This interview took place on Friday 28 July 2000 in Los Angeles USA. The interviewer was Kate Benson from META. During October Dr. Richard Bandler introduced for the first time in Europe his latest work, Neuro Hypnotic Repatterning.

Since this time Dr. Bandler and John LaValle have run the full programme in the UK for 10 years.
Q. What is Neuro Hypnotic Repatterning and how would you describe it?
Richard: Using the Hypnotic process to restructure people at the level of cortical pathways. Most of the problems and things that people do and bad feelings that they have, work automatically but they weren??™t there when they were a baby. These are learned behaviours and when you hypnotically repattern someone what you are basically doing is teaching them not to get to what they don??™t want to get. Archival memory systems always have to have up-datable memory where you put new information in front of old information. So if you teach somebody a new way to respond it makes it so that it is easier because they never get to the bad system. Everything human beings learned will always be there but sometimes what you need to do is make a left turn on the cortical pathways and use a new learning. People should always be relearning things anyway. The older we get the more millions and millions of neural cortical pathways we establish and there are many things that happen automatically, a handshake, kisses, all kinds of stuff, but it also includes people getting angry when it??™s inappropriate or being afraid of things that are not really scary.

After having done NLP which basically is designed to take the way in which somebody learns something and give it to somebody else, Design Human Engineering?„? looks at the limitations of only what humans produce and then artificially creates things which have never been used, as thought processes. All of these things are grounded and started by the fact that we were doing hypnosis so I??™ve come back to doing deep trance and seeing how to get people to respond in a new way. Think of the many things people do, like being afraid or being depressed, a lot of these things create a chemical base in the body, they change what you are doing and to get people before they get in the chemical bath of depression or suddenly getting angry or be afraid to try things or who are overly shy. They have to start being shy at a certain point and if ahead of that you can get them to do something else. This is about using very very deep trance tools to be able to make very pervasive changes across a wide range of behaviour to try and teach people the most important thing, which is to spend more time practicing feeling good than they do feeling bad so becomes a habit.

Q. What would a person who has never done NLP and has never worked with you and has never worked with you and has never done anything else benefit and learn from the NHR?„? processes?

Richard: Well, always over the years what I??™ve tried to do is to make everything easier, quicker and all I??™ve learned the simpler it gets. If you have some NLP background, that??™s fine and if not I??™ve designed the seminars to teach people how to do things without having to learn everything I did and repeat all my mistakes. Even the things I??™ve done that worked well, I??™ve found better ways and quicker ways and easier ways to do them. This is for somebody who doesn??™t want to recapitulate 30 years of trial and error, you know, I started doing Design Human Engineering?„?, because NLP was only extracting the strategies and most of them were based on feeling bad, avoiding something, and when your walking away from things and you walk backwards you are bound to fall into things so I wanted to be able to modify things so that we concentrated on getting people as an instinct to feel good. Because when people feel bad they make bad decisions when they feel good they make much better decisions and the difference between what??™s a good decision and a bad decision and deciding not to make the bad ones is what its all about.

There??™s nothing that is going to be difficult but the only thing is that they have to be somebody who can stand feeling good. A major question will always be how much pleasure can you stand, how much excitement can you stand, how much success can you have? Because if you get yourself in the right state there??™s just about nothing that human beings can??™t do. They climb the highest mountain, they have flown to the moon they have done every thing that was ever supposed to be impossible and things we haven??™t done yet doesn??™t mean that we won??™t. This is about redesigning the way you connect with yourself physically mentally and to some extent spiritually.