Steve Andreas: Studying with an NLP Master

A Weekend with his friend Richard Bolstad

Prerequisite: at least 2 days of NLP Training. This course is not currently scheduled.

Steve Andreas (1935-2018) was my friend and mentor. I stayed at his home, walking around the mountains of Colorado talking about his experiences during the founding of NLP; we went to conferences together and shared a hotel room; and he invited me to train at his training venue in Boulder Colorado. On this weekend as we experience some of his profound contributions to NLP, I want to introduce you to what it was like to be his friend, and to his style of thinking: scientific, sceptical, searching, and very much present in the moment. Steve was a Gestalt trainer, under the name John O. Stevens, before he married Connirae Andreas and adopted her last name. He and Connirae edited most of the early NLP books by Bandler and Grinder, and created structured training manuals for the first NLP Practitioner courses. His later work radically reframed NLP using the concepts of scope and category. He was central to the push to get scientific validation for the NLP Movie Rewind technique, which led to the development of RTM therapy. He also wrote extensively about his overview of NLP, about what to do when a process “doesn’t work”, and about why he didn’t approve of the NLP “hype” that flooded the field partially due to actions by some of the co-developers. Specifically we will practice the following NLP protocols he developed:

• Transforming Troublesome Internal Voices
• Healing from Grief
• Forgiveness Process
• Building a Healthy Self Concept
• Resolving Shame Process