NLP Master Practitioner 8 day Format

Here's the full 8 day agenda for the upcoming NLP Master Practitioner courses in Birmingham, Spain and India:

1	Welcome and framing Simulation Theory Outcomes for this course *
1	Models Eye Accessing Stimulus Response TOTE Strategies
2	Surface v deep structure Behaviour as process The process IS the content Meta Model course goals *
2	Reverse engineering Installation
3	Presuppositions of NLP Strategies Conversational Change
3	Meta Model 1 Meta Model course goals *
4	Meta Model 2 Rituals and Incantations
4	Meta Model 3 Meta Programs 1
5	Meta Programs 2 Meta Model 4
5	Slow Motion Coaching 1 Motivation Convincer
6	Rapport Congruence Incongruence Anchoring as control
6	Rules, Beliefs, Strategies Modelling Testing Slow Motion Modelling
7	Distillation Slow Motion Modelling Custom technique design
7	Slow Motion Coaching 2 Meta Model Practice
8	Briefing Certification criteria Assessment sessions

Why learn in a residential format? Is it really worth it?

After a few years in decline, the market for NLP training, certainly in the UK, seems to be picking up again. I don't know why that is, the coaching market seems to have matured, mindfulness seems to have been forgotten. Maybe's it's just the hype surrounding Bandler and Grinder running Practitioner courses again - separately of course.

On the other hand, the recent NLP conference in London could have been busier. We've got a variety of people saying that they were part of NLP's origins, and we should listen to them. And then we have a new generation of innovators who aren't bound by the legacy of NLP and who can incorporate the latest experimental, peer-reviewed research in fields such as psychology and neurology. That's where I sit.

I run Society of NLP certified training at Practitioner, Master Practitioner and Trainer levels in the UK, Spain and India several times a year. I used to run training only in the UK, in meeting rooms and the usual places. I've run long courses and short courses, weekends, evenings, contiguous, modular, every permutation over the 15 years or so that I've been training NLP.

I've found that the most popular format is short modules, because that fits around people's work schedules. However, I've found that the most powerful format in terms of the learning experience and the depth of learning and integration is the contiguous format, 8 days straight, and I've further found that a residential format amplifies the power of the experience amazingly.

NLP Master Practitioner - Birmingham, UK - November 2016

NLP Master Practitioner October 31 - November 6 will take place in Kenilworth, which is a small town between Birmingham and Coventry. Easy to get to, free parking, lots of affordable accommodation nearby.

Cost for the 8 days including SNLP license fee and The NLP Master Practitioner Manual is just £795.

Peter Freeth is an NLP Trainer and author of 10 books on NLP including 'Genius at Work'.

In this course, you're not going to learn more and more complicated techniques, because by definition, that would be at Practitioner level! What you'll learn in these 8 days is the fundamentals of the modelling process, and I mean thorough, analytical modelling, not just 'acting as if'. You'll learn the meta model properly, enabling you to decode your client's language, understand their complete situation from just their first statement to you, and construct custom, unique, conversational interventions that are more powerful than any 'off the shelf' technique could ever be.

This Master Practitioner training is challenging - yet I guarantee it's the best you'll ever experience.

"Personally this has been by far the best NLP training I have experienced." - Tony Moorcroft

"Overall, an excellent training experience and a complete shift in many aspects of my own skills and thinking. I cannot recommend this course highly enough." Steve Heneghan

See reviews at the NENLP youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB8JpOPTbZXsWBndUTH3n8g

Comparative Deletions

If you've studied NLP then you will have seen Meta Model, the questioning structure that enables us to uncover information hidden in a client's words.

One of the first Meta Model patterns is the Comparative Deletion - words such as more, better, easier, less, faster, slower and so on. Here's an example:

"This is better"

If you've attended NLP training, you were probably taught to respond with,

"Better than what?"

If this is familiar to you, then your trainer was one of the great majority who simply don't understand Meta Model. To ask, "Better than what?" is a trivial use of Meta Model.

Asking, "Better than what?" will essentially get the same level of response as the question, "Why?" in that the speaker will give a reply which sounds like a reason but is in fact a justification or proof of their world view.

