This is part two of the mini-series of blog posts I’ve asked Bill O’Hanlon to do on how he got started on the speaker circuit.  This is the story about Bill’s first opportunity to speak internationally. At this point, he’s spoken in 24 different countries throughout the world, but everybody has got to start somewhere . . . In the early 1980s, I wanted the whole field to know about Erickson’s approach. I was sitting in my farmhouse in Nebraska, excitedly reading yet another book on the work of the late psychiatrist Milton H. Erickson, with whom I had studied…

I’ve asked Bill O’Hanlon to do a mini-series of blog posts on how he got started on the speaker circuit.  Today, we know Bill as a very successful speaker – but he wasn’t always . . . The way I began teaching workshops was perhaps a little strange. I got angry. I was just learning about a new approach created by Bandler and Grinder, later to be called NLP. I had read a book about it and gone to one of their workshops. When a well-known Gestalt psychiatrist came to Tucson, a two-hour drive from my Phoenix-area home base, to…

Within certain circles I have a nickname: “Ruth the Reluctant.” I seemed to have earned this while trying to decide whether to accept an invitation to give a talk at a very large upcoming conference of psychotherapists. Besides wealth and fame, there are many advantages to being on the speaker circuit – building your practice, positioning yourself as an expert, boosting sales for your book, among so many more. And while many practitioners would jump at the chance to speak in a large venue, there are those of us (I know I can’t be the only one) who need to…