Staff of Expanding Enterprises, Inc.

Mr. Larry Westenberg, is the President of Expanding Enterprises, Inc.  His background includes careers in psychotherapy, sales, training design, training delivery and educational consulting.

Mr. Westenberg has been designing professional training programs since 2005 at Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 companies including Bank of America, BMO Harris Bank, Abbott Labs (x2), Abbvie Pharmaceutical, Blue Cross and Blue Shield (x5), IBM, Accenture, as well as AT&T (x2) and others. He is an experienced trainer and Instructional Designer with a Master's Degree (MSEd) specializing in Adult Learning, Training Design, and Instructional Technology.

Additionally, he has a Master's Degree (MSW) in Social Work, and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW).  Larry has worked as a counselor and therapist for over four decades.  His counseling experience includes six years assessing and treating the criminally insane (forensic psychiatric treatment), as well as 15 years assisting with involuntary admissions at a large state psychiatric hospital in frequent coordination with state government/legal agencies. He has served as an expert witness regarding psychiatric and emergency room assessment procedures, as he has done psychiatric intake assessments at several different emergency rooms in and around the Chicago area since 1986. 

Mr. Westenberg also maintains a private counseling practice in Illinois, where he offers his unique counseling services via "Way Beyond Counseling and Coaching, LLC." (Note - Counseling services are not available at this time. I am not comfortable with charging for "Telehealth.")

Training in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)

Mr. Westenberg is a Certified Trainer and Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and has taught and assisted with teaching NLP certification programs at numerous NLP Institutes in the United States since 1991.  He has several advanced NLP Certifications that include Design Human Engineering®, and a training by Charles Faulkner called, "Perceptual Cybernetics" which he credits with forever changing the way he utilizes, teaches and studies NLP. He has additional advanced training in Ericksonian Hypnosis, and is a published author in this field.

Larry is an Authorized Instructor of The First and The Second Degree Official Program of The Radiance Technique^®, (Authorized by Radiance Seminars, Inc.) and has studied to The Seventh Degree of The Radiance Technique^® (TRT^®). He began training in TRT^® in 1986. His first thesis included extensive research on stress and stress management techniques. 

Mr. Westenberg has also had the honor of training internationally, observing and revising pilot training classes of materials he developed for several large corporations on overseas projects. Training and living in Manila in the Philippines for over a month at a time helped him utilize his training in cultural communication as a therapist. Especially when he was teaching portions of the month-long classes he created, being piloted with over 50 students in each class. Three training classes he created with different teams of experts were purchased by MIT for use in their graduate school. Mr. Westenberg had no prior training in computer programming, but created classes in Java, C++ and .NET programming by learning programming concepts himself.

Larry has written training on everything from HIPAA scenarios, to FDA Clinical Trial (BIMO) Inspection Readiness, airline pilot checksheets for FAA certifications, and how to do critical thinking in laboratory testing trials. His background in psychology, mixed with his educational degree and background in understanding people's thinking make him particular skilled at interviewing Subject Matter Experts and modeling their thinking - something he has done while performing psychiatric assessments for over 40 years.

Mr. Westenberg studied human influence technologies since his childhood, including such varied sources as educational technology, accelerated learning, hypnosis, transactional analysis and cognitive therapy. Larry is the original developer of Human Animal Behavior Trainingsm (HABTsm), a self-help and self-coaching system that incorporates a number of rapid-change technologies into a powerful system to create change in yourself and others.

Larry's training programs are always flavored with his humorous presentation style, and he has a knack and a love for carefully structuring information to clarify complicated presentation topics. Larry honed this skill working for over fifteen years at large corporate organizations, taking horrifically dry technical topics and turning them into online training that didn't completely put people to sleep! He then studied a variety of different software programs and began developing online and virtual (teacher-on-screen) training programs for other large corporations. He continued developing his ability to identify and focus on the key elements of training that make it possible to actually LEARN complicated information. This experience also taught him the importance of having people practice what they learn immediately after they learn a concept. Thus his online and in-person training programs have lots of embedded, focused exercises and interaction groups. Participation in exercises is mandatory for all trainees because of Larry's observations about the importance of learning in a context, and then immediately practicing and applying new skills.

Larry is dedicated to sharing positive influence methods with therapists, coaches, parents, social workers, and teachers to help offset the often negative cultural influences of television and music.  His new book, "Beliefs and How to Change Them" teaches how to use a variety of cognitive therapy and NLP techniques to shift beliefs, and includes new distinctions in hypnotic language patterns that are not taught anywhere else in the world. These language patterns are utilized to help clients shift and change their internal maps and integrate new ways of thinking quickly and thoroughly. 

As the author of all of the training materials, Larry is authorized to train all of the classes taught by Expanding Enterprises, Inc. He was originally trained by NLP Comprehensive in classes that were supervised and/or delivered by Steve and Connirae Andreas and the early group trained to teach for them. He completed NLP Trainer's Training with them, and has taught for their organization in the past. He credits advanced NLP training from Mr. Charles Faulkner with helping him to most effectively integrate and apply the different models of NLP he learned.

Larry has been teaching since 1992 in classes for the general public as well as professional Continuing Education training for interested therapists. He especially enjoys sharing and HABT(sm) techniques with parents and school teachers nationwide.

                 View Larry's Resume                                                                             E-mail Larry