th September…

Look here and see the full course details

Are you ready to book your place yet?

If you would like to read the stories from previous NLP Practitioners, why they chose to do an NLP Practitioner training, what the got out of it and their own unique insights, you can!

The book is called “An Insiders Guide To An NLP Practitioner Training”

Click here to look at a sample of this new book. If you choose to purchase this book, when you join our NLP Practitioner course you can get an additional discount of either £75 ( paper copy) or £35 ( pdf).

Warmest wishes

Nigel Hetherington

“What I found really refreshing was that fact that the three trainers were constantly rotating in the teaching and this kept me very interested and alert.” Lisa

My first NLP Practitioner training as a novice student of NLP was a twenty day course for 140 people run by a single trainer (with helpers). That was very impressive to me, I thought that I had received a ‘true’ NLP training.

However when I attended my next NLP Practitioner training with a different company I found the style and set up were completely different – four trainers on a rotating schedule for 24 students. A very different atmosphere and a very different style of training and interpretation of NLP.

On my third Master Practitioner training (with yet another training organisation) I was introduced to some new trainers with yet another style of training.

The change from the first NLP Practitioner to the second was quite surprising. I thought I knew how NLP was done, I thought there was just the one right way to do things. By the time I had started my third NLP Master Practitioner training I realised that there are lots of approaches to NLP and I welcomed the difference.

Now I find the variety of perspectives helpful in the development of my own unique understanding of NLP.

If you look around at adverts for NLP courses you will see that some of the courses almost advertise themselves as ‘The True NLP’ from the mouths of one or other of the early developers or their students. Wouldn’t it be best to get the story straight from the horse’s mouth? That might be true if there was only one horse! Even the co-creators of NLP disagree about how best to do NLP.

Wouldn’t it be better to get the training from one person so you have a consistent demonstration of what NLP is? That might be the case if NLP was a prophetic revelation of ‘The Truth’.

Fortunately NLP is not a cult, it’s a methodology for modelling human skills. The more skills there are on display the more there is to model. Originally NLP was modelled on the skills of three therapists, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and Milton Erikson, people with very different ways of working, many more people have been modelled since.

Here are three reasons to have three trainers on a training:

1. You get more than one point of view.

If you attend a ’solo provider’ on your first NLP training it’s very easy to believe what the trainer tells you is chapter and verse on NLP only to be surprised by the variety of opinions within NLP. It is refreshing and reassuring to find that NLP is hotly debated between NLPers that new processes and approaches are being developed all the time and there is much to be learned from each other. Having three trainers gives you three points of view from the beginning.

2. You learn different ways of approaching the same situation.

Each trainer will tackle an issue differently. Each approach is one way, of many ways, of using NLP to get a result. Since the basis of NLP is modelling successful strategies – the more strategies on view the better.

One of the four pillars of NLP is behavioural flexibility, the ability to do things differently when required. The more exposure you have to doing things differently the more likely you are to be able to develop your own flexibility.

3. You get much more for your money.

Just from simple economics having three trainers on one course is going to cost you less than attending three practitioner trainings in a row.

The three principal trainers at IntegrityNLP for both the NLP Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner trainings have very different approaches and backgrounds in NLP. Nigel Hetherington has trained with one of the co-founders of NLP and has a strong interest in trancework and hypnosis, Andy Hunt blends NLP with Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and Harry Knox has an extensive background in training and mental health work within the NHS. As well as our different backgrounds and professional inclinations we have very different training and personal styles.

Special Offer

If you want to find out more about the experience of some of our practitioners you might like to check out the book “So, what is it you are doing? An Insider’s Guide to an NLP Practitioner Training“.

If you choose to buy a printed copy of the book you will be eligible for a £75 discount on IntegrityNLP NLP Practitioner Trainings held in Newcastle upon Tyne. (If you download the electronic version of the book you will eligible for a £35 discount.)

Photo courtesy of  Anderson Mancini

There has been some very good weather recently in Newcastle upon Tyne and like myself, I hope you have made and taken the opportunities to enjoy it while it lasts. While away enjoying this summer sun and balmy heat I have been out in the city centre.

