Hi,
I am a NLP Trainer and I am sad that there are serious problems with NLP today.
The more people learn NLP, the seriousness of the problems becomes more apparent. What are the problems? The problem is about the misunderstandings of NLP.
1. NLP is NOT NLP Skills. Many people are just learning NLP Skills and think that they are NLP. NLP Skills are the results of NLP, but not NLP itself.
2. NLP emphasizes the "How" of doing/thinking (i.e. Context). People misunderstand that we just need to know how to use the NLP Skills. But how about the "When", "Who", "Which" and "Why" to use the skills? People learned NLP, but just do not know when to use a particular skill, who needs that skill, which skill to use, and why to use it?
The Result: They can't use it!
The essence of "How" is to study how people think about something so that we can shift the "How" to achieve a better result. This full understand of "How" thinking happened leads us to know the "How", "When", "Who", "Which" and "Why" of thinking and of applying the skills.
3. NLP makes people thinking that they are therapists. Founders of NLP modelled some of the best psychotherapist at that time and work out their strategies. So many of the NLP Skills are therapeutic in nature. Knowing how they do it doesn't make us becoming a psychotherapist. Most of us are not trained as a therapist. People can easily misunderstand that learning NLP is equivalent to learning therapy.
Even a standard 128 or more hours of NLP training can't equip us with all the knowledge of doing therapy on others. This is dangerous, very dangerous. Furthermore, most of us will not do therapy in our daily lives. Learning all those NLP Therapeutic Skills becomes useless to us. We need something we can transfer back to our daily lives.
I don't have all the solutions to these problems. But I always remind myself not to add further more problems to the field of NLP!
Keith