“if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit”-anon If one may be permitted a brief advertorial before getting to the main point, might it be suggested that, regardless of how one feels about the phenomenon in toto, Anthony Robbins’ instructional audiotape from the Powertalk series, “References”, available at amazon dot com, is a not bad piece of work devoted to opening up the mind to new, hopefully paradigm massaging, experience.  Would that the Tony-bots take his highness’ message to heart. From my somewhat biased perspective, a quality training is one where the participants emerge less bot-like than when they arrived. The EST trainings that I attended contemporaneously with much of the NLP doings of that time did in fact generate useful, interesting outcomes with certain personalities, however there was a marked tendency to go Werner-bot… as in there was never a nominalization they didn’t fall in love with… Werner had been known to admonish his trainers, recreate ME ! Modeling run amok, I tell you. Good trainings, whatever they are, liberate us from the loopiness of bot-dom. As in increase the available palette of choices… more colors, more shades between the colors, more music, more flavors, more vestibular sensations. What this quality thing when your terms shift from instrumental values to terminal values ? Ontological sensuousness ? Enough arm waving… also contemporaneously with John Grinder I was fortunate to study with Dave Dobson, who holds forth on his island in Puget Sound. Dobson, for some esoteric reason, is deleted from too many discussions of the who’s who of NLP genealogies, a damned shame as in my experience Dobson’s work was exquisitely synergistic with John Grinder’s…. underline *synergistic*, there are significant contrasts between D.D. and J.G.  If Grinder thinks in terms of trance states, Dobson thinks in terms of congruity. I couldn’t tell you exactly what he did, but I do know that well after his seminar, it was virtually impossible to watch television or movie acting as the incongruities were so blatantly flamingly obvious. This was a decade ago, Dobson is an older man now, he won’t be with us forever. For those who wish to have a grounding in the work of the first generation masters, I would make a concerted effort to see Dave while he is active. My one disclaimer: People do change. Some of us age like wine and some of us age like cheese. When I attended his “funshop” (he gets his reframing in from the get-go) he was recovering from a near fatal bout of pneumonia, and could demonstrate an outrageous ballsiness I have never witnessed from another other trainer extant, R. Bandler inclusive. I made one of my life long friendships with a girl I met there, and to this day I wonder how much D.D. had to do with that. As for what he’s doing now, how his thinking and his work has evolved, and how his audience has grown or changed over time, I cannot say…. http://www.otcc.com/