nlpkb - nlp the truth behind the hype

8/3/2019 Nlpkb - NLP the Truth Behind the Hype

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nlpKB.com

NLP:

The Truth

B e h i n d

the Hype.

Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht


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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.

But, in practice, there is. - Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

TheConflictBetween NLPMethodology andits Trail of

TechniquesThis report can help you save a lot of

money and time if you are considering

getting NLP training. Im going to

explain core ideas that can make a big

difference in your approach to getting

training.

If you want to understand NLP

and select NLP training, you must

look beyond its techniques.

NLP is not nearly so much a collection

of techniques as it is a methodology. By

methodology, I mean a collection of

practices and principles that hold

together. In cooking, practices are things

like using heat to transform ingredientsinto foods. Principles are things like

convection as a means to heat food in

an oven. Methodology is more general

than a recipe. Recipes arise from the

principles and practices (methodology)

available to the people that create the

recipes.

A recipe is to cooking what apattern is to NLP.

NLP methodology involves principles

such as modeling as a means to transfer

skills from models to others. It involves

prac t ices such as s t ra teg ica l ly

influencing states in order to produce

resourceful behavior. (State refers to the

overall state or condition of a person--

what state they are in. It is similar tostate of mind, except that it includes

the body.)

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Discover The

Path to NLP

Mastery

By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht
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NLP methodology has brought forth many

techniques. There are plenty of examples of a single

technique making a big difference for someone.

However, to have the greatest effectiveness,

techniques must be applied in a way that is sensitive

to the individual or group, and must be woven

together in a strategic and responsive manner.

That is to say, the work must be relevant and flexible.

This has implications for selecting good training,

because it will help you decide what you really need,

and when you need it.

Well talk about how you can best sequence your

efforts to improve your NLP knowledge and skills.

Richard Bandler said,

N LP i s an a t t i t u d e an d a

methodology, which leave

behind a trail of techniques.

This points to two ways that you

can approach training. You can

start by getting to the essence of

NLP, and this is usually

provided in the longer, more

costly trainings, or you can start

by learning techniques.

The advantages of the latter

approach are:

1. You have fewercosts up front.

2. You can start getting results with many issues

right away.

3. You get a feel for NLP and you develop the kind

of burning questions that will compel you to

learn the fundamental understandings of NLP.

4. You can benefit from practicing with them for

your own needs.

After a hard day of basic training,

you could eat a rattlesnake.

- Elvis Presley

Types of NLPPractitioners

You dont have to spend much time among NLP

practitioners to notice that they are quite diverse. Im

not referring to their ethnicities or religions. Im

talking about their skills and attitudes about NLP.

I want you to do two things with this section.

First, identify which category you best fit.

Then, consider these categories when you consider

the competent NLP trainers you will learn from and

train with.

You can roughly divide practitioners into the

following categories:

1) Unconscious masters:

These practitioners practically

do NLP in their sleep. They

c r e a t e p a t t e r n s a n d

solutions on the fly while

working with clients. Of

course, they generate

creative solutions for their

own lives as well. They

e v o k e s u b c o n s c i o u s

resources in themselves and

others, making it possible to

produce changes that may have

seemed out of reach before.

Their abilities can have a mysterious and deep

quality, and its difficult to pin down how they create

change, unless you are intimately familiar with NLP.

2) Surface practitioners:

These practitioners know some techniques from NLP

and treat it like a cookbook. Either they are fairly new

at it, or havent been able to get the nature of the

subconscious.

In the latter case, they may have some unconscious

defenses that they have not resolved, and those

defenses can get in the way of their efforts to produce

creative solutions.

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I went to a Gestalt therapist and

said that I want to be able to at

least tell my muscles that arent

involved that they dont have to go

into spasms too.

- Dick York


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3) Personality-problem practitioners:

These individuals have significant problems that may

even rise to the level of being diagnosable personality

disorders such as borderline, antisocial, or narcissistic

personality disorder. (You can look these up online or

in the DSM; I am not a licensed psychologist andtherefore I cant explain further what each term

means.)

This is not a friendly advice, but a warning for you to

be cautious.

These certified, yet incompetent practitioners may

have been drawn to NLP by visions of control,

unlimited sex, wealth, or being a hero.

They may be trying to resolve problems that are sodeep-seated that they will be their own worst enemy

and possibly bring harm to others if they do not get

help from a qualified practitioner or mental health

program of some kind. They may be very self-

aggrandizing or play the part of the saint or guru as if

they are in a fantasy. Many of them have a boil of

interpersonal problems and drama going on much of

the time, causing trouble in social groups and

organizations. The trouble may include drugs or other

addictions that impair performance at times or on an

ongoing basis.

