About Us

Why did Des choose to work with NLP?

I’m a Dad with four children. It was through personal challenges with two of my children that I first discovered the incredible results of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).

Problem 1

One of my daughters took up 80% of our time. She had become physical with her siblings and us. This had become so much of a challenge to work with as a family that my wife, at her wits end, had given up on our daughter and wanted nothing further to do with her and I had stepped up to physical restraint. Anger was a problem amongst all of us and the whole family was suffering as a result.

I searched the world for information, read, attended courses and finally came across a course here in New Zealand called Transforming Communication. This was influenced by something called “NLP”. After taking the course I gained, a deep understanding of communication and, a set of NLP skills, that allowed me to understand what was happening and how to fix it.

Originally I thought my daughter was the problem and needed to change. I discovered that even though we all spoke English we all spoke in different ways. This meant that we hadn’t been understanding each other, this led to misunderstanding, conflict, increased frustration, not getting on and headed toward a complete breakdown.

With these new found skills I changed the way I communicated. I didn’t ask my daughter to change and didn’t teach her any skills. Over about a 3 month period my daughter changed completely to a delightful child. I would not have thought that this level of change was possible. The change in my communication allowed us to remove misunderstanding, mis-communication, conflict and frustration. It allowed us to talk and solve problems.

My daughter experienced these communication skills through my conversation and this changed her way of communicating. The change also filtered through the family.

A highlight for me was when my daughter came home from school announcing she helped resolve a playground dispute between others using these skills. I hadn’t even taught them to her.

Prior to this course I believed that smacking was a necessary part of discipline in raising a child. After this course and with my experience over many years since, I know that smacking is unwarranted in bringing up kids.

I learnt that good communication skills are essential.

I developed a curiosity to find out more about this “NLP”. It had been the key to the success of the communications course for me.

I now teach this course specifically for parents. Transforming Family Communication.

Problem 2

I then trained as a Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) Master Practitioner and began to wonder about a problem another daughter was having.

She’d been having 18 months of speech-language therapy. We were told she needed about another 4 1/2 years before she was up to speed with the rest of her peers. These were weekly sessions through the school term.

I came to the realisation that there was a neurological strategy that was going on for her that was causing the problem. I worked with her for 30 minutes and the problem was gone. Immediately following the session, her ability to read jumped, her ability to say words was sorted and comprehension arrived. On the one hand I was excited for her and on the other, as a parent, I was frustrated that I hadn’t been able to find out about NLP brief therapy previously.

I now provide Speech-Language Therapy utilising NLP for adults and children.

Brief NLP Therapy Practice

This finally put in place a transition for me as I trained further and moved towards working therapeutically with these skills full time.

Thanks to the success with my daughters I am now in full time practice helping people achieve surprising results in their lives. 40% of my clients are children.

Clients either contact me directly or are referred through medical practitioners.

I have a passion for this work and am the only Specialist Children’s Practice in New Zealand.