Anyone here use NLP.  Or find it affective?

  I have several years of experience with it and equivalent technologies, and have been quite deeply involved in private communities dedicated to its use.

 There are some techniques that I've found valuable, and some which I haven't; I've observed some developmental effects upon practitioners and also some inhibitive effects; there are some aspects of the ethos associated with it that I agree with and some which I find to be utterly devoid of merit.

 Essentially, though, there's one thing that's important to bear in mind: NLP is not a coherent and self-contained system. 'It' is an association of tools and perspectives which do not share a unified conceptual basis and which are not subject to any rigorous testing methodology. As such, I'd advise against trying to ''learn NLP'' or learn primarily ''from'' NLP trainers; doing so would be no better than elevating another's personalities and preferences above your own and holding it as some ideal to be striven towards. A far more productive route, in my experience, is setting out on a personal journey to learn about the areas that "NLP" deals with (communication, practical psychology, self-development) and giving consideration to some of its technologies as one part of your own, larger journey. "NLP" materials (I'm using scare-quotes because I don't see "NLP" as a unified whole, as explained above) are more efficaciously used as sources of ideas to be independently verified and modified by your own experience than as ''teaching material'' to ''learn from''.

 Having said that, the concepts which tend to be thrown around by NLP trainers-- and those presented in the source materials, such as Bandler and Grinder's books-- are hopelessly outdated and have largely been superseded by developments in the fields of semantics, psychology, etc. Once again: personall investigation of those areas, including their most modern developments, in combination with consideration of how to apply their findings will usually be more beneficial than recourse to NLP. In addition to being based upon the most up to date and accurate research (most of NLP was dropped by trained psychologists back in the 70s, because it did not stand up to testing and because its practitioners' dogmatic attitudes made its integration into a progress-driven scientific discipline impossible), using this independent style of learning will actually develop your own skillsets in a way that seminar-learning tends not to.

 Additionally, if a person were to ask me about change-work in general, and ask for direction, NLP is emphatically not the direction I'd point them in.

 That's for a number of reasons:

1. There is a hubris to NLP. By which I mean: there is a wish to impose a kind of static, limited psudorational framework upon the incredibly complex and pre-rational systems which make up our brain and body. In that sense, I see NLP as a kind of psychological outgrowth of the attitudes that have led to the carnage we've wreaked upon nature over the past few decades. Instead of achieving an empathy with the natural rhythms of nature (and I include our own 'mind'/brain within the category 'nature') and learning to skilfully and wilfully work with those rhythms as a seagull skilfully and wilfully works with the currents of wind which are beyond its limited control to fly gracefully through an environment which it does not rule over, NLP practitioners tend to ineffectively attempt to subject internal (i.e. 'mental') processes to their own limited understanding without sensitively approaching an understanding of those processes as they are in themselves. It's like the old British empire's colonialism, in that sense: desperately needing to impose its own rigid order on environments foreign to it.

 NLP practitioners would deny that, and it isn't explicitly indicated by some of their written materials, but that's what I've observed over years of seeing people use NLP to try and improve themselves and their lives. And surely a good way to judge a changework technology is by the effect it has upon those who use it, regardless of whether those changes are predicted by its source materials?

2. NLP was initially an attempt to model the behavioural patterns of a few highly effective communicators. In that respect, going by the effect I've seen it have on its students, it failed. As you know, I'm also deeply involved with esotericism (practical spirituality, like Zen Buddhism or Taoism), and one of the principles that I've found to be effective through my work in that area is: physis. Physis, as the term was used by the Greek playwright Homer, is growth in accordance with one's own nature.   For similar reasons to those discussed in the first bullet point, NLP does not facilitate this. It attempts to reform individual practitioners' nature (how they function) towards that of those who it models. Quite simply, this is doomed to failure because people come to the table with different experiences and characteristics; more dangerously, it can distort and undermine the subtle internal attributes which are unique to any individual, and prevent their unique development towards personal, individual talent. The attempt that NLP originally stemmed from-- by Bandler and Grinder, to recreate another person's individual talent-- assumed that humans work in a way which they really don't. We cannot be each other, and our skillsets cannot be identical in function with each others-- we have massive potential for individual development, but modelling and recreating another person's actualised potential is not the way to realise our own.

 Remember my personality change experiments? I think they were flawed for a similar reason: I didn't care what havoc I wreaked upon my own, subtle internal character in my attempt to (pyschologically) violently attempt to force myself to be something I am not. I was involved in NLP for a long time before starting those, and I think that my experiments were, essentially, a taking of the perspectives associated with NLP to their absolute limit.

 You're aware of the instability that's a part of my character now. It's as pronounced as it is because of the extreme exertion of energy that went into my personality-change experimentation. It's a result of imposing foreign, invasive, and rigid rhythms upon the subtle and incredibly complex psychological and physiological rhythms that made up my internal landscape. The association of techniques and perspectives that is NLP, although usually to a lesser extent, tend to have a similar effect: it damages what is already there and prevents it from growing naturally. Some skills are likely to be gained, but the systemic (i.e. whole-person) price paid is greater than that most people would knowingly, willingly pay to acquire those skills.

 What I've found much more effective, and what an individual quest for self-development not limited to the context of NLP would be more suited to, is placing oneself in circumstances where one's own potential is forced to develop. That is: challenging circumstances where and end must be achieved and one must stretch oneself to achieve it, but where the way that that end is achieved is undefined and up to the individual to determine. That's a way of working that entirely absent from NLP: NLP attempts to manipulate how people work-- to determine how they do things-- without really providing a context within which that growth can be measured. I.e. A specific goal-focused context which allows many routes for to the achievement of the external goal, and thus allows individuals to develop their own unique methods.

