NLP IS ENOUGH IF YOU CAN COLLABORATE

If you are a trainer, coach, consult, or client and customer, I believe that NLP is plenty enough for you. Well, another qualifier— it is enough if you collaborate. As a communication model, the Neuro-Linguistic Programming model is about people interacting, dialoguing, seeking to understand each other, work together, create partnerships, build effective teams, and modeling expertise from experts. And all of that is social. It is interpersonal. It is not an individualistic, “I’ll do it by myself” thing.

But NLP goes wrong when it is used individualistically to get your own way. That’s when it becomes manipulative and abusive. To the extent that you think of it in individualistic terms and use it individualistically, to that extent it becomes distorted and less effective. You even have to think in non-individualistic terms to use it well with yourself. You have to collaborate with yourself, recognize that you are a system of interactive parts and apply it to yourself. If you don’t, you end up with a corrupted form of NLP.

You may not know it, but NLP was not created by two men, it actually began as a collaboration of some two dozen persons. It began as Bandler and Pucelik worked with a group of a dozen or more students who wanted to learn and experience Gestalt Therapy. Eventually that group morphed into three or more additional groups over the next three years. Grinder entered into the collaboration once the first group began experiencing transformations and didn’t understood how it was happening.

Even later, in the first years when NLP got its name and original organization— there was another group of collaborators who made that happened. That included Dilts, DeLozier, Cameron, Gordon, McClendon, Andreas’, and many others. In this, there were many co- developers and it was in and through collaboration that it was so creative and productive.

What messed it up was the raw, rugged individualism that was introduced and demonstrated by two of the founders, Bandler and Grinder. In fact, their first act of anti-collaboration was the act that initiated Meta (that’s what it was called before it received the name, NLP) onto the public awareness. Unknown to the others, Bandler and Grinder wrote up the discoveries of Pucelik and the Gestalt group, “the meta-model of language in therapy” and intentionally left out Pucelik and everybody else. They claimed it to have invented it all by themselves. (All of that is detailed in the book, NLP Secrets: Untold Stories, 2018).

Today we understand collaboration and its value much more than ever before. We understand the potential power and productivity of a highly effective group. That’s why we spend money on

training people to learn how to be an effective team and how leadership teams can learn the competencies of shared leadership. Ian McDermott and I wrote an entire book on Collaborative Leadership (2016) after modeling some good examples of such.

How was collaboration so important at the beginning of NLP? Obviously, it emerged from the creative contributions of numerous people— not only the three founders, the dozen or more co- developers, but also the multiple experts that they either modeled or took their ideas from. That’s why and how NLP is an inter-disciplinary subject. It combines linguistics (both Transformational Grammar and General Semantics) with neurology and programming (Gestalt experiments, pragmatic experiences, experiential learning processes, group experiences, patterns, reframing, family systems constellations, etc.).

Collaboration is built into NLP in another way. As a communication model it inevitably involves a dialogue and the relationships we build by the many different kinds of conversations that we can initiate.

If you are a professional who uses NLP as your model for communication or modeling— collaborate! Get with others who use it so that you can expand your horizons. Interacting with others will both challenge and expand your own model of the world. You don’t know it all— no one does. Others have perspectives you do not, but which you can tap into if you engage them in collaborative conversations. And when you do, then both of you will grow and the NLP model itself can potentially grow. It happened at the beginning and it is still happening.