 | An exclusive interview of Drs Tad & Adriana James by LIVING NOW magazine (Vol 21 No 1) Australia’s Holistic Journal (http://www.livingnow.com.au) |
They wake up in the morning excited because they get to help people. People are hungry for knowledge and to learn techniques to make a difference in their lives.
It was recently my honour and pleasure to speak with Tad and Adriana. I perhaps somewhat bluntly mentioned to Tad that he can be seen as one of the living grandfathers of NLP. He laughed and said that they had in fact had a party last year to celebrate his teaching for 30 years. What he couldn’t believe about that was that he’d had so much fun over that time and that if anyone had told him 30 years ago that he’d be doing the same job for 30 years, he’d have said, ˜Forget it. I have never done anything for more than seven years.’
However, what has kept him going all that time, indeed kept him excited to jump out of bed and go to work each day, is that they help people. “People come in with their problems and we get to help them and make changes for the better. They take our trainings and get inspired by what we teach them. They find their lives change for the better.”
Adriana has been teaching NLP for 17 years now and she is of the same opinion. She explained, “There are many people teaching NLP but we are doing it differently. NLP is a bunch of techniques that assists people in getting control of their mind and, really, anyone can teach that – it’s not complicated, but what motivates us is the change that we notice in people. They come in with shoulders shrugged forward and they are in their head with their problems, they are superficially polite, they don’t have solutions to their life problems. Suddenly during the training they discover they have inside themselves resources they didn’t know they had. At the end they have their shoulders back and bright smiles on their faces. They go back and make change in their lives.”
Tad backs her up all the while with the same sorts of comments because he’s obviously excited and motivated by the same things, and reiterates, “That’s what drives us. We love to see the transformation in people.”
I speak to them about the reward in being able to serve our fellow humans and Adriana talks about the bigger picture. “I’m not advocating that everyone sacrifice themselves for others, but at some point everyone realises there is a greater purpose than just the individual life, than the me, living for myself, my person. Then they realise there are friends, a community, and the whole earth and we are all living here together. Once a person gets that viscerally, it’s easy to do this [serve others].”
Realising that we have been talking about NLP (neurolinguistic programming) without explaining what it is, I ask them to fill us in, and Tad says, “NLP is probably the most advanced science of making change that exists today. It’s been around a long time and has huge success. It’s a study of excellence and how to get there.”
Adriana says with dramatic flair, “Can NLP be used in politics? Yes. Is it used by politicians? Yes. Can it be used in business? Yes. Is it used in business? Yes. Can it be used for public relations, commercials and advertisements? Yes, and it is used in those, as it is a bunch of techniques for controlling the mind, the language, communication and behaviour – but it can be used for much more than that. Every person can use it to help in their own lives.”
The Tad James Co teaches much more than straight NLP, as they cover Time Line Therapy®, hypnosis and coaching as well, the last being how people put it altogether.
I asked Tad if he invented Time Line Therapy®. “I’d rather say I observed it.” He explained that TIME LINE THERAPY® is a series of techniques that allows people to let go of emotions and to let go negative events held in their minds. He had noticed that some people were good at laughing off and others were not. He realised that we all have a time line and how we organise our time line makes a difference as to the results that we will have in life. If people can put the past behind them, and it does not bother them, then they can move on and be happy. However, some people get hung up on old memories, and they’re living it every day. “That’s not a good way to go through your life in terms of producing happiness, health and results.”
He explained that the issue of focus is very important and TIME LINE THERAPY® allows people to change their focus and let go of past anger, sadness, fear and guilt, plus decisions they’ve made about themselves and their lives – that they are not good enough, they can’t have what they want. In short, TIME LINE THERAPY® gives you a specific technique for creating life the way you want it.”
I told Tad and Adriana that I’d had a very interesting experience of TIME LINE THERAPY® myself years ago. I found that I had been a ˜newspaper man’ in a previous life, presumably not long after the printing press was invented, because I found myself in stocks in that life and my legs were going gangrenous. The practitioner had me move back to the point on my time line when I could have prevented that from happening and work with that – and also to rub my legs and experience being able to run around again. A good session – but I got a real surprise the next morning when I awoke and found that my blocked capillaries had cleared almost totally from one leg and markedly from the other. These capillaries had started showing signs of discoloured blockage when I was 14 by the way.
The interesting thing is that obviously one part of my mind didn’t believe this could happen, because over the next few months the discolouration returned. As Tad said, it was ˜mind over matter’. He suggested that another session with a good practitioner would likely eradicate it forever. I might just do that.
“The message for all people is to get them to understand one thing – they don’t have to be prisoners of their past. No matter what happened to them, they can be free of that. No matter what age they are, or their background, they still have a chance to have a life that is fulfilling. Bad things happen to good people but that doesn’t mean you have to suffer with it for the rest of your life. You can let it go. Create the kind of future you want to have.”
Read online of this article in http://www.livingnow.com.au/read-online (Pg. 46)