Transformation Coaching Deep Dive

You know that repeated pesky part of your life where you ask yourself: Why does that keep happening to me? Or: that’s just my life! Or: I’m sick of that experience all the time! Let me tell you now: you are not alone. In fact, one of our three brains, the reptilian brain is also known as the old brain or lizard brain. This is the part of our brain responsible for our essential survival functions and instinctive behaviors. It keeps us alive…any way it can. That even means making the mistake of keeping us frustrated in order to help us survive.

Between the time we are 2 months from being born and 3 years old, our reptilian brain picks up patterns to keep us alive. Part of this experience shows up as dysfunctions manifested during the three developmental stages: Prenatal Development (from two months before birth to birth), Infancy (birth to 1 year) and Toddlerhood (1 to 3 years). A product of work from psychologist Jane Lowe, author Stephen M. Johnson and doctor of medicine Wilhelm Reich, there are delineated challenges during this 3 plus year time. In chronological order, these Neo-Reichian Model challenges are called: the Schizoid Pattern (-2 months to 2 months old) as an undeveloped Right to Exist, the Oral Pattern (2 to 6 months old) as an undeveloped Right to Need (or Choose), the Symbiotic Pattern (6 to 12 months old) as an undeveloped Right to Separate (be myself) and Still Belong, the Narcissistic Pattern (1 to 2 years old) as an undeveloped Right to be Autonomous (Take My Own Actions) which is the same general timeframe (1-2 years old) as the Masochistic Pattern (1 to 2 years old) as the undeveloped Right to Be Assertive (Right to My Own Consequences) and, finally, the Rigid Pattern (2 to 3 years old) as the undeveloped Right To Love, To Be Loved and To Love Sexually. As you can see, we are all inherently fighting ourselves from a young age, unless we get insanely lucky (see what I did there?). [For more on these developmental stages, I refer you Stephen M. Johnson, PhD’s 1985 book Characterological Transformation: The Hard Work Miracle.]

As luck would have it, people have been in the anthropological lab figuring out the best way to navigate this dilemma. In the 1960’s, there began a countercultural phenomenon that focussed on the expression of humans’ extraordinary potential. As a precursor to the movement, the “father of American psychology” William James (whose godfather was Ralph Waldo Emerson) was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States in 1875 at Harvard University. American psychologist Abraham Maslow was best-known for the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a conceptualization of the needs (or goals) that motivate human behavior, published in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Friedrich Salomon “Fritz” Perls was a German-born psychotherapist who developed Gestalt therapy as a process to experience presence and potentiality in the senses, with a book of the same name in 1951. English-born American historian and science writer Gerald Heard explored the psychology of human potentiality as a series lecturer in the spiritual Creative Initiative movement’s Sequoia Seminars in 1953. In 1955, Glenn Doman and Carl Delacato founded The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential under the presupposition that “Every child born has, at the moment of birth, a greater potential intelligence then Leonardo da Vinci ever used” (Doman). As the 1960’s commenced, philosopher and mystic Aldous Huxley and British American philosophical entertainer Alan Watts were huge proponents of human potentiality. Finally, American writer and educator George Leonard and American writer Michael Murphy established the term Human Potential Movement and founded the Esalen Institute as a hub for exploring this work in 1962 on the cliffs of Big Sur, California. The premise of this movement was that development of a human’s potential nurtures and nourishes a life of happiness, creativity and fulfillment and directly leads to a life of helping others to express their potential. And in 1967, the British guitarist of The Beatles, George Harrison, made the Human Potential Movement mainstream through his public assertion of self-realization practices.

As with all evolutions, the Human Potential Movement rooted and branched off with varying focusses. As a philosophy and framework, sociologist Elizabeth Puttick wrote that the Human Potential Movement developed a “set of values that have made it one of the most significant and influential forces in modern Western society” (Puttick, 2004, Encyclopedia of New Religions). Into the 1970’s, one branch fixated on specific methods to adjust neurological processes through the development of language and behavioral patterns to express human potential. Psychologists John Grinder, Richard Bandler and Robert Dilts were figureheads in the development of Neuro-Linguistic Programming in 1975. Robert Dilts was later credited with founding Third Generation NLP in 1991 to apply exploration of this potentiality work to: education, creativity and health. (Even after that, Dilts co-founded the International Association for Generative Change in 2015 to foster creativity, success and meaning throughout the world.) Dilts was best known for applying this branch of the human potential movement to leadership, health and positive self-belief. In school, he had developed a key learning that it takes half a second for externally or internally generated stimulus to reach conscious awareness and helped develop specific leading questions to elicit a client’s subconscious, unconscious and conscious information.

At the outset, in the fall of 1975, trained and licensed psychotherapist and PhD Jonathan Rice took an informational workshop by Grinder and Bandler promising “training outcomes stated in precise, behaviorally measurable terms” (Rice, 2011). Rice was immediately drawn to the practical, tangible and measurable outcomes that Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) delivered that he called “profound and permanent” (Rice, 2011) and at odds with the more long-term adaptive learnings in common behavioral psychotherapy. Rice developed his own inclusive psychotherapy model of NLP bridging the gap between his strict PhD education and the more exploratory behavioral interactive techniques. Rice developed what I would call the subconscious optimization format of reframing a person’s past experience in the present conversational session to make the subconscious/unconscious align with the conscious mind objective. One of Rice’s most significant contributions to this work was the “eye-accessing cue” technique where the practitioner observes a person’s eye movements that correlate with past subconscious and unconscious processes of events. Once accessed, these experiences can be re-experienced emotionally to create the more optimal consciousness that positively transforms the client within and then lasting past NLP sessions.

In 1993, Rice’s master student and also PhD, Carl Buchheit, created Transformational NLP as a training center called NLP Marin in Marin County, California, just under four hours north of the Human Potential Movement hub Esalen Institute. In 1996, he teamed up with Carla Camou and together they were my teachers in this work (and certification) for about three years, and still ongoing. Combining Dilts’ crafted questions and Rice’s eye-accessing cues, they have coached students to transform clients’ limiting beliefs and behavioral patterns. Their emphasis is on enabling and empowering people’s choice in their lives to develop, sometimes instantly, fulfillment in potential and inner peace.

In the years 2006 and 2007, scientific studies at the British hospital Sheffield found NLP was able to reduce claustrophobia in fifty patients needing MRI scans so that they no longer needed anesthesia. This was successful in 76% (thirty-eight) of the patients (Marc Dewey, November 2007, in the National Library of Medicine (NIH))! As a case study, I can also say that as a client and facilitator of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, not only have the methods taught by Carl and Carla worked, but I have now created my own unique coaching and speaking modalities that incorporate NLP, developed over 15 years. I transform audiences by directing their focus to what they want instead of what they don’t want. As famed NLP practitioner and motivational coach Tony Robbins says “We can change the way we think, feel and behave by changing our focus—because where focus goes, energy flows.”