David Gordon and Graham Dawes

David Gordon

As one of the original developers of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, David has helped create and shape the field for almost 30 years. Though his work has touched virtually every aspect of NLP, David's primary areas of contribution to the field have been in the use of therapeutic metaphors (inspired by his work with Milton H. Erickson) and in the pursuit of modeling. Modeling has consumed most of his professional attention for the past 20 years. In addition to training thousands of people in NLP, hypnosis, therapeutic metaphor, and modeling, David has written many articles on NLP, as well as books on various aspects of therapy, including Therapeutic Metaphors, Phoenix: The Therapeutic Patterns of Milton H. Erickson (with Maribeth Meyers-Anderson), and The Emprint Method and Know How (both with Leslie Cameron-Bandler and Michael Lebeau). David now lives in the Sonoran Desert with his friends the coyotes, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions, lizards, and other such beautiful creatures.

Graham Dawes

A founder of the UK Training Centre for NLP (the first centre outside North America), Graham received his PhD in Management Learning, from the University of Lancaster, for an exploration of the nature of reality, meaning, and change. An exponent of the Self Managed Learning (SML) approach, both for those in organisations and for school-age students, he has edited and contributed to two books on the subject, and was in the team that designed SML-based programmes for an MBA (University of Sussex) and an MSc in Managing Change (University of Sheffield Hallam). He is also the author or co-author of a workbook on humanizing organisational change (with Roger Harrison, the primary theorist of organizational culture), a training pack to develop coaching capability (for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, and published in the US by the American Management Association), the chapter, "A Bermuda Triangle of the Mind," on the work of provocative therapist, Frank Farrelly (for the German book, Der Zirkel des Talos), and the recent, The Handbook of Work Based Learning.