Landsiedel NLP Training → NLP → Frank Pucelik
In our treatise on the history of NLP you will learn the most important facts about the NLP founders and their successors. What Richard Bandler and John Grinder started with the support of others has led to a wave of enthusiastic NLP followers. More people than ever before can be trained in NLP.
Table of contents
The original form of today's NLP was created in the early seventies. Richard Bandler, who was a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz at the time, met John Grinder, assistant professor of linguistics. Grinder, who was particularly interested in advanced teaching methods, very quickly became aware of Bandler's work and conducted a series of courses in consultation with him. Initially, these courses had more the status of group experiments. But as Bandler and Grinder's experience and knowledge increased, the participants experienced more and more exciting change processes. This led to a collaboration between Bandler and Grinder that grew closer and deeper over the years. Together they investigated the question of why some well-known psychotherapists had so much success in their work with their patients and on what this success was based. While at the same time many others, who treated the same patients with the same disorders, did not succeed in bringing about such dramatic changes. Bandler and Grinder's initial hypothesis was that they assumed that successful psychotherapists had a common or similar pattern of behaviour in their work with people, which enabled them to achieve such excellent results. These common or similar patterns of behaviour have become known today as NLP or the structure of magic. So they began to study and analyse the forms of therapy of the top therapists of that time:
They were always guided by the hope of discovering patterns and structures that could explain the success of these top therapists in dealing with their clients. After long and careful observation, Grinder and Bandler, despite the differences between the three successful psychotherapists, discovered that they used surprisingly similar basic patterns in their work with other people. Grinder and Bandler recorded these basic patterns in writing, refined them, tried them out in their courses with other students who agreed to do so, and finally developed an elegant model that could be used to achieve more effective communication, accelerated learning, personal change, and to experience more pleasure and joy in life.
They called it NLP - Neurolinguistic Programming.
From this approach NLP developed in two complementary directions:
Many years later, Frank Pucelik emerged from obscurity as the third co-founder.
In the spring of 1972, driven by the lack of practical relevance of his studies, Bandler himself offered a seminar on Gestalt therapy. At that time this was possible for students in an advanced semester. He was particularly interested in researching the therapeutic effects of Gestalt work in a group and in developing his theoretical competence in practice. During these courses John Grinder became aware of Bandler's work and joined him and his research. From then on both worked together on Bandler's courses, with John Grinder being a newcomer to the field of counselling and psychotherapy. Between 1972 and 1974 an intensive and fruitful collaboration took place, with Grinder benefiting from Bandler's knowledge of psychotherapy and Bandler from Grinder's knowledge of linguistics. This combination was particularly valuable in modelling the therapeutic brilliance of Virginia Satir, Friedrich Perls and the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. In modelling, specific skills of a person are made learnable and usable for others through systematic and precise observation and questioning. Patterns and rules were derived so that the skills of interest could be imitated by third parties. Bandler and Grinder was not primarily concerned with describing something true, but with making something useful for others to learn. As confirmation of the success of their analyses and observations of Satir and Perls they saw the confirmation that they could produce the same results in other people as the person they had modelled. In early 1974, both began to develop the first meta-model structures with a group of students held in a squatted house on Mission Street in Santa Cruz. The meta-model is, in simple terms, a model of very specific questions that can be used to uncover thought patterns and obtain profound information. The starting point for research in the Meta-Model groups was the consideration that verbal exchange between therapist and client is a central characteristic of all therapeutic change work. Consequently, it was to be assumed that in the verbal communication of Friedrich Perls and Virginia Satir specific speech patterns would crystallize and could be cemented, making the problematic processes conscious and inducing changes. Through the linguistic background knowledge of John Grinder, both researchers succeeded in creating starting points for a model that enabled the targeted collection of information about the imaginary world of a person. They modelled the essential linguistic skills of Perls and Satir and managed to describe these structures explicitly and thus to be able to pass them on. From the end of 1974 onwards, Bandler and Grinder regularly participated in teaching courses by the hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson. Again with the primary aim of studying Erickson's work with people and to address his speech patterns and behaviour. The results were refined, as in Satir and Perls, recorded in writing, tested in student groups for their applicability and integrated into the existing body of knowledge. In 1974 and 1975 the aim of the group work was to develop further formal models for communication. Since, in addition to language behaviour, the non-verbal behaviour of Perls, Satir and Erickson seemed to contribute significantly to the therapeutic effect achieved, the effective non-verbal elements were then primarily analysed and attempted to present. The resulting models were later used not only for psychotherapy but also for everyday communication. Different types of procedures were applied and newly conceived, which, in addition to the methods of Perls and Satir, led to the current form of NLP. Bandler and Grinder documented their first discoveries in the four books published between 1975 and 1977. These were:
