AHT Blog - Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Reflections at the end of the first session of the NLP Practitioner Certification Training

By Berry Moore

Eyes have always been a big thing in my family. My mom says eyes reflect the soul, and that’s what makes some eyes more attractive than others. Now it seems there are a whole lot more reasons for watching eyes … consider the scene: I asked my best friend if he could remember the curtains in his childhood bedroom. Ping! His eyeballs shot to the top right corner, and before he could say anything I clapped my hands in delight and exclaimed “Oh wow, you did it!” My friend was confused. “Did what ?” he asked. “Went into visual recall. Don’t worry, it’s a thing people do, quite normal,” I reassured him airily, but he didn’t look enlightened so I just smiled and went back to my books.

It’s been fun, since that first weekend, watching people’s eye patterns, watching their reactions as I “mirror” their body language. Or not. Suddenly, instead of watching myself to make sure I’m saying what I mean, I find myself watching the person I’m communicating with to check what they are hearing. I’m playing a new game, called: “What I said may - or may not - have been what you heard”. And the world, it seems, is playing it with me.

NLP is not like an ice-cream, delightful but enjoyed only by the consumer. It’s more like a ripple of laughter, expanding outwards and creating more ripples and causing people to smile without knowing why - and who knows where that might end ? Once I saw a poster of a large gorilla lazing in a grassy glade, scratching his head. The caption was: “Just when I learnt all of life’s answer’s, they changed all the questions!” The first weekend of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming course is a bit like that. I always thought the question was “Why ?” For example, “Why don’t I have what I want ?”, “Why am I here ?” Now, it seems, halfway through my life, the real question is “How ?” as in, “How do I get what I want ?”, “How did I get where I am ?” … “or not”. Somehow - there’s that word again - changing the focus seems to bring the intangible closer, like grabbing clouds and finding … cottonwool.

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