I always keep a look out for people who are in the NLP space, especially those in the region and those who are online. Much of the time, I feel a little sorry for those who have been attended NLP certifications for a few reasons.
Many NLP trainers (let alone Practitioners and Master Practitioners) are not reinventing themselves because they are too busy making money. Since the 1990s, there really hasn’t been much of a breakthrough in the applicability of NLP, let alone the transfer of NLP skills into the real world. I know a few NLP Practitioners who have attended the certification but do squat with it.
This is primarily because most NLP trainers still focus on therapy training as the foundation rather than the real roots of NLP, which is modeling. Recently, I took a look at an NLP Master Practitioner syllabus and realized that they spend about 10% of the time on teaching therapy rather than real modeling work.
How many people in the world actually use therapy in real life scenarios?? How much practice are you really going to get, even if you learn therapeutic models in NLP??
The main danger here is simple. By looking through the lens of therapy, you see every problem as a need for therapy. The truth is, if there are pathological symptoms, you will be in ethical danger of treating someone without really knowing the pathology and how to deal with it if you are simply NLP trained.
[NOTE: NLP is not therapy; if you are a therapist, it can help you to catalyze and improve your skills. NLP is a modeling methodology, linguistically bound. Many people do not even have the appropriate linguistic background to claim they can maximize the use of linguistics in so-called conversational hypnosis].
NLP was meant to be modeling oriented. Conversational. Linguistic. Since the beginning of time, NLP has always focused on meta models – models for creating models. At the moment, there are only two linguistic models in NLP, but the plethora of linguistic models in the real world are much broader in purpose, depth of application to access individual mental models, and supported by a growing body of research.
There are key disadvantages to this. Firstly, you are learning models that are not enriched. Many people who are teaching therapy aren’t in therapy, let alone having had the rigor of studying and understanding and applying therapeutic models. They simply have an NLP certificate (which doesn’t really amount to much). If you really want to learn therapeutic models, please learn them from an experienced therapist, and be prepared to study them in great detail. Secondly, you are detracting from the modeling process by taking things and expecting people to be learners of a fixed model. This causes people to go about what I call “toolboxing” – where individuals say “let’s use A to achieve B”, resulting in fixedness instead of progression. Thirdly, a Master Practitioner should be Mastery driven rather than goal driven. A mastery orientation is different from a performance orientation because performance orientation reduces motivation to learn and is often associated with lower quality of learning (Dweck, 1986). In order for a Master Practitioner to be mastery driven, one needs to consider the fact that one has to be effective in modeling mental maps of others. This will include pre-requisite knowledge about:
- listening to beliefs, values and attitudes through language
- pattern recognition
- understanding and differentiating cognitive structures through the use of linguistic frameworks
- expert orientation – seeking out best practices and building the appropriate methodology to extract expert knowledge (multiple tools are in existence, including Cognitive Task Analysis, Applied Cognitive Task Analysis and Competency Mapping frameworks; Discourse analysis methods such as Speech Act Theory, Conventional Implicature & Conversational Implicature, the Cooperative Principle in comparison with Relevance Theory and the Politeness Principle ). Why? Simply because some methods help generate expert knowledge models far faster and comprehensively than other methods.
As the fields of psychology, linguistics and NLP begin to converge, it becomes more and more imperative for practitioners and master practitioners alike to be mindful of being able to expand the field not just for commercialization, but for professionalism.
