So now I’ve completed my NLP practitioner course I thought I’d document my experiences and views on whether the course was worthwhile…
I signed up for an NLP Practitioner course after attending a day seminar on influential language. I felt that I’d lost my way a little and was interested to understand ways in which I could regain some control of the world around me.
The seminar was a mix of psychology and NLP, and the NLP stuff blew me away, it let me peek behind the curtain to some of the stuff that goes on all the time and that 99.9% of people are blissfully ignorant of.
Wanting to find out more, I took the red pill and headed off down the rabbit hole. I wasn’t really sure why this interested me so, and I was less sure of what I would gain from it. At the start of the course we were all asked “what do you want?” and “how will you know when you’ve got it?”. It seems that most of the other students had answers to at least one of the questions, but not me. I had no real idea why I did the course, just that to do it felt like a better thing than not doing it. The course was run by Salad, and we were taken along a journey by Salad’s Jamie Smart and Peter Freeth.
And so over the next five months we explored many things, learning techniques in coaching, anchoring, hypnosis, removing phobias and much, much more. For three days a month, my mind fizzed with new ideas that ranged from philosophy to psychology to damn obvious, but always in a new context. In the meantime I made a bunch of like-minded friends, all on different paths, but somehow all meeting at the same service station once a month.
Of all of the stuff we learnt, the most useful “out of the box” by far was the Meta Model, a form of questioning that not only blows problems out of the water, but without offering a single piece of advice, can generate solutions at such deep levels that I’ve seen it bring grown men to tears. Believe me you have to see it in the hands of an expert to know what it can do. I’m no expert yet but I’ve already had major successes with its use. Another key outcome for me was an understanding of intuition and how to develop it. Sounds very Jedi but over the course of five months I’ve started to listen to mine and found it to be right a lot more often that my over rationalising is.
So now I’m an NLP practitioner and about to start a coaching course to fit all of that learning in to a longer-term process to help people get what they want. In a year’s time I will probably go back and do my Master Practitioner, because in the last five months i’ve made more personal progress towards being who I want to be than I have in the previous ten years, and I want more. The course has helped me to understand what I want, and now that I know how I will know when I’ve got it, I want to get it NOW.
