Japan Interview
By Kris Hallbom
Note: This article about Tim first appeared in Rapport Magazine, Fall, 2018
It is a rainy cloudy afternoon in Tokyo, Japan. The view from the 35th floor window of Tim Hallbom’s apartment is stunning, even with the dark grey skies. Looking outside you can clearly see the Tokyo Imperial Palace where the Emperor of Japan lives, as well as a nice view of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Residence off in the distance, plus hundreds of high-rise buildings dotting the vast Tokyo skyline.
Tim has been living part-time in Japan for the last five years, where he does a variety of NLP and Coaching trainings for the NLP Japan Learning Center with his training partner and wife, Kris Hallbom.
Part of being an international NLP trainer involves spending a lot of time on airplanes and in different countries. To date, Tim has trained and taught NLP in 25 countries around the world. In more recent years, he has been mostly working in Europe, Asia, Mexico, and, of course, through his own institute, “The NLP Coaching Institute of California,” which is based in the San Francisco Bay area.
Despite having such a busy training and traveling schedule – Tim still finds time to privately work with clients on a one-on-one basis, at his other home in the beautiful mountains of Holladay, Utah. Tim started his career as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and therapist, and has always loved doing changework with people.
He first found out about NLP in the late 1970s, when he worked for the Utah department of Human Services as a trainer and therapist. A big part of his job was doing trainings which focused on teaching people stress reduction and mindfullness-based techniques.
One day he was doing training for the faculty at the University of Utah, and a woman walked up to him on break and declared, “You are visual.”
“Oh yeah, how do you know that? “ replied Tim.
“Well you keep looking up while you’re doing the training,” she said in a matter of fact voice tone.
“What does looking up have to do with being visual?” Tim asked with a curious look on his face.
The woman then handed Tim a pile of crumpled pages from an unpublished book, that would later became “NLP Volume 1”, which Robert Dilts later published in 1980. Tim read through every word of her tattered pages and to his astonishment one of the pages talked about the NLP eye accessing cues, which he found very intriguing.
Of course, he wanted to test it out right away. So he asked a friend some questions (with the intent of getting her eye-accessing cues) and noticed immediately that there was a pattern to the way she moved her eyes. However, her eye accessing cues were different from the happy face diagram that he studied so closely on the crumpled pages. He would later discover that his friend’s eye accessing cues were reversed...
“Sometimes people are reversed from left to right, and their eye accessing cues are the opposite of the typical person. After doing eye-accessing cues with many , many people, I don’t find that many people are reversed. So, it is kind of funny that the first person I did this with was reversed. However, I did see a clear pattern to the way her eyes were moving, and this utterly fascinated me,” said Tim as he sipped on a cup of ginger tea.
As he continued to speak, the clouds disappeared from the Tokyo skyline behind him, the sun came out above his shoulders and the view from his apartment window was spectacular.
“As I began to discover more and more about NLP, I was electrified by the promise of this new field. I bought every NLP book I could get my hands on. However, there were only six books written on NLP in 1979 – which is quite interesting to think about it, considering that there have been thousands of books written on NLP since then,” said Tim reflecting on just how far NLP through the years
One of the first books that he read was “Frogs into Princes” by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, which was edited by Steve Andreas. There was a page in the back of the book that referenced the NLP Institute of Colorado, which Steve and Connirae Andreas co-founded in 1979.
“It was exciting to me when I discover that there was a training in Boulder, Colorado where you could actually learn to do NLP. So, I went there to do a weekend seminar with Steve and Connirae Andreas. Steve did a Visual-Kinesthetic type dissociation phobia process with a woman in the training who had a fear of driving through tunnels. I was utterly amazed at how well and how quickly it worked,” said Tim with a sparkle in his eyes.
He finally did his NLP Practitioner Certification training with the Andreas’ and John Grinder in 1983. Shortly thereafter, he started his own NLP training Institute with his business partner at the time, Suzi Smith, in Salt Lake City, Utah in connection with Steve and Connirae Andreas.
He would then go on to write a number of books; become the President of the International Association of NLP; and became the publisher of the most widely read journal in the world, Anchor Point Magazine which was mailed out to over 35 countries every month. Of course, this was all before the Internet and before Rapport Magazine ever existed, so Anchor Point Magazine was the go to journal for what was happening in the field of NLP at the time.
Through the years, Tim would contribute significantly to the fields of NLP, Coaching and Hypnosis. He would refine and champion such processes as re-imprinting, integrating conflicting beliefs and using eye-accessing cues for discovery and change. He would create and develop a number a number of popular NLP techniques including ones for: changing limiting beliefs, working with double binds, physical health, forgiveness, trauma and using eye accessing cues for discovering the origins of any issue.
In 1990, Tim co-created the “Graduate School” of NLP with Robert Dilts and Suzi Smith – the NLP Health Certification Training Program – which is considered to be one of the most advanced NLP training programs in the world.
He would go on to co-develop several other popular NLP programs such as the WealthyMind program, which helps people quickly release their limiting beliefs around money and prosperity; Dynamic Spin Release™, which is a powerful set of processes that allows users to release their negative thoughts, limiting beliefs and physical pain in rapidly – as well as dozens of other behavioral change programs related to NLP, Hypnosis and Coaching.
“I’ve always felt like NLP is the beginning of something new, and I’m grateful to have found my way into the field so early on. When I look at the whole of my life, it has been incredibly rewarding to know that I have been able to make a positive difference in the lives of so many people across the globe through the training and one-on-one work that I have been doing for so many years,” said Tim.
As the interview comes to an end, the Tokyo skies are now a beautiful shade of blue, the beautiful green trees covering the Tokyo Imperial Palace grounds are more vivid than ever, and Tim becomes somewhat reflective as he thinks about his long career in the field of NLP… “I feel grateful to be in the field of NLP. Even though people talk about the baggage of NLP, my experience with NLP is that the people who have been attracted to it are pretty evolved and in touch with themselves. At least that’s what I have seen in the students and people I have worked with, in all the countries I have taught NLP in.
I really like that you can meet NLPers across the planet and have deep and meaningful conversations with them right away. I love the connection that I feel with them, and I love that most NLPers operate at a higher neurological level,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
Tim Hallbom is the co–founder of the NLP Coaching Associates LLC (NLP Institute of California,) and is one of the most experienced international trainers, developers, and authors in the field of NLP. He is the co–author of best selling books, Beliefs: Pathways to Health Well-Being and NLP: The New Technology of Achievement, Coaching in the Workplace, as well as many other books, DVDs, and audio recordings. Tim has innovated and championed many useful processes in the field for creating lasting change. He has been involved in the field of NLP for more than 30 years, and has trained in more than 25 countries around the world.
