by Steve Andreas

Fairly often people object to having newly-minted NLP Practitioners doing therapy (even if they call it “counseling,” or “personal change,” or something else). Typically there are two kinds of concern:

1. “How well can someone be helped?” and
2. “What is the danger that someone might be harmed?”

by an inappropriate method, or by the therapist’s lack of skill in applying an appropriate method, etc. Although these two concerns are not completely independent, let’s first address the effectiveness concern, “How well can someone be helped?”
Effectiveness

Certainly it would be better if NLP Practitioner Certification trainings were much longer and more thorough, so that Practitioners offering themselves as psychotherapists were better trained. However, practically speaking, getting people to come to a 24-day Practitioner training is hard enough (which is one reason why so many “Practitioner” trainings are considerably shorter). How many would come to a 240-day training? Yet even a 240-day training would be less time than a college student spends in their freshman year! Most licensed professional psychotherapists have spent a minimum of five years in college for an M.A., and eight or more for a Ph.D. So it is certainly understandable that most people assume that a licensed professional, with a training lasting over 50 times longer than a NLP Practitioner, would do a far better job helping people make personal changes.

So how do the skills of an NLP Practitioner actually compare with those of licensed professionals? I have been observing the skills of Practitioners in Certification trainings for over 20 years now, so that gives me a pretty good baseline of understanding of their capabilities and weak areas, as well as the considerable range of skill/ability at certification.

Recently I have been viewing a number of videotapes of live client sessions with psychotherapists described as “leaders in the field” of brief therapy — all of whom have advanced degrees and many years of experience. All these therapists are licensed, and all of them have written prominent and widely well-regarded books about therapy. Their names appear regularly in both workshop brochures and on the roster of presenters at professional conferences.

What I have seen in these videotaped sessions has mostly ranged from irrelevant/incompetent to mildly harmful (with a few fine exceptions like Bill O’Hanlon, Michael Yapko, and Scott Miller). * And remember, the therapists on these videos are experienced “leaders in the field,” not newly-minted Ph.D.s. They also do not include people trained in the longer-term therapies, which are typically less effective, and certainly less efficient.

I would be willing to bet serious money that Practitioners who have gone through a thorough NLP Practitioner training do far more for their clients and for a lot less time and money, than any similar unselected group of recent graduates of any 5-8 year professional psychotherapist preparation program. The reason is simple; NLP Practitioners have a far better and more practical “toolbox” of methods for helping people change.

Risk of Harm

Now let’s respond to the second concern, the risk of doing harm to the client. I know of a number of specific examples of people who have been seriously harmed by both licensed professionals and by NLP Practitioners, so the risk is real.

Firstly, if someone thinks that the NLP toolbox is less effective than that of licensed professionals, you can point out that the danger must also be proportionately less, since fewer skills means less ability to influence someone. Then you only have to deal with the ethics of charging people money for ineffective therapy.

Assuming that Practitioners have a more effective toolbox, how about the danger that this more powerful toolbox might pose in the hands of someone with little experience? More power to help someone change does not specify the direction or usefulness of change.

It is much easier to help someone change in a way that is useful and congruent with their wishes and outcomes. It takes much greater skill (or bravado, or coercion) to overwhelm a person’s natural protective responses to unecological change. With appropriate frames, I believe that new Practitioners with minimal experience can significantly help a lot of people, while at the same time protecting clients from harm.

What are those frames? Primarily…

1. A lot of humility about how little they know, and how complex human beings are,
2. A gentleness and caution about offering alternatives/interventions,
3. A huge respect for people’s objections and concerns, and an unwillingness to attempt to make any change until, and unless, these objections are fully satisfied.

These are frames which we have always built in to all our trainings, in every way we could think of, and over and over again. There are a number of NLP training programs that do not emphasize, or even mention, them, or that offer quite different frames. However, given these frames, I believe it is very hard to harm anyone. The vast majority of the harm that I have observed has resulted from ignoring them, and I have seen far more of this resulting from the work of professional licensed psychotherapists than I have from NLP Practitioners.

