My Lessons with Kumi: How I Learned to Perform with Confidence in Life and Work

Michael Colgrass is a composer, writer and lecturer, who gives personal development workshops all over the world for performers, students and professional groups. A graduate of the University of Illinois, he is a Tanglewood scholar, twice Guggenheim Fellow, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He won an Emmy for the PBS documentary "Soundings: The Music of Michael Colgrass," which features his unique teaching methods. The Rockefeller Foundation created a special program for Colgrass called "Artist in the Theater at Large," which led to studies in mime, acting, dance and directing in New York, commedia dell' arte in Milan and avant garde theater with Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Theater Laboratory in Wroclaw, Poland. In 1985 Colgrass became a certified trainer of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and today combines these techniques with his 45 years of professional performing experience in his "Excellence In Performance" workshops. He has trained more than 25,000 people in Europe, Britain, South America, South Africa, Indonesia and throughout the United States and Canada. Colgrass' strategies for creativity were modeled by NLP co-founder John Grinder and also by Robert Dilts and David Gordon, and were described in Dilts' book, Tools For Dreamers (Meta Publications, 1991). Colgrass originated "Deep Listening," a technique for using hypnosis with audiences to heighten concentration, which is featured in the book Leaves Before The Wind (Grinder DeLozier & Associates, 1991), a collection of innovative NLP ideas edited by Charlotte Bretto, Judith DeLozier, John Grinder and Sylvia Topel. His articles on creativity and life skills have appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and Music Magazine. His first book, My Lessons With Kumi is the summation of his work as a trainer and performer. For more details visit: www.michaelcolgrass.com