HONEST ABE'S
NLP BOOK REVIEWS

Written and Produced
by Andy Bradbury (author of "Develop Your NLP Skills", etc.)


Reviews: Part 25

 
 
 

The Title
Name(s) of the Author(s)
Publisher and ISBN Number [this will be for the paperback version except where the number ends with (Hb)]

Six Questions
Peter Freeth
Communications in Action   ISBN 0-954-57481-8
What a pleasure it was to read this book!  And how I wish I could say that more often.)

Given that the book is just under 70 pages long, the author has wisely confined himself to dealing with the application of NLP techniques to just one area of business - problem solving.  As a result he is able to deal with his subject matter in much more detail than is often the case in larger, more costly books.  Moreover, although this is primarily an NLP book, the author doesn't allow himself to be constrained by that fact and he includes elements from neurology, etc., to create a more comprehensive, and comprehensible explanation of the processes and techniques he is describing.
The illustrations, on the other hand, benefit from being kept as simple as possible.

One thing I'm quite sure I've never come across before is the "World Famous Unsticker" - a lengthy set of questions which you can ask yourself when you run into a "What do I do now?" situation.  This is a great idea which gets the reader to draw on their own resources rather than passively accepting someone else's solution.  My one reservation is that having 180 questions means you need to randomly generate a number from 1-180 inclusive, and the comments on how to generate that number could have been a little more carefully prepared, I thought.  If I may add a suggestion of my own:

  1. For the first digit flip a coin.  Heads = "1"; Tails = "0"
  2. Close your eyes and make a "blind" stab at a telephone or computer numerical keypad for digit number 2.  If you get "9" interpret it as an "8"
  3. If you have anything other than "00", in which case you obviously do need a third digit, toss a coin again to decide whether there will be a third digit - "heads" = yes, "tails" = no.
  4. To get a third digit, if required, make another blind stab at the numerical keypad (if the first two digits are "18" then the third digit will automatically be "0").

Anyway, apart from that trivial quibble I reckon this book is excellent value for money, and a highly imaginative use of Kipling's "six serving men" - Why? How? What? Where? Who? When? and Which?
Yes, I know that's seven, but the author recommends very selective use of "Why?".
Highly recommended   *  *  *  *  *  * 

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Transforming Your Self
Steve Andreas
Real People Press   ISBN 0-911226-43-5
I must confess I found this review quite difficult to write.
On page 1-2 the author tells us how much smarter he was than a roomful of therapists and social workers because he knew what self-concept and self-esteem were and they didn't.  On page 3 he boasts that he can teach people "forgiveness" in an hour, even though Jesus Christ couldn't do it at all.  And just when I thought these claims were over, on pages 35-36 he effectively trashes "Buddhists, Sufis, and other mystics" because (he thinks) their teaching on consciousness of self is self-defeating!
As to closing the transcript with a section headed "Benediction" (check it out in your dictionary), what can one say except quote Mr McEntroe's famous phrase: "You cannot be serious!"

I'm afraid the idea that came to my mind closely matched a comment which appears much later in the book:

"A lot of people think that confidence is like the 'trumpets' [ostentatiousness] that Bruce mentioned, and a lot of politicians and motivational speakers talk like that.  For a lot of people that is very convincing, because they don't realize that overconfidence is actually a sign of uncertainty."
(page 170. Italics as in the original.)

In fact I actually put the book on one side after reading the comments on pages 35-36 whilst I decided whether it was worth reading on.
And was it?
Barely.

Transforming Your Self uses the seminar transcript format seen in the Andreas' early books - Frogs into Princes, etc. - an approach which needs very careful editing if the result is to be of value.  The Andreas', in my opinion, made an excellent job of editing the Bandler & Grinder material.  In this case, however, the author seems to have been his own editor - with less than satisfactory results.  So whilst I'll happily believe that the seminar itself was an absolute Wow! I can't say the same for the book.  On the contrary, I felt that much the book would have benefitted from some very severe pruning, especially of the comments from participants which frankly add very little to the overall value.
Indeed, by resting on what questions the students asked, the book fails to address some of the fairly crucial questions the reader might want to ask.  For example, at one point the author makes a useful comment about what "objections" aren't - and then rushes on without any clear description of what does constitute a valid objection.

