NLP has become very popular topic within the personal development Industry, because of three factors.
1) Neuro Linguistic Programming has a reputation for assisting personal development by working at the deepest level of the Psyche (depending on who is delivering the course, of course).
2) NLP has been born out of modelling the most prominent leaders of change in various contexts, including family therapy (Virginia Satir), Hypnosis, Hypnotherapy and Human Values (Milton Erikson), and Anchoring (William Twitmyer and Ivan Pavlov).
3) NLP is an art and a science, so it hasn’t become so rigid as to be aloof to the masses. Anyone can get access to becoming trained and there are many ways of using NLP – it is open and accessible to all industries and professions.
How does NLP work with self development?
In an NLP training (I can talk for NLP World and perhaps a few others), you’ll get the chance to make a quantum leap in your ability to clear out old issues that have interfered with your energy path. This equates to having the chance to evolve and develop yourself.
Of course, if you are becoming a practitioner of NLP, you are being trained to assist others and begin mastery with language, yet in this week (or four days), you’ll start to realise that all your memories can be redefined and reframed to assist you, rather than the old emotions on them dictating your moods in certain situations.
Also you begin to see that limiting beliefs can be taken away, phobias, habits and ideas can be reformed giving you the energy back that was taken away with them.
The self development you can get with these changes more than qualify as a huge quantum leap in your own personal evolution.
How does NLP Work?
NLP has a beginning in experimental research into how the brain and body makes things ‘real’; bad and good! How do we make illness and how do we make problems….and how do some people create miracles while others suffer poverty consciousness?
From this experimental approach, techniques came to the fore and these techniques became what we now call NLP. Yet the techniques were the result of experimenting!
So when you take an NLP training, the training should focus on how you go about experimenting with the mind, not showing you xyz techniques. For instance, we all have what’s called an internal world, mostly made of sounds, feelings and pictures (plus self talk). We call that the VAKOG for short (Visual, audio, kinesthetic and to a lesser extent, olfactory and gustatory). This inner world informs you and I what is good bad, valuable, or avoidable. It’s in the form of coding and very unconscious.
A good NLP training will teach a delegate how to access this internal world and be able to aid a client to a positive result by moving the inner world or VAKOG to what the client wants inside. I have seen some trainers simply showing their delegates the three techniques (called submodalities) to change this inner world without showing them the basic understanding of how this all works. The problem being is that if the three techniques don’t work, the Practitioner will be stumped!
So that’s why we call NLP an art AND a science. And that’s why NLP lives in the industry of self development – because you can’t work with an NLP practitioner (a well trained one) without actually changing some part of your life!
