Dr. Rick Brinkman ND

I was born and raised in New York City, graduating from the same high school (Stuyvesant) and 3-year time period as Eric Holder, David Axelrod and Paul Riser. After completing biology and pre-med at the State University of New York I wandered out west in a van on an open-ended trip that lasted 17,000 miles and 3 1/2 months.

It ended in Portland Oregon where I discovered naturopathic medicine . I had already changed my diet, being into raw foods, juicing and realizing how important what you eat affects your health. I graduated premed from college and had planned to go into medical school. This sounded like the perfect thing . As it turned out they had one space in their class , I had all the requirements and classes started in five days. It was a date with destiny.

At the beginning of my senior year I met a medical Doctor who used to be head of OBGYN at Saint Vincent's hospital. He had an awakening that changed the way he practiced. He told us, (“us” being my friend, fellow student and future partner and co-author, Rick Kirschner), that the symptom is a metaphor for what's going on and if somebody has uterine bleeding you should ask them , “If those were tear drops what would you be crying about”.

He gave us a book list on which were the nine NLP, Neural Linguistic Programming books that existed at the time. We read all those books and began experimenting with patients and finding we were able to get serious symptoms to resolve by digging deeper into people’s mental, emotional and relationship issues.

Subsequently over the course of a few months we did 60 days of residential training in Santa Cruz with the creators of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder as well as the other experts of that time, like Leslie Cameron Bandler , David Gordon, John Dilts , and many more.

We were highly advanced compared to most people in those programs which enabled us to see how they were using the NLP techniques on us in a group setting to install learnings and new behaviors.

We set out to not only use these skills but teach them to other naturopathic physicians, the first of whom were our fellow students. Finding school painfully boring after four years, we didn’t want to do that to anyone else. We decided we would become the Saturday Night Live of training, using skits, costumes, playing characters , comedy, and storytelling to make the learnings stick.

Our 4-day seminars became popular and we subsequently did programs all over Oregon and California, traveling with a costume trunk. We would have “guest” presenters, where one of us would dress up and play a different character and teach in character for over an hour.

In 1987 we connected with Careertrack the international seminar company and blew them away. They asked us to create an audio tape on Dealing with Difficult People which we did and it was not your father's audio tape. There were skits, there were characters, there were comical sketches but they always delivered a real learning point. In 1989, two years after its release, it became Columbia House’s all-time bestselling audio tape.

I went on to do solo keynote speeches and seminars and though not in costumes, still acting out characters, doing stand-up comedy, all of which made the learning point and became I known for Educating through Entertainment. Because the subject of Difficult People affects everyone, I have spoken to every industry imaginable. I did four programs for NASA with one specifically for the entire Astronaut Corps, another for Under Secretary of Defense Robert Hale (Obama admin) and his entire Department of Defense budget staff. I’ve worked with the FBI, with Aetna, Merck, Federal Reserve, LucasFilm, Sony Pictures, Intel, IBM, Pfizer, Hyatt, FedEx, Princeton University, the list goes on and on.

As of this writing I have done over 4000 programs in 48 states and 18 countries. (Guess the two states I have not). It seems the theme of difficult people and conflict is universal. The largest audience I spoke to was 8000 people at the American Association of Home Care convention. Recently pre-pandemic I was the closing keynote for the Scrum Alliance, 1200 software developers from 32 countries.

In 1994 McGraw-Hill published the book version of our audio and seminars titled “Dealing with People You Can't Stand, How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst.” It instantly became a bestseller and the media went wild with it. We had a full-page spread in the New York Times, we were on CNN, CNBC, NPR, and countless others. This is in an era before the internet.

Dealing With People You Can't Stand became an international bestseller and has been translated into 25 languages. It is in its third edition as of 2012 when it passed 2,000,000 copies. And continues to sell and be used in college MBA courses.

What really surprised us was how relatable the content was on an international level. Many cultures have specific rules about the communication game, for example in both India and Japan it's very hierarchal and so it's harder to speak the truth to your manager. Yet it seems everyone in the world can relate to our behavior types. I love the idea of doing radio. Since I got my first tape recorder at the age of 9 in 1964, I fell in love with riffing with the mic, doing comedy, playing characters. The same holds true today. Give me a mic and yeehaa! ;-)

Dealing With People You Can't Stand, How to Bring Out the BestiIn People and Yourself Turning Conflict Into Cooperation