Change Your Life with NLP
Lindsey Agness
Pearson Education   ISBN 978-0-273-71698-3
Another passenger boards the NLP gravy train, and another utter waste of paper hits the bookshelves.

This has to be in the top 3 "books about NLP that aren't".
I have no idea where the author got her ideas about NLP from, but it might be relevant that the Reading List at the back of the book includes:

• Deepak Chopra
• Mihaly Csikszentmahalyi
• Louisa Hay
• Napolean Hill
• A book of poems by Christopher Logue, and
• The Three Initiates' The Kybalion

Plus the films:

• What the Bleep Do We know?, and
• The Secret

Suffice it to say that none of these authors, and neither of these films, have anything to do with NLP.  In fact only 5.3% of the books (in a list of 19) is actually about NLP.  That's just one book - Sue Knight's NLP at Work.
Moreover, whilst I haven't checked it word-by-word, it is my impression that the main text doesn't contain such a high percentage of NLP material as there is in the Reading List!

As early as the Introduction we are treated to several examples of vague language, such as this little gem:

If you read this book and do the exercises in it, I guarantee that you and your life will never be the same."
(p.xi)

Which is indeed true.  Only we aren't told how our lives will be different.  And we aren't reminded that this is true every day of our lives - no matter what we do, or don't do.  That is to say, change is inevitable, so simply guaranteeing that some kind of change will occur over some unspecified period of time is somewhat less than impressive.

The next significantly questionable proposition comes on the very next page:

Before Roger Bannister ran the first sub 4 minute mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds, the experts said that the human body would literally burst if it ran so fast."
(p.xii.  Italics added for emphasis)

Huh?  Are we really expected to believe that, in 1954, all of "the [unspecified] experts" shared the opinion "the human body would literally burst" if someone ran a mile 1.5 seconds faster than the existing world record time of 4:1.4 (4 minutes, one and four-tenths of a second)?  Surely not.  The author is perpetuating an exaggerated version of the myth that it simply wasn't physically possible for a human being to run faster than one mile in 4 minutes.

And the roll-call of errors just goes on and on:

"It is estimated that 93 per cent of communication is non-verbal.  This means how you say what you say (intonation, volume, speed, etc.) carries five times more information than the words spoken.  And how you use your body (gestures, facial expressions, posture) is even more influential."
(p.5)

This misinformation, which is repeated, albeit in more detail, on page 53, is all the more strange since the author implies, in the later section, that she is familiar with Mehrabian's comments in his book on these studies, Silent Messages.  But if that were true why does she not make it clear that the figures only apply where there are inconsistencies in the way the message is transmitted, and even then only where an attitude or opinion is being expressed, not if the speaker is giving out factual information?

"Are you in the Grey Zone?"

This entire chapter (Chapter 2) is about a series of metaphors entirely of the author's own devising, and nothing to do with authentic NLP.

"How do you set goals? ... These principles ... are not traditional NLP but I use them as they are the best way I have found to set up goals in a way that means they are easier to achieve."
(p.33)

Which would have made a lot more sense if it weren't for the fact that the author introduces the "traditional" NLP model for setting goals a few pages later, disguised as questions, under the heading, "Questioning for Achievable Outcomes" (pp.40-41).  I wonder what happened between pages 33 and 40 to re-instate the regular NLP model?  Maybe we'll never know, so let's move on

Not to put too fine a point on it, these bloopers raise the question, for the umpteenth time, of why "NLP" is included in the title of this book.  And the claim that:

"We can only digest 126 bits of [sensory] data, that boils down to 7 (plus ir minus 2) manageable chunks per second."
(p.56)

raises the question, yet again, as to how many of her alleged "facts" the author has actually researched.  The article from which this information comes can be found (at no cost) at several online locations (see www.musanim.com/miller1956, for example).  Had the author taken time to read the article she might have realised how little information is contained in 126 bits, as Miller was using the term "bit".