3. I have never seen an NLP trainer match the results, in terms of immediate and significant self-development, that are regularly achieved by practitioners of the Feldenkrais method. Personality is embodied: how we move and operate within the world is determined by the physical options we have available to us. Feldenkrais, in an empathetic and natural way, quickly and effectively gives more options to the people who use it. I recommend these courses:

http://www.achievingexcellence.com/p-que10.html

http://www.russelldelman.com/order.html (only the first, not the second).

And Feldenkrais' own work.

 4. I've never seen an NLP master practitioner a good at what they claim to be masters of as the 18 year old girls who I am friends with. Find your own masters. Learn your own ways. Understand because you are driven to understand, not because somebody is claiming that you can buy understanding by attending their workshops and seminars.

 Hope that helps. Happy to answer any questions, either about this post or NLP and changework in general.

 Silvertongue.

I was never particularly interested in affecting other people. I've used NLP for some personality modifications and just for general tests. My experiments made my mind more malleable, so I can control my mind better and feel what I choose to feel. I also have greater control over my body's internal processes than I might have otherwise.

Personally I think its always good to have more tools to solve problems with and NLP contains interesting ideas that I believe do have merit. Still, it is something of an art form, so perhaps the knowledge has to be combined with your own growth in order to be of value. I've found not just with NLP but other things as well... People rarely explain processes in sufficient detail and with the correct emphasis so that you can recreate their approaches to the point of being equally effective, just by following the rules they tell you. You take in people's ideas, and you learn and apply until you have a system that works for you. I think NLP is a decent source of ideas and philosophy. Beyond that, practice and focus on results instead of theory. The Map is not the Territory... The Map has value only in terms of how well it explains the territory.

@Silvertongue: What experiments did you do with your own personality? What were you trying to achieve? What results would you be willing to share?

I agree that direct strong changes can be inconvenient, and its unlikely that you can define simple but awesome rules that will greatly improve your life handling a huge number of circumstances effectively - but there is no inherent truth to our personalities and the rules embedded in them - nothing I would think that is really right for us. We evolve a lot from the time we're born. Some ideas become strongly embedded and form part of the basis from which we build our understanding of things. Those ideas aren't necessarily right... our personalities are systems that we learned to get us through our lives. Other systems might have worked as well... born of other choices and other experiences.

I agree with the point of self-awareness though. I think it is best to understand what's going on within and then try to change it, rather than just directly try to change it since that way you create a conflict within yourself which your brain might not resolve very well.

Anyone here use NLP.  Or find it affective?

The MBTI in contrast is pseudo with different hazards. By force-fitting over 6,000,000,000 people into 16 tiny categories, as if we all are manifestations of mystical, Platonic molds, it has some tendency of creating a preconceptual fog, e.g. I am of type X, therefore I must act like this, or he is of type X, therefore he will act like this. I've never really cared about the abstractions; at best, we're dealing with a very general system of description, and nothing more. Taking NLP seriously is much worse, since it entails testable predictions that ought to be empirically quantified. Here, we have moved from the realm of possible crackpots to certain dupes.

That's one of the things I was getting at:

the core ideas and concepts have basically be superseded. It wasn't absurd to base a methodology upon them at one point in time, but it is now. If aspects of "NLP" do work, it's for very different reasons than NLP practitioners think. That applies to JHBowden's post (NLP isn't about 'positive thinking', by the way) and points 1, 2, and 3 of Zsych's last post.

An aside:  a person who underwent tremendous personal suffering with their eyes open would, to my eyes, be more likely to become a better human being than a person who attended weeks of NLP training.
A second aside: I only disagree with JHBowden on one point. The name. The term "Neuro-Linguistic" originated with Alfred Korzybski's "Science and Sanity: a Non-Aristotelian Introduction to General Semantics", which was very influential upon 20th century physicists and is a book worth reading closely. The term "programming" may seem pretentious today, but it was in line with the types of ideas people were having about the function of the brain back then. They thought it was a computer, so "programming" was the obvious next step. That people use that name earnestly today is less justifiable.

The brain is a computer - and it suffers from somewhere between bad design and bad programming

So how would you summarize your approach towards understanding the human mind?

And I wonder if different approaches wouldn't work to different degrees across the Myer Briggs personality types.

btw, I remember reading your post on personality destruction. I even told a friend of mine that someone was doing something this unusual. I've done similar experiments, but you seem to want to just break your personality. In all honesty, I think the idea is worth testing in the area of self-knowledge, but overall, it seems risky. Typically, I would prefer that you analyze and determine some type of objective - some superior state that you are trying to achieve and work towards that.

Agreed :-).

In fact, that's what I've been investigating lately. I've been studying (out of interest-- not in any formal setting) the effect that things like Facebook are having upon human systems, and how this involves a fundamental and unprecedented alteration of the structure of our experience. I think that the subtlety and flexibility of the open-system that constitutes a human being in combination with the introduction of such essential yet foreign elements will likely have results (even if unseen, or not recognised by those in whom such results are embodied) unlike anything conceivable in terms of what has gone before.

But, then again, I also see that vulnerability as a potential opportunity. Political revolutionaries have it all wrong; that's not the way to find vulnerabilities nowadays. The way is the ambiguous and emergent, and the overall systemic effects that manipulation of these pivotal subsystems can potentially have. Whether anybody yet has understanding enough to hack things like that without causing unforeseen kinds of suffering divorced from their intentions is another question altogether; but what is certain is that some people will try.

Strangely, it's all making me more conservative than I'd ever have thought I could become.