WOW! What could anyone say about having their work looked at by four fine eyes in the heads of two very capable human researchers? This book is the outcome of the efforts of two intriguing, smart, young men who are interested in finding out how change takes place and in documenting the process.
They seem to have come up with a description of the predictable elements that make change happen in a transaction between two people. Knowing what these elements are makes it possible to use them consciously and, thus, to have useful methods for inducing change.
I often say to people that I have a right to be a slow learner but educable. What this means to me as a therapist is that I have only one thought - to help the people who come to me in pain to make changes in their lives.
How I use my body, my voice, my eyes, my hands, in addition to the words and the way I use words, is my only tool. Since my goal is to make change possible for everyone, every someone offers a new challenge. Looking back
, I see that, although I was aware that change was happening, I was unaware of the specific elements that went into the transaction which made change possible. For years, I wondered what it would be like to be on the other end of me, to view myself working, to view the process of change from the other side.
The authors spent hours looking at video tapes and listening to audio material, and they found patterns emerging which they could document. I do something, I feel it, I see it, my gut responds to it - that is a subjective experience.
When I do it with someone else, their eyes, ears, body sense these things. What Richard Bandler and John Grinder have done is to watch the process of change over a time and to distill from it the patterns of the how process.
What they learned relates particularly, in a sophisticated way, to mathematics, physics, neurology and linguistics.
It would be hard for me to write this Foreword without my own feeling of excitement, amazement and thrill coming through.
I have been a teacher of family therapy for a long time, as well as a clinician and a theoretician. This means that I have seen change taking place in many families, and I have been involved in training many family therapists. I have a theory about how I make change occur.
The knowledge of the process is now considerably advanced by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who can talk in a way that can be concretized and measured about the ingredients of the what that goes into making the how possible.
