NLP Training, Techniques & Products for learning NLP

Readers of NLP Times have submitted several more questions about NLP. You can submit yours here.

One popular theme has to do with NLP and mind control. In this video I talk about the ideas of NLP, mind control and share several ideas that any parent can learn to help wire up new desired behaviour in your kids.

Got a question or comment, feel free to feedback below.

I've been involved in NLP for nearly 13 years now and one of the most common questions I hear people ask is "does NLP last?, does it work in the long term?

Lately I got the chance to answer a number of questions from community members.. and I am going to be releasing more videos in the coming month.

In this short video I answer "Does NLP work in the long term?" and provide some pointers on what to attend to when looking to have a change "stick".

Got a question you'd like answered around NLP? Then submit it here - I'll be reviewing these often and creating video or blogs to provide you with answers.

NLP is a brilliant technology for creating personal change. Since its creation in the 1970s there has been no shortage of NLP self-help books.

Popular and recommended ones include Tony Robbins "Unlimited Power", "Awaken The Giant Within" and Dr. Bandler's recent book "Get the life you want". All of these are good and many others also. But not everyone gets "top" results from every NLP book.  So it's a fair question to ask: Does doing NLP by yourself, from a book actually work?

The answer is yes, but it depends on 4 key things:

1. How well the author setup and articulated the procedure to be followed?

If the author did a poor job of articulating the procedure to be followed then it will be more challenging to follow. Not all authors do this well. Not every author is going to be your "cup of tea".

2. Who is doing the "following"? (Their attitude to learning)

Who is doing the following is key. NLP is very much about the study of subjective experience. That's a fancy way of saying how you use your mind and body to create specific results varies from person to person. No two people are exactly alike. If you are the kind of person who has a lot of internal dialogue and you always have to UNDERSTAND something before you are willing to even try something … then you are likely going to have problems using techniques from a book…

Why? Because you will be trying to make what you read "fit" into your understanding of the world and less likely to just DO what the author instructs. Some aspects of NLP, to someone who is very mind and logic driven, may not make much sense, at first. The idea for starters that changing how you use pictures, sounds, feelings etc can have and does have a profound impact can be a bit hard to believe, again at first. We've all been indoctrinated into this idea that change is a slow process and can only happen after you figure out the source of the issue … the why so to speak. And that is just not true.

Also if the person who is trying to apply the instructions is narrating on in their head with stuff like "is this working?", "I don't feel anything different" etc. then what they are doing will be interrupting the very process they are trying to effect.

Think about it, a technique is like a recipe. If you are cooking a meal and, while following the instructions you start adding in other ingredients that are counter productive to the taste, or decide to ignore other ingredients because you don't see the point or don't like it, then the meal you are trying to create isn't going to come out the same as the chef intended. In fact you may have unintentionally screwed the whole thing up all together. Obvious, but people make this mistake all the time.

3. How well you can follow instructions?

How well you can follow instructions is of critical importance. Part of how the processes of NLP work is that they are designed to move a person through an experience - a new or different way of thinking/seeing/feeling etc about a particular situation or problem. Therefore the order of the sequence (i.e. make a picture first, then hear yourself say x, etc) and qualitative aspects (make the picture big, bright, make the audio sound low, muffled, far away etc) have a key role to producing specific effects.

If you don't follow the instructions properly then you aren't going to be able to get the same results.

4. The technique used & outcome being working on…

Finally, the type of  technique or process the author is looking to instruct you through and the outcome you are using it on, also has a big role to play. Some techniques are designed for example to help you overcome trauma, get over a bad childhood etc. And they work really well. However if the experience you are trying to change is still very raw to you and you are trying to use a technique in a book by yourself, with no outside guidance, then your milage with this will vary.

Why? because if you are in the throws of tears at even the thought of X event, then trying to get yourself to follow a set of instructions from a book without first establishing a resource state (example feeling OK) etc is going to be difficult to do.

Also if you select the wrong technique to use on a particular outcome you aren't going to get the result you want. So some knowledge about what technique to use (and combinations of them) is required.

Helpful Tips:

So here are some tips on how to use the techniques of NLP from a book on yourself.

Tip #1: Go with the author's instructions

As much as possible follow exactly as the author instructs and in the order he or she specifies.

Tip #2: Quieten all unnecessary internal dialogue

This means if you are in the habit of self-talking your way through a technique - zip it - doing an NLP technique on yourself is not an intellectual - 'what would Socrates think' kind of moment. After you have done the technique properly, and gotten a result, then if you still want you can go self-reflective on it. But it isn't required.

Tip #3 Cut your cloth to measure

If you are just starting out using NLP with yourself then pick minor incidences and issues or behaviours you want to change. Don't go and pick the most traumatic event of your life as goal number 1. Once you have gotten used to getting results and following the instructions then you can move onward to "bigger" stuff you'd like to change. And choose the right "tool" for the job. Many changes require a certain amount of conditioning so make sure you continue to repeat the process until it sticks.

