From: L. Michael Hall
2024 Neurons #56
December 16, 2024
NLP’S FAILURE
With NLP Ideally, You Learn to Think
Earlier this year (2024), I completed the book, Thinking for Humans: The Art of Being Mindful. In it I addressed a problem in the field of NLP—something that to this day the field has still not recognized:
“While a great many people in NLP don’t know this, NLP is essentially about thinking. NLP begins with representational thinking (the VAK, sensory-awareness), it then goes to associative thinking (anchoring, cause-effect linkages), linguistic thinking (language, the Meta-Model), evaluative thinking (values, beliefs, meta-programs), and finally integrative thinking (state, embodiment, mind-to-muscle). In learning NLP, you learn to think. Or at least you should if you learned it well. Yet because most trainers and educators in NLP don’t know this, they do not emphasize this. This book is designed, in part, to change that.”
Previous to this book on thinking, I wrote Executive Thinking: Activating Your Highest Executive Thinking Potentials (2018). I wrote that, in part, because in the field of Critical Thinking I could not find a single book anywhere that even mentioned NLP or the Meta-Model of Language. I realized that after reading 80 books on the subject of critical thinking. Imagine that! Not a single one even mentioned NLP, let alone presented the Meta-Model as a great tool for critical thinking. I found that shocking!
Why? Because, in my opinion, the Meta-Model is the greatest tool that’s ever been presented for clear, precise, accurate, and creative thinking. So in writing Executive Thinking one of my objectives was to get the Meta-Model known in that field. Another objective was to introduce, or perhaps re-introduce, the Meta-Model to the field of NLP as a tremendous tool for critical thinking. And that’s because, as noted above, ideally when you learn NLP, you learn how to think. But, of course, ideally implies that ‘actually’ many people do not.
Astonishing, isn’t it? While NLP is a model of thinking and learning NLP, you should be learning how to think, many do not. I venture to suggest that most do not. How can that be? What’s going on that in the teaching and training of NLP that people are not getting a deeper learning—learning how to think. Anyone can teach you what to think. That’s what our schools primarily do which is why most young people graduating from High School do not know how to think. Again, why is this? What explains this? Here’s my guesses.
#1: Thinking is not made the focus of the training. Instead, NLP to presented solely as a Communication Model or it is presented in terms of one of its applications—sales, personal development, therapy, coaching, consulting, hypnosis, etc. There are also many trainers who are mostly enthralled by the “techniques,” and so all they present are the quick, easy, and/or sensational patterns. So people learn the techniques without learning the thinking behind them which makes them work as they do.
#2: The NLP trainer him or herself has not learned how to train the Meta-Model. This is a really sad one. From my experience in meeting lots and lots of NLP trainers, most of them do not even teach the Meta-Model in their trainings or if they do so, they devote a few hours to half a day at best. And why not? Because that’s how they were taught! Obviously, if you were not effectively taught how to think about the Meta-Model and how to train it, you won’t be able to teach it well yourself. Worse, if you think of it as grammar and linguistics, your mis-understanding of it will cause you to downplay it.
#3: The NLP trainer him or herself has not learned how to think using NLP. I think this is a big one. Having not become enthralled with the power and beauty of the Meta-Model and having really no idea how pervasive it is in NLP, a great many trainers and leaders in the field of NLP have never applied the critical thinking skills of the Meta-Model to themselves. This is obvious from reading some of the NLP books that have been written. This is obvious from reading the articles and promotional pieces on NLP websites. Sometimes when I do so I wonder, “Didn’t you ever learn the Meta-Model?” “Who taught you the Meta-Model?” That’s why in a lot of NLP communications on the internet and elsewhere you will find uncontrolled generalizations, distortions, and deletions. You will find mind-reading statements about people; unfounded cause-effect beliefs, ridiculous complex equivalences, and on and on.
#4: Thinking itself is devalued as ‘a given,’ and so little thought is given to it. Unless you have spent some time thinking about “thinking,” the cultural norm that we all grow up in is to take it for granted. “Yeah, thinking, so what?” We consider it natural, inevitable, and sometime everyone can do. No wonder we do not think of it as a skill— and a skill we need to learn. No wonder we put all “thinking” into that one category and don’t realize that there are dozens and dozens, scores of different kinds of thinking as well as levels of thinking skills.
#5: Some NLP trainers have been deluded into thinking that thinking is conscious and the really important stuff is unconscious. I’m now describing the two camps that have moved away from the mainline NLP field, the Bandler group and the Grinder group. What a paradox! Once Ericksonian hypnosis was modeled, both Bandler and Grinder decided to stop addressing what they called “the conscious mind” and focus almost exclusively on “the unconscious mind.” (Of course, there is only one mind—some content in conscious awareness and most of it outside-of-conscious awareness.) But thinking itself is a dynamic that involves all aspects of our brain-body and mind and so fluctuates in and out of conscious awareness. If you dichotomize this, then you set up an Either/Or limited way of thinking and dismiss “thinking” as only the conscious stuff.
Recommendation
Let’s get back to NLP as a thinking model and train it or use it to enable people to do more critical and creative thinking. If the world needs anything beyond love, it needs people who can actually think, and think clearly, precisely, and accurately. If we don’t have that, we will lose our civilization, our science, our well-being, and our sanity.
They should have known because from the beginning the founders said things like the following:
“The whole idea of the meta-model is to give you systematic control over language. It teaches you how to listen not only to other people, but to yourself. The meta-model is really simplistic, but it’s still the foundation of everything we do. Without it, and without systematic control over it, you will be do everything that we teach you sloppily. The difference between the people who do the things that we teach well and those who don’t, are people who have no control over the meta-model. It is literally the foundation of everything we do.” (70).