November 4, 2019

Meet Mark Andreas of NLP Coaching and Training in Boulder, CO

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark Andreas.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Mark. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’ve been in private practice as an NLP personal change coach since 2009, and I train NLP nationally and internationally. Last year I taught in Siberia, India, and Romania. I never guessed I would have the pleasure of bringing this work to so many varied places, and getting to broaden my community in such a global way. Though I have an office space in Boulder, most of my in-person clients are also from around the world, and we meet over video platforms such as Skype or Zoom (www.markandreas.com).

My NLP career did not start in a vacuum. Born in Boulder Colorado, I grew up with the presuppositions of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) as a consistent part of my experience: there is no failure, only feedback… people work perfectly… behind every behavior is a positive intention… My parents, Steve Andreas and Connirae Andreas have been developing and training NLP all of my life. They published the most widely-known books on NLP and started one of the first NLP training companies, NLP Comprehensive, which developed the first practitioner training manual for NLP. So I grew up in the midst of a new understanding of how each one of us experiences outer reality through the five senses, creating our own unique and rich internal representations and resultant strategies for navigating through the world. When we understand these inner structures, we can change what isn’t working for us, shifting to what does work.

It wasn’t ever a given that I would go into this line of work. I studied Peace and Global Studies in College, with a minor in Politics. I’ve always been interested in studying conflict and peace in all it’s aspects, from the global down to the local. After graduating I interviewed people about their experiences of conflicts where they or someone in the situation found a surprising, outside-the-box solution. I wrote up and edited this compilation which became my first book, “Sweet Fruit from the Bitter Tree.” One woman in the book was held hostage by a man with a shotgun, so she kept telling him jokes until he released her. In another story a man told a gropy salesman about having to get his dog fixed because it was mounting all the females in the neighborhood; after that, the salesman’s inappropriate behavior stopped. Or there is the story of the army commander who ordered his soldiers to take a knee and smile, avoiding an eruption of conflict in a tense situation in Iraq. Or the woman who befriended the man who broke into her house. Two incredible stories from the book about a very “dorky” and creative cop are free on Amazon here: www.amzn.com/B01NAFE0NR/.

After college I worked for a Wilderness Therapy company for two years as a counselor/trip-leader for the Monarch Center for Family Healing where I was in charge of facilitating groups of “troubled” youth on a daily basis both in individual therapy and group process. So I had lots of hands-on experience there, learning about conflict and it’s resolution. There was the time Toby drank his own pee and pooped in his hands, chasing the other kids around camp with his weapon of mass disruption, then dropping bio-terrorism in favor of threatening to stab me with his tent stakes… There was the time Christine and Kendra cheeked their meds, crushed them up, and did lines off the office toilet seat… Or the time Adrian had a temper tantrum and shattered the front windshield of the car… Or the time Tom and Ken stole my Subaru key and used it to start the old pickup truck in the middle of the night, escaping to a nearby town where they robbed a ski shop before driving the wrong way down a one-way street only to discover a police car coming the other direction… I later wrote my second book about these experiences, and how to lead teens effectively, called “Waltzing with Wolverines: finding connection and cooperation with troubled teens.” (www.amzn.com/0996802029/).

So I started out studying social conflicts and peace movements in college, then got experience facilitating small-group conflict resolution with these teenagers in the wilderness, and finally came full circle officially studying NLP and starting my private practice working with individuals. In my experience, individual personal change is based on internal conflict resolution. And with NLP, we have extraordinary tools to do this in a systematic and lasting way that doesn’t take years and years of therapy. You can check out a lot of examples of exactly how I guide clients to resolution of their problems on my blog: www.markandreas.com/blog.

There are many tools in NLP, but the process I use the most with my clients is called Core Transformation. It is an outgrowth of NLP, and an incredibly powerful process through which our limitations lead to profound states of being that transform our limitations. Many people describe these deep states of being as spiritual experiences. Though the process is secular and many people wouldn’t describe their experiences as spiritual, even atheists have been quite surprised to find deep experiences of God or spirituality through this process! For others they simply reach a profound state of being they might describe as oneness, beingness, or Okness, that transforms their initial limitations. Together with my mother, (developer of the Core Transformation process), and my aunt Tamara Andreas (Co-author of the book Core Transformation), we offer local live trainings in Core Transformation in Boulder Colorado, as well as other personal growth tools on the growing edge of the field: https://andreasnlptrainings.com/core-transformation/

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Yes, it’s been a smooth road. Just a matter of taking the opportunities presented to me and putting in the hard work to do what I’m passionate about. I’m very aware that not everyone starts out with the opportunities I was blessed with.

What were you like growing up?
I was always interested in story-telling and art from a very young age. How lucky that I’ve gotten to do both as a career, through my writing and artwork for several book covers. I also grew up in the country, gardening and playing in the wilderness, so the natural world has always been extremely important to me and I hope we find political solutions to preserve our natural spaces, not just for our survival as a species, but also for our deeper wellbeing.

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