NLP for dummies

The NLP Practitioner is the first level of the NLP training. It’s the first contact with a new world for many people. The impression they get of this technology will depend on this first contact. Who has read my blog knows that I am extremely critical with those who try to make people believe that they (trainers) know, and they sell the magic of NLP based on Bandler magic stories.


Many people come to NLP looking for a solution to their problems and wanting to believe that they’ll offer it to them, giving to the trainer the power to influence them much further. It seems that blindly belief in the trainer is the indispensable key to access to this magic.


Form my point of view; Bandler is partially responsible of this situation because he has been talking about magic from the first published book. It is curious how in those early books, more than magic there was engineering. But I suppose that someone realized that it wasn’t a good way to sell books or courses, and for me also it makes sense....

Something happened over the years, that made Bandler swift from teaching NLP engineering to teach "NLP for dummies." There are videos for free where you can watch how he is teaching the structure and then people just start asking stupid questions. Bandler’s closest people say he just got tired of these situations and he just began to demonstrate and to teach techniques most of the time.


For those who have just received this last information, it seems that they can get results just following what Bandler says in the courses, and that with these things it is enough to achieve the same results as Bandler.


I think that probably this was the perfect business: to transform NLP into something simple, accessible, theoretically with spectacular results (rapid phobia cures, etc...) and reachable for many people, so that meant large courses and events. Let's be honest, no one can live from a few human behavior engineers....


I don’t criticize their choice, because that decision made NLP accessible to many people. But as a many things, it provokes some brutal effects: the corruption of the concept and its trivialization. Now, thousands of people in the world believe that by teaching a few techniques and repeating what is in the books, they are doing NLP.

Well, that's NLP for dummies. Is this wrong? No, if they tell what are really doing. If the people who assist to a course of NLP for dummies know that they won’t find the structure of the technology, it’s ok. Because then, they will be able to choose the best option for them. Some of them will prefer technology, others just steps and recipes.


What I find intolerable is offering a pig in a poke. And much worse than that, if the course is done by someone who never knew the work of Bandler and Grinder, or who did it superficially, or that just was trained with someone else who is not Bandler or Grinder and that he decided to train people to teach the complex world of NLP without understanding the work that lies behind of what Bandler makes. Amazingly, this master trainer thinks that he has the authority to deceive his students saying that his work is the work of Bandler.


In my case, I know that I have a lot to learn and to improve, but at the same time, I had the good fortune to meet people who always have been moved to understand and further advance the work of Bandler, following his vision at the same time. People like Gabriel Guerrero, Eric Robbie and Omar Fuentes; they dared to deepen beyond where the NLP was born: Bandler’s work.


I will continue telling what NLP is from my point of view and from what I learned every time I'm close to Bandler, Guerrero, Robbie, Fuentes, Fitzpatrick ...., constantly improving, growing steadily.


My advice: stay away from gurus, false bearers of truth, phonies, and pursue the authentic, the original.


Of course this way requires more complex challenges, but also offers greater satisfactions.