And like any other day in Newcastle, I saw one or two street entertainers playing things from what looked like a cup with a rubber band, a one stringed guitar, a drum, a flute, you know, the usual mixture of good and bad. But one man playing an accordion really caught my eye.

During a pause from his playing, this very skilled, tanned and silver haired accordion player started to fumble in his pocket and pulled out a very new looking iPhone. With fingers seemingly as dexterous on his iPhone as his accordion, he looked to be checking email or texts or perhaps just surfing the web.

So how come I noticed his iPhone? Meta Programs.

Some people say meta programs can be described as the generalised repetitive patterns of thought, perception and behaviour that people seem to have. Another way to describe meta programs is where you focus your attention.

Please, these patterns are mostly unconscious, unless you know about them. You see, if you have completed an NLP Practitioner you will already know quite a bit about meta programs … but just in case you yet don’t, let me share a short example …

One of my friends, I remember like it was just yesterday, once told me he had started dating someone and the first time he went to her house he was in the kitchen. Looking around the kitchen out of all the things he saw there he noticed a cup. Now this cup was the same as one his ex-partner has.

Out of everything there to be see in the kitchen his focus of attention noticed the one thing that was similar. This perception of noticing ’sameness’ is called in meta program language ‘Sort for Similarity’. He then, not his best move, continued to tell his new girlfriend his new discovery.

One thing to understand about meta programs is that they are neither good not bad in and of themselves, they are simply repetitive patterns of thought and behaviour. So sorting for similarity will be valuable in some context and sorting for difference will be valuable in some context.

For example, sometimes, some specific meta program(s) may be responsible for a person having a string of failed relationships, they pick the same kind of partner and they have the same kind of experiences which massively contribute to an unhappy and then terminal relationship.

Perhaps in such cases noticing what is different in a fairly specific way could … and I stress could … clear the way for a much healthier more loving and mutually supportive relationships.

This is about not only recognising the language and behaviour of other and ourselves but even more so about being able to change our language and behaviour to ethically realise more of our desires and dreams. To be able to change meta programs for positive applications and purpose.

I don’t want you to take my word for this, just simply consider the possibility that, it is possible to alter, change and influence our own meta programs depending on what we want to achieve or even what someone else wants to achieve.

I am sure you are aware and now getting the bigger picture that the unconscious meta programs you run are to a large extent your patterns that determine your successes and failures in life.

All right, now, so how useful do you believe it is to coaches, therapists, personal developers and any one in the business of change to have a really deep understanding of the application of meta programs?

Our Newcastle NLP Master Practitioner explores and unpacks meta programs in terms of language and behaviour patterns in even deeper and more sophisticated ways than our NLP Practitioner training covers.

And here is an additional invite for NLP Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioners, re-read this article and look out for all of the meta programs. Notice anything you find yourself agreeing with and the ideas and concepts that see to appeal to you but also look out for things that you don’t agree with or sentences that do not entirely grip you.

Our NLP Newcastle based Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner courses begin this coming September and if you already have an NLP qualification and wish to to it again for all the additional benefits you can for half the usual course price. Now which meta programs does this great offer appeal to?

And while the sun is still out and shining I want to finish my story, and you might be wondering, so how come I noticed this highly skilled accordion players iPhone? Well no mystery there, I have one too!

The weather forecast is suggesting that this coming week the UK will this week experience a week long heat wave. So if you are out walking practising noticing NLP Meta Programs in Newcastle upon Tyne, you might like to keep your eyes peeled to see not just accordion players but one with an iPhone.

The V-K Dissociation or Fast Phobia Cure is one of the most well known NLP therapeutic intervention processes.  The Fast Phobia Cure process as we understand it has been ‘incorporated’ into Human Givins as the ‘Rewind Process’.

Demonstrating here in part two of three video clips, Andy Hunt from IntegrityNLP is seen doing the NLP Fast Phobia Cure during an NLP Practitioner training course in Newcastle upon Tyne.