NLP

mastery: (noun) comprehensive knowledge or command of a subject or skill

There’s a big difference between a good driver and someone who has just passed his test. There’s a big difference between a cook and a chef. There’s a big difference between a hill walker and a mountaineer.

One of the differences is practice and experience. There’s no substitute for practice, getting good at something means putting in the time and effort. Another difference is training in new skills, learning deepens the perspective and expands the range of choices available to you.

In an NLP Practitioner course you learn the fundamentals. In an IntegrityNLP training we visit and revisit the skills needed for communicating effectively with ourselves and others. It’s a hundred and twenty hours of training and practice. That might sound like a lot of time but it’s only time to scratch the surface of what’s possibles with this material. We have to leave out a lot of stuff: working on beliefs and values, even more skillful use of language, modeling the success of others to name but a few.

In the IntegrityNLP Master Practitioner we take you way beyond the level of Practitioner – opening up your skills and understandings – If you thought you learned a lot on your NLP Practitioner training be prepared to go much further.

In January 2010 IntegrityNLP will be running it’s first six month NLP Master Practitioner Training.

This training, and only this training, will cost you just £500.

This will be the only one offered at this price. If you have an NLP Practitioner certificate and you want to take the next step. Click here.

Photo courtesy of Andreas Rueda

Why would anyone bother to take an NLP Practitioner Training? After all it’s a weird thing from California and it costs money. On one level it’s a completely understandable question, time and money can feel like scarce commodities. Why spend 10 weekends over 10 months learning personal and professional transformation skills?

Most people want to learn to drive and they spend a lot of time and money learning. They don’t even think about it. Driving is an obvious skill with obvious benefits and everyone else is doing it as well.

The benefits of an NLP training are not quite so obvious, but what you can learn on an NLP Practitioner training will certainly change your life in far more ways than learning to drive.

What if?

• You could change all those old unhelpful patterns of emotions, beliefs and behaviours you have picked up along your way through life. The ones that make life much harder than it needs to be. The ones that stop you doing what you would really like to do. Over 6 months you have a lot of opportunities to undo old patterns in ways that are surprisingly easy and gentle.
• You could put down all the old junk from the past and choose the kind of future you had always wanted. The memories of old disasters seem to carry around those old debilitating emotional reactions. It doesn’t have to be that way. There are ways of taking the charge out of old memories so that they become just memories. Free of old clutter it’s possible to move into a new future greater ease.
• There were ways you could get on with people. People are tricky aren’t they? If you could really connect with people in an honest and powerful way things would just get so much easier. You learn how to improve on this skill (you already have it to some degree or another) on the very first weekend.
• You could be far more influential than you had ever imagined possible. If you can connect with people in a direct and resourceful way then you can be so much more influential than you imagined. After all it’s just what the influential people you know are doing. They are human beings just like you. If they can do it, so can you.
• Other people’s behaviour and your reactions to it made sense, and better still could be changed? Once you understand that people’s behaviour is just an expression of a positive intention. Then it’s possible to find new ways to meet that intention and enjoy much greater success. This can include your apparently less than useful behaviour.
• You had far more resources than you had ever imagined. It’s funny how some people have boundless energy or confidence or happiness or courage or …. (what would be a very long list of resources). We all have these resources to one degree or another, some people seem to have them close at hand whenever they need them. What if you had ways to draw on (and amplify) your positive resources?

You don’t have to take our word for it.

Reading about NLP led me to believe that there were many ways to change myself and others so that life would be ‘better’. What surprised me was how easy it was to change everyday habits and responses and it was the little changes rather than the deeper applications that really impressed me and I’ve never worn my socks in bed since !! The changes didn’t involve willpower and work just an NLP process and all of a sudden the habit was over.

Heather

I have begun to incorporate nlp methods into my every day life – without realizing it. I feel much more able to change states – particularly if I am in a sad mood – I visualise a bright cloud and step into it – or I think of sometime in the past when I was much happier and soon my mood lifts.

I notice the words and the language people use in everyday speech more, and I have started to be careful about my own choice of language. … But I think the biggest thing for me is using rapport skills – I do find myself practising down the local pub on some unassuming stranger – and I am always so amazed how it often leads to much more of a connection with the person that I am in rapport with.

Lisa

The next IntegrityNLP Practitioner Training starts in January 2010. If you are already an NLP Practitioner then you can always take the next step with our NLP Master Practitioner Training.

Yes folks, there is going to be another ChangeCamp this year. Following the great success of the first ever ChangeCamp we are going to show the Autumn collection of presentations and workshops on Saturday 24th October 2009 at Gosforth High Schoool in Newcastle

If you were at the first ChangeCamp you will know the score: pay £10, sign up for the presentations that interest you, turn up with some food to share and have lots of fun while learning lots of useful stuff.

The presentations list will grow as we get closer to the day, One of the things I’d like to find out is just how much excellent learning and enjoyment can be packed into one day.

If you want to attend, great! Tell you friends all about it.

If you want to help, great! It’s a great way to take part. Let me know if you can.

If you want to present, great! It’s a great way to meet new people and share what you know. Let me know.

Look forward to seeing old friends and making new ones on October 24th.

To sign up visit: www.changecamp.co.uk

Image by johnnyalive via Flickr

A client of mine is undergoing chemotherapy. Every three weeks she gets injections of three drugs into a drip line inserted into the wrist.

