NLP Demystified
What is NLP?
NLP is a set of tools, heuristics (rules of thumb) and attitudes plus a methodology, which once learnt and intelligently applied, allow anyone to move into any discipline or area that involves complexity, ambiguity or mess, in other words human behaviour and work. NLP is a discipline that illustrates how people learn, develop and change. It is not a science but an art. Through the use of the tools and ways of thinking you can enhance your performance and results in a short time and with efficiency of effort.
NLP is about discovering that your world has many more possibilities waiting for you than you could have imagined before. NLP is about cognitive and emotional intelligence, it is about changing how you view and respond to both your internal states and external circumstances. NLP works in the domain of the elusive obvious - where things seem so obvious but few people notice them. NLP teaches how to acknowledge and utilise the elusive obvious to your advantage so that all kinds of interesting things happen.
NLP and Business
Learning good relationship skills is of major importance in changing and improving how you work with people, present to them, persuade them, manage them, influence them, and get help from them. But NLP has much more to offer decision makers, people who have to deal with customers, people who have to deal with teams, people who are going to negotiate, arbitrate, design train and lead. NLP teaches the human skills that allow greater competence to emerge as easily as possible. NLP can sharpen up your insights and intuitions to the point where people are going to look at you and start treating you like a mind reader or magician.
The rate at which markets are developing and changing, the rate of change and scope of learning demanded in organisational life, the amount of legislation that is coming in all areas of business is creating tremendous uncertainty and instability. In a sense, certainty is a thing of the past. And yet the desire for something certain and fixed - unchangeable - leads to attempts by some to create a false sense of things being under more control than they actually are. This in turn impediments to our understanding of what is really required to thrive in these times. If you do not improve your skills, if you do not upgrade your ability to tolerate and deal with the chaos that is slowly submerging the business world then you are courting disappointment… and quite a bit more. Mastering the tools of NLP can help you deal with the amount of challenge that is coming up and upgrade you skills so that you stay ahead of the field.
NLP and People Skills
NLP will help you to pay closer attention to what other people are doing and saying, allowing you to begin to piece together what's really happening inside someone else's mind. It upgrades your cognitive abilities in that you will be far more able to hear and see what is behind someone's choices. It allows you to work with the fundamental logic of behaviour: What absolutely has to be there, what cannot be there, and what is relevant and not relevant.
NLP gives you a very powerful set of ideas, models and tools that allow you to change the way you listen, understand and communicate. NLP can help you to develop greater insights, greater ability to understand what is being said, and to formulate great questions. We are talking about being able to figure out what is the best question to ask. What is the one question that if you get the answer, it can completely blow apart the problem that is being presented to you, the question that makes problems dissolve before your eyes. That's just some of what NLP is about.
How I Teach NLP for Business
I know that some people present NLP as if it's a list of tips, techniques, panaceas, and cures for various problems. For me, that is the most trivial of applications, it does not teach people to think for themselves.
We teach NLP the way that it was created, through experiential challenge and experiential learning. You will be put into the situations where you have to develop and demonstrate a range of skills. This is not like learning from a book, nor like a standard training course.
You will be developing aptitudes by working through actual issues that people have, not a fake role-play. You will be solving real problems for real people. This course is not about jamming a certain amount of content into a participant's heads. This course teaches the art of flexibility so that skills and capabilities are developed to deal with real life. This is different from trying to force a situation to match our preferences or techniques. Participants will learn to adapt their ways of thinking, feeling and behaving to a situation and thus become more response-able. This means you will stop fighting with reality.
Some of the skills on the course are learnt by analysis and they require an analytical framework. Some of the tools are very concrete, are explicit and we give you the tools to make them concrete and explicit. This course will improve whatever your basic competences are and improve whatever competencies are demanded by your particular business.
I believe that our courses can teach you a tool set not available elsewhere and this will save you a vast amount of time and trouble in your business.