Interesting take on the ill conceived glowing review right after taking a seminar only to later discover that the changes don’t stick and it all feels hollow in a post about the Anti-Badboy Blog?.

The “afterglow” effect is very real and is a bane to customers of self-help seminars and the like a boon to business. Many seminars will rev folks up so that they feel like outstanding changes have happened and they’re on top of the world (the groupthink and bandwagon effects help a lot as does isolation from their normal lives) and it is at that moment when many trainers ask for feedback or testimonial (a few will even shove a camera in folks’ faces and ask them in turn to say good things with an added incentive of a partial refund gift in exchange for the testimonial, creating group peer pressure to respond as well as in essence paying for positive commercial testimonials . . . ethically very very suspect but unfortunately a practice that has become more common of late).

Once folks go back to their old lives then the context anchors all fire and boom they slip back into old habits and thought patterns.

If a seminar “guarantees” permanent change then it should deliver . . . the onus is on both the trainer and the student to affect the change . . . it ain’t a magick bullet . . . but responsible business practices are important.

Shills waiting in bars to meet and greet students? Really? Don’t know about any particular training setup but it wouldn’t suprise me.

Then again, there are probably folks who would consider that sort of thing an effective and valuable confidence-raising exercise (certainly a lot of folks who go to seminars would have difficulty talking to women who are paid to pretend to like them and talk to them so for them having success even with that would seem a giant leap forward). However, it would seem to be more of gimmick than actual change. Kind of like the folks who see the “vertigo” induction for what it is versus the ones who rant about how pioneering it is.

Personally, I would suggest using more powerful changework processes.

I agree that one should not write what should be a thoughtful review until well after an event. You’ll get better perspective on how well you have been able to integrate the processes and skills into your life and be able to note longterm benefits at that level.

All the best,
Brian