But the blunders come in a variety of shapes and sizes, so to speak, and the next one highlights the author's habit of promoting her own ideas and opinions over authentic NLP.  Under the subheading "Letting the specifics go" we are told:

"I don't believe that it's necessary to work out detailed plans to achieve each step along the journey towards achieving your goal.  Mike Dooley, author and collaborator on the film The Secret, calls them 'the dreaded HOWs'."
(p.42)

Of course we do not know exactly what this author means by "detailed", but it taken in context it seems to be somewhat dismissive of the planning process in general.  Did the author overlook the fact that neither Mike Dooley nor The Secret (which is nothing but a recycled version of the 19th century "New Thought" fad), have anything to do with NLP?  Is she aware that breaking a goal into a series of smaller steps is a standard NLP goal-setting technique?  And has it missed her notice that a survey by the British Psychological Society showed that the most common reason why people fail to achieve their goals is because they haven't produced an adequate plan?

I could go on and on, but I think the point is made.  This book bears only a passing relevance to authentic NLP, and most of it owes far more to New Age-style fantasizing than to an adequate knowledge of genuinely relevant information.

Perhaps the most worrying sentence in the book comes very near the end where the author is plugging her own company:

"Our clients include Unilever, DHL, Nokia, PriceWaterhouse Coopers and Henley Management College."

If those organizations, and others, are being sold with the same New Age-style twaddle about NLP as is found throughout this book then no wonder NLP has a poor reputation with some business people.

So, bottom line, if I had to categorize the contents of this book I think "intellectual sludge" would be about right, though people who identify themselves as 'New Agers' may well believe that it can transform their lives.
Recommendation:   Treat this book with the same care you would show a barrel of toxic waste.  Above all, DO NOT OPEN.

Clean Language
Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees
Crown House Publishing   ISBN 978-184590125-7
What a relief, after reading the book featured in the previous review, to be able to move on to something as well-writing, as coherently organised, and as generally competent as Clean Language by Sullivan and Rees.  I couldn't imagine a much more thorough-going contrast.

Some purists may wonder why I've included books on Clean Language in these reviews (see also Metaphors in Mind, Lawley and Tompkins).  And the answer is, "For the same reason that I've included books like Lakoff and Johnson's book Metaphors We Live By.  That is, because whilst these books aren't directly about NLP, they contain a great deal of information which it is useful for NLPers to know in order to enhance their NLP skills.

In the case of Clean Language (the book), the usefulness is particularly evident in chapters 3 and 7 - The Magic of Metaphor and Modelling Cleanly, respectively.  It is certainly true that the ideas in this book are, as you might expect, to some extent out of sync with those of NLP.  On the subject of modelling, for example, there is a clear intention in both approaches to keep the modeller's ideas, values, opinions, etc. out of the way of the modellee's processing.  But whereas in NLP this is achieved (as far as possible) by collecting information at a subconscious level with no conscious evaluation of the model until the modelling process is complete, in clean languaging (if that is the right term) the whole process is conducted at a conscious level, but the facilitator's thoughts are kept out of the developing model, as far as possible, by only feeding back to the modeller/modellee (they are the same person) their own words.  Done correctly, the facilitator excludes from their feedback questions all interpretation or paraphrasing of the modeller's words, hence the term "clean" language.

A further, and very important, aspect of this comparison is the difference between the two intended outcomes.
In NLP, the modeller is usually building a model to facilitate a transfer of skills between the modellee and one or more other people.  In clean languaging the primary purpose, again if I have understood the process correctly, is to guide the modellee in their construction of an entirely personal metaphor from which they will gain information which will help them to better understand their own personality, behaviour, world-view, or whatever.

Obviously where there are differences in approach these can be largely attributed to the differences in the underlying intentions.

Back to this particular book, I've been wondering if there is any way that the authors could have given it greater appeal to a diverse audience.  And I don't really see how they could.
I found the writing clear without over-simplification; there are plenty of script fragments illustrating various points; and plenty of "Activities" so that readers can immediately practise and apply what they have been reading about.

