It turns out NLP “techniques” are only really run as written at two times – when teaching the technique and when learning the technique. Otherwise you do what needs to be done.
For example, even doing something as simple as helping a friend remove the negative emotions from his past while keeping the positive lessons went strangely awry. I noticed he didn’t really want to use a particular timeline technique, even though he could go back and look at the ugly version, he didn’t want to clean it up.
I suggested a new approach and my friend “sub-contracted” the clean up. Everything was great until he went to look at the cleaned up timeline and all of a sudden he was physically avoiding looking in that direction. I’m entirely perplexed, but we made the needed changes in a completely different way and, in his words, he “woke up a new man.”
I discovered later that it was an ecology issue around a promise he had made to himself year before. I never would have discovered this and been able to address that no-longer-useful belief if I had not had the flexibility to work with whatever was there in front of me.
So, when someone hires me with the request to “teach me NLP techniques” I have to laugh and offer their money back. Techniques are rarely what they need, and if they are just looking for that “magic pill” or “secret button” or “ancient technique” that will just make things better, I have to be honest and say there ain’t no such thing.
What I can be hired for is to either use techniques as a natural extension of the NLP mindset I’ve developed over the years, or to teach them how to develop that NLP mindset in their own future. Neither of those are instant fixes, but they are both solid solutions to some rather tricky problems.
These days, even if I’m hired to teach the NLP mindset, methodology, and techniques, the first thing I do is have them get started with the NLP Monthly materials. They are a solid course in NLP and a great scaffolding to develop that mindset. Check it out and find out if you are ready for a more lasting solution than the “bandaids” offered by others.