NLP Day 2 & Overall Assessment

Well, Day 2 started with sexual innuendo - "Did you think of me in the shower this morning?" was the trainers openning gambit! Sorry you had to be there to understand, but it had clearly been a post-hypnotic suggestion planted by James (Hutchinson) the previous day - I did say in the previous post that he also trains hyponotherapists!

This level of innuendo continued for the rest of the day having the majority of the audience laughing frequently, with a group interacting at a similar level and almost certainly most going home feeling that they had had a good time.

Let me deal with the question of the humour first before I tackle NLP.

Looking around the room the male:female ratio was something like 30:70 with a strong HR/social work/counselling feel to at least the female contingent. Judging by the copious note-taking and an eagerness (verging on obsession in places) to understand and comply with instructions, many wanted to "believe". James played up to this, something that is not surprising when one one remembers that his primary interest is to sell more courses! At the end of course wrap up he did, in all fairness, acknowledge that his level of humour was something that had been commented on, but stated that he chose to use it as in his experience it helped. Fair play, he had an audience and he made the most of it - I am just not part of that demographic.

On Day 1 James had said that in building one's own business, 90% was about developing the business and 90% of that 90% was selling and he is definitely an entrepreneur and a salesman. I was certainly left with the feeling that he could sell snakeoil if he set his mind to it.

James also acknowledged that in coaching an therapy much of the work was done by having a personal brand that people recognised and wanted. Also if they had to wait to gain access and pay a significant amount the client was well on course to ensuring that they extracted value from the interaction. This was certainly true of the therapists whose work is modelled by NLP and can readily be seen as true today on coaching/counselling/therapy scenarios. James was certainly building that with members of this weeks audience with a string emphasis that if they signed up for the NLP practitioner course he dleivers it himself an they would have another ten days of his company and attention.

So back to the NLP. The first session spent a while (probably too long in my view) having people affirm what they had taken from Day 1. To be fair most people did return for Day 2 with only three people reported abesnt from around 90-100.

James then covered quite a lot of ground, threw out a lot more nuggets and did some practical exercises. The key pieces being positive language, hypnotic language, rapport, association and disassociation, submodalities, system checks and filters. This may have been new to some/many, but I have seen much of it in other courses. That does not mean that it was not good stuff, but delivered no "wow" factor for me.

The interesting piece was the dissociation element where we did an exercise to explore how to adjust a persons feelings about a situation. This, I guess, is what the NLP coach I experienced 10 years ago was trying to do. Once again though, and I was being honest about it all, it did little or nothing for me. It rather reminded me of a golf coach who would say "feel the club head open at the height of the backswing!" Unfortuantely I had no feel for the club head that was out of sight and behind me - all I could relate to was the positioning of my hands, that were physically attached to my sensory system.

I did feel sorry for my partner in this exercise, who was earnestly trying to experiment with the technique, but with the client from hell ie me.

I won't go on, but want to acknowledge a couple of things.

James admitted that one should not be too fixed on the pure NLP notation and elements. Indeed he changed some things himself and encouraged others not to use things if they felt wrong. I think this is most pertinent when trying to use NLP outside the counselling/coaching/therapy world. Not everyone wants to be coached and if they do they may not want to be coached by you.

James did touch on the question of is NLP manipulating or influencing, something that causes me discomfort. His argument was that the determining factor is your motivation ie if you are doing it soley for your own benefit then it is manipulation while if you believe you are doing it for their good it is not. I thought this rather convenient and could have taken up debate, which I didn't. His distinction presumes that you do know what is best for the other person and it felt as if he had applied his own filter to the question coming up with an answer that suited him - one my say hoisted on his own petard!

For me the distinction is the freedom of the other person to decide. No matter what you think your motivation is, if you are doing things to bring about an outcome of your choosing then it is manipulation.

James was also pretty honest in my eyes in telling people that if they bought his courses then they bought him! If that is what one wants then good, for me I doubt I could take ten days of that style of delivery - it would get in the way of and undermine the content.

So in summary what do I think? Well there is some useful stuff in NLP and it was worth reminding myself of parts of it. That said it should not be used blindly or uncritically. It probably works best in the coaching/counselling/therapy arenas and I am not about to label myself as an NLP change agent - what I use I will use silently.

I don't seem to be the ideal NLP client. This may be because I have done a lot of things before including a consiserable amount of self-hypnosis in my younger days. I understand and can relate at an intellectual level, but do not connect at the personal level. Whatever the cause if I need help I would not look to NLP first.

Lastly I suspect James is wasted. I think he would happily be a Tony Robbins, but something seems lacking. As I write this the word "authenticity" comes to mind ie it was laregly absent this weekend. This may not be the right word, but it is the one that appeared to me.

He certainly could be a successful stand-up comedian if he set his mind to it. Somehow no matter what he does he has to find his leverage and reach a wider audience.

So as weekends go, it was different to my usual weekends. It was entertaining and good to be reminded of some things. I recalibrated my thinking on NLP. It is now slightly more positive, but still not something I want to devote much more time to.

For me it is job done! One of the NLP foundations are that there is no such thing as failure and that each outcome is the perfect response to the strategy (sorry lots of NLP speak) so I certainly do not see this weekend as a waste or a failure and the outcome (of which this blog is part) the perfect outcome of the strategies James and I brought to the days.

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.