There are also numerous cartoons, some of them little more than thumbnail sketches which reflect the words of a subheading and help (for the benefit of the more visually-inclined) to break up what might otherwise be an overwhelming flood of words.  Others, such as the cartoon on page 148, clarify the meaning of the surrounding text in a way that will save some readers (including me) from having to read the text two or three time to be sure of getting the right message.

Finally, as far as this review is concerned, I was much impressed by the obvious expertise of the two authors.  This came across, for me, in little comments which may read common sense, but which are only likely to have come from personal experience, such as this comment on page 88:

"And remember that when working Cleanly, it's not the facilitator's job to make change happen.  Any Change that occurs comes from within the client and happens at the client's own pace, so that it fits them perfectly."

That's just one of the many things I enjoyed about reading this book, and why I've rated it:
Highly Recommended:     *   *   *   *   *   *

Making Your Words Work: Using NLP to Improve Communication, Learning and Behaviour
Terry Mahony
Crown House Publishing   ISBN 978-184590941-0
And back we go to the gravy train.  And in this case the intention to gain readers by putting those magical letters "NLP" on the cover seems evident for two reasons:

Firstly, the original (2003) version of the book simply didn't have "NLP" in the title.  It was called Words Work! How to Change Your Language to Improve Behaviour in Your Classroom.  For some reason, however (possibly sales weren't all they could be?), someone decided that sticking "NLP" on the front cover might give the book a boost.  Which would have been fine except for the second gravy train factor:

This book, despite using the NLP acronym quite a number of times, is mainly about a whole lot of things that have little or nothing to do with NLP.  If we turn to the Bibliography (pages 189-193) there isn't a single one of the books by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, either individually or working together.
Maybe it isn't surprising, then, to find that even where we're told about something that is (according to the author) a part of "NLP", it usually turns out that it's either plain wrong, or it isn't about NLP after all.

In fact what this book really amounts to is a disorganised jumble of ideas culled from here, there and everywhere, mostly described in far too little detail to be of any use.

Warning bells start ringing in the Preface as early as page xi (it only starts on page ix!) when we are told that:

"Although this book focuses on the use of the linguistic devices of NLP, the Bibliography lists those authors who have described how these and other powerful NLP techniques can help you enhance your child's learning."

But if we turn to the Bibliography, we find a total of 69 books of which only 8 are allegedly about NLP, and 3 of those 8 bear only a questionable relationship to authentic NLP.  And none of them, as I've already mentioned, are by either Bandler and/or John Grinder.  Of course it could be argued that there aren't too many books that specifically deal with any part of the FoNLP (field of NLP) and education - but that is due, for the most part, to the fact that there are few, if any, NLP-related concepts or techniques which ONLY apply to the educational context.  Most of the techniques, once one knows the basics, can be applied in any one of a range of contexts, including in the classroom.  For example, dealing with people (students) in accordance with their use of sensory predicates is an area where it is very easy to misapply the basic ideas.  It would have been most useful to have outlined Bandler and Grinder's ideas, as outlined in Frogs into Princes, for example.  But that simply doesn't happen.

Just four pages on and we're into the Introduction, and one of the weirdest descriptions of NLP I've yet come across:

"The study of how language and action affect the central nervous system is known as neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)."

I wonder if this author actually knows what the "central nervous system" is, even.  Is he aware, for example, that it only consists of the brain and the upper portion of the nerve structure around the spine.  Which would, if the description were true, restrict the "action" element to turning your head from side to side and up and down.  Moreover, having read over 160 books on NLP I have to say that remarkably few of them say anything about the central nervouse system, except the rash of authors who seem to have ill-advisedly picked up the way out-of-date description of the RAS in Steve Andreas' book Transform Your Self.  Yet how could this be if this author's description of NLP is correct?

