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Will Mac Donald and Richard Bandler
Review by Patrick Baron

Target audience: mainly for practitioner and above, but someone new to nlp could read it and be inspired by what nlp can do. It would also be a useful read for someone, like a psychologist, who would not think that nlp provides anything new. It is the most specific aspect of nlp and the magic of change.

Summary of content: this book is about submodalities - explanations and exercises. It uses a transcript of a seminar on submodalities by Bandler. But it is not as close to a transcript as frogs into princes is. Will MacDonald edited and he wrote about his own experience of the subject. People who don't like Bandler's style would be pleased with the tone of this book.

It starts with contrastive analysis of submodalities between 2 states, like confusion and understanding and then go on to how to make permanent changes.

Recommended features: for a trainer, this is a perfect book to review before presenting a technique which includes submodalities. It is also a very good manual for people who practise nlp in a group. It starts with explanations, then clear instructions for exercise, and debrief on what happened during the exercise.

Personal impressions: it is very concise. The first 3 pages are a good introduction to nlp from the perspective of submodalities and on how to work with another person during an exercise (the first piece of nlp methodology is to find out if the person you are working with did what you asked. How many times when you have asked someone to go inside have they gone in and done the wrong thing because they either jumped to conclusions or your instructions were inexact? When you are directing your own brain or when you are changing someone else's, you have to get rid of as much metaphorical description as possible. Brains are literal. To operate on this level means that you go down to the most basic components of brain processing. From what we know at this point, those basic components are the sub-modalities. In this exercise, you will begin to notice that it takes a very small incremental shift in the structure of subjectivity to be able to make a change. Beginning to do this slowly and methodically is also the process by which you will sort out the sub-modalities and begin to understand how to make transitions in your own brain…)

It gives a clear explanation of techniques like the phobia cure and of the swish, at the level of principles to do the technique and of what happens in experience. Especially why change would be permanent.

Patrick Baron
September 2004