Joseph Roberts Tell us about the cerebral cortex. You say it is about two to three million years old. What is it doing? How does it learn?
Marilyn Atkinson Well, research on the brain is amazing. We’ve got this three million year old brain that is so new that we only use 5 percent to 15 percent of it. Yet, visually it can do miraculous things that the older emotional brain could never begin to do. This brain is 1,000 times more flexible than the emotional brain. The big news is that good coaching taps this vast potential. Because we can see overviews we can diagram and create maps, we can create visual plans, sequences and flowing details that allow us to really succeed.
It is exhilarating to see a person really start to develop this vision and value system. We can connect heart and mind. And we do literally start growing neuron connectors. A myelin sheath develops around the circuitries that hold our new flexible processes for learning and it’s like when you ride a bicycle it takes a couple of weeks to really learn. As the neurons get sheathed, then you can ride a bicycle for the rest of your life.
JR What does the middle, emotional or so-called mammal brain do?
MA Our emotional brain is the limbic system. It’s the group brain system needed by mammals for nurturing and establishing family systems, so it is where we actually connect into our love of each other. The emotional brain has got some hugely important qualities, but it’s also habitual, simplistic, very hierarchical and focused on either/or, right or wrong, good/bad, yours/mine. Its goals are very short term.
But there’s a new kid on the block called language, which is at best 200,000 years old. Complex language is at best maybe 65,000 years old. This means something major has happened in our development in the last 50,000 years.
JR Well, how is this relevant?
MA It’s relevant because to understand the new humanity we can’t forget where we came from. People get lost in the future sometimes. People get lost in the future because they get lost in little specific futures. They see only certain areas of life. It’s like having your library card to only one room in the whole library of life. Each of us can, in fact, connect fully into the whole system and get into the flow of amazing capacities to see choice and change past, present and future. This is what we teach at Erickson. We can ask questions that take us right into the largest perspective that connects heart and mind, vision and value.
When we start by questioning and visualizing from our values, then a flow of information opens up a whole creative, innovative integration. Creative integration, our deeper knowledge system, is enormous and it’s available with practice.
JR So, the brain has three parts. The ancient reptilian brain centres us from present to past and its focus is physical movement and survival. The middle brain is now centred, linking us to the emotions and communications. The cerebral cortex, our newer brain, gives us future planning capacities and visual capabilities. So, which one gets programmed by television?
MA Well, they all do because of the power of emotion and tone in all conversation. We literally are fixated to tone throughout life.
Negatives are very interesting. If you hear you’re inadequate to do something it stays with you because you hear negative tone. If somebody growls at us and says something that for us is a negative about ourselves, we may still hear that same tone for many years after. We might play that “tape recoding” again and again. People so easily get caught in simplifying belief systems formed by conclusions said in a negative tone.
JR Are you saying that negative language doesn’t allow us to see futures, because as we’re playing these tape recordings we can’t then easily visualize choices?
MA That’s right. People just talk conclusions to themselves instead of making pictures and asking questions.
A lot of people don’t visualize because they have not developed that skill set, they don’t even know it’s missing. This is true for the majority of people on the planet. We’ve become so overwhelmed by directive training and schooling dominated by closed statements and conclusions, that we’ve mostly developed closed, auditory thought systems.
As adults we hear our own inner negative tonal command structures; ideas like “you will probably fail again.” It’s what in coaching we call a gremlin. Negative conclusions are like a cork in the bottle. They plug up the whole visualizing capacity.
It’s a failure “growl” if you like, from the old tonal, emotional, mammal brain. People might play it as a tape recording in their thoughts for years. It creates moods, say of regret, or sadness.
A study of toddlers from many homes in California who wore a tape recorder daily for a week, showed that 85 percent of the time, whenever communicating to adults about anything, they were told no. That’s huge. With our recent discoveries we can now learn to move beyond these early auditory conclusion systems of “I can’t do this” or “I shouldn’t learn that.”
JR Over the years you ran one of the first NLP schools and taught a lot of people through that tradition. What was the name of your school before it became Erickson College?