In all but the first group (unconscious masters), you

will see that there is a split between NLP technique

and mindset. Techniques without the spirit of NLP are

very limited. Surprisingly, some of the third group

(problem personalities) may develop strong

unconscious mastery, and even help many clients.

However, their performance will be very uneven,

because they will be unconsciously triggered by

certain situations.

Greed, the need to use people, and disruptive

emotional reactions may derail the practitioner, their

clients, or their social group under certain

circumstances, or under stress in general.

If you are getting started with NLP, or want to take

your practice to another level, you need to identify

what kind of training and experience will be of the

greates t value. You may have budgetary

considerations as well. If you cant afford an intense,longer training (these tend to be very expensive),

youll want to select the best reading, training, and

experience to get the best skills you can. This should

enhance your earning power so that you can, among

other things, get the best training available in order to

further your development. This article will help you

identify the strategies and trainings that fit your needs.

The Importance ofModeling

Good training flows from good models; it manifests

those models in its approach to teaching as well as its

content. If models were not important, you could

learn everything you need regarding NLP from books.

Would you rather learn a collection of techniques, or

have the same abilities as those Bandler used in

creating the models that gave NLP its start?

Having that kind of skill would mean that you could

discover and invent techniques endlessly and

according to the needs of the individual client. This is

why I wrote the Path of Mastery article that delves

more deeply into the spirit of NLP. It points out that

NLP is primarily a model, and that this is more

important than any theories or philosophy attached to

it. That model is the meta-model that tells us about

modeling.

You might say that it is the how of how.

It takes the birds eye view of creating excellence.

Modeling is the foundation of NLP, it is how NLP got

started, and it is the source of the theories and

patterns of NLP. Lets get deeper with what modeling

is. The key to modeling is being very observant--

looking for and observing subtleties. Thats the yin of

modeling.

The yang of modeling is being willing to experimentand to seek the active ingredients of what you are

observing; why does it get the results it gets?

This yin and yang can streamline your approach to

getting results or producing excellence, because you

are coming into the situation with an eye for these

active ingredients. You may find that many of the

things the model (the person you are modeling) thinks

are important are not actually the active ingredients.

This discovery allows you to eliminate some of thebehaviors and ideas that make the person less

efficient.

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Unconscious ingredients:

Some of these active ingredients are

unconscious; the model does not

know they are doing them. You cannot

know everything about a persons state just by

looking at them. But you also cannot learn everything

from what they say, because most excellent

performers do not fully, consciously understand why

they are successful.

Discovering such hidden wealth was very important

in putting NLP on the map. It created a great deal of

excitement, especially among therapists, because it

was revealing things that even excellent therapists

could not tell you about why they were successful.

Regardless of how passionately or

authoritatively the model tells you, how they

do what they do, look for unconscious

ingredients.

Bandler and Grinder in their book Frogs into Princes

state that modeling is not about what people say, its

about what people do. But I believe it is both, that it

is also about what people consciously experience.

However, you have to determine which of the things

they tell you are the active ingredients. This requires

experimentation.

Syntax and submodalities:

A key to modeling is to ask

questions and make observations that

uncover the syntax of the internal

thoughts and external behaviors. This reveals the

structure behind excellence or dysfunctional

behavior. Therapists may focus on dysfunctional

behavior and thought patterns in order to help their

client recognize that they have choices throughout

the process. This is one way of opening the door to

change. By getting sequences of thoughts and

memories in the form of sensory submodalities (like

size, brightness, and loudness), NLP dramatically

surpassed cognitive therapy.

One of the reasons NLP is so concerned with

submodalities is that they are such a powerful part of

change work. Through means such as the NLP swish

pattern, they can connect strong drives to propel a

new, desirable behavior. The idea here is to generate

motivation to do what works, and to avoid what

doesnt work. At the time NLP was becoming popular,

cognitive therapy too narrowly focused on thoughts

and beliefs in the form of words. This is like

comparing a drawing on a piece of paper to the real

world. One is much richer than the other. To this day,

many mainstream therapists are much more limited in

this respect, in comparison to an NLP practitioner.

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Are you a

victim of

Self-Help?
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The UnconsciousThe conscious mind may be compared to a

fountain playing in the sun and falling back

into the great subterranean pool of

subconscious from which it rises.

- Sigmund Freud

An understanding of the unconscious is crucial

to NLP methodology. Patterns II: NLP was

inspired by the Milton model and recognizes

that the unconscious is responsible for a vast

amount of processing power and information.

There are several things NLP does with this

insight:

1) Unconscious mastery:

It understands that change work with NLP

requires too many skills to handle consciously.

You can learn by practicing consciously, but then

they must become largely unconscious skills

integrated into a larger whole that we call

unconscious mastery.