This more analytical approach to Meta Model is much better.

What did you just say to yourself when you read that last sentence? Did you think, "Hmmm, yes", or "Better than what???!!!", or "Better for me...", or, "Better than that rubbish trainer who ran my Practitioner course", or, "No it's not!"

The point is this: Information was missing, and you filled in the gaps from your own experience. Hence, used as an instruction, the Comparative Deletion is a Milton pattern. It's better to relax. It's easier to ease yourself into the chair. You might find it more valuable after you've read this article.

Let's consider three levels of Meta Model analysis.

Level 1, the trivial, we can ignore. It's clumsy, it doesn't flow in the natural conversation and it doesn't tell us much.

Level 2 takes us to the two missing pieces of information.

In order for the word "better" to be grammatically correct within the sentence, we need to insert the missing reference, for example, "This is better than watching paint dry". So the point of reference is the first missing piece of the puzzle. The reference is not an 'it', it can also be a 'where', a 'whom' and, most importantly, a 'when'.

The second piece of the puzzle is the criteria for the reference. Take a moment right now to look at your hands. What differences do you see? Which hand is better?

Immediately, a question comes in to your mind: "Better for what? Better at what?"

Noticing a difference only requires perception. Giving that difference a bias requires judgement, a cognitive process. What is the judgement based on? An unpleasant previous experience? A preference for chocolate? A desire to get home early? An intention to save money? When we ask about the criteria, we discover the very narrow set of features which are being compared, and the judgements used to make those comparisons. We can explore those judgements further.

So level 2 takes us to the deleted reference and the deleted criteria which makes one of the elements being compared preferable to the other.

That sounds pretty good, yes? That's certainly a lot of information to explore. So what is level 3? What more could there be?

Level 3 is about time. Take a moment to look at your hands again. Compare them. Notice some details or sensations and compare them. Do you find yourself looking from one hand to the other? Of course, you must do, because your focus of visual perception is extremely narrow. You can't read these words out of the corner of your eye, you must look straight at them. The cells on your retina are not uniformly distributed. Outside of your focal area, the cells and their neural connections are optimised for detecting movement, which is change over time. In the focal area, the cells and their neural connections are optimised for picking out real time details.

You can't look at both hands at the same time, so your eyes move from one to the other. Which means that when you look at 'this' hand, you are not comparing it to 'that' hand, you are comparing it to your memory of 'that' hand, and one thing that we know for certain about our memories is that they are faulty. In fact, they're dreadful. It's amazing that we remember our own names.

We know that, in order to cope with the volume of sensory data available, we delete, distort and generalise, before we become consciously aware of what we are noticing. By the time we know that we've encountered something, we're already experiencing a distorted version of it.

Right, so what does this tell us about Comparative Deletions?

When a person says, "This is better", they are comparing an extremely narrow facet of their current sensory experience to a past experience, and that past experience will be distorted. It's not distorted randomly, it's distorted to prove their current judgement.

I was in Dubai last week. I first went to Dubai in June last year. Last year I hated Dubai. It was a big, expensive, hot, dusty building site. I hated it. I regretted going there.

Last week, the weather was much more pleasant, I saw different parts of Dubai, and most importantly, I wasn't feeling ill.

Dubai had not changed in those few months. Well, they built a dozen more skyscrapers, and opened some new shopping malls. But apart from that it was exactly the same. What had changed was my experience of Dubai.

It wasn't Dubai that had changed. It was me.

What the Comparative Deletion tells us is that the person has distorted an experience in order to fit their expectation, or to explain an exception to their expectation, so that they can be right, then that experience has become a reference so that they can maintain their rightness in the future.

"My way is better"

How do you know? You haven't tried any other ways!

"I just know"

So what you really mean is that you deviated from your routine once in the past and had a bad experience, and now you're afraid to try again? And because of that, you're missing out on opportunities to improve, and you're giving control to your fears, and you know where that road leads to, don't you?

(Sound of cogs whirring)

When we understand what the Comparative Deletion tells us about the client's inner world, their experiences, their distortions of those experiences and their future expectations, we can explore those reference points with far greater tact and dexterity, and what's even more important, instead of a Meta Model interrogation, we can actually have a normal conversation with them.

