Plenty of people these days have “heard” of NLP.
Some people have been “trained” in NLP as well.
I’ve got some mixed feelings about this. Having been to a few trainings myself over the years, it’s always important to separate the marketing from the product.
This goes with pretty much any product where you aren’t going to be able to immediately tell if it works or not. Obviously, you’re going to know right away of a cheeseburger that’s been advertised as “delicious and juicy” is indeed delicious and juicy. If it’s try and horrible then you know you’ve been had.
Things like NLP training or products and courses that promise miraculous results are a bit more difficult to ascertain.
A lot of very expensive NLP trainings offer something like “unconscious installation.” I don’t know who came up with that, but it sounds pretty good.
Almost “Matrix” like.
Meaning you get to sit there, passively in your chair, while guru spins fantastic stories that are supposed to speak directly to your unconscious.
Then a week or so later, you supposedly have all that NLP has to offer programmed directly into your brain, ready to dodge bullets and break the laws of physics with your mind.
Sure, you say, you’ve practiced in the seminar. Everybody set anchors on each other and they worked fantastically. Everybody tried using some patterns and procedures on each other and they worked like magic.
I’m reminded of an episode of “Friends,” where Joey (the stereotypical “dumb” character) was listening to a French language tape. Because the guy on the tape told him he was doing a “great job,” he assumed he was doing a great job.
But here’s something to think about:
When push comes to shove, you don’t “rise to the occasion,” you “fall to your level of training.”
Meaning when it comes time to persuade out on the street, whether you’ve got to convince that girl to give you her number, or you need to convince the hiring manager to hire you out of the hundreds of other candidates, you aren’t going to be facing a fellow seminar attendee who’s going to tell you (like poor Joey) that you’re doing great.
You are going to be faced with somebody who’s got their own intentions, their own biases, and their own beliefs.
Clearly, the more training you have built into your brain to fall back onto, the better.
Luckily, you don’t need seminars and expensive gurus for your training. All you need is the right language patterns, a few notebooks, some pens, and some time.
You’re responsible for the notebooks and the time, but you can get the patterns here: