I had read books on personal development for years and had also already encountered NLP through the books of Anthony Robbins, but I had never attended a live seminar until I traveled to London to see Tad James deliver "The Secret of Creating Your Future".
This was sometime in the early 90s and since I had not heard of Tad James before and just went because I liked the title of the seminar, I had no idea what to expect.
Here is my review in a nutshell:
Seminar: excellent
Trainer: patronising
The seminar was really good and I learned a lot of tools, some of which I still use.
It went like this:
find out about your time line
clear past blocks/limiting decisions
clear past negative feelings
align your values
put good stuff into your future time line
Looking back at the seminar with my current knowledge, the biggest complaint would be that it was a 3-day seminar. I normally teach all those things in maybe half a day, including different applications and methods of using your time line.
My biggest complaint back then was that I and other delegates felt quite unsupported when we had questions or challenges.
And I really hated that the whole course seemed to be a setup for selling us other seminars, books, and tape sets (remember audio tapes? Yes, I am that old!).
As I was so inexperienced, I fell for it and bought some tapes, books and also attended an intro day on Huna, which was just not very good. I trained with several other people in Huna and they would eat Tad James for breakfast.
Oh yes, Tad James, let's see: Back then I did not know better, so thought he must be quite good, but listening to his tapes now and having seen him since, I must say that he is the most patronising NLP/Personal Development trainer I have ever encountered!
He talks down to you. He does not answer questions properly. He is obviously so happy when he uses "clever" language patterns. He is constantly trying to upsell stuff (not as badly as his disciple David Shephard, but it still gets pretty annoying).
I met his son Matthew once at an NLP conference and while he had good rapport skills, he came across as a lightweight.
One last thing about Tad: in 2000 he (well, Matthew actually did it) bought the web domains www.richardbandler.com and www.johngrinder.com and had them forwarded to his own web page. However, he did not know that Grinder and Bandler had their names trademarked and so they had him hand over the sites pretty quickly.
Still, quite a despicable and unethical act, methinks.
Make good decisions!
Update: Here is a very interesting comment by Gerrith Wil Lassen on a LinkedIn Group about Time Line Therapy:
"I think there is some confusion here. Interesting to read the story of Tad and his wife from a Wyatt Woodsmall perspective. He brought Timeline to Hawaii 3 years after the discovery in a Workshop about Metaprograms and Beliefesystems in 1982 with Leslie Cameron in Illinois. There was two students: Anne Linden and Frank Stass who did discover the timeline whilst exploring their Metaprograms In-Time and Trough-Time. They asked all the other students, how they experience time. A idea was born. A year later it was demonstrated by Steve Andreas on the 2th NANLP conference and at the same time Robert Dilts was also working with exploring the timeline on the west coast. They did not know from each other. No Bandler involved at all! In fact Timeline was discussed already intensively in the 20s and 30s by Huserl and Heidegger in Europe.
About 3 years after the workshop in Illinois, Woodsmall started a practitioner group on Hawaii and Tad James and his wife Ardie did participate as students. Tad was immediately fascinated and did explore the Timeline with Marvin Oka and Richard Diehl in a little group, together with Wyatt Woodsmall. Before Internet, nobody had a clue about whats happen in Santa Cruz, in Boulder Colorado or Illinois and Tad seems he was very clever when going to the patent office on Hawaii 5 years after he heart about it and protecting the Timeline on Hawaii. It was never his in first place.
The guy in the office hasn't heart about NLP at all and nothing about what the other groups have explored the last 8 years already. So Tad James got the patent on Hawaii - and only there! It was a lousy chess move by an Practitioner, who did not understand the rules in our field. Ego wins over the Soul from time to time. NLP belongs to those who carefully learn it and using it and comply with the ethical rules and prepositions."
Just another interesting tidbit about Tad's ethics (and excellent business sense!).
Update: Here is a very interesting comment by Gerrith Wil Lassen on a LinkedIn Group about Time Line Therapy:
"I think there is some confusion here. Interesting to read the story of Tad and his wife from a Wyatt Woodsmall perspective. He brought Timeline to Hawaii 3 years after the discovery in a Workshop about Metaprograms and Beliefesystems in 1982 with Leslie Cameron in Illinois. There was two students: Anne Linden and Frank Stass who did discover the timeline whilst exploring their Metaprograms In-Time and Trough-Time. They asked all the other students, how they experience time. A idea was born. A year later it was demonstrated by Steve Andreas on the 2th NANLP conference and at the same time Robert Dilts was also working with exploring the timeline on the west coast. They did not know from each other. No Bandler involved at all! In fact Timeline was discussed already intensively in the 20s and 30s by Huserl and Heidegger in Europe.
About 3 years after the workshop in Illinois, Woodsmall started a practitioner group on Hawaii and Tad James and his wife Ardie did participate as students. Tad was immediately fascinated and did explore the Timeline with Marvin Oka and Richard Diehl in a little group, together with Wyatt Woodsmall. Before Internet, nobody had a clue about whats happen in Santa Cruz, in Boulder Colorado or Illinois and Tad seems he was very clever when going to the patent office on Hawaii 5 years after he heart about it and protecting the Timeline on Hawaii. It was never his in first place.
The guy in the office hasn't heart about NLP at all and nothing about what the other groups have explored the last 8 years already. So Tad James got the patent on Hawaii - and only there! It was a lousy chess move by an Practitioner, who did not understand the rules in our field. Ego wins over the Soul from time to time. NLP belongs to those who carefully learn it and using it and comply with the ethical rules and prepositions."
Just another interesting tidbit about Tad's ethics (and excellent business sense!).
