NLP: Educating the Skeptics & Cynics

When I first got into this area of NLP, I was a cynic totally and completely. In no way did I believe that a phobia could be cured so quickly, that you could feel really good most of the time or that you could change your beliefs so easily. Ireland, I believe, is quite a cynical nation and many of the people who I have met have been very sceptical about NLP like me when I first began exploring the area.

What I have to say is not to convince the sceptics or cynics out there that NLP has all the answers or indeed that it is the solution to most of your problems. It is only a different way of thinking. It is a way of thinking which challenges the alternatives. There are lots of different ways about looking at the way we think or behave and the way we do things. NLP shows us ways of looking at these things, which are, by their very nature, useful.

The art of using NLP is to begin being more cynical about all that, which made you feel bad and more open to what works for you usefully. We all have choices. If we choose to look at NLP as a cult or as a pop psychology movement filled with hype then we could but we would be missing what it is truly about. We would be missing all the things we could get from it. We would be missing all the tools we could learn which could help us in our lives. We would be missing out on valuable learnings because we prefer to ‘feel right’ than we do to help ourselves.

I still think that there is a need for cynicism and skeptisism but it’s vastly overrated. I am still cynical about certain things but only until I gain and experience in it. When I experience something myself that’s when I will judge if it works or not, if it’s valid or not.

In the world we live in, distinguishing what is real and not, what is true and not, what is right and not, is not an easy task. For every scientist you can give me to prove one side of some argument I can give you another who can prove the exact opposite. We all live in these models of the world and from them we have certain views, certain ways of speaking about things, different feelings about things.

Some of our models hold us back from being effective and some of them allow us to be effective. If we believe we are good learners, that will open up our learning channels and allow us to take in information more easily. If we believe we are bad musically then our belief will hold us back. We will use it as the blueprint for our efforts in music and we will work to fail.. it’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

My training is as a researcher, a scientist, but I’ve always preferred getting my hands dirty and practising in the real world. The fundamental flaw I’ve found in science was not that they didn’t accept things were true until they got proof, it’s the type of proof that they are looking for.

I won’t except anything as true unless I have proof and the proof I’m talking about is an experience. According to the scientific method in all cases proof exists according to certain rules that must be followed for standardisation yet most of the time standardisation simply restricts the ability of the experiment to work properly.