NLP (Re-)Assessment?

Yesterday was Day 1 of a two day NLP Foundation Course. I invested my time as while I have not been a fan of NLP I was concerned I had not given it a fair go and may just have had a bad experience.

In summary, at the half way mark, I remain unconvinced.....though the course leader will of course blame that on me, saying that that outcome is the result of the personal "frame" I brought with me to the course.

One problem may be that I have been to a run too many courses of all sorts so I am picking up lots of things around the course as well as the pure content.

The first is that I find that my stand up comedy experience has a lot of relevance. James Hutchinson, effectively presented all day. His persona reminded me of a mix of Jim Carey and Michael MacIntyre, both of whom I can admire, but who can also become annoying. The day was riddled with jokes (setups, reveals, callbacks, etc), an increasingly annoying false smile and head/hair flick and playing to a number of middle aged ladies (social worker  comes to mind) who desperately want to believe and lap up the attention and innuendo.

There was a large pile of Christmas cracker-like nuggets (James' term) of wisdom. For example "every life coach should get a life first" and "all theories are lies". He is also very disparaging of visual learning - maybe that is why I am having a problem in that he does not acknowledge or cater to m pictures and patterns style of learning.

It certainly was a consumate performance, but that is what 90% of this felt like and James loves the attention. While I believe he has a passion for NLP his reveal that he is a trained hypnotherapist and in the last seven years he has set up slimming seminars and had a tooth whitening business that died, places him into the serial entrepreneur category in my mind, with all that brings!

That said there were some useful takeaways and reminders.

• The first is the importance of the frame or context in which something is said or done and that different people will have different contexts.
• Presumptions (or presuppositions) can create issues that did not exist and limit/divert outcomes.
• NLP is based on the work of therapists and effective therapy. In that situation the recipient is there voluntarily and seeking help. This is not the case in most work and everyday situations, where the prescribed structures and formats will more like come across as patronising, verbose and unhelpful.

This last point may be why my experience with an NLP coach was so unsatisfactory. The company set it up, I was not seeking the help, and the coach's use of full NLP techniques was so dissonant that it failed to provide any value. I think I just put that down to a bad experience and as a reminder that even the best tool can be used badly.

 

James did go off piste quite a bit and acknowledged it, providing more general management / life skills advice, but did not clearly identify the boundaries.

 

I will also take away his definition of NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming as being a methodology that looks to observe and model excellence and find the fewest (programming) steps to change another person's behaviour and that in doing so NLP leaves behind a set of tools and practices. Cynically this suggests you can include what you want and discard what you don't when it comes to NLP, something that may be behind the rifts in NLP world.

 

Oh yes, James also reminded me how annoying it is to spend time within someone who never answers a question with anything but another question or a flippant laugh and comment.