Learn NLP in Spite of Peter Freeth!

Yes! You too can fulfil a lifelong nightmare and join Peter Freeth in Spain this September for literally some fun, and an experience of learning NLP which you are guaranteed to never forget, and for all the wrong reasons!

With Peter's expert training and 20+ years of experience, you will come to regret learning:

• The secrets of aversion therapy, with Peter's home thawed 'chicken surprise'
• The key's to you're deeper understanding of the English language
• Countless new ways to skyrocket your powerful use of exaggeration
• The six secret contract terms that will keep your clients coming back for more
• How to bore your clients into a trance
• Banish those phobias with the full contact swish
• Some other things

Seriously, you just can't beat this NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner training, and to prove it, I have never given a student a refund in 20+ years!

Only you know just how much this training will win you the much needed approval of your parents and workmates, and the adoration of many people who, according DNA samples, really are of the opposite sex. Not male or female, just opposite.

What are you waiting for?! Places are strictly limited! You'll never believe that learning NLP can be so much! For so little! But not often. Just once a year in Spain...

NLP Practitioner - September 15 - 23

NLP Master Practitioner - September 26 - October 4

And in India too, if you are feeling even more adventurous.

Both are just, only, merely, unbelievably £1,495 fully inclusive of training, accommodation, meals, drinks, airport transfers, books and SNLP certification. I know, I can't believe it either. The only possible explanation is that the training is rubbish.

Book now to ensure disappointment!

NLP Master Practitioner in Goa 2015

I recently returned back from running NLP Master Practitioner in Goa, hosted by Charles Saldanha. We had 15 students and the whole experience was just wonderful. A very nice venue with great staff (Highland Beach Resort, Candolim) and the whole training group were fast learners, insightful, playful and, most importantly, willing to get stuck into the process.

We had some super Meta Model insights, and the final presentations produced some really superb models which other students are reporting are working really well for them!

Everything you know about NLP is wrong

I'm speaking at the NLP Conference to be held in London, April 2016 on the subject of...

Everything you know about NLP is wrong

And that's why you can't always get the results you intended.

When trainers just emulate the pseudo-science they’ve been taught instead of testing for themselves, they pass that on to their students. So instead of an evolving, developing field, we have bad techniques being taught badly, and then we wonder why NLP gets a bad name.

For example, if you have trouble getting anchoring to work reliably, it's because you've been taught it wrong. And you're probably trying to use it to access resources such as confidence, which is the wrong way to use it.

Swish? Having trouble keeping the client's mind on the process? You've been using it wrong.


Just can't get your head round the Six Step Reframe? You've been doing it wrong.

But how can all of these experts be so wrong? Because they have failed to take into account the 30 years of neuroscience research since NLP was first created.

And we’ve learned a lot in 30 years...

Overall, delegates will learn to incorporate the last 30 years of real scientific research into their NLP practice, so that they can use NLP more reliably and consistently and avoid many of the myths that surround the field.

Delegates will learn the easy, right way to perform techniques such as:

Anchoring – and use it correctly, not just to access states
Swish – and use it any place, any time, even in business meetings
Six Step Reframe – surely, there’s an easier way?

Delegates will also learn the ‘truth’ about some of NLP’s most loved concepts, such as Eye Accessing Cues, Metaprograms and Logical Levels.

Delegates will even learn the most surprising revelation of all – that submodalities, the very bedrock of NLP’s approach to subjective experience, are completely made up.

This workshop will be practical, it will show you a better, easier, more reliable way to use NLP’s techniques, and it’s based on 30 years of research in neuroscience and 20+ years of personal research and experimentation.

Overall, this workshop will bring delegates’ knowledge of NLP up to date and give them a new understanding of the subject which will make them measurably more effective in applying techniques with their clients.

Peter delivers hundreds of hours of training, and hundreds of coaching sessions every year and incorporates fresh insights and learnings back into his books and his training at every opportunity.

Does that mean that he knows best? No, it only means that he’s open to the challenge, that to evolve, we must often let go of our most valued beliefs.

