Experiential Training: What It Is — What It Is Not
An experience becomes useful training when the learning transfers to everyday life. Michael Hall explores that distinction and offers five ways to make it part of your training practice.
Once upon a time at the University where I did my doctorate, I met a colleague who said that he had studied NLP. I was delighted. “That’s great! Where did you study?” He said he had flown down to Dallas and then went out on a ropes course. On the inside, my spirit immediately dropped, ‘ropes course?’ Externally, I kept smiling as I asked for more details about this ‘NLP ropes course.’ I first asked how long was this training. He said 5 days. “Yeah, I knew it’ I said to myself. And what parts of NLP did you study? That’s when he asked, “There are parts of NLP?”
By the end of the conversation, the impression I got was that the ropes course was called “NLP” because they did the Swish pattern to “imagine the me for whom this is not a problem,” and they did a pattern for “stopping the world” in order to come into sensory awareness. And that was it.