Nor does the book maintain its pace.
To me, the text positively creeps along until somewhere around page 110.  Then it begins to pick up speed, but only temporarily.  By page 150 it has dropped off considerably, and the "demonstration" on pages 200-212, which seemingly ends without having achieved anything of any significance, was slightly less exciting than the proverbial drying paint.  There's a whole lot of difference between watching a demonstration (and seeing/hearing all the non-verbal signals) and just reading about the edited highlights.  Bracketted comments like "(He gestures high above his head and to the right, about arm's length)" aren't nearly as descriptive or useful as the author appears to think.
I appreciate that the point may have been to show what kind of responses one might get during a therapy session, and some ideas on how to address them, but in my opinion that could have been done to far greater effect if the book was not locked into transcript format.

Talking of demonstrations, another weakness of simply transcribing a seminar into book form is that it ignores the fact that the instruction "(trios, 15 minutes)" which accompanies almost all of the exercises, is going to be beyond the scope of the majority of readers who don't belong to a practice group, who don't run NLP courses, and who quite possibly don't even have two friends or colleagues who are sufficiently interested in NLP to be willing to work through all of the exercises with them.

But perhaps the strangest thing about the book is how it touches on the activities of the brain.
In Chapter 1, for instance, we are told that:

"[Since] ... the reticular activating system in the brainstem ... determines what someone pays attention to, it is at the very root of values and choosing."
(page 18)

An interesting but rather misleading observation, which is hardly surprising since it is taken from a book published nearly 40 years ago!
Thanks to major developments in brain scanning technology over the last two decades, neuroscientists now know that the RAS extends all the way from the brain stem, up through the area often described as the limbic system, and on into the neocortex - reaching all the way back to the visual cortex and the back of the brain.
What is located in the area referred to by Andreas is only the reticular formation.  This part of the RAS is little more than a conduit for signals on their way to and from the Thalamus (there are actually two RAS's, the "ascending" and the "descending").  And whilst the Thalamus does indeed play a central role in the processes described here, the "ascending" RAS itself does nothing more complex than govern our state of arousal at a very basic level.  It wakes us up when things are going on, and it allows us to nod off when things go quiet.  It does carry sensory messages to and from the "higher brain", but as an unsorted collection of signals because the reticular formation itself has only vague awareness of any particular sensory modality and is therefore in no position to determine (as this passage suggests) whether a particular noise (for example) is or is not important.  In fact it may not even recognise the stimulus as being "a noise".

By the same token, the brief treatment of the emotional element of belief change is amazingly naive:

"Many people equate a large show of emotion with effective change, and I think that is one reason why NLP has been criticized for 'leaving out the emotions.'  There are plenty of counterexamples to the idea that drama and emotion is a sign of effectiveness, and I think that this idea is actually exactly backwards.  Quite often when people are very emotional, they are simply expressing their frustration, and their lack of resources to deal with a difficult situation."
(page 143. Italics as in the original.)

Spot the "straw man" - "large show of emotion", "drama and emotion", "very emotional".
The point is that we have large amounts of information showing that the emotions play a key role in the processes of learning, and the formation, maintenance and changing of beliefs (see, for example, Emotions and Beliefs, Cambridge University Press, 2000, also reviewed on this site).  To dismiss the emotional dimension of beliefs, self-esteem, self-concept, etc. seems incomprehensible, especially when it is someone with a postgraduate degree in psychology doing the dismissing (see page 274).

Overall, then, this book looks to me like a rather thin idea padded out to look far more substantial than it really is.  Indeed, I'm not convinced this material adds anything of any significance to the work of "mainstream" researchers such as Albert Bandura.  So whilst I believe it does include some useful ideas, especially in Chapter 8, I question whether it is worth wading through the rest of the book in order to find them.
Personally, if I had it to do all over again - I wouldn't.
Not recommended   *

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Changing with NLP
Lewis Walker
The Radcliffe Medical Press   ISBN 1-85775-810-2
Okay, so I'm hopelessly naive.  I had imagined that nothing could be worse than this author's previous book Consulting with NLP (also reviewed on this site) - but I was wrong.  In one sense this "new" book is little more than a re-write of the previous book, because much of the text is little more than warmed over repeats of material in Consulting with NLP tarted up with blobs of "how to bluff your way in psychology".  As a consequence, in my opinion, Changing with NLP is easily as appalling as the previous book, and then some!