In 1977 Grinder and Bandler held their first public courses in the USA. The courses quickly met with great approval. In the following years NLP became more and more popular and is now used worldwide, especially in the fields of therapy, education and management. In 1982 Bandler and Grinder developed the concept of reframing. It shows how one can contact unconscious parts that are the cause of undesired behaviour or symptoms of illness. In this way, changes became possible that were previously only conceivable under classical hypnosis. In 1984, the concept of submodalities was invented, making it one of the most effective and impressive techniques of NLP. The submodalities represent a quasi programming language of the brain, which every person can use consciously, if he knows the commands. Humans absorb information with their five senses, process and store it internally as events and thoughts, which are represented within their senses - the so-called modalities. These modalities can in turn be specified more precisely and thus it is possible to inquire more precisely about the inner image of a past experience. What is special about this method is that it takes advantage of the fact that the human brain not only reacts to WHAT we think, but also to HOW a person thinks, e.g. rather in colour pictures or in black and white pictures. In 1988 Tad James developed the Time Line Therapy (Timeline). This is a method that is particularly suitable for the gentle healing of traumatic experiences in the past. With the help of the timeline, unconscious or repressed traumas that are the cause of physical or emotional problems can be found and mentally processed. In 1990 Robert Dilts developed Reimprinting, a process for changing limiting beliefs and convictions that have arisen from the relationship structures of our childhood. An imprint is a powerful past experience from which the person has formed a belief or set of beliefs that are effective in his or her world. Such imprinting usually also involves an unconscious assumption of roles by other important people involved. The purpose of re-imprinting is to find the missing resources, to change the belief system and to adapt the role model developed there to the real and acute circumstances of the person concerned. Contrary to public opinion, however, Grinder and Bandler did not develop NLP alone. There is a third comrade-in-arms who, after thirty years of silence, has now come out into the open: Frank Pucelik.
Richard Bandler was born in 1950 in the state of New Jersey. In the mid-60s he joined the hippie movement and was one of the long-haired flower children. In 1967, in his spare time, he helped organize rock concerts and gave drum lessons to Dan Spitzer, the son of Robert Spitzer, a renowned psychiatrist and president of the publishing house "Science & Behavior Books". Through these music lessons he often came into conversation with Mrs Spitzer and she discovered that Richard Bandler was very open to all philosophical questions and that he had a special way of teaching her son to play the piano. Over time, the Spitzers tried to develop Richard Bandler's talents further, as they saw in him a multi-talented and exceptionally skilful young man. Robert Spitzer employed him a while later in his publishing house and taught him various publishing activities. After college, Richard Bandler began studying philosophy, mathematics and computer science at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Over time, however, Bandler's interest in the behavioural sciences and its study became increasingly important in addition to these subjects. He paid special attention to the therapy methods of Friedrich Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy. One day in Reno he met the successful family therapist Virginia Satir at one of her workshops and was very enthusiastic about her work. Through sharing his experiences with Virginia Satir, Robert Spitzer asked him to travel to Canada on behalf of his publisher to record and transcribe a four-week seminar with Virginia Satir. While Bandler accepted this commission and spent the following months working intensively on Satir's work, he miraculously adopted more and more of Virginia Satir's expression and choice of words. Shortly after Bandler edited and transcribed the material of Virginia Satir, Robert Spitzer asked him to edit the material of Friedrich Perls, the well-known Gestalt therapist, and to draft a manuscript. As with Virginia Satir, Bandler worked intensively on the extensive material of Perls and began to imitate again the way of speaking and even the behaviour. It is reported that Spitzer once even addressed Bandler with "Fritz" by mistake, because he simply behaved too similar to him. However, Fritz Perls then inspired Bandler so much that he had three books published with the material he had obtained. The titles of the books were:
John Thomas Grinder was born on 10 January 1939 in Michigan, USA. He studied at the University of San Francisco and graduated in philosophy in the early 1960s. He then joined the military and served as a Green Beret in Europe. After working for several years as an undercover agent for the CIA, he began his linguistics studies at the University of California in San Diego in the late 1960s. In 1972 he became Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Santa Cruz. As John Grinder was interested in advanced learning methods, he became a supervisor for Richard Bandler's Gestalt therapy courses. In order to further expand the newly discovered field of NLP, he continued to develop new patterns in the mid-1970s. The result was in the middle of the 80s the present model of NLP. Grinder has now written 14 books on NLP and many more on linguistics. His work has been significantly influenced by his mentor Gregory Bateson. Bateson was also the one who put John Grinder and Richard Bandler in touch with the hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson.
