A META- HIGH-FIVE TO THE CANADIANS

The Canadian Association of NLP is celebrating their 20th year anniversary this year! So for 20 years the Association (CANLP) has been around as a collaborative association for NLP-ers. For 20 years, they have been hosting an annual Conference bringing in leaders in the field of NLP and apparently no other Association anywhere on the planet has been around that long doing that. So a big congratulations to all of the men and women who, over the years, has had the vision, commitment, and persistence to make this possible.

For the first time in many years I returned to the Canadian Conference. The last time I attended was in 1999 or 2000 when Bob Bodenhamer and I attended the CANLP and presented “The Shocking Discovery that Sub-Modalities are not Sub-Modalities at all” which launched the book Sub-Modalities Going Meta. This year I presented the Keynote on Friday morning and then I did do a two day training on “Transformational Coaching.”

What I was really delighted to see and experience was the high quality of people at the Conference. In fact, it is the quality of the people there that gives me tremendous hope and excitement for the future of NLP in Canada and around the world. As a movement, we seem now to have passed on beyond the days when there were so many attracted to NLP as a tool to use for getting their way with others, manipulating, and controlling people—learning NLP to use it for the dark side. What I now see everywhere around the world is a passion to empower people, to contribute to the health and goodness of the world, and to make a positive difference.

I used the Keynote to offer an explicit definition and description of NLP (5 descriptions of what NLP is), and from that I identified the greatness in NLP (5 excellences that are within the NLP model ) that we could unleash. Then finally came five suggestions for how we as a community could release the greatness of NLP. This presentation will soon be posted on the Neuro- Semantics website (www.neurosemantics.com) under “new articles.”

While I thought that my words and ideas might be a bit audacious, I discovered that they were not all that bold at all. As it turned out, what I was saying out-loud, in that context, most everybody had already thought and had already said. For me this highlights the fact that there’s a new generation of NLP people arising and a new spirit of collaboration and professionalism emerging—one that is less self-promoting and more aware of the importance of working together.

In the Keynote I noted that in the United States there is not a single NLP Association left and not a single NLP magazine or journal; that what the Canadians have done in collaborating, working together, keeping things going, holding annual conferences, etc., we Americans have not. It

really is a shame.

For some that was new information and so then came the questions: “Why is that? What explains that?” I got those questions a lot. The answer is that Richard Bandler’s 1996 90- million dollar lawsuit against “the field of NLP” nearly wiped out NLP in the United States. That was the lawsuit that caused hundreds of people running Training Centers to hang-up their NLP Certificates and stop conducting trainings. It triggered many others to simply change the name from NLP to something else. And it caused even more people to make a decision to never use the three-letters of NLP again to define what they do. If Bandler had wanted to sabotage the movement that he had co-created and had hired a crew of strategy experts, they would not have come up with a more excellent process!

What I find sad about it is that some 8 years after the lawsuit ended (which Bandler lost), and after NLP was declared in public domain both in the United States and in the UK, there’s only a handful of very small NLP Training Centers in the States. And yet, just to our north is an Association that continues to pioneer new ways to collaborate and to keep the larger vision alive. Just to the north is a great example of NLP people working together, collaborating, and keeping an Association alive and well for 20 years. What a tremendous example!

So I say a big thanks to out-going president Jean-Stephen Gendron, Steve Whiteley, vice- president (who will be the new president for the next term), and the marketing team of Lise Valcour, Judith Spence, Ariel Garten, and Linda Ferguson as well as former president, Carol Ann Brazier. Elected for the next year is Steve Whiteley and David Kynan (a Meta-Coach) as the next president and vice-president and another Meta-Coach is on the new board: Anne Letourneau.

=========================== Later this month I’ll be back in Canada — this time in Montreal to do two trainings: May 26-28 — The Neuro-Semantics of Health: Unleashing Your Health Potentials May 29-31 — APG: Accessing Personal Genius, introduction to Meta-States

You can get an English or French brochure about the trainings if you write for them.

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