The Art of Being an NLP Practitioner

One of the more daunting aspects for new NLP Practitioner students is the enormous breadth and depth of information to be assimilated. It may or may not be comforting for these people to know that as they progress through the art that this aspect is actually heightened rather than diminished. Especially as it is ever changing and evolving with more emphasis on the subtleties and nuances involved than coarse level distinctions. An NLP Practitioner becomes more flexible with their skills as they develop.

Even the most basic modelling project will soon reveal the fundamental difference between those who hone and refine their skills to an exquisite level of expression against those who leave this information at a first level of learning. It is no great secret that NLP Practitioners who first use their science truthfully for their own development and second maintain ongoing contact with their peers make the greatest progress.

An NLP Practitioner applies the art to themselves

In short it is the NLP Practitioner who has learnt to know him or herself the most, within the broad range of distinctions available, who develops the most flexibility and awareness. These two features form the foundation for release from habitual responses and allow clean calibration of a client at the level of process. The NLP Practitioner who embodies the philosophy and live the principles in their own life first will be the most effective. Imagine going to see an NLP Practitioner professionally who is in the moment depressed, nervous or tired. Clients will be drawn more by the results in your life than the NLP Practitioner certificate on the wall, no matter how well you frame or even reframe it.

So how does a skilled NLP Practitioner conduct him or herself during a consultation? How do you keep track of the myriad number of distinctions available and necessary for ongoing calibration? Are you still in rapport at the conscious and unconscious levels, what are the appropriate strategies (TOTE's) to be installing now, what sensory channels are preferred - how, sequencing of eye patterns, when, where, why and how are you anchoring - covert or overt and is it effective, well formed outcomes in place or not? As the NLP Practitioner do you use a metaphor - what structure are you pacing and/or leading to where, which submodalities and why, are the 3 +1 legs of NLP in place, how is the client sorting time in this context.......to mention a few.

All this reflects the principles of matching the client's model of the world at the level of process. Hence the necessity for extreme flexibility and awareness. Then the NLP Practitioner is able to operate from principles and create your own techniques in the moment as required. Each session with a well trained NLP Practitioner will become a re-creation of the entire art guided by the outcome for the client.

The NLP Practitioner in Consultation

An NLP Practitioner during a consultation, will live with certain questions - stated or unstated, conscious or unconscious. For elegance the first of these is not "What are the appropriate distinctions to be calibrating now?" but rather "What is the state from which I notice the appropriate distinctions?" This essential quality is the key to trusting your unconscious or intuitive insights into your client's situation. A highly trained NLP Practitioner knows themselves well enough that this becomes elementary.

The NLP Practitioner and client within a consultation become a single, living, dynamic entity. To facilitate learning and change the NLP Practitioner works his or her own neurology first and the whole responds. Again, the guiding light is the outcome for the client in the context of their whole life, linked to values, beliefs and their sense of identity - elementary for an NLP Practitioner.

Strategies for an NLP Practitioner

Other guiding questions during a consultation may be in such areas as - second order change v's technique, presuppositions of NLP, constantly reorganizing yourself in response to perceived changes in the client, calibrating appropriate input the client can receive - appropriately future paced and contextualized, developmental requirements or chunking and sequencing of the session or sessions, time frame and so on. There is much more than this available to an NLP Practitioner of course, this is just to give an indication of the processing involved.

Tell tale indicators of a lack of flexibility and awareness of self would be consistently seeing the same patterns in your clients, repetition of the same techniques and procedures within sessions, a narrow range of expression, gestures, tempo, rhythm etc. In particular, one of these indicators would be the NLP Practitioner having a pre-arranged set of procedural techniques to draw from - a classic drawback with many a trained NLP Practitioner. Aim to be beyond patterns and predictability to enter the realm of spontaneity within chaos which science tells is the natural order anyway.

To finish: the way to encapsulate your NLP Practitionerskills within an art form is to treat NLP as a discipline with discipline. A disciple of what: of whatever your definition of NLP is - reflecting and expressing your presence and values and beliefs.

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