This error is all the more confusing given that we are later told that:

"NLP adopts a 'black-box' model of the brain - i.e. the brain can be thought of as a complex device within which a number of unknown (because they are unseen) processes work on the data input into it to produce a set of outputs that you can observe as behaviour."
(p.12)

Since the brain is indeed part of the central nervous system I'm not sure how NLP can study how language and action can affect what is going on inside a 'black-box'

In fact, the errors just keep coming throughout the book.  These are just a few:

"Another key concept in NLP is that of 'neurological levels'."

As explained by co-creator John Grinder in Whispering in the Wind (2001), the neurological levels models (I think there are about 5 of them) have no place in authentic NLP.
Indeed, although Mr Mahony is listed on the back cover as "a member of Robert Dilt's [sic] Global Training and Consulting Community", instead of including one of Dilts' own models, on page 12, he presents his own version of one of the lesser-known versions which is labelled "The neurological levels (after Dilts)".  Maybe he doesn't know about the other four models?

"NLP has its roots in the study ... of the language patterns of three of ... Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls.  From these patterns they produced two groups: the first they called the meta-model of language ...."
(p.33)

and:

"Much of the meta-model has its basis in the work of the Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls."
(p.159)

Which will surely come as a big surprise to all the people who thought that the primary source of the meta model was Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar.

"Research with people sending mixed messages shows that, for the listener, only about 7 per cent of the communication is conducted by verbal content.  However this is the focus of most teacher-pupil interaction."
(p.47)

If we take Mahony at his word he is saying that most teacher-pupil interactions are focused on mixed messages.  Or does he mean they are focused on verbal content?&nbs; Does the author understand what is meant by the term "mixed messages"?  Does he know, and if he does, why doesn't he mention, that this research only applies to messages expressing opinions, not to factual messages?  And does he seriously believe that "most teacher-pupil interaction" rests on only 7 per cent of the verbal content?  Sadly it seems that he does since he goes on to say:

"The quality of any communication in that vital 7 per cent can be improved greatly by matching the pupil's representational system ..."
(p.47)

Yet this assertion is entirely the author's own invention.  Mehrabian did not corry out any research that would justify this conclusion and nor, as far as I know, has anyone else.  Not only that, but Mahony is walking into yet another compound error:

"Predicates are words that relate to the senses, and most people have a vocabulary biased towards the use of a particular sensory representational system."
(p.47)

In the first place predicates are not exclusively sense-oriented.  In grammatical terms a predicate is simply the portion of a clause, excluding the subject, that expresses something about the subject.  The NLP description of a predicate is a "special case", so to speak, which focuses only on sensory predicates.

Secondly, what the author is talking about here appears to be the notion of "Preferred Representational Systems", a notion that was indeed explored in some detail during the early development of NLP, but which was relegated to a minor role sometime around 1979 (see Frogs into Princes) to 1980 (see NLP Vol. 1).  Which possibly explains why Mr Mahony, whilst diverting into a couple of dozen subjects which have nothing to do with authentic NLP, fails to give calibration skills adequate coverage in his book.

There are many, many more examples of the author's confused thinking, such as:

• The strange idea of referring to the fictional character Shaharazad (from The Arabian Nights) as though she were a real person in order to justify a point (page 129)
• Putting the diagram and a brief description of the Sleight of Mouth model on pages 130-132, yet giving the desciptions of the fourteen elements of the model nearly 40 pages later, on pages 168-172?
• Recommending paraphrasing on page 145 and Clean Language on page 147 (paraphrasing being the absolute antithesis of Clean Language)
• And the shuttling back and forth between 'beliefs' and 'perceptions' as though the two words were synonymous (see, for example, pages 147 and 149)

But the real tragedy is that none of the twaddle was necessary.

