"NLP Training provides the stuff you never learn in school about how to function effectively in the world. It gives very concrete and actionable strategies to help you achieve your goals, overcome your limitations, and communicate effectively..."

"NLP training introduces a range of practical skills and tools with tremendously powerful application to one's work life and personal relationships. Thanks, Peter, for your excellent flexibility and accessibility."

"NLP has allowed me to drastically improve the way I communicate with others. Understanding more about my thoughts, patterns, feelings, and choices has been a wonderful and empowering experience. I have more flexibility than I thought possible."

"I learned that just about anything I want to do in life , that is "success" to me, I can. NLP provides the tools, the structure, and the processes to enhance one's opportunities for success."

I am just now completing the nine-month Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Practitioner Certification Course offered by NLP Trainer Peter F. Kean of the NLP Institute of Washington, DC, and his assistant, NLP Master Practitioner Elizabeth Hand. My motivation to take this course revolved around (1) my desire to learn the discipline that made Anthony Robbins so sought after, (2) a desire to apply these NLP skills to the development of my own personal coaching practice, (3) the fact that the training was offered locally, and (4) the reasonableness of the tuition rate. Peter's course lived up to all these expectations quite handily! In fact, I would like to offer you the benefits of my hindsight of this training, by describing it below in terms of a recipe. I am sure that each of you knows that a recipe is nothing more than a set of ingredients and instructions that, when assembled in the right amount, in the right order, using the right utensils and employing the right processes to prepare, will yield something that is delectable to consume. With that in mind, here is how I would describe Peter Kean's course, which I highly recommend to others who are serious about learning the artful practice of NLP:

NLP Practitioner Cake
1 NLP trainer, seasoned with Integrity and Knowledge.
1 assistant NLP trainer, spiced with Knowledge and Enthusiasm.
Students, ripe for learning.
NLP manuals, exercise-laden and fire-tested.

In a cozy classroom coated with Respect, combine trainers and students, mixing slowly with Integrity, Knowledge and Exercises, until ingredients become difficult to distinguish one from another. As the mixing progresses, the ingredients will slowly heat and bond to one another from Trust. Keep stirring the contents, until the texture of Practice becomes smooth and uniform. Add manuals, to leaven the mixture. Cover the classroom from the outside world and allow to stand for weekends at a time. After the mixture rises in Confidence, place in the oven of the Real World and bake on High Experimentation. Remove from oven when turned to Golden Opportunity. Test for firmness of Competency. Coat entire NLP cake with the sweet icing of Certification. Serves many.

"I think that we are all given lessons in a controlled environment for critically important things like driving, flying aircraft, etc. When it comes to our lives, which is the most important thing for all of us, we are thrown in, sink or swim, no lessons, with hundreds of people worse off than we are yelling instructions from the shore. You try a couple of strokes and get a mouthful of water or damn near drown.

"The NLP practitioner course would be likened to four weeks of intensive swimming classes at the YMCA.

"Result:

1. You won't be afraid of the water.
2. You won't drown.
3. You can help others in trouble.
4. You can now enjoy the swim instead of thrashing about.
5. Potential Olympic material? Who knows? It's up to you."

   Charles Anway Consultant. Odenton, MD.

"I have learned that I know more than I ever thought I did. My self-confidence has increased. I believe more strongly in my ideas and the way I want to do things - and without needing to apologize for them. I feel I have refined some of my techniques as a therapist and become more creative in the process. I have come to find that I have more internal resources and am now able to begin the process to actualize my dreams and goals.

"NLP could be the most important synthesis of knowledge about communication to emerge since the sixties."

"NLP may be the most powerful vehicle for change in existence."

"...NLP cannot be dismissed as just another hustle. Its theoretical underpinnings represent an ambitious attempt to codify and synthesize the insights of linguistics, body language, and the study of communication systems."

"(NLP) does offer the potential for making changes without the usual agony that accompanies those phenomena...Thus it affords the opportunity to gain flexibility, creativity, and greater freedom of action than most of now know...."

"Of all the techniques [for healing co-dependency] in this book, I consider NLP to be one of the most powerful..."