Tip #4 A book doesn't replace a skilled practitioner

Some stuff like uncontrollable nightmares, rape and self-harming behaviours etc are not the kind of thing I'd recommend you pick up an NLP book for. Go find someone who is properly trained in NLP or a qualified therapist and have them assist you in make the desired changes.

If you would like to learn more about how to use NLP with yourself then check out "Using NLP to create more of the life you want"… here.

Got a question or comment? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Comment box below.

“Oh, I don’t have the time to practice!”

This is one of the most common complaints I hear from students in reference to NLP. You may have even it said it yourself?, perhaps even many times.

But is this really true?

Try this… if you want to get better at NLP and you find yourself saying often that you don't have the time, stop, think again.

The opportunity to practice and develop your skills with NLP can occur anywhere. Perhaps the mis-take you are making is thinking that NLP is a set of techniques, a something you do 'on' someone else, rather than presupposing that it is more akin to an operating system, that is always running, and operating to help you experience and feel more of what you want, more often (and help others where you can.)

Sure, if you live on the top of a mountain, isolated with no other human beings around, there are some aspects of NLP that might be a little difficult to get feedback on but for everyone else, you can’t help but have the time to practice.

Here's why…

Why You Always Have The Opportunity To Practice

From morning to night, there is one person who is always with you… yourself. So you have 24×7 opportunity to use the technology of the processes of NLP to better your own life.

From managing and lifting your baseline state, using the Meta Model to improve your own thinking processes and challenging 'unhelpful' inner dialogue, to reviving precious memories, to being fully present in any given moment. The opportunities to use NLP to help yourself are pretty much unending.

Chances are your life is giving you plenty of great opportunities every day to use NLP to better yourself, whether you are a stay at home mum/dad or a CEO of your own corporation.

If you always find yourself needing an "NLP" book to know what to do… throw it out. At some point you have to move from "'learning' mode to 'doing' mode. As the old phrase goes 'the learning  is in the doing'.

Start trusting your own instinct that you can make good decisions. NLP, or indeed any personal development technology, should not be a crutch. NLP is really more about creating greater freedom and choice about how you want to respond in any given situation. If you need further training to get the foundational skills onboard - do it. And if money is a problem, treat that as a resource issue and become inventive: expect that it is a temporary issue. Stay fixated on achieving your goal and you will almost certainly succeed.

And of course there is ample opportunity to use whatever you do know about NLP… when you watch TV, listen to radio show, use the Internet, engage personally with other human beings etc. The opportunities are endless.

Investing your time to become really good with NLP really is a worthwhile experience.

"Yea, but I want the easy technique, the unconscious installation of everything NLP"

Sure, I'd love the "Matrix" installation too for lots of things but, as of 2011, a process to do that doesn't exist. There are some things you can do to help speed up the process but whether you learn from a master or pattern from someone who has exceptional skill… these things only  “shorten the learning curve”, they do not eliminate it. Ultimately true skill comes from practice, lots of practice. Dancers, sports athletes and high performers of all types know this and they invest in that practice.

Making it Practical:

So if you want to make significant inroads (for free) on your skill with NLP, take 5 minutes today and every day to intentionally practice your skills.

Perhaps you can set a memory hook, like every time you are at the water cooler or having dinner or in a meeting etc… and start practicing the fundamental skills… working to a T.O.T.E, state elicitation, state management, anchoring, eliciting the present state, desired state, evoking resources etc. Immerse yourself in the fundamentals of the technology. Practice them daily and you can't help but become significantly better in time.

Review your performance, identifying what went well?, what didn't?, what will you do differently next time?

This simple process of action, reflection, improvement, new action - will help you become a much better NLP'er in 2011.

Got a question or comment? I'd love to hear your feedback. Feel free to leave a comment below.

To learn more about Using NLP on Yourself, click here.

Happy New Year.  May 2011 be your best year yet.

To help kick off the new year to a flying start I've put together a simple seven part strategy below.

Follow it and you will enjoy a transformation in your results.

1. Are you clear about what you really, really want?

If you genuinely want to make real progress on some important
goal - its essential that you are able to describe what it will
look/sound/feel like in sensory based terms. Why? So your brain
has something to focus on that it can fixate on and not some
abstract term like "success".

By doing this you also enable:

- Your brain to map criteria for when you are getting closer to
what you want
- Increased motivation… by going through this
imagination/thinking process you will be stroking the cinders of
your motivation and setting the seeds for a big enduring motive
to pursue this goal
- Yourself to have a real world external check you can use to verify
your progress against.

"Success" is subjective, but to get a increase of $4000.00 this
year is not. Understanding how this goal fits into and colours
EVERY area of your life will make the goal state very
compelling.