Robert Frank Pucelik was born in 1945 in the US state of Nebraska. Fighting, violence and an alcoholic father gave him a difficult childhood. Even as a young man he felt that he was on the losing side of life. After graduating from high school, he studied psychology and political science, but had to leave college after three years due to poor performance. To avoid forced recruitment, Pucelik volunteered for service in the U.S. Navy. There he received medical training and worked as a field medic. In 1966, he found himself ill-prepared as a marksman in the Vietnam War and described this period as "13 months in hell". After the war he returned to the United States severely traumatised and resumed his studies. In order to come to terms with his trauma, he began to deal with personality development, especially with the Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls. He now achieved top results in his studies and was socially committed. During this time Pucelik also met Judith Ann DeLozier. The two fell in love and got married. In June 1970 their son Eric was born. A year later the family moved to Santa Cruz and the two students continued their studies at the highly esteemed Kresge College of the University of California. There, too, Pucelik became socially involved in the student crisis intervention centre and he began leading Gestalt therapy groups, as he found this approach to crisis work enormously helpful. Richard Bandler, who knew nothing about Pucelik's groups, decided to lead Gestalt therapy groups at Kresge College himself and quickly gained attention. Pucelik realised that Bandler was a highly talented Gestalt trainer and a successful collaboration quickly developed. They offered joint groups and later developed the "Meta" project together with John Grinder. The joint project began to explode under the hands of Grinder, Bandler and Pucelik and they realised that they had discovered something groundbreaking. Initially Pucelik was Bandler's partner, but he began to spend more and more time with Grinder. "It was still the three of us," Pucelik said, "I just had a different role. I became the organiser, the middleman, the guinea pig, the confidant. For a while, I was the observer from the third position that they could use to check their own thoughts and patterns. I was able to give them feedback and tell them what I thought, what worked and what didn't." In 1973 Pucelik's marriage to his wife Judith ended. A little later she became John Grinder's partner. But that was not all. Pucelik met Leslie Cameron and they became a couple. But only three years later, in 1976, after Bandler had invited Pucelik's partner Leslie to accompany him, Grinder, Judith DeLozier and their son Eric on one of their study visits to Milton H. Erickson, the big break came. When the group returned, Leslie Pucelik opened the door to his surprise that she would be breaking up with him. She now wanted to be with Bandler. A few days later Pucelik met with Bandler. He bluntly asked him to leave. Pucelik, who found himself back on the losing side of life, suddenly lost his partner, his research team, his job, his friends and his source of income. Nevertheless, in the same year he completed his Bachelor's degree in psychology and one year later founded the "Meta Institute" in San Diego. He also completed his Master's degree in Psychology and Organizational Consulting, held a professorship at Oklahoma University in Norman and expanded the institute founded in San Diego to become "Meta International, Inc. In 1987 he made Russian contacts, moved to Moscow and began an international career as a management consultant. Today he lives as president of the "Pucelik Consulting Group" in Odessa, Ukraine. With Bandler's expulsion, Pucelik's contribution to the development of NLP was also erased. Bandler and Grinder also increasingly went their separate ways from the meta-group and it began to dissolve. From a purely legal point of view, however, the term belonged to the group. So Bandler and Grinder decided to call it "Neurolinguistic Programming" (NLP) in the future. Bandler began to claim sole authorship of NLP from the beginning of the 1990s. He tried to legally enforce this in two court cases. But his efforts failed. John Grinder and Frank Pucelik still have a personal friendship. In a later interview, Grinder emphasises: "None of us could have created NLP on our own. It was a real joint effort of three people."
