The NLP conundrum

A couple of years ago I was wanting to deepen my knowledge of NLP and related fields such as hypnotherapy, so I called round a few people whose opinion and integrity I respect. One of them FOTP had established a practice oop north somewhere, having left his job as a qualified nurse in the NHS. I asked him why he had left the "official" health service and gone into an area that many regard as dubious. His reply was interesting.

He had gone into the NHS to help people and he had left it because he found he could help people better outside of it. He gave an example of helping an old lady who had developed agoraphobia, explaining how the NHS would have tackled it with several people over several months, and how he sorted it out within a matter of weeks.

In the right hands, for the right tasks, NLP is very effective. It was put together around 30 years ago by an academic and a gifted student (John Grinder and Richard Bandler) and built out by a number of "first generation NLPers" such as Robert Dilts. It had huge potential, and was quickly taken up by "early adopters", who ranged from diligent explorers of their experience through to get-rich-quick snake-oil merchants.

One on hand, NLP s not a "proper" discipline with a scientifically-validated body of knowledge and practice, and a governing body enforcing standards. If the founders of NLP had gone the strictly academic/establishment route, NLP would have been still-born. It would have had the life squeezed out of it. Part of the power of NLP is that the principles of it enable practitioners to generate their own "techniques".

However, this openness means that there's no regulation and there are no generally-recognised standards of competence in training or in practice. Being an "NLP Master Practitioner" means anything and nothing. It probably means that the person concerned attended a training that imparted certain elements, but is says nothing about the quality of the trainer, the length of time spent training or the competence of the Master Practitioner. Very, very few people who pay for NLP trainings fail to get a certificate at the end.

At most, NLP might have gone the Freud / Jung / Klein route. These forms of analytical psychotherapy aren't recognised as scientific, but they are acknowledged to be "serious" because the lay down a very exclusive and very expensive training and qualification process. The trouble is, in my experience, the people who emerge with the qualification are not necessarily more skilled at providing psychological help than a skilled and dedicated practitioner of NLP. This applies even more to medically-qualified psychiatrists and psychologists.

So here's the conundrum for NLP and other new bodies of knowledge (e.g. Ecademy Digital School). To be useful and timely and generative, it can't go through the process of being endorsed and regulated by official, established bodies. But to become respected and respectable and to give certification that means something, they need to have real minimum standards of knowledge and competence. And if there are real minimum standards, then some people will - MUST - fail to meet them.

The net-net of all this is "caveat emptor". If you want to learn something like NLP, do your homework. Ask around, check which trainers have a good reputation. Ask hard questions. If you sniff snake-oil or get-rich-quick motives, or any lack of integrity, think hard; you will be investing your time and effort, not to mention your money