Lost At Sea by Ronson Jon

Author:Ronson, Jon [Ronson, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781447236764
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2012-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

The Sociopath Mind Guru and the TV Hypnotist

It is a Friday in April and you’d think some evangelical faith-healing show was occurring in the big brown conference room of the Ibis Hotel in Earls Court, West London. The music is pumping and the six hundred delegates are ecstatic. And it’s true that there are lots of damaged people here who’ve come to be healed. But this is no faith-healing show. The speakers are atheists. And the audience is full of people from British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, British Gas, BT, BUPA, Dixons, the Department of Work and Pensions, Ladbrokes and Transport for London. These people have come to learn how to be better in the workplace. Now the audience jumps, cheering, to its feet. I look behind me. And I see him passing through the crowd looking like Don Corleone, square-jawed and inscrutable: Richard Bandler.

Of all the gurus who thrived during the Californian New Age gold rush of the 1970s, Bandler nowadays has by far the biggest influence, on millions of people, most of whom know nothing about him or his extraordinary past. These days nobody bothers much with naked hot-tub encounter sessions, or primal screaming, or whatever. But Bandler’s invention – NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) – is everywhere.

The training manual we delegates have been handed describes NLP as ‘a methodology based on the presupposition that all behaviour has a structure that can be modelled, learned, taught, and changed.’

The rest of the manual is a confusing mix of psychobabble and diagrams marked ‘submodalities’ and ‘kinesthetics’, etc. But from what I can gather, NLP is a way of ‘re-patterning’ the human brain to turn us into super-beings – confident, nonphobic, thin super-beings who can sell coals to Newcastle and know what people are thinking just by their eye movements. It is the theory that we are computers and can be reprogrammed as easily as computers can. You were abused as a child? That makes you a badly programmed computer who needs a spot of instant reprogramming. Forget therapy: just turn off the bit of the brain that remembers the abuse. You aren’t selling enough houses? NLP can instantly reprogram you to become a great salesperson, or public speaker, or whatever. NLP teaches that – like computers – we are a tapestry of telltale visual and auditory clues to what’s going on inside our brains. Our winks, our tics, our seemingly insignificant choice of words – it is all a map of our innermost desires and doubts. It is the secret language of the subconscious. NLP can teach the salesperson how to read that map and act accordingly.

Some people hail the way NLP has seeped into training programmes in businesses across the world. Other people say terrible things about NLP. They say it is a cult invented by a crazy man.

I first heard of Richard Bandler, NLP’s inventor (he actually co-invented the technique, with the linguistics professor John Grinder), in 2002 when a former US Special Forces soldier told me he’d watched him, two

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