Transforming Your Self: Becoming Who You Want to Be

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Summary: Transforming Your Self
Review: For years, the world of psychotherapy has used words like self-esteem and self-worth. When posed with the question "How do you build good self-esteem?" most psychotherapists and authors would talk about giving positive regard to a child, etc. Steve Andreas, author of Becoming Who You Want To Be, is the first person I've come across to dissect in detail what are the internal "building blocks" of a healthy self-concept. His thinking is clear and precise and the models he presents (for building healthy self-concept) are well layed out and fairly easy to follow. Some of the ideas are revolutionary. Steve's humor and humanity make this book heartfelt and very enjoyable to read. Even if you use just some of the information, I predict it will change your thinking and actions. The world needs all the positive help it can get. Tell others about this book!

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Summary: A Great Read
Review: I `ve been reading this book with great enjoyment and interest, taking time to do the incremental exercises, although the temptation is to rush ahead! It's very satisfying, solid, thorough and well-organized, with a nice mix of attention to detail and ability to hold the bigger picture, and a sense of the author's depth, experience and humanity sustaining it all. I appreciate the careful crafting of the methods used and patient attentiveness to make sure that it all supports sanity, and not adding to the hubris and inflation that can easily occur when people think about working with their own self-concept.

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Summary: Something borrowed
Review: I'm gonna have to stand with the previous reviewer who, quite rightly, points out that there is nothing significantly new in this book.
Indeed, the fact that many NLPers think this is some kind of breakthrough simply illustrates how little NLP takes account of what is going on in the rest of the world.

One reviewer says: "What is certain to surprise many motivational speakers and self improvement authors is that not thinking of mistakes or failures actually weakens a person's sense of self, making it rigid, brittle, and perfectionist."

Yes. And the point is?

In fact Professor Albert Bandura has been pointing this out for the best part of three decades (nearly 30 years!) in his work on what he calls "self efficacy". Not exactly "new" or "breakthrough" in 2001!

In the relatively early days of NLP Steve Andreas and his wife, Connirae, did NLP's co-developers Bandler and Grinder a tremendous service by editing their seminars to produce books like "Frogs into Princes" and "TRANCE Formations". But being a great editor isn't the same thing at all as being a great writer or a great teacher - as this book shows all too clearly.

This book is actually a weak and derivative entry in the NLP genre. If NLP wants to survive much longer as a distinct entity it needs to be generating material a whole lot better than this, such as Joseph Riggio's work on the "mythoself".

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Summary: Shabbily Written Disappointment
Review: In his introduction, the author describes a conference, in which he is the only participant who actually knows how to change the self-concept, and promises a systematic methodology -- an exciting prospect. He also mentions that the book uses the "Workshop Training Format", which amounts to taking the transcripts of group workshops and editing them to simulate (and avoid) an actual writing effort. The result is a promise unfulfilled, and a reader frustrated.

The workshops are apparently given to NLP groupies, who evidently spend their learning sessions watching movies dance in their heads, and hearing voices coming from their nose. The ordinary mortal is faced with a barrage of esoteric jargon, such as "future-pacing", the "Swish" method (undefined), "running a movie ... until it's what they want", and "putting that experience in the future".

The author is clearly NOT addressing the reader, but is talking to a group of agreeing and nodding therapists who already are conversant in his bafflegab. Even if one grants the faith that his methods might work, the methods are so unintelligibly presented, that they are useless.

What a shame! The author is (he says) the only one who knows how to transform the self, and he can't take the trouble to write it down coherently.

Save your money.

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Summary: Can change really be this easy?
Review: Steve Andreas has been at the forefront of the behavioural change field for two decades now. His latest publication is an insightful and tremendously practical treatise on HOW to not only enhance your current well liked qualities, but also to transform those less than desirable attributes that we all have and wish we didn't have! Chapter by chapter he leads us through a gentle, elegant yet very powerful set of processes for profound ecological change. The results are an increased sense of personal congruence and integrity which becomes increasingly available in all our differing life contexts as a natural outflow of who we are at our best.
Written in a seminar format, you feel totally included as if personally participating. Steve covers all the "big picture" pieces as well as the smaller level details which allow the process both to really flow and for you to learn it easily. As a family physician I have used this cutting edge material both with myself and my patients to very good effect. If you are interested in the kind of personal changework that allows you to be who you really want to be, then look no further.

