dimanche 12 décembre 2010

Interesting links and forums...

http://www.nlpconnections.com/nlp-teaching-learning/16290-nlp-learning-languages.html#post110098

http://www.nlpconnections.com/forum/16293-nlp-youtube.html#post110106

http://www.voxopop.com/group/24b84ebc-d47e-42b4-ac99-0beb51fa2b4e

Don't hesitate to leave a message...

mardi 7 décembre 2010

Paul McKenna and his claim to change people's lives

What do you think of this?



Case 1:
Celia graduated as doctor in 1991 and she lives now in South-London. When she was working with sero-positive patients, she was pricked by a used needle. Since that day, she had to live with an unbearable phobia of everything that is sharpened enough to potentially cause injuries. Her career was ruined and for ten years she avoided medical environments.

When McKenna read her case notes, he thought he could help her and was very confident about it. His method consists in desensitizing the triggers of her phobia and also reprogramming her mind for her to feel inconsciously secure and deeply conviced that she is able to protect herself against diseases.

Case 2:
Matthew is a 20 year-old boy who's got almost everything to lead a normal and interesting life. He's passionate about dancing, he's got a black belt in matrial arts and he's a driver for a local cab firm. But something bothers him constantly in his life, even though he's making huge efforts to try to live normally. He has the Tourette syndrome, a nervous disorder that incontrolably manifests itself in tics and unusual vocalisations.

In order to treat this case, Paul McKenna called Matthew to make him feel confortable during his treatment by saying that he had already worked with people with Tourret before him. After that he asked him a couple of questions in order to have more information about him and to choose the right treatment (mmm...very professional!). For him, Matthew has to learn to control his stress and NLP can help him. Finally, Paul managed to help our boy reduce the symptoms of his disease but most important, he learnt to feel better about himself so he was less under stress which helped him move forward in his life.

Case 3:
Lizzie had a boyfriend for 12 years which left her 18 months ago. Now she's completely obsessed about him and hardly sleeps at night. She feels like her mind is giving her the same images and the same emotions again and again, day and night. Trying to get rid of that already cost her a fortune but she didn't get any satisfying results in return.

For Paul, this is not a mental disorder since almost everyone has to go through this at least once in his life. The problem Lizzie encounters is the proportions that the love pain gained in her life. According to him, the solution is to reprogram Lizzie's mind in order to modify the way old images of the past made her feel. She can't forget the past unless she has some serious accident but she, and like everyone, can change the way she feels about things.

Paul McKenna's method
McKenna believes that the mind has a limitless capacity to reprogram itself. Like Grinder and Bandler, he conceives the human mind as a computer with many little programs that are constantly run. One can choose which program to run, which one to shut down and which one to modify. These techniques are very similar to hypnosis.

lundi 6 décembre 2010

NLP and science

NLP is not a science, but a pseudo-science. What is the difference?

A pseudo-science is a claim or practice which sounds like a science (terminology...etc...) but doesn't follow a rigorous scientific methodology. If you look for pseudo-science on wikipedia, you can learn how to identify a pseudo-science:
"use of vague, exaggerated or untestable claims, over-reliance on confirmation rather than refutation, lack of openness to testing by other experts, absence of progress, personalization of issues, use of misleading language, absence of citation databases."

Sharpley's work

A crucial hypothesis of NLP is that everyone has a preferred representational system (PRS). It can be one of the following senses : visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, gustatory (VAKOG). Sharpley, who publishes in the Journal of Counseling Psychology, studied the effectiveness of this hypothesis and according to him, there is little evidence to confirm if. Einspruch and Forman contested Sharpley's work (even though they agreed with his thesis) by pointing out some methodological erros. Later on, Sharpley will respond to that by publishing more precise studies.

However, did you know that NLP is a recognised mode of psychotherapy in the UK? The next post will show you some magic powers of this practice...just keep reading...

mercredi 1 décembre 2010

The story of NLP...

Two names should be remembered : Richard Bandler and John Grinder.


Richard Bandler




When he was a student in mathematics at the university of California, he was passionate about computer science. He transcribed some audio tapes for therapists like Fritz Perls (the founder of Gestalt therapy) and Virginia Satir. While doing that, he realized that by imitiating those people he could get the same results which made him run a Gestalt therapy group on the university campus.

John Grinder



As a professor of linguistics, John Grinder was impressed by Richard Bandler's skills so he told him once : "If you teach me how to do what you do, I'll tell you what you do.". Then he also inquired the same skills as Bandler just by imitating what he was doing, and by eliminating all what was not important in this method according to him, he was able to determine what was really essential in it.

These two men wrote the first book about NLP : The Structure of Magic. Then comes the work of Alfred Korzybski and Noam Chomsky who underlined a major discovery which is very famous in the NLP community : "The map is not the territory". It actually means that we percieve our environment through our five senses which makes us draw an internal map of the world in our brain. This map is different from the reality but who cares? The objective of NLP is to make you draw an efficient map which will make you realize your objectives in life, not a map which will lead to the truth. But who knows if anybody can ever know what the truth is.