The drugs have to go into the drip line because there is quite a volume of medication and the syringes holding them are big, about six inches long and an inch across, arriving in a plastic tray with the needles, tubes and other bits and pieces.

The day before her second round of chemo  she told me that just the thought of those injections was making her feel very nauseous.

She said: “The syringe is this *$!*%$# long!“. Moving her hands about two feet apart, in the style of a fisherman telling you about the one that got away.

I asked her if the syringe was that big in her mind’s eye. She told me it was. I suggested to her that she shrink that image of the syringe down to it’s actual size. She did this easily. Commenting that the syringe now fitted in the tray.

Then she told me that her nausea linked to the treatment had completely disappeared!

This is an excellent demonstration of a fundamental principal of NLP: How you represent the outside world in your inner world will powerfully affect your subjective experience.

Do some things make you unnecessarily anxious and afraid? How are they depicted in your imagination? Are they too big? Closer than they should be? More vivid in some way? Do they sound louder than they are in real life?  These qualities of our experience, known as submodalities in NLP, can be understood and changed to change the quality of our lives.

In my clients case, changing her representation of that syringe changed the way she felt about it.  It’s a simple enough change to make if you know it’s possible. The best way to learn how to make changes like that is to attend an NLP Practitioner training. Click on the link to learn more about IntegrityNLP NLP Practitioner trainings.

When I did my first NLP Practitioner training, people asked me what I was doing and I told them as best I could. If they hadn’t heard of NLP they would have an air of puzzlement or disbelief. “What are you doing that for?” seemed to be the unspoken question. At that time I found it a very hard question to answer.

I’d first been introduced to NLP about 20 years earlier on a teacher training course and had been intrigued. It kept surfacing from time to time down the years but it took me until 1999 to attend my first NLP training. I attended a weekend introduction to NLP (a lot like the IntegrityNLP Introducing NLP course) in London to find out at first hand what it was all about.

I was astonished. Up until then I thought the furniture of my mind was fixed in place and I was stuck with it. After two days I realised that a lot of the limiting and negative thoughts I experienced were optional not obligatory. I had to find out more.

If you think all the thoughts, feelings, ideas, memories that rattle around in your body and mind are fixed this is probably difficult to imagine. If you have not attended an NLP training take a moment to imagine that you can quickly and easily change the way that you think and feel, that old hurts can be healed and old reactions dissolved. It’s a very different way of thinking about the world.

I think that contributed to my difficulty in explaining what the training was all about and what it meant to me. This experience prompted me to start the “So, what is it you are doing?” book project, where participants of past and present NLP Practitioner trainings share their thoughts on what it means to attend an IntegrityNLP NLP Practitioner Training.

Here are some of their thoughts about why they chose to do an NLP Practitioner Training

Are you a worrier?

It’s not quite the happiest of New Years. Financial difficulties. Looming recession. The flu bug that’s going around. Wars and disasters on the TV.

Lots of challenging situations for all of us, but if you are a worrier it’s just so much worse. As if the reality of the situation wasn’t bad enough you can’t stop worrying about it.

Do these statements apply to you?

• You’re not able to calm down
• You imagine the worst
• You feel anxious far more than you should
• You just can’t stop worrying
• You feel out of control

If they do IntegrityNLP is running a short course in Hexham that will help you:

• Feel calm
• Stop worry in its tracks
• Get back control of your mind.
• Gain greater peace of mind.

The course will be held at The Bodywork Centre, 19 St Mary’s Chare, Hexham on Friday 27th March from 9:30 am to 5:30 pm.

The full cost for the full day workshop is just £69.00.

To find out more click on Coping With Worry – A Short Course

I’d like to invite you to a rather unorthodox un-conference called ChangeCamp 2009 that I am organising for Saturday 27th June in Gosforth High School in Newcastle.

ChangeCamp 2009 is designed as a low cost conference event for practitioners of NLP, EFT, Hypnotherapy, Solution Focussed Brief Therapy and coaching, and for members of the public who may be interested in such things.

The themes for ChangeCamp are:

1. Changing yourself: Using psychological techniques to change our own experience of the world.

2. Changing others: Using psychological techniques in therapeutic or educational contexts.

3. Changing groups: Making groups and organisations more effective through psychological means.

Please not the emphasis on psychological applications. We will be restricting the presentations to a psychological orientation there wont be any presentations on crystal healing or aromatherapy. Our aim is to have a high quality content event that will appeal to professionals and public alike rather than a mind-body-spirit fare (of which there are many).

In a conventional conference attendees pay a large sum of money to sit and listen to acknowledged experts (who are paid an even larger sum) to tell them about the latest findings or how to do things.

In an un-conference that is put to one side, people who are interested in a subject and want to present about it make presentations to other people who are interested. The presentations may be talks, workshops, exercises, question and answer sessions, brainstorming sessions – what ever format best suits the issue in question. Audience participation is strongly encouraged. The event is organised to encourage an informality and cross fertilisation of ideas.

ChangeCamp is arranged to bring together a large number of participants from a variety of fields so they can be exposed to other ways of working and thinking. It’s set up to stimulate discussion.

To encourage high attendance the entry fee is set at £10 which is just enough to cover costs.

If you would like to attend just go to www.changecamp.co.uk and sign on to the website. If you would like to present in some way you can either email me with an idea.

I look forward to meeting with some of you in June.

View my page on ChangeCamp 2009