— Steve Andreas
© 2000

* All three of these therapists have had extensive training in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy and Ericksonian Hypnosis, both of which teach many of the same skills that NLP does. Bill O’Hanlon has also had extensive training in NLP. Jump back

This article originally appeared in the June, 2000 issue of Anchor Point magazine. Reprinted with permission.

Steve Andreas is one of the best-known developers of NLP, a noted NLP trainer, and author of numerous NLP books and articles. Before his involvement in NLP, he was a Gestalt therapist and trainer.

How can NLP help to design and run a course that has a positive result for everyone, including you, the trainer? Deni Lyall outlines the processes, gives plentiful advice and shares her personal experiences.

I have a degree in electrical engineering and loved mathematics at school – a logical lady I felt. So there I was, one summer afternoon, listening to the voice of my coach gently encouraging me to walk along an imaginary timeline on the carpet of the hotel room. This was to help me with the problem we were exploring! I took one step and looked at him quizzically. What was supposed to happen?

Another step, another look. And another and another. Then suddenly it happened. For some reason I felt a calmness go through me and the situation seemed to be settled. I knew it would be OK in the autumn.

This was my first experience of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and, I have to say, I left that room feeling somewhat bemused. In the following years I heard more about NLP and realised that it is an emotive subject. Should I mention my experience with it to other people or not? Rather than being sceptical about something I knew very little about, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to find out more. Eventually I found a small group of like-minded people and a good trainer. Fourteen months later I had successfully completed both practitioner and master practitioner training.

For me, NLP is a very useful addition to my toolkit. It’s a little bit like the pizza slice a friend recently bought me; I don’t know how I managed without it and it’s handy for more than just pizza, but I’ve still kept all my knives. Rather than allow NLP to take over, I have integrated it into my toolkit and used it to enhance what I already do.

Put simply, NLP is about using the language of the mind to allow you to consistently achieve the outcomes you want. It comprises some philosophies, some tools and techniques, and some methodologies. With around 2 million bits of data coming to us every second we generalise, delete and distort the information to cut it down to a reasonable amount. To do this we use our experiences, our values and beliefs, our attitudes, our use of language, our memories and ‘metaprograms’.

The information that is left is internally represented in our mind ,which then produces our (emotional) state, which in turn affects the way we behave. NLP helps to provide choices as to how that information affects us. It also helps us to understand how and why others may react differently to the same information.

NLP is a large topic with many aspects to it and I don’t intend to cover the theory here. There are many good books, tapes and courses on the subject. As a trainer, though, I have found it very useful in three main ways:

• my own self
• interacting with participants
• training design

MY OWN SELF
A key aspect of NLP is about choosing how to react to what’s happening to you. Therefore when I am training I make sure that I choose how I am feeling about it. I want to be in the best frame of mind for training so that I can confidently handle the situations that I am going to come across during the workshop.

First, I am always positive about the outcome. I put myself into the future, at the end of the workshop, using the present tense in my thoughts. I see the participants enthusing about what they have learned and I look around the room with all the workshop outputs. I hear laughter and good comments about what they have learned, and finally I feel very satisfied with what I have achieved. I understand that not everyone will feel like this about the training, but I focus my thoughts on the people who will feel like that. How does focusing on negative thoughts help you? It just makes you feel unhappy!

Tips
• Make sure the feeling you have about the workshop is the one you get when you are feeling very satisfied and happy with something. Get the feeling first by recalling a past experience. Now keep the feeling, then imagine being in your successfully completed workshop.
• Imagine hearing good comments about the workshop in the voice from someone you respect.
• Usually making the picture big, colourful, bright and close up gives it more impact.

About the Author:

TrainerActive, http://www.fenman.co.uk/traineractive/ an online resource providing human resource training activities on-demand and the latest news in the learning and development. It is run by Fenman Ltd (http://www.fenman.co.uk) the UK’s premier publisher of training materials and publisher of the Training Journal http://www.trainingjournal.com
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