From a recent blog post:

People just don’t understand what love is, so they suffer. Most Westernized people think love is when you can’t live without someone or some object. Any doctor will tell you that actually sounds like a disease.

Atisha, a Buddhist monk in the 10th Century echoed what love really is:

“Love is the wish for others to be happy.”

Love is the wish for others to be happy? I disagree.

Merely wishing others to be happy, without taking tangible action to help them achieve happiness, is not love. It is mental masturbation. And delusional, if a person thinks that intending love makes up for their unloving actions.

I do agree with Erol that an addiction to someone is not love. But I have seen and heard far too many people who are convinced that they “love” someone because they feel loving, or intend good things for the other person, while actually treating that person badly, even abusively.

What you feel and intend matters to you. Other people only experience your actions, not your feelings or intentions.

When you want someone to be happy and you take action to help them achieve happiness, then you love them.

Luckily, you can take action whether or not you feel loving feelings, and whether or not you wish the other person happiness in that moment. That freedom gives you tremendous power to love, even in less-than-ideal circumstances. Loving action is a choice you can make, a habit you can build.

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.

NLP’s content has expanded enormously since the early 1970s. But NLP trainings are still short. Especially compared to training in disciplines like therapy and psychiatry.

The expectation of “fast NLP mastery” combined with short, relatively inexpensive trainings has combined to create a business climate in which an NLP training long enough for students to actually master NLP skills would cost far more than most people are willing to spend.

Hype creates unrealistic expectations

Before getting licensed to practice, therapists typically must complete years of school, then do hundreds of hours of work with clients, some under supervision by other professionals. NLPers get no such training to learn to use tools and techniques promoted as far more powerful. What’s wrong with this picture?

Many NLP students start courses with ridiculously inflated ideas of what they can expect to learn and do during and after their training. Some NLP trainers encourage students to believe that they can take a course or two (sometimes just a few days long) and gain “NLP mastery.”

(Think how hard you’d laugh at marketing that claimed “Master the skills of brain surgery when you take our 18-day Master Brain Surgeon training!” Yet this type of claim is so common in the NLP world that NLPers hardly notice.)

As a result of training hype, I’ve met all too many graduates of NLP trainings who were dangerously under-trained, yet overconfident. In fact, I used to be one of them. (Some people might argue I still am…)

“Instant mastery” trainings cost the NLP field

Because of poor-quality trainings and unreasonable expectations about NLP, NLP is rife with:

• Insecure newbie NLPers smart enough to know they really don’t have the skills they took classes to get. Many are afraid to apply what little they know. Far too many have no idea how to gain the skills they thought their training would give them.
• Arrogant newbie NLPers blind to the limitations of their skills and knowledge. Some of these newbies start practices, fumble a bit, and eventually turn into good practitioners. Others disappoint clients by giving them poor results, or even harm clients.
• “Professional” NLPers who don’t follow up with clients or trainees to make sure that what they do actually works. NLP is all about calibration, feedback, and course-correction… but all too many of us NLPers don’t apply that standard to the long-term outcomes of our own work! (I feel somewhat embarrassed by my own track record in this regard.)

What you can do

Frankly, I don’t know how to fix the problems with NLP trainings, although I’ll discuss some ideas in future posts.

In the meantime, what can you do about the problems I outlined?

As an NLP student:

• Expect to get what you pay and work for. If you want a few NLP skills, a short training might suffice. If you want to master NLP and do NLP professionally, take lengthy NLP trainings from first-rate trainers.
• Expect NLP to work differently outside the classroom. Your trainers picked demo subjects and issues that would be easy to succeed with. Real life isn’t like that! There are a lot more complex issues, mixed motivations, and risk.
• Do lots and lots of real-world application and practice. Start with calibration skills. Then practice simple, harmless techniques, such as anchoring good feelings, or using embedded commands to give people empowering suggestions. As your skills improve, work your way up.
• Protect the safety of the people you work with. Start with simple techniques applied to small issues whose outcomes don’t matter. This lets you gain skills and help people without significant risk to them. Notice your results, especially ecology issues, and make corrections to what you do. As your skills improve, work your way up to bigger issues and more complex interventions.
• Plan on spending hundreds to thousands of hours practicing, applying, and improving your skills before you achieve any kind of mastery. Some kind of daily practice will help, as will joining local practice groups. (Google NLP practice group to find a group near you. Somnambulistic Sleepwalkers is a member-run group that hosts free or low-cost NLP and hypnosis practice sessions in various cities worldwide.)

As a NLP practitioner:

Underestimate your skills and mastery. You probably got trained to overestimate your skills, so compensate.

• Base your skills evaluation on your actual results, not wishful thinking. Include not-so-good outcomes and failures.
• Pay attention to failures and mistakes. They provide useful feedback to help you improve.
• Do followup with people you work with. Tracking their long-term results will give you useful feedback about what you do that does (and doesn’t) work.
• Underestimate your results and undersell your skills. If a client thinks it will take 6 sessions to solve problem X, and you do it in 4, they’ll be thrilled — and they’ll get the beneficial outcome. If they think you can solve the problem in 3 sessions, they might leave before session 4 when they would have gotten results that would have benefitted them for a lifetime.

