Real NLP for Real People

The question many NLP Practitioners ask is how specifically I apply NLP patterning with clients who have real world problems. At an NLP practitioner course many of the exercises are set up in a contrived manner for learning purposes. This gives the new NLP Practitioners an opportunity to learn the steps, but what it doesn’t do is give them real world experience of the steps. A major piece missing in NLP at the moment is real world application of practitioner techniques.

Each year we run an NLP Trainers Training where people from all over the world attend to learn how to deliver NLP Training courses. One would think this is superb, that there is such a high interest in expanding the field. The problem is lot of the budding trainers have never done real NLP with real people. This is similar to the situation we have with the career politicians who are running the country; they lack real world experience!

Personally when I learned NLP, I wanted to put it to the test, and used all the patterns in multiple scenarios. Today, I work mainly with health and healing issues.

The woman terrified of restaurants

“I suffered from migraines, overpowering tiredness and stomach upsets from the age of 7, but it was not until my mid twenties that I realised these symptoms were connected with certain foods. Since then, I have progressively cut out the foods that caused me to become ill, but I have been terrified of eating with friends or in restaurants because if something that I reacted to was present (whether I knew it or not) I would be unable to stay awake, followed by an upset stomach and either a headache or migraine. I had given up hope of a ‘normal’ life and saw myself as a sort of ‘second class’ person.
However, after a consultation with Michael Carroll where he conducted several NLP techniques I can now eat anything with no side effects at all! I feel like a new person, happier than since I was 7, one who does not have to apologise all the time and one who can socialise without fear of being ‘antisocial’ anymore.”

Fear of Bridges

I have a chronic phobia of bridges, the higher they are the bigger my phobia. Last week I had a panic attack going over Chiswick flyover on the Hogarth roundabout incurring an £80 fine as a result of abandoning my car! Following a session with Michael Carroll, I drove over the flyover without any problem that evening.
For me that was wonderful and since then I have driven over some big bridges including the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland, The Queen Elizabeth Bridge in Kent and The Clifton Suspension Bridge, all easily. However I had never put the small pedestrian bridge scenario to the test – knowing that was 100 times worse than driving over bridges, and being apprehensive as to whether this really could have changed so quickly.

Whilst on holiday with a friend last week, I had the opportunity to visit a massive tree house which was awesome – the only way to reach it was via a very long high level rope bridge suspended above the forest, no more than one person wide, with wooden slats, bouncing and swaying alarmingly. It never occurred to me not to do it and it was only after crossing it and seeing numerous people refusing to cross that I realised what I had done so easily. Indeed I was then so excited at having done it – I did it a few more times just because I could!

Dramatic cancer healing

I had previously suffered from prostate cancer and to heal I avoided conventional treatment and pursued a macrobiotic treatment based on a book called “The Cancer Prevention Diet” written by Michio Kushi. Practicing the macrobiotic way has never been easy given that modern life is instant, artificial and yes, convenient and I was no exception to that trap, and maybe it was that I had broadened my diet too much in the intervening years. So it was in December 2010 this was all brought back home to me when during a routine test the results showed my antigen reading had gone from a
moderate reading of 26 at which it had hovered for the previous 3 years to a staggering 232! It was shock horror as this could only mean one thing and that was that the cancer had returned.

Whilst this melodrama was unfolding I had seriously questioned myself on why the cancer had come back or was it that it had, in essence, never really been totally healed and thus never gone away. Had I really not nailed it the first time? In the intervening years I had done much work on myself from a spiritual mind and body perspective. I had studied Vipassana meditation with Burgs the Buddhist monk, and I had also studied and qualified in hypnotherapy with my good friend Michael Carroll, founder of the NLP Academy, and so it was during a meditation one day the solution came to me, and it was so obvious. This had all come back to bite me because on a subconscious level I had not given the subconscious permission to let go of the cancer and so therefore how on earth could it take control and heal both itself and the body?

I placed a quick call to Michael who kindly arranged a hypnosis session in quick time and under deep hypnosis the subconscious agreed to heal the cancer within 60 days. 2 months to the day on the 14th June a PSA test revealed the reading had dropped to 4.2 (from the 232). Medically there was disbelief, as this was quite unknown in medical circles. Another session with Michael to galvanise the subconscious into taking on a new life, living like a man in his twenties with the wisdom of the 70 year old. And so it was on the 1st August 2011 the 2 monthly PSA test revealed a level of 2! That was just 6 months since original diagnosis. Happy days, and thank God for the power of the mind and good food.

I have hundreds of cases studies collected through the years; the above are just examples of how NLP can be used in different contexts of phobias, allergies and healing.  There are many applications of NLP including weight loss, addictions, helping people with learning difficulties to name just a few. The way to start finding the deeper applications is practising everything you learned at your practitioner class with real people in real situations until you are bullet proof with every NLP pattern. The next level is understanding the relationship and cross over between the patterns.

If you would like to see me in action working with people who have fears, phobias, and allergies, I will be running a masterclass in June where I work with real people and their real situations and as part of the seminar you can get an opportunity to do the same. If you would like to attend the master class as a practitioner to learn from me or a participant to work through an issue please email me in info@nlpacademy.co.uk to go on the list. The course numbers will be restricted to maximise the opportunities for all. IN your email please be clear about your outcome.