From: lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady)
Subject: Re: NLP
Followup-To: sci.psychology
Summary: NLP is incredibly diverse.  
Keywords:  NLP   NeuroLinguistic Programming
Organization: University of Hawaii (Mathematics Dept)
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 19:20:23 GMT


In article <714959001snx@bspesc.atr.bso.nl> pesc@bspesc.atr.bso.nl 
               (Peter J. Schenkels) writes:
>
>  Personally, I find that after reading a book on NLP myself, the idea
>  of influencing people's inner thoughts and feelings by (re)producing
>  the right "input signals" sounds simple, but could be effective when
>  used in appropriate situations. Pavlov's dog is a clear example. 
>  
>  The concept of 'congruent actions' looks more usefull to me, since it
>  doesn't assume the mechanical way of handling "input signals" in such
>  detail.
>
>  Nevertheless, I sometimes wonder if the whole NLP thing isn't just
>  a misconception based on an invalid reversion of cause and effect. 
>  What about someone who says: "Yesterday, after I saved my neighbour
>  from his house on fire, I had a good feeling. Why not today set the
>  other neighbour's house on fire and have it back."
>
>  Does anyone recognize this?

It's amazing to me the number of different things that people identify
under the label NLP.  There are an incredible number of books out and
many different groups giving trainings, and some of them have very
different conceptions from others.  

I don't recognize what you've posted as a description of NLP at all.  

When I took my basic practitioner training in 1983-84 I was aware that it
was different from a lot of other NLP trainings.  In fact, the NLP group
giving it had decided to acknowledge that by using the term Programmer
Training rather than Practitioner Training.  The main thing that I was
aware of was that there was a de-emphasis on techniques and a stress on
learning to ask questions in an intelligent way and gather information
from a client in structured form.  

By the middle of the training, many of us were growing vaguely uneasy
about this and were tired of hearing the trainer say "Remember, in this
exercise you're not suppose to be trying to change the person you're
working with, you're only gathering information about the problem."  I
hadn't paid all that money just to learn to ask people questions without
changing anything!  

Later, I learned to be really grateful for having been taught what I had
been and I found out that I could learn techniques from books.  

What I didn't quite realize, though, was that NLP was at that time in the
process of becoming incredibly diverse, almost fragmented.  Submodalities
were becoming the most popular type of intervention for many NLPers,
for instance, but I'm told that for a long time John Grinder refused to
have anything to do with submodalities at all.  (I don't know what his
attitude is now.)

The National Association of NLP (since renamed the International
Association of NLP) was started in 1984 largely (I've been told) as a way
of resisting that tendancy toward fragmentation, and there's a lot more
unity now than there was eight years ago.  

I went through the Master Programmer training in 1984 and was not very
satisfied with it.  There was a large emphasis on metaprograms which I
did not find useful.  Leslie Cameron Bandler, Michael LeBeau, and
David Gordon presented a lot of experimental stuff they were developing
(the "time model") which was fascinating, but it was difficult to see how
to use it.  

This past June (1992) I decided to repeat the Master Practitioner
training, this time from NLP Comprehensive in Colorado.  It was certainly
very different, and very intense.  At this point I'm not sure quite what
I got out of it.  I did learn two extremely simple little techniques
to use on myself and over the course of time these two techniques (which
could have been taught in one morning) will probably be worth the 
approximately $5,000 I spent on tuition, room & board, and airfare.  

There are places, including certain regions of the US, where NLP has a
really bad reputation, sometimes justifiably so.  One of my fellow
students this summer explained how he handles this:  "When people ask me
if I do NLP, I ask them 'What's NLP?'  Then they give me a list of all
sorts of objectionable things that are their conception of NLP and I can
answer quite honestly, 'No, I don't do any of those things.' "  

--

Imagination is greater than knowledge.  -- Einstein 

lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu         lady@uhunix.bitnet
Newsgroups: sci.psychology