hypnosis was just one of the many tools in this amazing new technology. I was hooked from that moment forward!
He lent me a book by Dr Richard Bandler—the first edition of the book you are holding in your hands right now. Not only did I read it, but my life began to change for the better almost immediately.
Several years later I met Richard at a seminar in London and we became friends. The more I learned from him, the more I wanted to know.
Even though I was at the top of the TV ratings and filling theatres every night with my hypnotism show, I began spending my weekends sitting with small groups of people in hotels and teaching them the basics of NLP. This book was our bible—the most powerful and practical guide to NLP and hypnosis ever written.
I flew to San Francisco and started to harass Richard. “I would really like to put on a training session in London with you,” I said. Years later we had become the biggest NLP training organization in the world. I feel very privileged to train by his side.
This book has made a massive difference to my life and to the lives of so many people around the world. Not only does it eloquently detail many easy techniques you can use straight away, it beautifully captures the spirit of Richard’s humorous and creative style of presentation, a style we refer to as “stand-up therapy.”
What is so exciting about this new edition is that Richard has continued to evolve NLP and hypnosis far beyond what they were when it was first published nearly 20 years ago. Inside, you will find not only an introduction to “classical NLP” and “Ericksonian Hypnosis,” but also the very latest innovations and developments from one of the true creative geniuses of our time.
We cannot control everything that happens to us, but using these techniques gives us control over the way we feel about the events of our lives, and consequently what we decide to do in response. I hope you use this amazing book to unleash your power and redesign your destiny. May each page fill you with the delighted fascination that I felt when I first read it.
Hang on—your life might just be about to change for the better!
PAUL MCKENNA, PH.D.
I AM DEEPLY PRIVILEGED to have been invited to edit this book by Richard Bandler on the subject of hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Once or twice in a lifetime, one may encounter a true rainmaker, someone who makes the impossible possible to the benefit of those around him. From the very first page I read of his first book, The Structure of Magic I, so many years ago, I recognized him as one of these rare beings. Since then, I have studied with Richard for many years and have benefited hugely from his training and his personal attention, which he has always given with the utmost kindness, generosity, and patience.
I cannot pretend that editing his writings has been an easy task—not because of a lack of material to include (few people on this planet can be as consistently creative and productive as Richard), but because it has been difficult to know what to leave out.
This is not a definitive book of Richard Bandler’s work. No single book could hope to be that. Rather, it is one of a series of new works written in his own voice to introduce newcomers to Neuro-Linguistic Programming and his endlessly creative development of this and related fields.
In this book, Richard returns to his roots—hypnosis, altered states, trance-work…he declines to call it one thing. From the time he met Milton Erickson nearly forty years ago, he has been deeply interested in how the alignment of conscious and unconscious processes can cure apparently intractable illnesses, remove deep-seated emotional problems, and create shining futures for those prepared to do the work. But he has also been driven to seek the boundaries to what is possible…limits, he says, that he has not yet found.
The principles, processes, techniques, and exercises he writes about here may seem simple, but do not be deceived. They are profoundly effective, and Richard’s ability to teach with apparent simplicity, together with humor and a kind of laid-back energy, conceals highly complex and ambitious underpinnings. With Richard, it’s never “what you see is what you get.” What you get is not only what you get; it’s always far more than you ever noticed him giving or you expected to receive.
The book is divided into three main sections. The first addresses the structure, process, and elicitation of the patterns of human consciousness (how people create their unique worlds and how we can know how someone else is thinking), the second explores altered states and their role in accelerated learning, and the third outlines some of the applications of these principles, processes, and techniques in optimizing human behavior.
The Resource Files at the back of the book are intended mainly for those people not yet conversant with Richard’s work. Rather than slow the narrative with too much background information, the relevant files are flagged in the main body of the work, leaving readers, NLP and hypnosis newcomers, or experienced practitioners to consult them according to their needs.
Unique transcripts of Richard at work with real clients close the book.
I am especially grateful for the help and support Richard has given in so patiently filling in some of the many gaps in my own knowledge; in supporting me in the writing of my own book, Magic in Practice; and in the founding of the Society of Medical NLP, created to promote his approach to healing and health to the medical profession. Already, hundreds of doctors and allied health professionals (and their patients) have benefited from training in Medical NLP.
I hope you enjoy reading Richard Bandler’s Guide to Trance-formation as much as I have editing it.
GARNER THOMSON
IT’S BEEN FOUR DECADES since I started writing my first book, The Structure of Magic, Volume 1. The Structure of Magic was a book about how psychotherapists unconsciously use language.
Since that time, I’ve studied and modeled unconscious behavior, not just of psychotherapists and hypnotists and great communicators, but of experts in sports and many other fields, as well as of people who made profound changes in their lives with or without psychotherapists—people who were great learners, great inventors, great innovators.
My career modeling these people, and developing behavioral technologies aimed at helping people solve problems and achieve goals, has been long and in many cases very successful, even where other “experts” have been unable to help.
This book represents a little of some of the old things that I did, patterns that were in my books, including Trance-formations, Frogs into Princes, and The Structure of Magic. Many of these things, I feel, are still useful. They worked then, and they work now, so I offer them to you in the hope that you can learn from my years of experience.
I want to make clear the very real difference between my work and psychotherapy. People who know me know I always reject the “therapists’ label” for the following reason: most therapists looked for what was wrong and tried to get the client to understand