Lewis Walker FRCP
Family Physician
Buckie
Scotland, UK

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Summary: Andreas helps readers transform identity
Review: The first time I encountered the writing of Steve Andreas was when I read his superb book "Awareness" written under the name John O. Stevens. That was over twenty-five years ago. Since then, Andreas, in his writing and teaching, helped to found NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and to guide NLP towards sensitive morality and technical effectiveness. The subject of this book--transforming your self--is a tricky one. Any book on this subject must guide readers to change their self with--guess what?--their self doing the guiding. This is a complex, paradoxical endeavor, one Andreas deals with well throughout the book through the use of many specific examples. What makes this book and its subject especially important is this: our sense of self influences many aspects of the rest of our lives: our values, our feelings, our relationships, our decisions, our hopes and dreams, and certainly our behaviors. Andreas treats this important subject much like he treats his workshop participants--with care, sensitive guidance and technical skill. He accomplishes this without falling into a review of often confusing and contradictory philosophical theories. Instead, he goes beyond theories to practice. He focuses on what we *can actually do,* to transform our sense of self in the privacy of our own minds. The process Andreas reveals in this book not only helps us to enhance our sense of self, but also offers something else: the book's workshop-style format helps therapists, educators and other professionals to discover how to pass on what they've learned to their clients and students. Parents too can benefit in this way, passing on what they learn to their children. For all of these reasons, I highly recommend Steve Andreas's book, Transforming Your Self: Becoming Who You Want to Be. Kelly Patrick Gerling, Ph.D.

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Summary: A must read for NLP readers
Review: The whole book is a transcript of author's seminar. Through reading his transcript, I learned "how" to employ NLP techniques more effectivly. It is one of the best NLP book I've ever read.

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Summary: A True NLP Modeling Project
Review: This work is the best and most thorough example of NLP modeling excellence. The organization, sequencing, breadth of thinking, and rigor in distinguishing between structure/process and content shines throughout. I love the teaching style: clear distinctions, examples, humor, demonstration, and gems of practical wisdom in every chapter. The unique information that begins on page 196 is essential reading for any student of human transformation. I have used many of these methods in my own life, and my clients are also using them to get immediate results. This book will become one of the NLP classics.

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Summary: A Really New Kind of Change
Review: Transforming Your Self is a work as ambious as its title. It describes what your identity is made of, how it works, and how to use this knowledge to change who you are. Author Steve Andreas, once a student of Abraham Maslow, editor of Fritz Perls, and then popularizer of Richard Bandler and John Grinder, has already made numerous contributions to various fields including NLP. With this cognitive modelling of self-concept, Steve solidifies his reputation as an NLP innovator. Steve's ideas about self-concept correspond with Robert Dilts' idea of Identity level change and enriches it with many new distinctions and techniques including: how we create continuity of experience, how feedforward patterns lead to our futures, and how our mental processes act upon themselves. It will be no surprise to people who know Steve's work, that all this is clearly explained along with easy to follow exercises which enable the interested reader to create a more durable, accurate, self-correcting, and connected sense of self. The identity change processes are a mix of classic NLP patterns and distinctions applied in new ways with these new understandings. The NLP jargon has been kept to a minimum.

Steve introduces an important new concept into NLP and popular psychology - the "summary representation." NLP asserts that understanding a word means accessing a particular experience - often a memory. For example, on hearing the word "dog," you would remember a particular dog. Except only some people do that. Others think of a dog that stands for all dogs, or a cartoon dog, or dogginess. It all depends on the number, and the qualities, of the examples of dog you have to draw on to make your summary representation. The fewer the number of examples, the more impoverished (and caricatured) the representation. The greater the number and variety, the richer. With more abstract words, like the ones we use to describe ourselves - including beliefs, values, and qualities - this gets even more complicated. Each of these words refer to a number of categories each containing examples that are to be summarized. A summary representation is a simplified image of the examples it represents - and therein lies both its strengths and weaknesses. Previous identity change processes have for the most part tried to change a person's summary representation or self image. Steve found that while a self image can be difficult to change directly, the individual examples that it summarizes are easy to change, and cumulatively have profound transformational effects.

What is certain to surprise many motivational speakers and self improvement authors is that not thinking of mistakes or failures actually weakens a person's sense of self, making it rigid, brittle, and perfectionist. Not only can you afford negative thoughts; when handled with processes so easy they can be done conversationally, these "counterexamples" actually strengthen and enrich your sense of self - making it more open to improvement. You also learn the difference between self-concept and self-esteem (and how many of the self-esteem building efforts in American schools are an attempt to have the tail to wag the dog); as well as how 'classic' NLP distinctions like time, perceptual positions, and submodalities combine to create our identities.

This book doesn't say everything there is to say about transforming your self. There are ideas, observations and insights along the way that if they were followed up it would easily have doubled its length. I was particularly struck with Steve's modelling of the structure of paranoia, something wholly unanticipated by him. (A good sign that there is actual NLP modeling going on.)

Among the people who have written about NLP modeling, few of them have actually produce new models. This book offers the reader an opportunity to listen in on an actual modeler of human experience practicing his craft. For all these reasons, Transforming Your Self is likely to be the basis of identity change work for some time to come.

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Summary: Breathtaking
Review: Transforming Your Self is simply breathtaking. Reading this book is like being back at the emergence of NLP with Frogs into Princes, but vastly more coherent and detailed--fresh new thinking combined with Steve Andreas' customary clarity, warmth, and humor. Steve takes the lead in the NLP community again with the best NLP framework ever for dealing with the level of Identity. I've already had people who are hungry for self-renewal reading my copy and being delighted.