NLP IS ENOUGH!

If your aim is to be a full-time trainer, whether you plan to publicly or within organizations or some combination of the two— all you need is NLP and specifically Neuro-Semantic NLP. That is all that you need. You do not need to try to supplement it with other things— not any of the personality typing programs, not neuro-science (as if you or any of us are qualified for that), not quantum mechanics (which has nothing to do with what we’re doing anyway), not yoga, not wilderness adventures, etc. You do not need anything else. The same holds if you want to be a coach, consultant, therapist, etc. NLP is enough.

Why do you not need anything else? Because NLP and Neuro-Semantics are incredibly rich domains. It is a domain so rich that you could spend the rest of your life studying it and never come to fully gain mastery of all of its facets. It is also a domain so suggestive that there are many, many more areas (sub-domains) within NLP that are yet to be developed. And because we need sharp brilliant minds working on developing those domains — you could be one of those persons.

There is yet another reason for this, namely, there is far too much over-simplification in NLP, an over-simplifying that has degraded NLP so that what is presented publically is a mere shadow of its full reality. NLP is presented in far too many places in a way that makes it anemic and shallow. From the way it is present you would not realize how dynamic it is and all of the things you can do with it.

What explains this? Several things. First and foremost is the fact that most people not know what it is. They do not know that it is most essentially a Communication Model. Look at the first NLP book, The Structure of Magic. Look at its subtitle: “A book about communication and change.” There you have it! Communication and change.

Why then is it called “neuro-linguistic programming?” It is because that’s what “communication” is made out of— neurological processes (brain, neo-cortex, nervous systems, physiology, etc.) that generates linguistics (symbolic systems for encoding and transmitting meaning) and encode them in dependable and repeatable programs.

When you communicate to yourself, you create your internal sense of reality and map of reality. That gives you your “reality” and it could be highly resourceful and effective or it could be completely dysfunctional and miserable. Whatever it is— you created it. You learned it and you maintain it and you can change it if you like.

When an expert communicates to him or herself, that expert creates a great internal map of reality and experience of reality. It enables the expert to do things that the rest of us cannot. Yet

we could discover it, model it, and then use it to inform how we could do so much better in that area of expertise. We call this modeling and herein lies a whole range of things we have yet to model— ways to find best practices, “programs” that some expert spent a lifetime learning which we could map out and replicate in our own lives.

When people communicate among themselves, whether it is a couple, a family, a team, a business, a community, etc., they co-create their social sense of reality and map of reality. If it is accurate and precise, if it works and produces good results— it creates healthy organizations and even governments. If it is inaccurate and imprecise, then the inter-personal communication will probably result in misunderstandings, arguments, conflicts and ineffective relationships.

Communication is everything in NLP — that’s what NLP is. That’s why NLP is all you need.

What then about Neuro-Semantics? How does Neuro-Semantic contribute to NLP and expand the NLP Model? It does so by focusing on self-reflexive communication. That is, how we not only communicate linearly and outwardly, but also systemically and inwardly. This reveals the hidden dimensions of communication— how we frame and set frames on our communications— frames that give us and others a way to understand or interpret what is said and done.

Personally I have spent three-and-half decades on this one single model. In Thinking Like A Modeler (2018) I described the twenty-six modeling projects that I have taken on— projects that became books, training manuals, and a lot of the content of Neuro-Semantics. And I am nowhere near done, in fact, I can now see that I will not live long enough to cover all of the subjects that I’d like to cover. There’s too much. There are depths in NLP that have not been plummeted and there are many other areas that we have not even begun to explore. If you want to spend your life in an area and master it and develop expertise in it — NLP is enough, especially Neuro-Semantic NLP.