As an NLP trainer:

Help students set realistic expectations of your and other people’s NLP trainings.

• Sell realism, not hype. Market what your students will actually get in your trainings. (A bit of scoffing at other trainers’ unrealistic offerings might help your students reset their expectations to realistic levels.)
• Differentiate between learning skills, which students will do in your training, and mastering skills, which students will need to do on their own after your training ends.
• Tell your students that “NLP mastery” consists of having high-level skills, which requires practice and experience they won’t get in your training.
• Require your students to practice their skills as part of your training.
• Encourage your students to practice after training, and provide resources to help them do so.
• Start thinking about what it would take to shift at least part of the NLP training market from the “instant mastery” paradigm to something more like a college degree in therapy, complete with supervised practice with real clients.

World-renowned NLP trainer Steve Andreas has been saying for years, “What we really need is a 4-year college program for a BA in NLP. In four years, we could turn out Milton Ericksons by the hundreds!”

That kind of real result, not hype and unrealistic expectations, is something the NLP world desperately needs.

Joy

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.

During training, my fellow students and I were often able to rapidly 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 half an hour or less. Gaining the power to do this seemed miraculous.

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

Inevitably, I encountered problems I couldn’t fix right away. Now, in many cases where one NLP quick fix doesn’t work to resolve a client’s issue, a different quick fix will work. It often makes sense to try a few. If an issue can be solved with the right fast method, best to find that out at the beginning, rather taking multiple sessions to do the same work.

But quick fixes don’t always work. My training didn’t encourage me to expect some issues to take longer to resolve.

Sometimes my focus on a “quick fix” kept me from even noticing evidence that a slower approach might work better. Or noticing where a quick fix might prove inappropriate or could cause harm.

Encouraged to be arrogant

By partway through my NLP training, I had gotten overconfident about NLP’s power and my own skills.

In retrospect, I became dangerously arrogant.

Unfortunately, the NLP community I encountered didn’t provide counter-examples to the “quick fix” idea, or encourage me to be humble. Instead, much of what I heard and read fed and inflated my arrogance.

Used inappropriately, NLP can damage people. I feel very lucky that I only did significant harm to two people that I know of. (One of them was me.)

It took me several years working as an NLP developer, and years struggling to work through my own issues, to realize that NLP is not the comprehensive quick fix many people claim it to be.

Quick fixes aren’t always possible or appropriate

Problems and issues have structures. NLP’s emphasis on simplicity and dealing with the minimum amount of structure to get an issued resolved is usually useful.

However, NLPers tend not to distinguish between issues where a “quick fix” is and isn’t structurally appropriate.

To use a simple analogy, let’s say that Juliet comes to you for help because she has trouble running.

• If the issue is a stone in her shoe, you can find and fix the problem quickly and easily. Here, a quick fix is appropriate, while longer “treatment” is not.
• If Juliet has trouble running because she hasn’t exercised in 5 years, she needs to get in shape. Fixing this problem ecologically requires a systemic approach. You would not help Juliet by encouraging her to take amphetamines so she can immediately run faster. Or by convincing her that she can instantly gain the ability to run well by changing her beliefs. With a systemic issue like this, a quick fix might simply fail. But it might make the problem worse.
• What if Juliet has a stone in her shoe and she’s out of shape? You can instantly boost her performance by removing the stone. Such dramatic results might convince both of you that a quick fix approach works. But removing the stone can’t and won’t fix Juliet’s systemic performance issue. Trying to remove more stones from her shoes is a waste of time. Once the rock is gone, she needs to get in shape.

NLPers often complain that conventional therapies, especially psychoanalysis, can take years to fix a problem NLP can fix in 5 minutes. As a NLPer, if you get a client with a systemic problem, do you have the wisdom and humbleness — and the calibration skills — to notice when a quick fix isn’t appropriate?

Solve all your problems instantly with NLP!

I think we in the NLP community harm our clients, our fellow NLPers, and the general public by promoting the idea of NLP as a universal quick fix.

I also think we cause harm by allowing NLP practitioners and trainers to make ridiculous claims without being publicly criticized or held accountable for the results they actually get.

The “quick fix” appeals to our near-universal human desires to get instant gratification and something for nothing. But how many clients that NLP could help instead stop doing NLP because it doesn’t work as fast or completely as they were unrealistically led to expect?

Death to NLP hype!

I think NLP will be better off when we NLPers talk honestly with clients about what we offer. When we openly discuss what NLP can and can’t do. When we encourage clients to develop realistic expectations. When instead of hyping NLP, we market the amazing results NLP really can and does produce. And tell clients that resolving longstanding issues might happen quickly and completely, but more often takes time.

Most of the professional NLPers I know who had serious, ongoing issues in their lives — the kind clients come to us to fix — took years to resolve them fully. That includes me.

Why should we NLPers promote NLP as if it will fix the client’s problems instantly, when it didn’t do that for us?

Joy

What’s your opinion? Please add your respectful and intelligent comments to the community dialogue below.