Understanding NLP: Principles & Practise
Peter Young
Crown House   ISBN 1-90442-410-4
Note: The book I'm reviewing here is the second edition of Peter Young's book (published in 2004), as distinct from the first edition which was published several years ago,  I mention this because the author tells us that things have changed since that first edition (see quote below).

Despite it's seemingly unambiguous title - Understanding NLP: Principles and Practice - this really isn't a book about NLP.  Indeed, based on the contents of both the book and the author's website, in my opinion a far more accurate title would have been: "What I Think NLP Should Look Like in 2004, by Peter Young"; or possibly "What NLP Would Look Like If You Ignored Most of the Last Thirty Years and Reconfigured it to Fit the Really Neat Ideas I Found in a Book by Someone Who has Nothing Whatever to Do with NLP, by Peter Young".
Either way, it's a tediously verbose mess.

The basic cause of the mess is that this author has (apparently) joined the small but vociferous club for people who tend to demand that we believe that their ideas (collected under whatever title they have individually adopted) are so much better than NLP that we should all drop what we're doing and sign up to their theory instead.  Indeed, at one point the author tells us in no uncertain terms:

"...because of the fixed nature of books, to understand what I have to say about NLP, you will have to adjust to my predominantly Mythic approach."

What he is saying, not unreasonably, is that to understand his point of view we must take account of his "model of the world."  (Remember that phrase, is has a special significance and I'll come back to it in a moment.)
So where do you think this comes in the book?
In the Preface?  No.
In the opening chapter?  No.
It comes at the very end of Chapter 5, on page 100.  By which time I had already read more than enough to convince me that, in a straight choice, watching paint dry was potentially more exciting than struggling through this book.
And in any case, doesn't the fact that we cannot understand Young's version of NLP unless we enter his world simply confirm that what we're dealing with here isn't NLP at all but Mr Young's personal thoughts?  And that being the case, wouldn't it have been nice of Mr Young to provide some basis for his claim that he knows NLP better than anyone else?  Yet this is precisely the kind of evidence that is entirely absent.

Anyway, back to that "club" I referred to, and the fact that so many of its members seem bereft of the intestinal fortitude needed to simply strike out on their own.  Instead they announce that their wares are a "development" of NLP, the "third wave" of NLP, etc.  And in the case of this book we are told that:

"This book is a complete revision of the first edition of Understanding NLP: Metaphors and Patterns of Change.  Since the first edition was published in 2001 my own thinking has moved on, and I have extended and refined many of the ideas which that book explored. "
(page vii.  Italics as in the original)

So what thinking would that be, then?  Ah, yes, we've already arrived at the "I know better than anyone else how to give NLP the "makeover" it so desperately needs:

"... [NLP] needs a paradigm or theoretical basis that will streamline it and enable it to evolve to the next stage.  Understanding NLP is my attempt to provide that paradigm for NLP. ... This paradigm will enable NLP to reinvent itself and move forward with a clearer structure, and with increased power to meet its own future requirements."
(pages v-vi.  Italics as in the original)

Which would be really neat - but for the fact that it flatly contradicts the idea at the very heart of the development of NLP: a desire to avoid theoretical navel-gazing and instead follow a pragmatic approach.  In other words, never mind what "ought" to work, let's stick to using the techniques we've modeled from people who have already demonstrated their ability to get outstanding results.
And the conufsion has hardly begun.

"NLP has produced a vast number of techniques and processes designed to help people move from being stuck."
(page 14)

It wasn't some strange entity called NLP that produced those techniques, it was people, working alone or in partnership.  And just as a matter of interest, I wonder what Peter Young means by "vast number," here rather than something a littler more precise such as "nearly a hundred," "a couple of hundred," or whatever?

By the same token I personally found this comment totally mystifying:

"NLP refers to a person's 'model of the world' but does not define what would constitute one, or provide details about what features it would possess."
(pages 33-34)

Especially since he then goes on to quote Bandler and Grinder's description of a client's 'model of the world' from The Structure of Magic 1.  Not to mention that demand on page 100 quoted above: to understand what I'm saying you must meet me in my model of the world.
If no one has provided an adequate description of what one of these models looks like, what, precisely, is the author referring to on pages 99-100 when he says he wants us to meet him in his 'model of the world'?
And what on earth is the point of the question except to set up a "straw man" which can be knocked down in support of the author's own ideas?

