Living Well NLP

In “NLP and the myth of the quick fix,” I discussed how promoting NLP as an instant cure-all causes problems for NLPers an our customers.

Unfortunately, NLP’s “quick fix” mentality also extends to NLP training.

Instant NLP mastery!

NLP includes advanced technology for quickly transferring skills. However, while training can expose students to skills and techniques, mastering skills takes practice. And practice takes time.

When I began my NLP training in 2002, I quickly embraced the myth of the NLP “quick fix.”

To their credit, my trainers were fairly low-key about what NLP could do. But they did promote the idea of NLP working “much faster” than alternatives, such as conventional therapy. And during training, my fellow students and I were often able to quickly fix some of our own and other people’s problems. Sometimes these were issues that had endured for decades, yet with NLP we could resolve them in under half an hour.

Many of us NLP students, including me, quickly developed overblown ideas of what NLP (and we) could accomplish.

NLP expert Andy Austin explains the anatomy of post-traumatic stress disorder — including the hidden factor that drives the PTSD trauma:

(This clip is part of the 2009 NLP Advanced Mastery Training video series, featuring Andy Austin, Steve Andreas, and Steven Watson. )

What is psychological trauma?

A trauma is a strong, persistent, negative emotional response to a past event, or reminders of it.

Trauma characteristics:

• A trauma is not an experience. It is an emotional response to an experience. If the emotional response is positive, the experience is not traumatic, no matter how harrowing its sensory details. (Think of all the people who pay money to have scary, dangerous experiences such as white-water rafting!)

Recently I have been dealing with a cancerous breast lump. I had surgery in December, and started chemotherapy a few days ago. At this point my prognosis is good, and I am doing well.

Using my NLP and hypnosis skills to deal with cancer

As you can imagine, throughout my diagnosis and treatment, I have been using my NLP and hypnosis skills to:

• Accept my situation, and deal with it resourcefully and proactively.
• Keep my perspective. While I am dealing with a potentially life-threatening illness, in the present I’m in good health, and better off than millions of other people. Including many people I’ve personally met.
• Manage my internal states, so that I am consistently resourceful almost all the time, in a good mood, and mostly happy. Rather than staying in unresourceful and unpleasant states, I have taught myself to automatically pop out them after a short time.

What do NLP techniques, applications, and models have in common? What makes them NLP?

Not a core theory of how the mind works. NLP doesn’t have one.

Not field of application. NLP gets used for therapy, business, sales, seduction, negotiation, writing, sports, education, personal coaching, and more.

Not origins or developers. Lots of people developed and expanded NLP. Many NLP models (including the first formal NLP pattern, the Meta-Model) got imported into NLP from other disciplines or modeled from experts in other fields.

Given that, what makes a model or technique an NLP model or technique?

If you’re like most NLP Practitioners I talk with, your training included a lot of elicitation, and little or no NLP modeling.

That’s unfortunate, because modeling is the core skill of NLP. In fact, Richard Bandler and John Grinder used it to create Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP’s rich array of techniques, models, and applications got developed and refined using modeling.

How ironic that NLPers so rarely learn NLP’s core skill and strategy. But fortunately…

Today I’m going to remind you of a simple NLP pattern that can help you:

• Make friends and keep them
• Become more popular and attractive to others
• Get dates and keep partners
• Reduce conflict and negativity in your life
• Get more support from others
• Keep people around you happier

You already know this skill. You learned it during NLP training, and use it during interventions.

But you probably haven’t generalized it to everyday life. (Most NLPers don’t.) This subtle shift in language can make a big difference.

This is an NLP modeling, research, and development blog. In a previous post I defined NLP modeling. In future articles, I’ll write about my process for modeling, and reveal modeling tips and tricks. Today, I discuss how NLP and modeling relate.

What is NLP?

When most people talk about NLP, they mean:

1. NLP techniques, such as anchoring, pacing and leading, and the Fast Phobia Cure;
2. NLP applications, such as applying rapport skills to sales; and/or
3. NLP models, such as timelines and eye access cues.

However, I and most NLP developers regard another aspect of NLP as more important:

1. NLP modeling, NLP’s process for figuring out the specifics of how someone does a skill in enough detail that other people can achieve similar results.

In a previous post, I discussed the problems of learning skills and attitudes from role models who aren’t competent. In this post I’ll discuss how to find real experts to learn from.

What makes an expert?

To find good exemplars (examples of a skill or ability) to learn from, evaluate their results. Ask:

• How good are the person’s actual results? It doesn’t matter if Rowena thinks she is the world expert in good relationships; it matters whether she has good relationships. Judge only by results, not by what you, she, or other people think will work, does work, or should work.
• Does this exemplar get consistently great results? Someone who has excellent relationship skills will tend to have lots of good relationships: with their spouse, parents, children, friends, neighbors, etc. They’ll also have minimal problems with bad relationships, quarrels, firings, and people doing nasty things to them.