Peter Freeth - The NLP Practitioner Manual

The
NLP Practitioner
Manual

Peter Freeth

2016

The NLP Practitioner Manual

Peter Freeth

First Edition: August 2011

Second Edition: August 2014

Third Edition: August 2016

ISBN 978-1-9082930-3-9

Peter Freeth 2000 to 2016

Peter Freeth has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved in all media. This book may not be copied, stored, transmitted or reproduced in any format or medium without specific prior permission from the publisher.

Published by:

CGW Publishing
B 1502
PO Box 15113
Birmingham
B2 2NJ
United Kingdom

www.cgwpublishing.com

mail@cgwpublishing.com

For information about NLP training programs, visit:

www.nenlp.com

The Format of This Book

This book contains:

• Text that explains the principles of NLP

• Exercises that teach the techniques of NLP

• Space to write your own notes

When Im talking about the principles of NLP, Ive written in plain text, like this.

When Im explaining a technique with step by step instructions, Ive written in a slightly different style, like this, leaving space to the left of the exercise for your notes.

There are two or three roles in each exercise; Practitioner, Client or Observer.

And when I want you to think about a question and note down your own answers before moving on, Ive used a box, like this.

Finally, I might refer to coaching at various points, simply because thats easier than listing all of the professional scenarios within which you would use NLP.

NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming; a study of the mind and nervous system (Neuro), language and the way that we build a linguistic map of the world (Linguistic) and our learned behavioural responses (Programming).

NLP is a study of how we can use language to map the connections between internal experience and external behaviour.

People describe NLP in different ways; a study of excellence, a model of human communication and behaviour or a toolkit for personal change are ones you may have heard. Some NLP trainers even present NLP as a panacea for all ills; it can give you confidence, wealth, contentment, good health and more. Because of this, NLP has earned a reputation from some critics as a hyped up, pseudo-scientific cult that tries to pass itself off as a branch of psychology, or neuro-science, or psychiatry, depending on which website youre looking at.

Many years ago, I ran a large practice group operating out of London. A trainer came over from America to run a short course, and he graciously joined us for the evening. I forget the subject of his workshop, but half way through, he began talking about why NLP is not a cult, and spent the rest of the evening trying to convince the audience that this was the case. The members of the audience, about 40 people, stared at each other in confusion. Who had said that NLP was a cult? No-one had. The trainer was answering a question that no-one had asked, because he had anticipated that someone would ask it. Was he trying to be too clever? The fact was that 40 people had turned up, either because they thought that NLP was not a cult, or that it was and they liked that, or they didnt care either way. In any event, the trainer possibly made life too complicated for himself.

In this Practitioner manual, I am not presenting NLP as something it is not. NLP is a powerful toolkit, and it is well worth the time and effort required to learn and master its subtleties. NLP should never be used to influence or manipulate, and if anything, subversive intentions do have a habit of surfacing quite clearly in a persons behaviour.

NLP is currently used in business, sports coaching, therapy, counselling, coaching, training, teaching, sales, advertising - in fact in any area where people want to achieve better results for themselves and others.

At the heart of NLP is a set of linguistic tools for understanding the intuitive mindset and behaviour of excellence in any field.

Whether you are an athlete, sales person or teacher, you have certain perceptions, certain skills and an attitude that enable you to achieve results within your own environment. By tapping into the intuitive excellence of experts in the field of personal change - therapists - the creators of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder created a broad and flexible toolkit for personal change. It works with our fundamental perceptions of the world, from which we form our beliefs and generate the behaviours that we hope will get us the results we want.

NLP at Practitioner level comprises these techniques, and certainly they are highly valuable in many different everyday situations. Yet we shouldnt overlook the value of those core modelling tools too, because they are the means by which we can continually generate new techniques and increase the flexibility and effectiveness of NLP. NLP is a generative approach, meaning that we are always seeking to build on what is already working.

This modelling toolkit is the subject of The NLP Master Practitioner Manual which is also the manual for my Master Practitioner training programs.

NLP is not an abstract theory. NLP is a study of real people achieving real and tangible results in their real lives. NLP is a way of sorting and organising our mental and behavioural skills, allowing us to understand and refine those skills so that we can achieve more, easily and consistently.

NLP was originally the modelling toolkit by which intuitive talents were extracted and coded, but because the first people modelled were therapists, NLP has become confused with the techniques that it produced.

You might like to think of the techniques as being NLPs footprints. By following in those footprints, we can retrace the steps of the people who created NLP and experience their journeys for ourselves, always remembering its the journey that is important. Getting your feet precisely into every one of those footprints is not, perhaps, a good use of your time, because whilst youre looking down at your feet, youre missing the scenery.

The people who come to NLP training wanting to improve their lives and their relationships have already taken the first critical step - taking responsibility for change, and for the effect they have on other people. These people already know that it is they who must adapt, not others. Perhaps, in the past, they learned the hard way that you cant make other people do what you want. They learned that you can only do what you want, and if you need other peoples help then you need to be better at expressing what you want, or change the action you are taking to get it.

NLP is about you. Its not about what you can do to other people. If you try to learn NLP with an attitude of, Im already good at this, I want to learn to do it to other people, then NLP training will magnify that attitude so that its even more apparent to others.

If you are curious about yourself and other people, and if you are hoping to find new ways to get better results more consistently then you will definitely benefit greatly from learning about NLP.

The three levels of licensed training; Practitioner, Master Practitioner and Trainer have quite distinct aims. At Practitioner level, the key aim is to give you a personal experience of change. Before you start learning how to change other people, its very important that you have a personal reference for the way that people change and how the tools work. You will learn some basic change tools and by the end of the course you will have experienced some kind of personal change such as solving a problem or curing a phobia.