Bear in mind that I am writing this based on the first day only. For various reasons I decided not to attend the subsequent two days.
Seeing John Grinder in action is worthwhile if only for ten minutes, and audio tape would probably suffice most purposes. He had a definite well-refined presence once I'd got used to his low-key style. He was extremely precise with his language, often correcting himself or rephrasing things mid-sentence. Despite this, his delivery was still very smooth and somewhat poetic. His gestures were equally precise, especially in their quality and range of movement.
What most attracted me to want to train with John in the first place were two things: his elegant (and overt) use of metaphor and his care in respecting the balance between conscious and unconscious. The whole seminar is based on the metaphor of "the tapestry". Each significant aspect of our life is represented by the warps (vertical threads) and the more subtle intricacies of life by the wefts (horizontal threads). This seems overly restrictive to me. It wasn't John's own metaphor but maybe it's the best the average conscious mind can cope with. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
He was not using nested loops or other structures that I'm familiar with. Instead I believe that he was simply working backwards and chunking down from the goal state (the woven tapestries) through the elements which go into building these (the warp and the weft) to the specific NLP tools we'd use.
This cannot have been easy for the following reason: most of the content of his teaching was in response to questions. These questions were generally in regards to very specific and IMO irrelevant details. John's answering of these questions usually involved further detail which would then prompt more questions. This seemed particularly wasteful because about two-thirds of the group had significant previous training in NLP and only 5% had none.
Therefore the entire content of John's teaching was a quick summary of a handful of the very basic elements of NLP in addition to his personal crusade for formal NLP. He seems determined to strengthen the epistemological basis of NLP to a level equivalent to that of modern science. In particular he asserted that NLP was the study of form and not content. While we may have heard this before, John was adamant that models such as Dilts' Neurological levels were content models and hence not NLP. Ultimately, I found it difficult to maintain my interest.
While there is no doubt that John is a master of what he does, he was much less accessible than others I have trained with. He was vastly less entertaining than Richard and didn't keep me hanging off the edge of my reality like Carmine did. What he chose to talk about was mostly revision for me. Add to that his preference for explaining these things in a very precise and formal manner. With his use of vocabulary that was surely beyond anyone without a university education, you can begin to imagine the dryness of this presentation. Having said that, I suspect that was what he was aiming for. The unprecedented ease with which we could understand these formal concepts is testament to his skill.
John presented in the morning session and Carmen Bostic St. Clair presented the afternoon session. While she was a lot livelier than John her style really didn't appeal to me. Which was a shame because that was what she was teaching. And her message seemed to miss most of its audience. Carmen talked very slowly (which was an asset) and made herself out to be eccentric. She used a lot of humour which was mostly self-deprecating. The content of her presentation was "style", but offered no examples to me that I would want to model.
She may have been having a bad day - I wouldn't be surprised. The appalling technical problems that plagued her would probably have made any sane trainer walk off in disgust. On the other hand, John has talked about over-reliance on technology before... Several times I was half-deafened by faulty microphones. At one point her microphone simply switched on and off every 5 seconds for about a minute.
The worst was yet to come though. She intended to show selected clips from a video. There were about ten of these clips and rather than record them in the right order on to a new cassette, we were subjected to very long pauses between clips. Carmen would repeatedly and half-heartedly tell the technician: "No, that's the wrong bit". I'm not exaggerating when I say that probably a whole hour was wasted looking for clips from this film (I think it was called Living From the Heart), which weren't very good anyway and shown on a poor quality projection screen with barely audible sound. Thanks to this I am never training with PPD again.
Some other people seemed to like the film but I don't know whether that was because they were told to. The exercises we were meant to be doing involved pretending to be someone else. Very few people did them as far as I could tell. That may in itself be an important learning.