2. Does your focus need more focus?

Is your attention split across many different goals/areas?

If so - bring your focus into focus and zero in on just ONE goal
that when achieved will help manifest all the rest.

It's counter intuitive but this practice can work really well. By
focusing in on your most important goal and maximizing your
effort towards that you will make progress quicker. If you
wake up each morning with just one critical goal in mind you can
ensure you are consistently taking action towards it.

Tighten rather than expand your focus and you will enjoy greater
results in that direction.

3. Have you examined your performance from 2010?

In NLP we presume that all behaviour leads from some neurological
process. And you don't need to have a PhD in people to notice
that much of what we do is the result of other than conscious
habits… Therefore if you aren't getting the results you want -
and you haven't been for some time - then it is likely that the
behaviours you are doing are not sufficient to cause the results
you want. In fact several behaviours are most likely counter-productive and
hurting your goal attainment… Do you know what these are?

You can't hope to benefit from identifying and changing these
behaviours if you don't self-reflect and look to identify the
underlying patterns which have likely been dictating key areas of
your life for years, or perhaps decades.

For example if you own a business or are in a job and you had
some big goal for 2010 like win a new big corporate client or get
a big promotion but it didn't happen. Make the time to STOP and
re-examine what assumptions your expectation was operating on and
identify what assumptions were missing/flawed or overlooked.  Use
that awareness to improve your future performance. This strategy
has been used by top athletes, performers and successful people
for generations. But it is not common practice.

If you self-reflect on your performance every day and assess what
went well, didn't go well, what you will improve tomorrow - you will
make dramatic progress within a few short months. Put this habit
into practice and you will be richly rewarded.

Fail to learn from your erroneous thinking and behaving and your
results will be handicapped.

4. Have you challenged your beliefs?

Being successful in any worthy and challenging endeavor starts
with the belief that it is or at least could be, possible. If you
don't believe something is possible you are likely to not try.

The beliefs or "thoughts we repeat" with a sense of certainty to
ourselves and eventually stop questioning become the chains that
bind us. Every top performer in any field will have an "attitude"
or set of beliefs and valuing that enable certain behaviours that
produce desired results. It is not so much as having "right" or
"wrong" beliefs/thoughts, as much as it is about ensuring your
mind-body is regularly trained to think and act in a way that is
in line with what is required to create "success".

Have you stopped to think what beliefs are inhibiting your goal
attainment and what beliefs you need to entrain in yourself that
result in achieving your desired results?

5. Have you set up a learning plan?

Have you got a learning plan?

To get from where you are now to where you want to be you will
need additional resources. Those resource will likely include
specific skills and knowledge (among others). If you want to make
2011 a great year, make some time to establish what your learning
priorities will be and chunk them in to 30 and 90 days slots.

Having a learning plan ensure you focus your finite resources on
the most important learning oriented behaviours relative to your
top goal(s).

It also ensure your learning is far more effective, because you
will be looking to use right away the things you learn to improve
your life.

6. Quit trying harder!

More of the same tends to create more of the same. And if that
"same" isn't what you want then you MUST do something different
to expect a different result - everything else being equal.

There are only 24 hours in the day, there is only so much you can
do. Burning both "ends of the candle" is rarely the cure.

If you are:

*  Clear about what you want
*  Are focused and taking progressive consistent action
*  If you regularly examine your performance and learn
from experience when it isn't working to produce the result you want
* You have entrained the core beliefs requisite for success in
your desired goal area (as best that you can identify them)
*  And have a realistic and achievable learning plan in place

… but you are still not getting the results you want, then it's time
to question…

What strategy are you following?

Quit trying to work harder (doing more of the same) and presume
that there is a error or issue in your strategy.

Become curious and map out what strategy you are pursing on a
sheet of paper or with some sticky notes and identify where the
"gap" is that is resulting the under-performance. Perhaps it is
with an assumption you have that doesn't hold up to fresh
scrutiny or perhaps a resource isn't outputting as much you
thought it would, or maybe it is with some aspect of your own
mindset and behaviour. Ferret it out, establish a hypothesis of
what you think it is, then change your behaviour and test to see
if you get a better result.

Bottom line - results manifest from actions. As Winston Churchill
once said "The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it
and ignorance may deride it, but in the end there it is." If the
requisite causes/actions that are necessary to produce a "result"
aren't present then the effect can't be present either. Quit
trying harder - use your brain to work smarter.

7. Have you considered & adjusted to your environment?

The final tip is concerned with your environment. This topic is
a much bigger area for discussion, but in terms of manifesting
results, only personal development books would have you believe
that the only factor that counts is "you". In life you don't get
a "A" for effort, but for results.