Later on, in a chapter tellingly entitled The Philosophy [sic] and Presuppositions of NLP, the author writes, still on the subject of our mental maps:

"The 'representation' metaphor suggests a Realist philosophical stance by assuming that there is a separate 'objective' reality of which we create our own mental version or depiction."."
(page 80)

Even though I personally believe that there is an objective reality which stimulates our subjective maps, I have to say that this assertion about the use of the term representation isn't correct.
Information enters our consciousness and out-of-consciousness through our senses, and we create our own world model from a version of that information.  In other words, our depiction of whatever is "out there" - if anything - is entirely down to internal processing.  I would be hard pushed to think of any authoritative book on NLP which wastes time in philosophical discussions about where the initial information comes from, if, indeed, it "comes from" anywhere outside ourselves.
The relatively common occurance of phenomena such as "phantom limbs" demonstrates very clearly that, kinaesthetically at least, our senses are quite capable of generating information on their own without any external stimulus.  Likewise the ease with which we create a coloured "after image" which is not the color we actually saw, shows how we can visually "see" something that has no external counterpart.

Anyway, shortly therafter, the author makes a further claim, as follows;

"A similar Realist position also arises in Bandler and Grinder's explanation of the language Meta-model, in which the 'deep structure' is taken to be some kind of 'objective' truth about the world which the speaker is 'representing' using the words they utter - the 'surface structure'."
(page 80)

Oh really?  That certainly isn't the message I got from Bandler and Grinder's books, nor have I heard any NLP trainers express such a view.
On the contrary, I've always understood that it was simply a case of 'deep structure' being the full thought within someone's brain which they then express verbally in abbreviated form - 'surface structure' - and that the meta model questions are just useful tools which can be used to get someone to expand on the initial 'surface structure' description so that questioner(s) can get a clearer idea what that person was actually thinking at the "deep structure" level.  Just how this author arrived at his definition is anyone's guess, but I don't think it shows a very clear understanding of even the basics of NLP.

I could go on and on like this, but I'd only be ploughing the same furrow in different words.  Let me end, then, with a quote that seems to me to sum up where this author is coming from.
On pages 93-97 the author very briefly (5 lines) discusses the presupposition: People already have all the resources they need to change, followed by a longer section simply headed Resources.  In the course of this far-too-long discussion the author manages to reference Frogs into Princes by Bandler and Grinder, the I Ching (the Chinese book of divination), Games People Play by Eric Berne, Changing Belief Systems by Robert Dilts, the movies The Wizard of Oz and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller,
Did you spot what's missing?
Yep - not one single word about Milton Erickson, the person from whom this presupposition derived.  In fact, according to the index, Erickson only gets 5 mentions in the whole book - one of which seems to be a misprint, and none of the other four amounts to more than a sentence or two!

In short, if Mr Young wants to convince anyone that he has something new and useful to say about NLP he might do worse than start by showing a greater knowledge of NLP and its roots, and put a little less effort trying to turn NLP, its techniques and its applications into something they aren't.
As it stands this volume, with this title, strikes me as being a misguided waste of time and paper.
Recommendation: Another book to avoid.

Note:   Mr Young has recently (August 2007) created a website on which he writes:

"[Andy Bradbury] makes some perceptive comments, but his review then tends to make points which reveal his thinking as somewhat 'unexamined', simply failing to be curious about matters that challenge the conventional thinking within NLP.  He is not alone in this. From my point of view, the accepted 'wisdom' of NLP leaves a great deal to be desired."

This is a fairly revealing comment, I think, of the variety: "Anyone who disagrees with me doesn't think clearly, like what I do. [sic]"  This seems, to me, to be based on two unspoken presuppositions, (a) the author can read other people's minds. (b) only people with a lesser intellect than the author's will disagree with what he says."

The simple fact is that Mr Young has tried to impose a whole different model on the body of NLP practise and theory.  Not on the basis of his own musings, but a model lifted wholesale from someone who has nothing whatever to do with NLP.
This I know because I attended the ANLP Conference session where Mr Young aired his ideas before he wrote the book.  And because I have read the book on which Mr Young's ideas are based - the rather obtuse Paths of Change by Will McWhinney.