Virginia Satir was born in 1916 on a farm in the state of Wisconsin/USA. After graduating from high school and college she worked as a teacher for six years, gaining insights into the special situation of children from different backgrounds. In addition to her teaching, she studied social work and at the same time underwent psycho-analytical training. By opening her own practice and involving the family in her therapeutic work, she became very well known within a few years, as her way of treatment by or within the family was considered revolutionary. The success of her method proved her right and she was offered a training course for psychiatric doctors, which she followed from 1955 to 1958, while working in parallel in her now two practices. In 1977, Virginia Satir founded the "Avanta Network" to bring together people who had received extensive training with her and shared her values. On September 10th, Virginia Satir died of jaundice at the age of 72 years.
Friedrich Salomon Perls was born on 8 June 1893 in Berlin as the third child. His strict Jewish upbringing and his father's authoritarian behaviour shaped his rebellious attitude and he was soon considered difficult to bring up. Friedrich Perls was a gifted pupil with excellent grades. He began his medical studies in 1914, went to the First World War in 1916, completed his studies with a doctorate in 1921 and opened his own practice as a psychiatrist and neurologist. In 1933 Perls had to leave Germany after the National Socialists seized power. First he went to Amsterdam with his wife and daughter Renate. 1934 they emigrated to South Africa, where he was offered a job as a training analyst accepted. Following the resignation of the Prime Minister Jan Smuts the family to America. There Perls opened after an initial Difficulties a practice. From 1948 to 1950 Perls worked together with Paul Goodman on the development of Gestalt therapy, his book was published in 1951. In 1969, Perls founded a company at Lake Cowichan in Canada a gestalt kibbutz, which was to enable continuous growth. During a trip to Europe in the winter of 1969, Perls became surprisingly ill and died during a trip to Chicago in March 1970.
Milton H. Erickson was born in Nevada/USA in 1901. He suffered from severe physical impairments since his birth. He was colour-blind, suffered from tone deafness and was dyslexic. In 1919 Erickson graduated from high school and fell ill with polio. He fell into a coma and when he woke up he was completely paralysed and had lost all his physical awareness. After therapy and constant training for minimal exercise, Erickson's condition improved again and after a few years he was able to walk again and attend college. In the second year of his studies he came into contact with the technique of hypnosis and from there he began to hypnotize people himself. After his studies he became head psychiatrist of the research department of the Worchester State Hospital. In 1947 Erickson developed a severe allergy to pollen and was again plagued by severe muscle pain and several breakdowns. The pollen allergy eventually required him to move to Phoenix, Arizona, where he opened his own practice. In 1953 he fell ill again with polio and now suffered from recurrent attacks of the disease. In 1957 he founded the American Society of Clinical Psychology and initiated the journal "The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis". Besides co-authoring five books, Erickson is the author of 130 essays. After many years of suffering he died in March 1980. Today he is considered the most important hypnotherapist of the last century.