In the Introduction (p. xvii) there is a table of "The NLP Language Approaches".  It consists of just three headings: the Meta Model, the Milton Model and Metaphors.  If the author had settled for giving a clear, well-researched explanation of these three subjects - instead of everything in sight, including at least two "kitchen sinks" - this might have been a book to treasure.  But he didn't, and it isn't.  And all we have here is a little over 200 pages of wasted paper.
Recommendation:   Avoid like the plague.

Roots of Neuro-Linguistic Programming
Robert Dilts
Meta Publications (1983)   ISBN 0-916990-12-5 (Hb)

Despite the later copyright (and publication?) date, this book appears to be a collection of three "papers" written by the author in 1976 (Part 1), 1977 (Part II) and 1978 (Part III), plus an undated section simply called "Experiment".
To be fair, since much of the book is allegedly about human neurology, it should be said that many of the references are to works that date back to the 1950s and '60s.  This is highly significant because even in the 1970s, the brain scanning devices which have revealed so much about our brains over the last two decades or so were still in their infancy.

Part I: Roots of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (yes, it is indeed the book's overall title repeated) is, and I quote Dilts' own description:

"... a highly technical exploration of the relationship between information theory, neurology and cybernetics as background for the NLP model."
(page 9)

Which would be fair enough, but for three things:

• NLP's co-creators, the people the author was working with and supposedly learning from when he wrote this paper were absolutely specific about NLP being pragmatically based - not theoretically based.  in Frogs into Princes, for example, they unambiguously state that: "we're ... not theologians or theoreticians." (page 7)  So what is the relevance of a book that tries to create some kind of theoretical underpinnings?
   
• A few pages later, in the same book, Bandler and Grinder make it clear that they are "not interested in whether what we offer you is true or not, whether it's accurate or whether it can be neurologically proven to be accurate" (page 18).  So what relevance is there in page after page of questionable ideas about the structure and functions of the brain?
   
• To be blunt, this book is as foreign to the authentic FoNLP as the so-called neurological levels models which made their appearance some 10 years later.  For example, he sets himself the task of giving an indepth description of human neurology, yet includes - not once but twice (Part I, page 45 and Part II, page 7) - a diagram which is labelled: The Neuron: Basic carrier of information in the brain.

Problems:

• The diagram does not show a pyramidal neuron (the type which constitute 70% or more of the 100 billion neurons in a typical human brain), it shows what's called a bipolar neuron
• Bipolar neurons are actually pretty rare, since their function is indeed just to carry information rather than carry out processing (they link our retinas to our brain, for example).
• Unfortunately this doesn't help much, since Dilts has represented the cell as having two axons (outputs).  Moreover he has positioned dendrites (inputs) on both of these outputs.
  
• In fact the cell body should have an "arm" on one side with dendrites, and an axon on the other with terminal buttons.  That is, each neuron has both an input and a separate output.
• And to crown everything, and presumably based on the error I've just described, there is a circled "blow up" of one part of the diagram which carries the information that it illustrates a "Synapse" which Dilts seems to believe is correctly described as a "Connection of two dendrites".
  
• Which contradicts one of the most basic features of the human brain - the fact that synapses (the connection point between two neurons) always feature a dendrite on one side and an axon terminal button on the other.  If dendrites connected to dendrites the cells could never receive an input or send any output.

Almost straight after the second of these two diagrams (Part II, page 7, Figure 1), in Part II, page 8, Dilts went on to include an illustration (Figure 3) labelled "Types of Neuron" which shows hand-drawn examples of "Unipolar, Bipolar, Multipolar, Pyramidal Cell, Purkinje Cell and Autonomic Ganglion Cell".  In fact there are two forms of classification here:

Unipolar, bipolar and multipolar neurons are all defined by the number of neurites (axon and dendrites directly connected to the cell body), whilst Pyramidal, Purkinje and Autonomic Ganglion Cell are all forms of multipolar neuron.  For someone who set out to discuss Logical Types, Hierarchical Levels and Logical Levels (Part I, p.43) it seems strange that he apparently couldn't tell the difference between a "type" and a "sub type", so to speak.