Are you?

Limiting Beliefs - And Why You Have None

(There's now a Facebook Q&A group at www.facebook.com/groups/nlpmetamodel)

I often read comments and posts and blogs from people on the subject of limiting beliefs, and in particular, how you can overcome your own.

Nonsense, I'm afraid. You don't have any limiting beliefs.

This topic is very popular amongst coaches and NLP Practitioners, so I'm going to turn to NLP's Meta Model of language to show you why you don't have any limiting beliefs:

(You can click on the image to make it bigger)

Does that all make sense?

Don't worry if it doesn't, it's quite technical. Here are the highlights.

It's impossible for you to have limiting beliefs because logically, a belief cannot do anything. Can a belief run? Can it play the piano? Of course not, only a person or animal, a living entity, can do such things. Only a living creature can act, and if we talk just about people, then only a person can believe. A chair can not believe.

What about 'limiting'? A limit is a point on a scale, so for there to be a limit, or for a person to limit something, it must be possible to have more and less of that thing. For you to limit your spending, it must be possible for you to spend more or less. The word 'limit' therefore implies a hidden scale, where both more and less of something is possible for you.

The phrase 'limiting belief' takes two verbs and freezes them in time, turning them into nouns, and that is called a nominalisation. Here are some examples, form a mental picture for each one:

I went for a run

I had a meeting

I made a decision

Now let's turn those back into verbs and see what happens - form a mental picture for each one:

I ran (somewhere)

I met (someone)

I decided (something)

What was the difference between the two sets of mental images? Do it again if you need to - I'm guessing that the first set of images were still and the second set were moving.

At a superficial level, the few NLP Practitioners who properly understand the Meta Model will say that this freezes the action in time, and makes it 'stuck' and difficult to change. However, something far more important is happening.

Every language spoken by every person on this planet conforms to one of two basic structures:

Subject Verb Object (The cat sat on the mat)

Subject Object Verb (The cat on the mat sat)

In other words, every sentence, when grammatically complete, has a person or a thing acting upon a person or a thing.

When we turn a verb (to believe) into a noun (a belief) it moves from the Verb position to either the Subject or Object position, which is logically incorrect. However, humans are adept at twisting logic to fit the story.

A chair cannot be happy, but a person can be happy with the new chair they just picked up at a local market. To attribute an action or quality to something which it cannot have is called a Selectional Restriction Violation. A belief cannot limit, but a person can limit, and a person can believe.

When the nominalisation 'belief' becomes active, the person, the speaker, becomes passive and gives up control and responsibility for their actions.

I said that freezing the verb in time is a superficial interpretation, so here is a more profound one. By taking the verb, the action, out of time and turning it into a thing, it loses its action, its event because it is taken out of time. Instead of starting and ending, the belief applies now, which also means forever, because it's always now. So by nominalising a verb, I don't just make it apply now, I make it apply forever, and that's what makes it stuck, because a chair will always be a chair (until someone acts upon it with an axe) and a belief will always be a belief.

To believe something is temporary. It has a start and an end. You can think of your beliefs, when you learned them and you can imagine changing them.

Why, then, do you have no limiting beliefs?

You believe in certain facts. You believe in your abilities to do certain things. You believe that the sun will come up tomorrow. You believe that you're a good person, a hard worker, someone who always tries their best.

You also limit. You limit your spending. You limit your ice cream consumption. You limit your choices, in order to make it easier to make decisions.

What you believe does not limit you.

You choose, freely and responsibly, to limit what you believe, or to believe that you can limit yourself. And as soon as you realise that it's you doing the believing and you doing the limiting, then no belief can ever hold power over you again.

Everything You Know About NLP is Wrong

I've been writing my proposal for the NLP Conference to be held in London, April 2016 ... do you think it's provocative enough? It's entitled...

Everything you know about NLP is wrong

Here's the description:

Everything you think you know about NLP is wrong.

And that's why you can't always get the results you intended.

When trainers just emulate the pseudo-science they’ve been taught instead of testing for themselves, they pass that on to their students. So instead of an evolving, developing field, we have bad techniques being taught badly, and then we wonder why NLP gets a bad name.

