Teleconference 5, Marc Carlin interviews Rex Sikes & Jonathan Altfeld

A great introduction to the many facets of building rapport. Jonathan is extremely fluid in his presentation of this subject perfectly pacing the assembled delegates with his relaxed and fun approach to the material. His explanations of rhythm, mismatching, non verbal communication and frames of learning are excellent and its clear from watching that Jonathan has genuine enthusiasm in presenting seminars and is fully aware of how each of the delegates is responding both consciously and unconsciously as well as the dynamics of the group as a whole. As someone who avidly collects all kinds of NLP and hypnosis materials, (in CD, video and DVD formats), what I really liked about this DVD set is that Jonathan breaks the subject down into logical sections, which makes it extremely engaging and memorable for the viewer. His use of metaphors demonstrates someone who is in my opinion a natural presenter and I consider this DVD set invaluable and great value for money for anyone training in NLP, hypnosis or simply interested in improving their communication skills! In fact, I am sufficiently impressed by the quality of this set that I am going to seek out the other DVDs in Jonathan's "Skill-Builders Series".

For me the true value of a course becomes apparent after the session itself. How many times have you been to a training course where you heard some interesting things, promised you would apply them and then found that after a couple of months - despite all your best intentions - most of those great things you had heard were forgotten? Well, this is a course that has made a difference to my every day life. My skill at communication (both listening and sharing) has greatly increased and the fantastic thing is that as a result of this course I am still learning new things every day! So what is different versus other courses? Well firstly Jonathan managed to find a way to make the content of the course really meaningful for me (and the interesting thing is he found a way to achieve this for each one of the course delegates without losing out on the overall aims of the course), and secondly the course provided a number of tools that facilitates ongoing exploration and learning. One example, my brother had a presentation to do and after he shared some of his planned content my husband and I made a number of suggestions and observations based in our learning from the course with Jonathan. My brother asked how we could be so insightful. We explained and immediately my brother decided to sign up for the course.

I recommend Jonathan's NLP Course to anyone who is interested in dramatically improving his or her rapport and communication skills. I am very impressed with Jonathan's quick and practical approach to the questions posed by his students. I have accepted the challenge to continue practicing these skills in the future, and strive to achieve Jonathan's elegance and mastery.

 I used to think modelling was strategy elicitation and from that I could never figure out how people like Richard Bandler so successfully modelled Erickson etc. I thought that maybe it was innate genius or maybe its something they don't teach explicitly now. In this training Jonathan brings his expertise from the domain of Knowledge Engineering (modelling experts and encoding that knowledge in software) together with his expertise in NLP. [...] What I had no idea of how to do before was how to code the information that I elicited. A Knowledge Engineer writes the rules that enable an expert system to make decisions, and while Cyberspace may be an overused word, its interesting to think of having a dataspace to represent the matrix of information you construct to build your model. [...] I recommend this training to those who want to learn how to model the excellence in other people and make it their own.