For me personally, one of the most amusing moments in that earlier book came at the point where we were told:

"As you look at the reframing diagram in this section it will help you to visualise how the reframes fit together."
(page 150)

But it wasn't the notion that looking at a diagram might help me to visualise that caught my attention.  Rather it was the diagram itself, a poor copy of the diagram on page 269 of Dilts' book Sleight of Mouth, because a full two-thirds of the connecting lines, not to mention three or four labels, had been left out, so that anyone not already familiar with Dilts' book would, at a guess, actually find it pretty difficult to visualise how any of the elements related to anything else in the diagram.

Anyway, be that as it may, if imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, then the first two chapters of this latest book must rate as a positive hymn of praise.

Starting on page 21, with three boxes and an arrow, we are guided through nearly every significant brand of 20th century psychology, incorporating each in turn (regardless of any differences there may be between them), until we end up with a truly baroque structure on page 36.
It was good to see Albert Bandura getting some long-overdue recognition in the context of NLP, though unfortunately the description of Bandura's ideas on the subject of self-efficacy are somewhat skewed.  Thus we are told:

"Nothing succeeds like success, and direct experience of successfully performing a task or achieving a goal is a very powerful source of self-efficacy." (page 29)

Okay, as far as it goes, but it might have been useful to include mention of Bandura's belief that 'nothing fails like unmitigated success'.  That is to say, it seems that lasting self-belief depends not just on success but also on the occasional knock-back, which develops resiliance in the face of obstacles.  Nothing but success in the early stages of learning a new skill or task, according to Bandura, leave us more vulnerable when we do eventually meet with some kind of setback later on, and more liable to feel crushed and defeated.
(Given the assertion that NLP is nothing more than a sort of Cognitive Therapy adjunct (see below) I'm at a loss to understand why Aaron Beck, the "father" of Cognitive Therapy, is only mentioned in passing, whilst Albert Ellis, founder of RET goes totally unacknowledged in the course of this description.  But who cares, huh?  At least Freud gets a mention later on.)

And the matter doesn't end after the "map" on page 36.  On the contrary, after a brief respite we start all over again on page 44.  From a base diagram of four boxes and an arrow, we build up rather more slowly and less elaborately to a diagram on page 57 which, I think, is supposed to be the NLP equivalent of the grand design on page 36, but hey, who knows?

Nor did it do much for my ability to take this stuff seriously when the text rather lost the plot partway through this second project and we are told that:

"More and more emphasis was placed on cognitions, especially the strategies, the internal sequencing of thoughts that predicated observable behaviour."
(page 47)

From the context, and especially if you were a newcomer to NLP, you might be forgiven for supposing that this sentence means that the focus of NLP in general shifted towards cognition (more usually referred to as "internal processes").  But you'd be wrong.  For Robert Dilts, and a few others this may well be true, but not for the whole of the NLP community.  Richard Bandler, on the other hand, has devoted much of his attention to the sensory submodalities, which are intimately linked to internal states.  Indeed, far from everyone moving in the same direction there was a noticeable parting of the ways which lead to the emergence of the three main schools that exist today - those who feel that internal states are of paramount importance, those who think internal processes as the guiding force, and those who put the primary emphasis on external (physical) behaviour.
Insofar as the second series of models in this book are based on a variation on the inaccurately named "logical levels" model, the diagram labelled NLP model of learning and change isn't really "what it says on the can".  In fact it doesn't even illustrate a genuine system, because it makes internal states and external behaviour subservient to internal processes instead of co-equals.

This is hardly surprising, however, if we examine a basic presupposition behind this book.  Very early on in the text we are told that:

"Cognitive change is central to the human change process.  This is a cornerstone of CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy].  It asserts that for meaningful emotional and behavioural change to occur, cognitive processes (thoughts and imagery) must change first."
(page 10. Italics as in the original.)

By the end of Chapter 3 the book has expanded upon this seemingly innocuous theme to reveal where its true sympathies lie:

"In many respects, therefore, NLP can be seen as simply another set of strategies for performing cognitive-behavioural interventions."
(page 62)

At this point we realise how superficial a version of NLP is being presented both here and in the author's previous book.
If the whole of NLP really was solely, or even primarily, concerned with "internal processes", then it might be fair to describe it as little more than a variation on CBT.  In practice, however, this is by no means the whole story, and NLP is definitely not limited to a single focus.  Where avoidance of the emotions has been a deliberate policy of the various branches of cognitive science, (that's why it's called cognitive science, Duh!) there is no such inherent exclusion in NLP, no matter what paths individual members of the community may have chosen to take.

