A lot of people ask me to recommend trainers to them. If you want a great training experience, my recommendation is that most people couldn't choose better than Jonathan and the Mastery InSight Institute of NLP.
The reason is simple - Jonathan consistently provides a wonderful learning experience for all his attendees. I've been to a lot of Jonathan's trainings and have never seen a student who didn't benefit greatly from their tuition. If I'm wrong, email me and I'll review this statement!
Trainings are expensive. Loss of earnings, hotels and travel costs alll add to the costs. If your trainer isn't consistent, it's harder to justify that expense.
I know that many of the reviews I write have a big influence over people's choices. Consequently, I try very hard to separate my admiration for a person from the effectiveness of what they sell. And Jonathan, as both a human being and a trainer, has earned a huge amount of admiration from me.
Of the 10+ trainers I've trained with and met, none have been close to his 24/7 devotion to students (especially the 'difficult' ones). For example, 90% of the time he offers bonus lessons over meals and often late into the night.
He always sets up a comfortable learning atmosphere and handles interruptions gracefully. All hypnotists know that your brain makes 10x better connections when you're comfortable.
His understanding of NLP is as deep as that of any trainer outside the original Santa Cruz study group. But more importantly, it's his ability to package and deliver that knowledge so that his students use it... that makes him one of the best trainers ever.
This incredible ability is what Jonathan aims to teach in the Holographic Communication seminar. I'll let others speak for previous HC trainings but I can tell you that this time he hit a perfect bulls-eye.
And it was a blast! I don't remember having so much fun in an NLP training. This group was a wonderful mix of personalities, including the fabulous Nick Kemp.
Of course, when you're learning to communicate, you should probably be communicating as much as possible. Therefore, Jonathan keeps his HC group sizes small and the students get a lot of time on stage. I'd estimate that each student spent a whole hour on stage and another 2 hours getting feedback unique to them. Additionally, most of the presentations are filmed so that students can review them at their leisure.
Rather than focusing on people's public speaking phobias, Jonathan designed exercises to give students comfortable experience of being onstage. This was especially during the first 2 days. Later on, he usually gave us one or two additional things to work on, whether it was the task itself or improvements we could make. Sometimes the tasks were really strange... ;)
I often go into a seminar with different outcomes from the other students and Jonathan allowed us the flexibility so I could focus on what I wanted out of it. I've got more out of this seminar than all but 2 of the other 19 I've done.
Here's some of what I got out of it:
- I identified 7 main distractions in my delivery style. 5 were eliminated during the seminar and the other 2 should disappear easily with practice.
- I learned and practiced 13+ mostly new methods of entertaining and/or improving my connection with the audience, including how to stand, gestures, sensory description, humour and headlines.
- I learnt how to package and sequence information so that it's accessible to the audience when they need it rather than when they can screw it up consciously. This included how to chunk information and also covert techniques such as nested loops, the discovery method, anchoring, rhythm shifts & pattern interrupts.
- I learnt how to effectively pace and start leading any audience in any situation in a few sentences.
- I learnt how to maximise the group's learning and rapport even when 'difficult' students start distracting the group. Jonathan is probably the world's expert at this.
Most of these were things I didn't even know about. There's a big difference between what you think you're doing when you're teaching and how it comes across. Apparently, I stunned both the group and the invited audience with the quality of my last presentation...