MA It was the BC NLP Institute, also Toronto and Eastern Canada. We opened up NLP in Canada 20 years ago. We still teach three tiers of NLP training.
JR How did you get into NLP and what influence did it have on the human development movement?
MA What I loved about NLP in the early days was that 60 percent of it was based on Milton Erickson’s work. His focus was on how people could become masterful in their own lives. NLP offered us so many ways to explore people’s inner skills. I could learn from masters who were very good at what I was not good at, exploring mastery in the sense of learning and creativity, but also discovering ways to connect more profoundly with other human beings.
As an NLP master trainer, and as a psychotherapist, I find the wish to support people a wonderful urge in humanity. I think that wish is like a great river that’s flowing into our future. The surprising thing today is that this original focus on wanting to assist has turned inside out. Coaches are learning what’s needed, and people can do the job themselves.
NLP provided us a wonderful chance to get a coach position or witness position on the mind. It offered some great
learning on how to open the mind. That means you notice that you are not your mind. You are not those chattering thought systems going by.
JR Why did you decide to call the NLP Institute Erickson College and when did that occur?
MA This was in 1993. We were focusing on a new paradigm that integrated the best of NLP, solution focused, creativity studies and accelerated learning systems.
At Erickson we were discovering how people could use these tools to engage their intelligence and find their inner vision. People can quickly relearn how to relax, visualize profoundly, connect to inner purpose and create strategic plans and results. Early on we realized we had something special to share.
Our participants were moving out of disabling frameworks and rightfully so. If we put our attention on how we are masterful, guess what we get more of? If we put our attention on how we can actually live our vision, people discover they’re OK, and they learn to get great results. The whole system starts to right itself. We experience our connection to each other and our capacity to truly live our dreams.
When we discovered that with practice people could hugely shift their intelligence, Erickson College was created in honour of Milton Erickson who first set us on this path. Since then we’ve been busy developing the system throughout the world.
JR Since the beginning, you were being coached by wonderful people – Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls.
MA And also some wonderful NLP teachers, Robert Dilts, a genius and Stephen Gilligan, an amazing teacher. These are people with values that inspired me enormously.
JR Now the overarching thing in a sense is helping people become their potential through coaching, holding the space for people to open up.
MA Exactly. Coaching really isn’t about assistance, it’s about effective listening. It’s really about presence. It’s about being deeply present as someone discovers their inner wellspring of humour, their own capacities, their own genius. That eliminates the need for psychotherapy. Suddenly people discover that they are truly well and that they can trust themselves.
JR A lot of times in business, sports models are used because many people see business as a game to win. That’s part of it, but it seems like the best managers and coaches are the ones that really support people to be all they can possibly be.
MA You’re right. I work a lot with creative systems in organizations. It is wonderful. We take people who are deeply embedded in their conversations about politics and who’s right and who’s wrong and evaluating each other, and start to move into an aligned sense of purpose, people visualizing goals together, getting excited about and producing results together.
Coaching is multiple things to multiple people; it’s increasing our capacity for genius and connection with each other toward achieving our goals and finding our purpose in life. In working with organizations, I am thrilled with the power of coaching to increase the intelligence of organizations and the value structures that make our life at work meaningful.
I also love bringing programs, particularly the art and science of coaching, into the public arena. It’s a training that’s becoming popular in many countries and it provides a framework that takes people way beyond their expectations about what they think they’re capable of.
JR We’ve watched kids at games and saw the value of coaches there. Each of us needs a coach.
MA It makes a difference. And it’s always the right time to start.
JR: Finally, is there anything else you want to say to our readers?
MA First of all I’d like to invite people to become curious and to find out about Erickson College. We have programs happening in Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary and other major cities; particularly the art and science of coaching, which is an accredited program with the International Coaching Federation. We are very proud of that federation moving minds all over the world.

Marilyn Atkinson, PhD is a registered psychologist, professional coach, NLP master trainer and founder of Erickson College. This is the second of a two-part interview; Part 1 was printed in the December magazine. More info www.erickson.edu, 604-879-5600 or info@erickson.edu