Nowhere is the book's failure to get a grasp on the relevant facts more obvious than in the section headed: Emotions and the limbic system, where we are told:

"Emotion researchers such as Joseph LeDoux have found only a few primary emotions, from which the more complex ones are textured.  They arise in the limbic system, a subcortical structure that includes several brain nuclei which are intimately connected - the amygdala, thalamus, caudate, putamen and hippocampus."
(page 67)

Sounds impressive?  All them big medical-type words?  Well, let's look behind the facade.
I'm assuming that the book Walker is referring to is LeDoux's The Emotional Brain (1998), because that's the one cited in the bibliography (though the stated publication date - 1996 - is two years earlier than the book's copyright date.  But hey, who's counting?).  In that book LeDoux makes no claim to having "found only a few primary emotions", a topic which, as LeDoux explains, is still the subject of much debate.  What he actually does is describe the views of various researchers, both pro and con the "basic emotions" thesis, such as Robert Plutchik, Paul Ekman, Andrew Ortony and Terrance Turner, etc..  Nor does LeDoux suggest that all emotions "arise in the limbic system".  He makes it absolutely plain that his own research is concerned with emotions such as anger and fear, which involve the amygdala and associated functions, and that he is only discussing the genesis of those emotions.  He suggests that other emotions may use similar processes but far from attributing all emotional activity to the "limbic system" he writes:

"To the extent that emotional responses evolved, they evolved for different reasons, and it seems obvious to me that there must be different brain systems to take care of these different kinds of functions."
(page 126)
Here are some more samples of what LeDoux really has to say:

On the hippocampus in particular:

"While it is true that some areas traditionally included in the limbic system contribute to the control of the autonomic nervous system, other areas, like the hippocampus, are now believed to have relatively less involvement in autonomic and emotional functions than in cognition."
(page 100)

And on the limbic system as a whole:

"Either the limbic system exists or it does not.  Since there are no independent criteria for telling us where it is, I have to say it does not exist.
... The limbic system term, even when used in a shorthand structural sense, is imprecise and has unwarranted functional (emotional) implications.  It should be discarded."
(LeDoux, page 101)

In other words, the hippocampus was nominated as part of the notional "limbic system", a model dreamed up by Paul MacLean in 1952 and based largely on theory because at that time brain scanning devices were very much still in the experimental stage and our ability to study the functioning of the human brain was, by today's standards, almost non-existant.
According to LeDoux we now know that the hippocampus is involved in:

"... exactly the kinds of processes that MacLean proposed that the ... limbic system would not be involved with."
(LeDoux, page 101. . My italics)

and that the concept of a "limbic system", for which there has never been a definitive description, is still based very much on theory rather than on evidence.

To be fair, the book contradicts itself, quite extensively, and therefore, by default, does manage to get things both wrong and right from time to time.  In the case of the hippocampus, for example, having claimed it as part of the emotion-generating limbic system on page 67, by page 72 it has become, "a sorting and relay centre for information"!
Likewise, on page 47 we are told that:

"... many would now agree that the [logical levels] model is neither 'logical' nor hierarchical as first described"
(Italics as in the original)

Yet on page 310, in the glossary, we find this definition:

"Logical levels   The various levels of experience divided into a hierarchy ..."

And incidentally, since when has the logical levels model been identified as a model of "levels of experience"?  If we accept this definition then the "behaviour" level will presumably encompass "all experiences of environment", or should that be "all environmental experiences"?  The mind boggles!

In my opinion, this book shows remarkably poor understanding of much of the material it addresses.  It presents a seriously skewed version of NLP, precious little understanding of psychology beyond some superficial familiarity with the jargon, and even less understanding of the teaching process.  On the contrary, in Chapter 5, for example, if the notion of "priming" as an aid to learning is valid, as I believe it is, then the material is essentially back-to-front.  There certainly is a diagram showing the various elements of a well-formed outcome, BUT it only appears after the eight page description of those elements!
In later chapters even the basic explanations are absent.  We get a few anecdotes, a "do it like this" panel and the author's interpretation of how the NLP technique relates to neuropsychology.  No doubt it was all crystal clear in the author's mind - I just wouldn't want to be an NLP novice trying to make sense of this stuff.

Whilst I am heartily in favour of any well-informed effort to demonstrate NLP's credibility, and disseminate it to a wider audience, I really cannot describe this book as anything more than a ludicrously over-priced "dog's dinner".

"Trust me, I'm a doctor!"
I don't think so, not in this case.
Definitely a book to avoid.

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Andy Bradbury can be contacted at: bradburyac@hotmail.com