As a student of Tad James, I love Time Line Therapy™, and of course I have read Time Line Therapy and the basis of personality, from Tad James and Wyatt Woodsmall. The authors start within the introduction (section I) by presenting the NLP model of communication and from there how they have built their model of personality. Filters, that we automatically apply, are keys to how we create our model of the world. The authors link our Time Line as a key element onto understanding our personality… how? simply ‘our memories, our decisions, our experiences good and bad are collected here over time and determine how we relate to the world’ (section II, pg 15) and all these are stored within our Time Line, ‘arranged in gelstat’ (pg 27). Reviewing first how time is understood, the authors describes the two types of personality ‘through time’ and ‘in time’ (which can be correlated to the P/J of Myers Briggs), before moving to exercises and study cases to assist readers understand better this notion of Time Line, and later on looking at the sudmodalities of Time Line (chapter 7). Of course the authors bring us to program our future using our own Time Line, with specific information on goals settings, and dropping a memory in the future… Yes dropping a memory in the future… I know that sounds weird, this is simply a way of creating a direction in your life, another way to create a powerful suggestion (Similar to the active imagination used in self-hypnosis… actually this exercise is simply a form of self-hypnosis, using pictures versus words… which is great as our unconscious mind is much better at reading symbols and images than words). Tad and Wyatt then lead us to an in-depth look at meta-programs (section III), before going onto values (section IV), an inventory of both meta-programs and values allowing to ‘quickly determine the thought processes or a client or colleague and therefore to predict one’s behaviour or actions’ (pg 91), in another word to understand the basis of one’s personality. The authors conclude the book with two appendixes, a detail lay-out on changing personality, and a case study.
To any practitioner working with Time Line Therapy™ this book is a must read and a great tool in coaching; for someone learning NLP, keep it aside for the moment and go through it while you work with a NLP coach, only then you will get the best out of it… And remember, nobody should ever think about changing the basis of a personality without checking very thoughtfully the ecology of it.
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