The New Stuff of NLP

While I’ve been working on updating the basic training of NLP, the NLP practitioner course, the question of what to add and what to subtract has taken a front row seat in my mind. After all, there have been lots and lots of models and patterns which have developed in the field of NLP since the 1990s. For the practitioner course, we have added one day about the Meta-States Model because it explains NLP and without it, a person cannot truly explain how NLP works (see #6 in this series).

In 2011, I edited a book, Innovations of NLP, along with Shelle Rose Charvet which has contributions from 27 trainers, researchers, and writers. There we highlighted Lucas Derks’ Social Panarama, James Lawley and Penny Tompkins’ Clean Language and Symbolic Modeling, two on-line technologies, Arne Maus’ Identity Compass and Patrick Merlevede’s JobEQ, Jaap Hollander’s IMPA MindSonar. In that book are numerous new patterns, Robert Dilts’ Success Factor Modeling, Charles Faukner’s Modeling Market Wizards, lots of patterns for coaching, meta-programs, dealing with cancer, stuttering, the well-formed problem, overcoming addictions, and on and on.

What shall we take away from all of that? The best thing to conclude is that: NLP, as a field, has not stood still. There have been many insightful, clever, and transformative models, patterns, and technologies created since NLP was formalized in the 1980s. All of these things came out of the original NLP model—the basic practitioner and master practitioner courses which was, and still is, the foundational model. And an indication of the richness of any model is the number of things which can arise from it.

As new patterns have been created, some of the old patterns have been made redundant. Even back in 1990 Bandler put the “6-step Reframing” pattern into the Museum of Old NLP Patterns. He said that he and John created it to seduce therapists to use hypnosis in their practice.

“How much of the new stuff is in your updating of NLP?” That’s a challenging question because we have limited the practitioner course to 9 days—that means 3 modules of 3-days. And why limit the practitioner course to just 9 days? Primarily because “the times they have ‘a changin’” as the song goes. And today, unlike the 1970s and 1980s, holding a training 28 days long is just no longer feasible (my original NLP training was 28 days!). Today what is more doable is a 3- day intensive (i.e., Friday through Sunday). And yet trying to cover the entire practitioner course in 9 days is itself a challenge— a big one.

Now given that there is already more than enough basics to cover, I really cannot add any of the new stuff that has been developed. But there is something I can do— I can include a page or two at the end of the manual identifying the key models and patterns that have come to light in recent years. It is a small way of preparing the next generation of NLP-ers to try to stay current with the developments in the field.

That NLP has always been, and still is, a growing field speaks of the challenge to all of us who practice NLP in some form. What will be some of the new things developed in the coming decades? What expert human experiences will be modeled and then developed into a model for providing an experiential training so that people can learn an expertise?

When you learn and come to know how to be a practitioner of the NLP model, you have just started! There is so much more to learn and to discover. Neuro-Semantics, which is our version of NLP 2.0, discovered Meta-States in 1994, that led to remodeling a lot of NLP which meant the Mind-Lines Model and the Frame Games Model (now Winning the Inner Game). And from that the Matrix Model was developed ... which 20 years later gave birth to the Meta Place as a model of the mind and what the mind does.

Along the way we discover that NLP arose as one of the ‘children of the Human Potential Movement” (HPM) (something the founders conveniently failed to reveal). They also failed to identify that the presuppositions of NLP which came mostly from Perls and Satir were assumptions that they picked up from Maslow and Rogers. That led us in Neuro-Semantics to the Self-Actualization Quadrants (based on the meaning and performance axes)—a model which the HPM never had.

This ongoing discovery of new stuff, based on the foundational models of NLP, should alert us to keep exploring and digging into NLP. I think we have barely scratched the surface of what can be discovered within NLP.

By way of contrast, those who think of NLP in shallow and superficial ways think they “know it all.” They then go off looking for “the next big thing” or the next big sensational thing. Many then try to bring it back to mix it with their superficial understanding of NLP.