My own career in counseling, coaching and consulting began with humanistic psychology and NLP in 1978. Synthesizing some of the most important fields of science in the 1970s, NLP combined neuroscience, linguistics and the logic of software computer programming to create models of how the best therapists helped their clients. The basic idea of finding an example of someone who is an undisputed expert and then learning from that person harkens back the craft tradition of apprenticing under a master. It is a sound approach.

I worked with one of those masters—Virginia Satir—as part of my doctoral dissertation to identify the universals of negotiation.

It was fascinating to create user-oriented, practical models of how to use language to build trust and to help bring about change. I loved learning to know how someone else was thinking based on verbal and non-verbal cues. I enjoyed using what I learned in NLP trainings to help my own clients. I taught NLP methods in numerous NLP trainings, and later, writing, as a way to participate in and contribute to the field of NLP. I describe more details of my involvement with NLP in the Kelly's Quest section of this website.

Today, I continue to use the NLP methods even as I blend them with other methods in my own expanding synthesis of methods for helping my clients. For a summary of these methods see the resources section on this website under Books and Tapes. I recommend the book and tape set called NLP: The New Technology of Achievement which I and my fellow trainers wrote in the 1990s.