In a recent email I referred to the NLP Practitioner training as ‘life-changing’. Some of the responses I received gave me the impression that the writers were taking this description with a very large pinch of salt and I thought it might be useful to elaborate.
To say that something is life changing is indeed a bold claim and one that is worth qualifying. I have two ways of qualifying my statement – one is dramatic, the other much more pragmatic. Take your pick, read one, read the other, read both or neither. Please, don’t write off this description of NLP being ‘life-changing’ as marketing hype. It’s not.
The dramatic…
As a teenager and well into adult life I suffered badly with asthma. I was allergic to cats, dogs, horses and house-dust and I felt I was in a constant battle to breathe. Cold, damp weather could provoke an attack and so could exercise – school hockey lessons in Winter were my pet hate!
It’s well-known that there can be a powerful psychosomatic element to asthma. In my case, when I look back, I can see that I’d forgotten what it was like to be able to breathe freely and had ceased to expect it – even when I wasn’t around any of my allergic triggers.
Three months into NLP Practitioner training I’d travelled to London for the start of the next module and, because I was early, I decided to get off the Tube at an earlier station and walk for a while. I found myself strolling down King Street in Hammersmith on a cold, damp, misty morning in November with a huge smile on my face…
It took me a while to notice. It took some thought to figure out what was going on. I was walking down the street in the cold and damp and enjoying it. Why? Because I could breathe.
That was the moment when I realised that the work I’d done, with an NLP technique called the Six-Step Reframe, to break the pattern of constant asthma, had made a difference.
That was truly life-changing!
(It’s also probably one of the reasons why I continued to study NLP and eventually qualified as a Trainer of NLP so I could bring it to other people.)
I’m still allergic to cats, dogs, horses and house dust. I still carry an inhaler – but the last one went out of date before it was empty. I breathe normally most of the time but that’s not the only life-changing bit. The bit that is truly life-changing is the discovery that things can change. That I’m not stuck with my current reality. That not everything I think is true is, in fact, permanently true.
The pragmatic…
Most people don’t feel the need to change their lives. When I say ‘life-changing’ you might think I mean leaving your job, living ‘off the grid’ or dumping your partner in search of new adventure. That’s extreme life change and only appeals to small number of people – usually because they are massively dissatisfied with their life.
What NLP offers us is something more measured and practical.
I remember reading about the success of the GB Cycling team at the 2012 Olympic Games being the culmination of an improvement campaign, the focus of which was to ‘get 1% better in 100 things’. Rather than striving for big improvements in the obvious areas, they decided to give attention to everything and look for small improvements. The results speak for themselves: seven of the ten gold medals for cycling were won by Team GB.
Imagine this principle applied to your life…
If you were 1% better at:
- Customer engagement
- Presentations
- Staying focused on your goals
- Managing your stress
- Dealing with disappointment
- Defusing arguments
- Persuading people to take action
- And all the myriad things that make up your working week
Imagine if you were 1% better at all these things and more besides, how big an impact that would have on your life.
These are the kind of things that most people address in the course of an NLP Practitioner training: getting clearer about goals; figuring out what’s holding you back and how to overcome it; building better working relationships; solving long-standing problems in the workplace; using words that make a difference in getting your message across; creating new habits that get things done; ditching your doubts; facing your fears and creating more choice and control.
In reality, I expect a practical application of an NLP technique to an everyday situation to create an improvement of more than 1%. Using NLP means paying attention to habits and adjusting them to get better results, using simple processes that get results straight away and don’t need painful repetition to embed them. Keep doing this to create improvements across all your areas of activity and you can see how this can be life-changing.
It’s not a big dramatic change when you reduce your stress, but it changes your life for the better.
It might seem like a small thing to stop fretting about your work, but it changes your life for the better.
It’s not a big, challenging goal to stop wasting energy on things you can’t control, but when you let it go, it changes your life for the better.
This is why I say that doing NLP Practitioner is often a life-changing experience. The little things add up. Life gets easier. And perhaps more importantly, you discover that things can change easily. That you do have choice, even in situations that might have been feeling stuck. You find out how your unique mind works and you’re able to use it more effectively.
You might not believe that’s possible. But imagine if it were…
You might think I’m lying or exaggerating. But imagine if I were telling the truth…
You might think it wouldn’t work for you. But imagine if it did…
I understand that it’s a leap of faith to enrol in a course to learn how to manage your thinking, your habits and your actions. I know that many people grow up with myths such as ‘it takes six weeks to make – or break – a habit. You may believe that if it were possible to do the things I say we can do with NLP you would somehow already know about it.
Remember, not everything you believe to be true is, in fact, permanently true. Our understanding of Psychology has advanced rapidly in recent decades, to the extent that a great deal of what I learned as part of my degree course is now out-of-date, inaccurate or obsolete. It’s good thing I’ve kept on learning!