My opinion of Mr Young's book is based on the fact that I don't think the contents hold enough water to bathe a gnat, not because of what I do or don't think of "the conventional thinking within NLP" (a marvelously vague phrase).  In other words, if NLP didn't exist and this book was offered as a useful way of viewing the world, I would still think it was a waste of paper.

Hope & Resilience
Short, Erickson and Erickson Klein
Crown House, ISBN 1-90442-493-7
Possibly one of the most influential decisions taken by the original co-developers of NLP was their (understandable yet controversial) choice to emphasise the pragmatic rather than the theoretical foundations of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.  Controversial in that, whilst is has certain points that recommend it, in the long run it has led to the swamp of mediocrity known as: "If it works, it's NLP."

In the first place, this epigram is such a huge generalization that it is quite obviously not true.  For example, cars, telephones, the woman on the till at the supermarket and felt tip pens all "work" (at least until they run out of ink - the felt tip pens, that is) - but none of them is NLP.
Secondly, the word "works" is so vague that there is no way of telling what "If it works it's NLP" actually means.
It is, in fact, yet another useless piece of sloganizing of a kind that is becoming so commonplace that the credibilty of the NLP techniques as a whole is in question.

With this background in mind serious NLPers will be likely to welcome this new book on the practical aspects of the work of Milton Erickson with open arms.

On the front flap of the cover we are told that the book, subtitled: Understanding the psychotherapeutic strategies of Milton H. Erickson, "defines several key components that made [Erickson] successful as a therapist".  And it does, with considerable insight.  Which is hardly surprising given that the authors of the English-language version of the book* are a one-time Associate Director of the Milton H. Erickson Foundation (Dan Short), together with two of Erickson's daughters (Betty Alice Erickson and Roxanne Erickson Klein).
(* Other authors have been involved with the preparation of the book in other languages.)

After a fairly brief Biographical Sketch, the majority of the book is given over to what the authors describe as Erickson's Six Core Strategies - namely Distraction, Partitioning, Progression, Suggestion, Reorientation and Utilization.
Each strategy gets its own chapter, each of which starts with a bruef case history and continues with a thorough discussion of how Erickson used the strategy, along with variations on the basic theme where relevant.
The book ends with a fairly brief summary, and a final chapter which sets out a peactical exercise for each strategy which readers can try out on themselves.

It seems to me that this book, which the authors describe as "a brief introduction" to Erickson's clinical work, has the very practical purpose of providing readers with a deeper understanding of a selected subset of Erickson's techniques rather than a rather superficial review of everything in sight - and makes a very good job of carrying out that task.
In my opinion the book is indeed a useful, and very practical introduction to Erickson, and in particular, from an NLP perspective it gives a far clearer picture of why Erickson developed and used certain techniques that are all too often taken for granted in the NLP community.  Indeed, with all due respect to the original developers of NLP, I was reminded of Erickson's comment, late in life, about the results of Bandler and Grinder's modeling of his work: "They have taken the shell," he is reputed to have said, " but they have left the nut behind."
At a time when some NLP trainers seem to have carried this process even further and have reduced the techniques to a series of "mechanical" actions, this book is all the more welcome for helping to remind us what was originally inside the shell.
Highly recommended:   *  *  *  *  *  *

A Framework For Excellence
Charlotte Bretto Milliner
Grinder & Associates, ISBN 0-92951-403-3
Few of the reviews I've written for this site have given me as much difficulty as this one.

Firstly because of the production values, which quite frankly are appalling.
The basic font for the book is large, san serif (Arial or somesuch).  This is not an easy font to read in large blocks, so why on earth was it chosen in preference to a font such as Times Roman - which is used, but only on a very limited scale?  Why is underlining frequently used for emphasis, rather than italic font, given that in some places an italic font is used for emphasis?
And in the exercises and "quizes", why are answers supplied for some but not for others?
What is the purpose of the diagram on page 7 of the introduction, given that it is never explainewd or discussed?
What is the purpose of the table on "page 33", given that it is never mentioned in the text and seems to have three boxes that aren't actually examples of "synethesia" (the table heading) because they only involve a single sense?
And who on earth thought up the ludicrous system of page numbering where each chapter is independently numbered - but not as 5-1, 5-2, 5-3, etc. but simply by reverting to page 1 at the start of each chapter so as to make using the index a real pain in the arse without any perceptable advantage?