For example, if you have trouble getting anchoring to work reliably, it's because you've been taught it wrong. And you're probably trying to use it to access resources such as confidence, which is the wrong way to use it.

Swish? Having trouble keeping the client's mind on the process? You've been using it wrong.

Just can't get your head round the Six Step Reframe? You've been doing it wrong.

But how can all of these experts be so wrong? Because they have failed to take into account the 30 years of neuroscience research since NLP was first created.

And we’ve learned a lot in 30 years...



Overall, delegates will learn to incorporate the last 30 years of real scientific research into their NLP practice, so that they can use NLP more reliably and consistently and avoid many of the myths that surround the field.

Delegates will learn the easy, right way to perform techniques such as:

Anchoring – and use it correctly, not just to access states
Swish – and use it any place, any time, even in business meetings
Six Step Reframe – surely, there’s an easier way?

Delegates will also learn the ‘truth’ about some of NLP’s most loved concepts, such as Eye Accessing Cues, Metaprograms and Logical Levels.

Delegates will even learn the most surprising revelation of all – that submodalities, the very bedrock of NLP’s approach to subjective experience, are completely made up.

This workshop will be practical, it will show you a better, easier, more reliable way to use NLP’s techniques, and it’s based on 30 years of research in neuroscience and 20+ years of personal research and experimentation.

Overall, this workshop will bring delegates’ knowledge of NLP up to date and give them a new understanding of the subject which will make them measurably more effective in applying techniques with their clients.

Peter delivers hundreds of hours of training, and hundreds of coaching sessions every year and incorporates fresh insights and learnings back into his books and his training at every opportunity.

Does that mean that he knows best? No, it only means that he’s open to the challenge, that to evolve, we must often let go of our most valued beliefs.

Are you?

Is Learning Dependent on Environment?

I'll start this post with a blatant advert - due to cancellations, I have one remaining place on each of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner in Spain this September. If you're interested, or you know someone who's interested, see www.nenlp.com for all the details.

Now, I mention this because one of the most important aspects of the training in Spain is that it takes place in a wonderful environment. Peaceful, relaxing, beautiful, and a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of daily life.

You roll out of bed, have breakfast on the patio and join the training, all in the glorious Andalusian sunshine. Previous participants have said that the environment is a great place to learn, but does it really make a difference? The course content is the same, regardless of whether it's delivered in the foot hills of the Sierra de las Nieves or in a meeting room at the Holiday Inn just off junction 25 of the M1. And at the Holiday Inn, you don't have to make your own coffee, it's provided for you in thermos flasks conveniently located outside the training room. Also, you get proper flip charts and fluorescent lighting for those dull autumn afternoons.

Intuitively, you're probably thinking that you'd rather work in the sunshine. Doesn't it evoke memories of primary school, and being allowed to work outside on the sunniest of afternoons? And doesn't it make your manager think that you're skiving, not working?

My experience is that taking people away from their daily routine for long enough that they actually forget their routine is what 'works', rather than the specific environment. Going to a hotel function room for life-changing training is exactly like going for a team meeting or health and safety training. The associations that we make probably include boring, waste of time, mandatory, irrelevant and so on, whereas the associations that we make with travelling to a villa in Spain are the opposite - exciting, valuable, free choice.

'Alternative' meeting venues are popular for corporate training, team meetings and team building events, and superficially these offer a good alternative to hotel rooms, except for one big problem - in order to cater to what they think the corporate market wants, they provide... meeting rooms with flipcharts, projectors, bowls of sweets, coffee on demand, cheap biscuits in individual packets. So as soon as you're past the lovely landscape, or the museum displays, or the fun stuff, you're right back where you started - in the hotel meeting room.

In Spain, we'll be putting lining paper on entire walls to work out language structures, and we'll be using all of the outdoor space as a 'breakout area', and as soon as I call it a breakout area it sounds boring. There will be no flipcharts. Outdoor and indoor activities, demonstrations, practice sessions and group discussions will be broken up with videos and other media. None of this is any different to how a course would run in the UK. The difference is the whole set of associations that students make before they even arrive.

