Nine Days (Three 3-Day Weekends)
10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. each day
See Calendar for dates.
Register for Foundations online
Who will benefit from training in miraculous communication skills?
Foundations of Communication and Change (NLP1)
In this course of three 3-day weekends, you will learn the full basic skill set of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Supervised practice supports integrating these powerful tools into your behavior so that they are automatically and naturally available to enhance communication and connection with others and to make life choices previously not available to you. The perceptual and behavioral skills and tools that you will learn have been proven to work wherever people are relating and working together. These skills are being effectively used by:
- Managers, leaders, and trainers: you will learn skills to build and sustain rapport with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Managers will improve their ability to hire and fire, to coach, to motivate, and to give feedback to their teams. Trainers and meeting facilitators will better be able to take charge and hold the attention of the group, regardless of whether group energy is supposed to be sourced from the leadership or from the team. Leaders of all kinds will learn to understand, accept, and respect the internal maps that the others are working from. The complaint, “I just can’t understand how they can be like that!” will disappear from the team space.
- Therapists, counselors, health practitioners, and coaches: you will learn to elegantly, rapidly clarify both the proximate and deep outcomes of your clients and patients. In this skillset, therapists will discover a reliably miraculous method for gaining immediate, respectful access to the deep unconscious content of the client’s experience. Moreover, this skillset allows the practitioner to immediately work with this unconscious material, to quickly revise stuck and dysfunctional patterning, should this be a desirable in the client/practitioner process. (NLP Marin is possibly the only teaching center–NLP or otherwise–that has the expertise and experience to successfully transfer this know-how to our students. Mastery of this material is essentially unavailable elsewhere.) Practitioners of all kinds will learn to work with clients to develop truly compelling motivation toward fulfillment of long-desired dreams and outcomes. Coaches will gain increased skills to assist their clients to articulate meaningful new realities and create congruent shifts towards ultimate outcome-based goals.
- People wanting better personal relationships: all of our students learn everything in this course at least three different ways. You will learn to use these tools, perceptions, and paths toward new action 1) with yourself, 2) with others, 3) by offering support to everyone who participates with you during the learning adventure. You will be learning to experience and revise both your own map of reality and that of many others. This broad, private-but-intimate experience enables everyone to gain new insights into themselves and to grow into a wider and richer wisdom about life and about what makes human beings the way they are. Your new relationship with yourself will give you an increased ability to create safety and intimacy with others.
- Anyone seeking personal change: many of our students join us with the intention to explore and accomplish highly personal change work. Over many years of training experience, we have found that the best way to grow as an individual is to not only have the change patterns and techniques applied to you, but also to stretch yourself and assist others to change. Many of our students come into our courses with the conscious intention to learn to change and better manage others, only to realize–months or years later–that what they learned and did absolutely transformed their own lives as well. At the other side of the spectrum, many students come to us with the voiced intention of working only on themselves, and gradually discover that the experience of being in the “practitioner chair,” thus making themselves available to help someone else, is the most valuable and powerful component of creating growth and change in themselves.
Marin-style NLP emphasizes learning to accept and respect what is and what has already been. We honor you as you are, and we invite you to learn to do that for yourself as well. And then we ask, “OK, regarding those goals and dreams of yours, what would you like?” Then we get to work. The work is part of a lot of fun, mostly, and we do spend a lot of time laughing. It’s amazing how well and quickly it all works.
What’s included in the Foundations of Communication and Change curriculum?
NLP Marin classes are completely experiential. Our class time is usually about 25% lecture and other highly interactive presentations, about 25% live demonstration of the material being covered, and at least 50% “live-in-person” practice with fellow students. (To be blunt, the idea of “online NLP certification training” is laughable. One might as well take online classes in downhill skiing. If one wants to actually ski, rather than just to know something about skiing, then reading or listening to information about skiing will obviously not be sufficient.) Our training weekends are designed to transfer information and to allow that information to transform itself into elegant and powerful behavioral know-how. Each weekend includes–actually, each weekend emphasizes–lots and lots of practice with people. Our training weekends are organized to work. We are unique in that we also provide multiple study group sessions, every week, conducted by our Training Assistants, at many locations around the San Francisco Bay Area. Practice, practice, practice leads to an exceptional level of integration and implementation.
First weekend: In this weekend we discover the core presuppositions of NLP, explore and integrate the basics of brain-based rapport skills (the art of allowing ourselves to be perceived as the useful, helpful, trustable people that we really are), learn how to usefully and reliably interpret non-verbal and body signaling, and also learn a variety of remarkable language-based skills that allow us to tune our words for maximum respect and positive impact. We will learn how to join others in their accomplishing their dreams, and how to irresistibly invite them to join us in ours fulfilling ours. The result is a remarkable set of powerful tools for communication and connection that pave the way for the amazing change patterns that come in Weekend 2. (listen to audio excerpt)
Second weekend: In this weekend we learn a powerful set of new language tools to open up our understanding of our deepest dreams and goals. We will then proceed immediately to acquire amazing new tools for change–tools that allow us to direct our brains to change themselves, so that we move naturally and respectfully toward the fulfillment of our goals and dreams. Of course, in the process of acquiring these new change capabilities we also learn to make them available to others. One of our most important themes at NLP Marin is “respectful change for self and others.”
Third weekend: During this weekend we reveal and integrate heretofore unknown aspects of brain magic that make it easy to change even lifelong behavior patterns. We practice creating and changing the meaning within and behind all of our important life experiences. We conclude the course with some magical methods for stepping into the experience of others and understanding the true intention behind our every action with them.
Logistics
Location: Our classes are held at the Best Western Novato Oaks Inn on Freeway 101 in Marin County, California. The hotel is approximately 20 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge (click for directions).
Training Assistants: Assistants are selected from amongst our graduates who have achieved a high level of integration. We have a ratio of at least 5 students to 1 TA or better. So that there is almost always someone observing an exercise who can give feedback.
Each weekend will begin at 10:00 am on Friday. Class runs from 10am-6pm with a lunch break from approximately 1-2:30 (the time frame is sometimes a little later or earlier depending on the flow of the day). Students are expected to bring their own lunch or go out to a local restaurant. Coffee, Tea, and Hot and Cold Water are provided.