Gregory Bateson had given many interdisciplinary impulses in the course of his life and was thus one of the most important personalities of the 20th century. His findings integrated the systems-theoretical approach of cybernetics into the human sciences and provided a basis for systemic work in psychotherapeutic practice. His works, however, are often not given enough attention, as they are unconventional, complex and transdisciplinary in terms of both language and content. He was born in Grantchester, Great Britain, in 1904 to an upper middle-class family. His family background (his father William Bateson was a famous zoologist) and the proximity of the university town of Cambridge led the young Gregory to study zoology at Cambridge University. However, after his trip to the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin was doing research at the time, he returned to England in 1925 to begin studying anthropology. Two years after beginning his study of anthropology, he travelled to New Guinea to conduct field research with the Baining and then with the Sulka, which was to become the basis of his anthropological thesis in 1930. Bateson was bored by the formal requirements of ethnographic research at the time, so this research stay was frustrating. In 1932, during his second research trip to the Iatmul in New Guinea, he met the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who made him aware of the differences between the sexes. However, instead of devoting himself to typologising the differences between the sexes, Bateson preferred to focus on the creation of the gender stereotypes he observed among the Iatmul. This gave rise to his concept of "schismogenesis", which was intended to explain how these cultural ideals were created and reproduced. According to this, it is not the innate characteristics of character that affect individual behaviour, but mainly the cumulative human interactions and relationship dynamics that influence each other. This concept also influenced his ideas about the development of diseases. If character traits are not innate, psychological problems cannot be due to internal causes. Therefore, the causes of illness must be sought in human interactions. After his return to England in 1933, Bateson began to systematically analyse his ethnographic research results and search for patterns of human interaction. In doing so he made an attempt to create a transcultural, universal theory of personality-forming interaction patterns, which culminated in the publication of "Naven" in 1936. In 1936 he went to Bali together with Margaret Mead, whom he had married the year before, where they studied the socialisation processes of the Balinese in particular in a detailed ethnographic study. Surprisingly, they found that Balinese, in contrast to the Iatmul, do not exhibit cumulative patterns of interaction which, according to the concept of schismogenesis, should be decisive for the process-based formation of personality structures. The Balinese everyday life did not know cumulative emotional, rhetorical or musical patterns. The harmoniously living Balinese avoided any form of climax that could endanger the stability of everyday life. Mead and Bateson attributed this to socialisation measures. According to them, cumulative tendencies, which they still considered universal, were discouraged from the very beginning and generally devalued. In the early 1940s, after the publication of "Balinese Character", Bateson, now in New York, was mainly concerned with social learning processes and communication. He was particularly interested in the question of how ideologies arise at the individual and social level and how they are learned and reproduced. His attention increasingly turned away from ethnographic research and towards learning theories of behavioural science. Thus, he dealt with Pavlov's theory of conditioning or Skinner's theory of positive and negative amplifiers in the process of conditioning. However, Bateson criticised the approach of these researchers, who often focused on individual, learned behavioural patterns. He stressed that learning processes are also cumulative. So over time, you not only learn the new behaviour pattern - you also learn to learn. These considerations resulted in Bateson's distinction between "proto-learning" and "deutero-learning". Preuto-learning refers to the learning of simple behavioural patterns, whereas deutero-learning leads to the development of patterns of perception, feeling and thinking and in turn has an effect on proto-learning and thus has a self-confirming character. Bateson's examination of circular learning processes subsequently led him to cybernetics. Cybernetics came into being in the middle of the 20th century, when the mathematician Norbert Wiener compared the mechanical feedback loop of airguns with the human nervous system. This feedback process leads to the evaluation of the effects of automatic actions, whereupon future behaviour is corrected - in other words, a learning process takes place within the system (with an exchange of information also taking place between systems). A series of transdisciplinary congresses were held in succession, to which Gregory Bateson was also invited. It is mainly thanks to him that the system-oriented concepts of cybernetics have found their way into the human sciences, but especially into psychiatry. From a systemic perspective, psychopathological phenomena become processes rather than objects in their own right. Consequently, it becomes irrelevant what has triggered these processes; it is more meaningful to ask how they are restructured - an aspect that has now been applied in psychotherapeutic practice. However, Bateson could not say how exactly this perception of reality is changed and introduced into the system so that the subsequent information processing can be re-regulated. This project was taken up in the 1970s by Bandler and Grinder. After separating from Margaret Mead, Bateson went to San Francisco where he became a member of the Palo Alto Group. During this time, his collaboration with the psychiatrist Jürgen Ruesch came about. Bateson