So, does environment make a difference to learning? Absolutely, yes. But it's the anticipation of the environment that makes the biggest difference of all.

Stop Trying To Get Into Rapport

On any NLP Practitioner training I've ever seen, students are taught how to get into rapport. Seriously, it's a total waste of time, and at worst, harmful to a normal working relationship.

We're a social species. Rapport is our default position. You don't have to do anything to get it.

You already know what rapport is. It's that thing you have with people you like, when you're on the same wavelength, see eye to eye and feel a real connection with them.

You can think of rapport as being a conduit for communication. Without it, it's very difficult to engage the processes of agreement and compliance, and you have to work harder to be understood. 

When you have rapport you can take a lot of shortcuts, such as asking a close friend to pass you “the thing”, and expecting that they’ll know you meant the TV remote control.

Let’s make a useful assumption: you already have rapport, so there’s nothing you need to do to create it. From the moment you walk into a room, you are already connected with the people in there. 

Some of them will be connected with the real you, some of them will be connected with their own mental models of what a trainer is like – their previous experience. And sometimes that previous experience will be helpful to you, and sometimes not, so there are certainly times when you don’t want to be in rapport with other people, so that you can avoid being drawn into their hallucinations.

If someone is reacting to you in an odd way before you have really started, the chances are they are reacting not to you but to their own expectation, so that’s a good time to stop and find out what is really going on.

As I said, we're a social species. Rapport is our default position, and while you don't have to do anything to get it, it is very useful to learn how to control it...

Want to know how? Join me for NLP Practitioner training in Spain in September 2015. 

And you can download my book NLP - Skills for Learning from Bookboon for FREE. Most of this post is an extract from that book.

Answers to Webinar Questions

On 26th February 2015 I ran a webinar, hosted by the Coach Support Service, on the subject of NLP's declining market presence, and the need to adjust our sales and marketing methods in response.

A number of questions were raised which we didn't manage to get to, so I've answered all questions below.

Do look me up on LinkedIn or Facebook if you'd like to ask anything else.

You can also see the slides and a video of the whole webinar.





Do you feel if NLP was regulated the public perception would shift back to the mass market approach?

No. By 'regulated' I presume you mean 'accepted by the mainstream therapuetic professional bodies', as hypnotherapy is, for example. What it would mean is a slower decline because front line doctors would ensure a steady stream of new clients being referred for help with smoking, diet, anxiety etc. which is what happens with CBT today. In that respect it would be different if Bandler hadn't alienated the therapeutic community from the start, but it's too late now, I believe.

Do you feel the decline in the search result over 10 years is the move away from use of the internet as an educational tool to the leisure platform it is today

No. The Internet has grown in all directions. The growth of online and social gaming has not been at the expense of other applications.

The name Neuro Linguistic Programming is something of a handicap. 

Is it? Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is widely accepted. As is Person Centred Counselling. I do agree that people wonder what the Programming bit means, and assume mind control.

Finding the correct markets and strategies

You'll only find them by knocking on doors and speaking to people. If we practice what we preach, then the only way to know if something works is to do it and test what happens.

It cannot be accepted in its own right as still not understood - has to be incorporated into training, seminars, coaching

I don't agree that it's not understood, the problem is that a profession has a professional body of knowledge. Even though NLP's Practitioner techniques are essentially plagiarised from other therapeutic practices, we could say that the modelling process is a unique body of knowledge. But while the likes of Bandler and Grinder are perpetuating the argument of what is and isn't NLP, and who did and didn't create it, and who can and can't teach it, a self-governing profession will never be established. Given where the market is, as I said in the webinar, our options are to integrate, which is what the question proposes, or differentiate, which is getting more difficult.

Just wondering Peter. What about some practitioners / trainers who have managed to demonstrate scale and seem to do very well, (Tony Robbins, Grinder, Bandler, Mckenna) is that evidence that NLP is not dead and actually the rest of us are not very good at marketing / sales.