As an individual you are part of a series of much larger systems,
each which operate by certain rules that guide their behaviour
and output. Hence if you have done all six items above (and
repeated the process iteratively) and still aren't getting to the
result you want - then look to your environment. Are there
certain constraints that up until now were invisible to you that
have been impacting your performance negatively?

This may be certain people, contexts, market forces etc which are
impacting on the system in which you are looking to produce a
result. Failure to factor these things in and set a counter
strategy in play will result in lots of frustration.

The world and your environment, is constantly in a state of
change. So is the field of NLP.

As Darwin once said "It is not the strongest of the species that
survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to
change."

One of the big issues I hear from people often is that they have
"tried, tried, tried" yet still not succeeded at something and
begin to feel a sense of hopelessness or that there must be
"something wrong with me".

This is mostly nonsense. While there is no doubt that in most
cases a certain change in behaviour will improve performance -
the cause for the under performance is sometimes due to factors that are
external to you. This doesn't mean you put your hands up and say
the situation is hopeless. Hopelessness doesn't exist 'out there'
in the world, it like every other emotion, is embodied in
people.

The attitude of NLP is one of resourcefulness, go-for it,
unbridled curiosity.

James Allen once wrote "Circumstances do not determine a man,
they reveal him." It's one of my favourite quotes.

When you face an obstacle on the road to your goal, become like
water - move around it, flow over it, go under or over it.

Make sure as you plan and set in motion your path for 2011 that
you use the environment to set yourself up for greater success.

Wishing you an awesome 2011.
Tom
PS: Interested in learning how to use NLP on yourself? Then be sure to check out our new product here.

BBC 4 have run a 30 minute piece on NLP called "Power to Persuade: The Story of NLP"

Within it journalist William Little interviews Richard Bandler, Michael Carroll and several others with a view of exploring what it is, does it work and questioning the "science" behind it.

The interview (IMHO) doesn't really add much to the story of NLP for anyone who has read an introductory text but it does highlight the increasing drive by some people looking to validate/invalidate its claims.

This isn't the first or last time someone has challenged if "NLP works", "isn't it just pop psychology?" etc. etc. Others have called NLP a cult (see Sects, 'Cults' & Alternative Religions, written by a David V. Barrett).

My experience of learning and using NLP has taught me that the distinctions and meaning someone can make about any subject or experience depends on who is looking, how they are looking at it and what filters they are looking at it from.

NLP isn't a science. It focuses on creating models of excellence in performance - whose worth is measured on usefulness, not whether what we as NLPers describe/presuppose is "true". The ultimate question is - does it get you results? For many people this has been most certainly yes and also at times, no. People aren't robots, so it is unreasonable to expect that it will work for everyone in every context.

Either way, the curiosity and energy of the co-founders that started the field has resulted in many great frameworks, techniques and strategies for achieving all manner of outcomes being created and are widely used in many trainings and professional contexts.

The Research Question:

Research may or may not find 'validity' in the techniques and processes of NLP.

Either way I'll be taking any 'conclusions' under review. Here is why.

Much of what passes as 'research' isn't a solid as you think.

Just because researchers says something is so doesn't necessarily mean it is. All claims to facts of science and research should be appended with "to the best of our (research team's) current knowledge as of this date."

The results of tests vary on who is doing the testing, what is being tested and how it is being measured and reported. When it comes to NLP, a big factor is also who is doing the intervention/change/technique etc.

Of course to be given any serious weight any research should go through the peer review process. Yet a lot of "research" isn't. Even when it is, and assuming that it is an accurate peer review, the conclusions that make headlines are often expressed without the full context on which these conclusions have been reached and therefore can easily mislead.

Bottom line - without looking deeper into the who/what/how the research was done and who by/how it was reviewed - you may want to hold any conclusions at arms length…

Of course it is also worth saying that just because something hasn't been empirically tested or that a piece of research hasn't been peer reviewed doesn't automatically mean that the conclusions aren't sound. Rather it raises concerns about the credibility of the research - and also may be a warning flag that some company or body has an agenda to grind and wants "scientific" research.

Ideology also plays a role. The ideology of the persons doing the testing will influence how they perceive, act, look for answers, formulate hypotheses etc. Researchers are human beings and not devoid of being influenced by their own beliefs, or indeed the social and ideological structures in which they exist.

For years tobacco companies funded scientific research demonstrating that cigarettes did not cause negative health effects. Other companies/organizations are no doubt looking to 'science' to help substantiate the conclusions they want.

Knowing where to look, what to look for and how to look and prove yourself wrong is vital to designing effective research projects. If anyone is involved in that work now, or in the future, or if you know of any good NLP- or neuroscience-related projects happening near you - feel free to let me know.

In the meantime, check out the BBC 4 broadcast here.

[Note: This broadcast is online for 6 more days before they take it down.]

Got a question, opinion or comment - feel free to submit it below.