One of my favorite stories is about a guy we used to have here on the island. I haven’t seen him for several years now. In the heat of summer, he would be wearing one of those old, thick, World War I army greatcoats. If you were downwind, you could smell him thirty feet away.

He had a little twitch and one day I accosted him and asked “Why do you do that?”.

He said “Simple, it protects me.” I said, “How does it protect you?”

He said, “Keeps the elephants off the island”. I said, “There aren’t any elephants on the island”.

He said “See, it works.”

I anchored a butterfly. I know that sounds strange. Auditory anchors work.

I named the butterfly Ralph. He stayed around for four months. I could call him and he would land on my finger. I raised Ralph from the time he was in the chrysalis. When he was busy pumping up his wings I’d put him on my finger. I saw two or three clients with him sitting on my finger.

I ultimately turned him loose, but all the time he was in chrysalis I’d make this same little noise and call him Ralph. When I turned him loose, I went out the next morning, made the noise and called his name. I put my finger out and down he came.

We have a little, wild cat under the porch. I petted her for the first time today. She is just terrified of humans. Probably justifiably. I started putting a little bit of milk out for her. Every time I did it I made a sound, whether she was out there or not. About the third time, I walked out making the sound and there came a little head looking at me. Finally yesterday she got to the point where she would stay on the porch and let me put the milk down, but she wouldn’t let me touch her. Today I guess she figured I’m safe so she let me pet her. One of her kittens let me pet her. They were more skittish than she is. The anchor is what’s there.

My mother made a sailor suit for me and for my brother and somewhere around the house I have a picture complete with a little white sailor hat that is just darling.

About fifteen or eighteen years ago I was traveling through Portland and I wanted to get some of the pictures to take back to L.A. So I asked my mother if it was okay, and I went up into the attic and looked around.

There are a lot of boxes, including one marked “pictures”, but lots of others too. I got nosy. In one of those boxes were those two little sailor suits.

Can you imagine how humorous it would be if I attempted to get into that little sailor suit now?

We change as a part of the process of growth.

Years ago, over in eastern Washington, near Spokane, is a place called Williams Lake. A great big, huge lake. My aunt and uncle used to take me out fishing with them when we went to Williams Lake. First time I’d ever been there. And it was gorgeous weather over there, the lake was gorgeous, and I must have been all of maybe 13 or 14 years old, and you know how 13-year-olds are. We had a little rowboat there, so I told my Uncle Ray, “I am going to row across the lake”. Well, you could see the other shore. I also had heard a rumor that there was a girl scout camp and my uncle said, “are you sure you want to do that, it’s a long way?” Distance is nothing to a 14-year-old chasing girl scouts, so I pooh-poohed it and got into that rowboat and started going.

Now if you’ve ever rowed a rowboat, you’re not looking forward, you’re looking backward. So, I had this gorgeous view of the shoreline where I had been, diminishing, going away from me. My aunt and uncle glad to be rid of me. Imagine how surprised I was when I turned around and the girl scouts were still as far away as when I started. That’s very frustrating. So I rowed for another half hour or so, now I can’t even see my aunt and uncle back here, or the tent, or the car. I know I must be closer. I swivel my head around. You know, it’s an optical illusion – I’m still just as far from that shore and now I don’t know where I am out there. And there was a moment there when I gave serious consideration to turning around and going back to my aunt and uncle. But my curiosity about the girl scout camp prevailed and I did make it to the other shore.

There is a girl scout camp there, they weren’t there, and now I had to row all the way back. But a couple of things were beneficial. Sometimes, achieving skills, learning new patterns can become a drudgery. Try this for several hours. That’s a drudgery. And sometimes the rewards don’t look like they’re that forthcoming.

So you have to look for the other things and experience the other things that were available to you to learn. So many people, I’ve found, need an immediate reward of some kind to get them to recognize that they’re learning. That they’re progressing.

If I had it to do over, I think I’d swivel my neck more so that I could check my progress and not just take one piece of information as to how far you’re going.

I do not think this modeling that is talked about works. I have not seen it work. I think that you can act like someone else. I referred a young man who was interning years ago to an NLP event. This is when I was in practice in LA. He came back and his brain was scrambled.

He was excited, he said, because he hadn’t known Richard (Bandler) had worked in a burn unit. I replied that I hadn’t known either. He said Richard had had stories about working in a burn unit.

So, the next time I saw Richard, I asked him when he’d acquired experience in a burn unit. He replied that it wasn’t his own experience, he was paraphrasing some of my experiences, and experience is experience. I replied that was correct, that my experience is my experience, his experience was his experience and let’s keep it that way. Or grab my little hand and let’s go down to the burn unit and let him get his own experience. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn from my experience. But I don’t believe you can model it. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I just don’t know how yet.