CONTENTS
1: A Three-Day Course in Personal Freedom
2: Day One: How to Change Negative Thinking
3: Day Two: How to Change Limiting Beliefs
4: Day Three: How to Create the Life You Want
5: After the Workshop: The Most Important Question
Epilogue: Share the Message, Share Your Story
NLP Techniques
The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™
This book is dedicated to our families and friends for their advice, support, love and encouragement. They make our freedom worth while.
This book would have never seen the light of day were it not for the amazing help from the following people. We send out a huge thank you to all of them for their support, suggestions and hard work in making this book possible.
First to our agent, Robert Kirby, for his wonderful support, dedication and belief in this book. Robert is a terrific professional, and his insights, guidance and ideas proved incredibly useful.
Thanks to the wonderful team at HarperCollins, especially Carole Tonkinson and Victoria Eribo, who have been really great in their belief in the book.
Next, we thank John and Kathleen La Valle for their friendship and ongoing assistance and encouragement.
And last but not least, we thank all of our colleagues, the seminar attendees, support staff and Society of NLP trainers all over the world. Without you there would be no life-changing seminars.
From Richard
I would like thank my wife Glenda for her help, her support and her magical smile.
Also my thanks go to forty years of clients who faced the worst and taught me so much.
From Alessio
I would like to thank Cinzia and Damiamo, my world of love.
From Owen
I would like to thank the following:
My parents Marjorie and Brian Fitzpatrick. I would be lost without you both. Thanks so much for everything. You are amazing role models and the reason I am who I am.
My goddaughters Lucy and Aoife, who make me smile continuously.
My cousin Breandan Kearney, a true wordsmith, for his invaluable help with the book. My fantastic friends Brian and Theresa Colbert, Gillian McNamara, Cristina Granizo, Robert and Michelle Orr, Michael Connolly, Paul Kiernan, John and Anna O’Connell, Elena Martelli, Joe Higgins, Lauren Wickel, Sandra pou Van Biezen, Lauren Inkster, Olivia Lavelle and Lynda Morrissey for their honest feedback on the book, love and never-ending encouragement.
There are hundreds of books published on NLP but this, and its sequel The Ultimate Introduction to NLP, are the only ones that give you the chance to experience what it’s like to be a fly on the wall at one of Dr Richard Bandler’s seminars. This book is a workshop between the covers.
We called this book The User’s Guide to NLP because through the story you get a really clear understanding of how you can use NLP to take charge of your life.
As the characters apply the skills, so can you. The story is of a man named Joe who wants to break the chains of problems that he has in his life. His story is a story that many of us can relate to. The lessons he learns we can apply ourselves to live the life we desire. These lessons are from a workshop that Joe attends given by a man known around the world as ‘The Einstein of the Mind’: Dr Richard Bandler.
In the early 1970s Richard Bandler co-created the field of NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming. By studying the most effective therapists at the time, it was possible to identify what made them effective at producing change in other people.
Although traditional psychology has often focused on why people have problems, NLP came about by studying how people actually change so that they can get the life they want.
This simple distinction has been one of the reasons NLP became a global phenomenon and has been used by millions of people across the globe, including many celebrities, Olympic gold medalists and billionaires.
We have made the story of Joe as representative as possible of the many thousands of participants in courses that Richard and we have taught over the years.
We have learned and applied the insights of Richard Bandler in both the corporate world and the field of psychotherapy, with amazing results.
We’ve had the privilege to teach NLP to more than 200,000 people so far, from more than forty countries, helping them to improve their lives and businesses.
Our passion, and the purpose of this book, is to share with as many people as possible what we have learned so far: it has transformed our