The answer is simply that they had full time sales teams. Tony Robbins uses a very traditional and well established consumer sales model. Jonathan Jay used a timeshare sales model for life coaching. Grinder and Bandler have enough of a reputation to trade off. McKenna got out of NLP! He sold PMT to Bernardo Moya, remember. And before he was a NLP trainer, remember that he was a radio DJ and had a TV show as a stage hypnotist. If any of us had that foundation to build on, or the resource of a full time, paid, targeted sales team, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Finding clients who will pay for my services

Yes.

How to deliver NLP so it makes really a transformation in peoples lives not just a short term change.

If you don't know how to do that then you were taught badly at Practitioner. Come to Spain in September!

To be able to know the right NLP techniques

If you don't know how to do that then you were taught badly at Practitioner. Come to Spain in September!

What's your key marketing strategy? Online, Offline? How are you getting clients knowing what you know?

Great question! A combination of both. I do as much public speaking as I can, both inside and outside the NLP community, and of course I have written a few books which are very important in building credibility. I'm very careful to align my online and offline activities, as I said in the webinar, because both together form the client's perception of you.

From your stats whilst you could see a decrease of 1 marker, we don't know what % decline in interest that was, firstly do you know that decline as a percentage and what's happened to you business sat in the last year knowing what you know?

The search volume is one half of what it was ten years ago.

What's happened in my business is a far greater focus than I've had before. In past years, I had the luxury of being able to do lots of different things that looked interesting, now I don't.

For success in NLP we need to recognise and use its fractal nature. 

I'll say yes.

Far too many in the field that think they know NLP yet are unable to extrapolate.

Yes, the result of either poor quality training, or often people go into training for reasons that aren't... well formed, or at least aligned with the practice of NLP. For example, to fix one personal failing, or to use on others.

How do we embrace the various names of coaching and proceed with NLP?

Stop putting them on our business cards.

Finding the appropriate audience. The market seem to be less transparent as many people call themselves e.g. Coaches.

Yes, as coaching is not a profession, any failed sales person, media 'celebrity' or sports player can decide to be a coach because they see the field, and especially corporate clients, as a cash cow. This makes it harder for clients to choose a good coach, so organisations such as the ICF spring up to add 'credibility' through a self-styled and non-peer reviewed certification process which is aimed at letting anyone be a coach, regardless of ability, as long as they follow the defined criteria. So we end up with a badge that helps clients choose, but in reality, it still doesn't guarantee a 'good' coach, only a 'certified' coach.

Looking at the social media, I see tons of people writing "coach". I think this has some impact too. 

See previous question.

In addition and along the lines with Peter's great presentation, in Denmark NLP is a commodity. 

Denmark is an advanced, Western European market so will be very close to where the UK is, as will be France, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, and so on. Sorry if I missed anyone's country out.

Focus seem to be packing NLP into something else. There seem to be a trend calling it "sales training" etc.

This is the integration strategy that I discussed in the webinar. Really, we don't call NLP sales training, what we do is to integrated aspects of NLP into sales training to make the sales training more effective. For example, belief change around cold calling, or how a sales person perceives the 'gatekeeper'.

How to encourage clients to believe in their own abilities

If you don't know how to do that then you were taught badly at Practitioner. Come to Spain in September!

Where to find my clients

You'll only find them by knocking on doors and speaking to people. If we practice what we preach, then the only way to know if something works is to do it and test what happens.

I add "NLP Practitioner" to my list of credentials, but really it is a set of tools to be used to deliver transformation

Yes, this is the integration strategy that I discussed in the webinar.

I don't sell myself as a NLP therapist - I use it, no problem there

Good. An integration strategy.

I have expectations of it being potentially very helpful

Yes, it is a far more versatile tool than many people understand it to be.

At the moment I don't 'promote' my NLP services to clients as I need greater in-depth experience of seamlessly introducing it ..

If you don't know how to do that then you were taught badly at Practitioner. Come to Spain in September!

I sell the result of the service, so NLP not always announced. The challenge is always in getting better as with all skill

Definitely, and practice groups are useful in that way, although it's sad to see that there aren't as many of them around any more.


That's all folks!

As I said, do look me up on LinkedIn or Facebook if you'd like to ask anything else.

NLP Training in Spain 2015 - what will we be getting up to?

For this year's dates, follow the link at the top of this page.