and Ruesch tried to establish a general theory of human communication and to explain psychiatric phenomena systemically from a cybernetic point of view. The concept of "double-bind", which Bateson considered to be the cause of schizophrenic phenomena, became particularly influential in this context. According to this, schizophrenics are not able to move on the communicative meta-level, i.e. to decipher the meanings of verbal and non-verbal messages depending on the context. Bateson attributed this to the fact that contradictory statements were repeatedly made in their family environment, the interpretation of which always had negative consequences - hence the "double-bind" term. In this way, psychopathological phenomena are attributed to communicative disorders within the family. In psychotherapeutic work, these double-bind relationships could now be restructured, but at that time there was a lack of concrete strategies for systematically recording the change work. When the Mental Research Institute (MSI) in Palo Alto was founded in 1958 by Jackson, Jules Riskin and Virgina Satir for this purpose, Bateson initially remained involved in his advisory capacity. In 1963, however, he retired and turned to dolphin research. He spent a year observing communication between dolphins on St. Thomas Island near Puerto Rico and later on Hawaii until 1967. Influenced by the ecological and political crisis of the 1960s, Bateson was involved in the planning of a congress in 1967 that was to deal with the influence of human thinking habits on the environment. He wanted to draw attention to the dangers of interaction within and between systems if no self-correction takes place, which can result in planetary disasters. Although he did not have much influence on ecological awareness at the time, this changed a few years later when he became an icon of the ecology and New Age movement in California rather involuntarily. From 1972 he taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz, where he met John Grinder and then Richard Bandler. It was through Bateson that they became aware of Milton H. Erickson, whose therapeutic work inspired the observations of Grinder and Bandler, which soon became the basis of NLP. During the last years of his life he was occupied with the attempt of a synthesis of cybernetics and evolution, which led him back to his beginnings in zoology. Bateson died of lung cancer in 1980. This ended the life of one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century.
Robert Brian Dilts was born in the United States on 21 March 1955. He received his degree in Behavioral Technology from the University of California, and in 1977 he was awarded a Presidential Underground Fellowship to study eye movement in relation to brain function. He is active in the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) as an English language book author, trainer and NLP consultant. Robert Dilts further developed NLP, which was founded by John Grinder and Richard Bandler, and has played a significant role in the spread of NLP. Dilts is best known for his development of the neurological levels. Today, this model is trained in almost all NLP-Practitioner trainings worldwide. Although the name has led to repeated discussions, the usefulness and effectiveness of this model has been confirmed a thousand times over. Furthermore, it has made an excellent name for itself through various modelling projects. Among other things, he examined the creativity strategy of Walt-Disney and Albert Einstein and developed the strategies of the same name. Robert Dilts has been a trainer since 1975. His (co-)developed models are:
Robert Dilts is recognised as an international developer, trainer and practitioner. He has coached and advised many different professions worldwide. From 1979-1981, Robert Dilts was appointed Vice President and Director of Research for the Education and Research Department in NLP. Here, together with Leslie Cameron-Bandler-Lebeau, David Gordon, and Maribeth Meyers-Anderson, he was responsible for creating the curricula and testing procedures for the first NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification programs. In 1981 Robert Dilts developed NLP concepts that were important for training, further education and personal development. He invented several programmes where special attention is paid to spelling and other strategies. In 1982 the NLP co-inventor was involved in the foundation of the Dynamic Learning Center. In 1991 the NLP University was founded by him, Judith DeLozier and Theresa Epstein. Furthermore, the three Dynamic Learning publications and the Academy for Behavioural Technology were founded. In 1994 Robert Dilts founded the Institute for Advanced Studies of Health (IASH) with Tim Hallbom and Suzi Smith. Here the research and dissemination for the use of NLP methods in the field of health takes place. In addition, other health certification trainings are also held here, which means that certified NLP doctors are also available. Robert Dilts is also the co-founder of the Biofeedback device, which could also be called NeuroLink. This can be used to record and monitor heart rate, body temperature and the difference between the left and right side of the body. He tried to measure the activities of the nervous system with artificial intelligence and use NLP methods. In this way he helped people to achieve an optimal state of health and to increase learning and personal performance.
Over the years, the first NLP methods have been refined to the form in which they are trained and used today. Especially in the last few years NLP has been discovered more and more for the current economic processes and has been increasingly learned and applied in practice by business people in the fields of marketing, sales, personnel and employee training, leadership and organisation. Due to the increasing demand for NLP training, more and more people are training in this sector and passing on what they have learned to others. In this way, NLP will probably be further refined and improved in the coming years.
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