Updating the NLP Model

At the end of February, I announced that I would do one more NLP Practitioner course and that would it be. It wasn’t my idea—it was a conspiracy led by none other than my wife along with several trainers of whom I had thought very highly. Anyway, feeling myself forced into the position I finally surrender knowing it was a losing battle (now if you didn’t catch it, this is a bit of humor). Anyway, since it has been 21 years since I had trained NLP Prac. I knew that I needed to work through the current manual and update it as best as I could. And that’s what I’ve been doing.

Most of the updating I’ve done to date has been about making the manual more and more user friendly—one that will be good for all of the Trainers for the next couple decades. Having come off of several days of training both trainers and coaches on how to run a pattern, I have been especially diligent about making sure each of the patterns read well and that a person could easily follow the step-by-step processes.

Coming across some of the original patterns written by the NLP founders I realized that when they created nearly all of the original patterns, they almost never detailed the questions to ask. They only wrote instructions about what to do. “Have the person find a limiting belief. Make sure it is limiting them. Have them identify three most impactful sub-modalities.” Reading that with my recent experience I suddenly realized how and why it was that there have been so many ways that NLP trainers could interpret and misinterpret the patterns.

In preparation, I have also given myself to re-reading all of the foundational NLP books, especially those presenting the Prac. Level of NLP. Amazingly (or perhaps not so amazing) I found the same NLP pattern in different books that radically differed from each other. Reading them, I frequently laughed out loud, “My God, no wonder that pattern doesn’t work!” I found patterns that were exceedingly convoluted, others where major steps or transitions were left out. What’s truly astonishing is the amount of low quality materials that are out in the marketplace.

Then there are the errors. I began making a list of some of the errors that I had noted my 40 years. For some of them I wroten articles about them years ago in Anchor Point, NLP World and other journals. Others that I noted were errors that others had caught. I began with a list of five which grew into 16 (I will publish my list in the next Neurons newsletter).

That got me thinking. I update my books and training manuals regularly. Some of the books are in the fifth or sixth editions. Some of the training manuals are in the 20 th edition. I’m always correcting, updating, adding, and subtracting. I catch things, and many others catch things and when we do—I update the book or manual. But when it comes to the basic NLP books, especially those by the founders— none of those books have been updated. Some are now 50 years old! And manuals, well there were no original manuals.

Why not? Why did the founders and most the early trainers (but not all) not keep updating and cleaning up their tests? Why did they not put out “corrections?” If there’s no such thing as failure, only feedback—where is all 6the feedback from the founders? The answer is obvious. There has been none. They never corrected anything. Were they perfect and never made an error? I don’t think so! Instead during the 1980s and 1990s they mostly argued and debated about each person’s intellectual property— who “owned” it.

Does the NLP Model need updating? Of course it does! Everything written 50 years ago needs updating. Information and knowledge along with experience keeps changing things so that we can stay current as well as recognize when new models and/or new patterns make some of the old ones redundant.

In 2011, I and Shelle Rose Charvet invited nearly 30 NLP trainers, researchers, and writers to collaborate on the book, Innovations in NLP. We identified the new models and patterns that were created during the 1990s and 2000s. We invited people to identify new approaches, new communities, and new technological innovations. It was a full book of lots and lots of new things (the book is available from Crown House Publications, www.crownhouse.co.uk).

Now 2011 was 14 years ago. Has anything new happened in the world or in the field of NLP? Again, you bet things have. So, yes, there are things to update in the NLP model itself and how we train that knowledge.