The answer seems easy and expected, but after all I've seen these days I'm beginning to have some doubts. I went to the presentation of the nth book on NLP, whose goal was unveiling what's non visible in NLP. After 90 minutes of bananas I stood up and ran away, bewildered, astonished and, all things considered, annoyed. The opening of the presentation was weird and soon went off the rail: a gestalt psychotherapist started talking about the concept of truth, what it is and how men cannot really achieve or perceive it because of their limited perception (mankind was compared to salad, speaking saladian language!) - and, in the final end, why pigeonhole NLP only to the therapeutic field, although very effective?
What mostly surprised me more than anything else is that, when I left (once again, after 90 minutes of presentation) none of the Authors had even explained what NLP is, on what it is based, which are its creators and so on. They talked about Aristotle, Cicerone, the German philosophers. An entire evening talking about themselves and other nonsense, and everything absolutely alien to NLP. An evening that totally misinformed all the participants, eager to learn what this NLP thing was. In a word, awful!
Because, after all, what is this “NLP model” if not a non-model which comes out of empiric observation and eventually, after a constant practice, has been codified into a corpus of rules and procedures from which a few postulates were later extracted? From this point of view, the epistemology of NLP is virtually non-existent. If there is, it was created and developed a posteriori. On the contrary, the two Authors insisted upon a superstructure - which NLP does not have and never really wanted to.
Even more than the five years next to Robert Dilts, Steve Gilligan, Norma and Phil Barretta, it was the four and half years (and those still to come) spent side by side with John Grinder as his translator and interpreter (something Grinder himself thinks goes beyond the simple translations of thoughts and concepts) that led me into understanding and comprehend the essence of NLP is modeling and meta-model and both things are much more spontaneous than codified. Children are excellent examples of both aspects, and children do not have epistemological superstructures. They simply observe the world and reproduce it with no cognitive superstructures, and the repetition of the experience refine their perception of it.
This is real NLP. The subtitle of a book written by Bandler and Grinder reads the study of the structure of subjective experience. This, though, should not fool, using the axiom the map is not the territory to justify that people are different and thus attack the model, as the two presenters actually did. First of all because, in the final end, there is no real model. Second because the attitude both Bandler and Grinder had toward modeling was of absolute transparency and an exam with no filters at all, sort of a verism followed by the meta-model oriented toward the desired outcome.
In a recent interview, which I translated, John Grinder said children are great nlpers. They observe, model and act according to their desired outcomes. They do it with extreme effectiveness which often turns into excellence, whatever allows the best result with the least effort, the ideal use of the resources, ridiculing all those models of excellence generated by a distorted vision of NLP which makes it look like some extreme form of eugenics.
In the final end, distrust those who tell you what NLP is and learn from those who do it.