2) Unconscious resources:

Although the client of the NLP practitioner may

have conscious ideas about the problems and

solutions they want to work on, surprising

solutions may emerge when the subconscious is

respected and stimulated or directed to resolve

the problem or pursue an outcome. Not only are

clients able to benefit, but also the practitioner

may find surprising solutions arise that enhance

their NLP practice at any moment.

3) Deconstruction into consciousness, and

reconstruction into unconscious mastery:

Many of our reactions and solutions (including

destructive or limiting ones) can be brought into

consciousness using methods of NLP, such as the

analysis of how they are represented in the

sensory modalities. Many NLP techniques help

us rearrange the way the processes take place or

are encoded as memories. This can produce

dramatic improvements in problems that have

defied numerous efforts from more traditional

therapists. It helps us rearrange a dysfunctional

behavior into a resourceful one. Thus, the

beginning practitioner, or a practitioner that has

not yet learned to utilize the subconscious, can

use NLP techniques while missing the spirit of

NLP. Trying to do NLP with a focus that is

exclusively on conscious workings will miss out

on the rich resources of subconscious

information and problem solving. The work will

be much less likely to result in solutions, and

will appear quite superficial to a more well-

rounded practitioner.

Meta-Questions forIntegrating the Spirit

and Skills of NLPBy observing and questioning creatively, it is

possible to create unexpected and novel

solutions. This is very important, because we are

highly conditioned; in a sense, we are only

partially conscious. NLP is about owning your

own brain. One way to do this is to breakfamiliar patterns, to not be satisfied until a novel

behavior is generated. Add to this the criterion

that the new behavior supports a meaningful

outcome and you become a solution generator.

How can it happen?

Ask what state would help to produce novel

behavior in the situation, and ask what resources

can be capitalized upon in service of desired

outcomes.

Utilization:

A key to identifying resources is to get clear on

what is already propelling the person. It may

appear very pathological, but the NLP master is

not fooled. Instead of being blinded by

pathology, he or she looks for ways to use that

energy. Few things are as powerful as a

compulsion redirected. Many of the mosttreasured NLP stories have these ingredients.

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One

of my favorite

stories is of Milton Erickson,

the psychiatrist, meeting with a young man who

insisted that he was Jesus Christ. Erickson wanted to

teach him some skills that would make him more

independent, because the young man lived in a

mental institution. In order to start getting the magic

word yes from the young man, Ericksonapproached him and said, Sir, I understand

that you are a carpenter. This is

referred to as utilization. It resulted

from meta questioning the idea

that pathology must be directly

eliminated, like an infection.

Next, Erickson asked the patients

help with a project, since he just

admitted to be a carpenter. That is

the point in which the patients

recovery has began.

Want To Find Good Training

Programs?

Be careful. Just as if you were on a blind date, take a

step back and observe very carefully. Any trainer that

promises you grandiose results, you ought to delete

them from your list. Real NLP masters will not drool

over your wallet. They will take the time to listen to

your needs and personal struggles. They will not giveyou a feeling as if theyre running a certification

factory. It is hard to find a good training program

because so many trainers are just in it for the money

and just teach it by the book (if youre lucky). This

means that their students miss out on the whole point

of learning NLP. Consider one of these options for

beginning your NLP journey:

1. If you have the money and time, go for the training

to learn the core and essence of NLP.

2. If you want to get results right away (or youre short

on cash), follow the techniques.

Although

I have focused on

negative aspects of a cookbook approach to NLP, it is

actually advised to start your NLP work by learning

patterns. This is because NLP techniques have come

from very astute modelers, from theories that have

resulted from their work, and from refinements made

to earlier patterns.

Thus, using NLP techniques in a

cookbook fashion is a good way to

learn, but only in the beginning. As

Tony Robbins says frequently in

his seminars, You dont need to

know how electricity works to

turn the lights on.

The NLP master is very flexible

and responds to what is going on

from moment to moment as well as

having an overall strategy and

collection of techniques to use as needed.

This means going beyond the patterns themselves.

Like a musician who has practiced scales and who

has the spirit of music, the quality of his or her

improvisation is built upon disciplined practice and

an intuitive understanding of fundamental musical

principles. By all means, to sound great momentarily

playing the guitar, you dont need more than applyinga few techniques, even mindlessly. But to become

truly competent, you must spend the time, the money

and the energy, repeatedly until you get the results.

NLP in its essence allows you to make that long path

shorter, but it does not provide you with a shortcut

only a better, more efficient, format to learn, practice,

adapt and grow.

Our next special report will be on mastering the skills

of NLP - take it from our site at:

www.NLPkb.com

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Can NLP Be

Used to

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