The Sourcebook of Magic - L. Michael Hall & Barbara Belnap

Paperback: 383 pages

3/5

The subtitle of this book is A Comprehensive Guide to NLP Change Patterns, which should make it a pretty valuable book for those studying and applying NLP to changework, should it not?

I bought this book some time ago when I was in the run up to taking my first Practitioner training. I thought that a book that outlined all of the major patterns, step by step would be really useful. I still pick up this book from time to time as a reference - and I mostly put it back down rather quickly before deep irritation sets in. The problem for me is that this book (the patterns section at least) is largely written in questions. And in reading it seems not so much to tell you how to run NLP patterns, but more ask you if you know how to run them! Here is a fine example from the state elicitation 'directions'. This is step 8:

"Do you know how to create and use questions that invite or presuppose the person will go inside and get information or the experience? What "downtime" questions do you have ready? What questions have you noticed are powerfully reliable to send a person inside?"

And that's it! If the reader is able to understand and answer these questions positively, they already know how to do it, if they don't how does this help.

I understand that they are trying to write this in a coaching style, but the problem is (1) this assumes that the reader already has the basic skills in place and just needs a little coaching, and (2) coaching is a live process that relies upon the coach being able to respond to the client (not possible here). For me, the style of this book just doesn't work, which is not to say that there is not some interesting insights embedded amongst the hundreds of potentially irritating questions. To be fair, it is not all questions - just mostly.

Aside from the patterns section (part 2 - the bulk of the book). Part 1 and part 3 are written in a more traditional manner and work fine. Part 1 introduces NLP (suggesting the book is in part pitched at relative beginners), and then goes on to sell Hall's meta-states model (not sure about this in its current form). Part 3 is a high level take on stringing it all together to make the magic happen. These sections are both OK and worth a read, but for me have never been particularly influential.

All this aside, the Amazon reviewers mostly seem to like it!