As to the text itself, most of it is written in a style you'd expect to find in a very mediocre, very boring textbook.  Frequently obscure, often long-winded, regularly inaccurate and atrociously edited - if, indeed, it was efited at all.  How, for example, would a competent editor miss the fact that the second paragraph on page 39 ("REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEMS - 15") is repeated word-for-word as the last paragraph on page 41 ("REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEMS - 17")?

And most incomprehensible of all, why do we read the criticism on pager 1 of the Preface:

"For example, looking at the section on Representational Systems, even though cleanly written, people have classified individuals as either visual, auditory or kinesthetic."

and then discover, on page 46 ("REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEMS - 22") that rep. systems are allegedly so fixed that they are more or less tied to one's "body type" - the "thin tense ... visual person", the "full soft ... kinesthetic (internal) person" and the "active muscular ... person who is kinesthetic external"?

I ask because the Preface is signed "John Grinder" - whose own company published the book!
(By the way, I'm not criticising the author's references to "visual people", etc. - I've made that mistake myself.  I'm referring to the unresolved conflict between the publisher's views (as one of the original creators of NLP), and the content which he publishes even though he declares it to be wrong!)

This book looks and reads like an very early and not too well-informed addition to the NLP library.  Like far too many other NLP books, the good stuff is totally cancelled out by the inconsistency and inaccuracy of the text as a whole.
Not recommended.

Ericksonian Hypnosis Cards
ISBN:   1-905045-01-8
Irresistable Influence Cards
ISBN:   1-905045-02-6
NLP Coaching Cards
ISBN:   1-905045-08-5
Jamie Smart (ed.)
Wordsalad Publications.
I'm going to review all three sets of cards together for two reasons

1. All three packs follow the same formula - but with entirely different contents
2. You can get a major discount by purchasing all three packs from the Salad website - http://www.saladltd.co.uk

As many long time NLPers will know, once upon a time there used to be a set of playing cards bearing Erickson word patterns, known as Zebu cards.  These disappeared from sight, about 10 years ago.  But why?  That's something I've never been able to fathom,  It certainly wasn't because there was anything second rate about them.

More recently, NLP trainer Jamie Smart, who owns and runs Salad, brought out his own version of the Zebu cards, and has now followed that up with two more packs (with others on the way, I understand).

The basic layout of the cards - which in one respect make up a standard deck of playing cards: clubs, hearts, spades, diamonds and values Ace-10, Jack, Queen and King - is as follows:

Across the top and bottom of each card is its designation - 5♣, for example - and the outline of a sentence structure, such as: "I could say ________ but ________", or, in the case of the coaching cards, a question such as "What's important to you in/about ________?"
The body of the card carries an explanation of the sentence, and a practical example, thus:

"I could say it, but I'm not going to, so it won't ruffle your feathers.  Except I already did!  I could say you have all the answers already within you, but you already know that.  I could say that you will make these changes quickly and easily, but it's going to be a few enjoyable minutes before you know it to be true.  I could say that these cards will massively enhance your skills, but you're already noticing that, aren't you?""
(Italics as on the card)

So, nothing very outstanding there, you might think.  BUT, the big sales point, in my opinion, is the way the cards can be used for "unconscious installation."
All you need to do is use the cards regularly WITHOUT deliberately trying to learn the phrases and meanings.  Just let the learning happen, effortlessly.  Because believe me, it will.  You can play on your own (any kind of Solitaire, for example), in a group (Poker, Whist, Gin Rummy, etc.), or one of the games suggested on the relevant insert, such as NLP Coaching Eights.

The point is to see the phrases over and over again, along with using whichever ones you've actually learned so far in your daily activities when it is appropriate to do so.  In this way you'll find that you'll quite naturally remember them, building up an increasingly large "vocabulary" as the phrases and questions become permanently fixed in your memory.

Given how important a part linguistics (structure of language) - and semantics (meaning of language) - play in NLP, these cards appear, to me, to be an excellent resource for anyone wanting to become skilled in the use of NLP.  And on that basis I have given them a top rating:   *  *  *  *  *  *  *