You have decided to study NLP. Congratulations! We wish you well in your studies.

Before enrolling in a course you need to be aware of the following:

• Not all NLP Practitioner courses are the same.
• The word, NLP cannot be licensed and therefore is not legally protected, just as the word "Math" is not. There are people who claim to know NLP and are not qualified to practice or teach NLP.
• Becoming a Practitioner of NLP is not enough to become a good therapist
• NLP is a methodology that is extremely effective in therapeutic environments. If applied as intended, it is a tool that can seem almost magical. In order to be proficient in these methodologies, you must practice them on a daily basis and become generative with them. A good NLP practitioner training will give you a solid foundation to become proficient in these methods.Unfortunately some trainers have chosen to lower the standards of NLP training which makes it difficult for NLP to be taken seriously.

Suggested questions for the trainer

People choose to study NLP for many reasons. Some people want to be therapists, others want to use it in their business and sales, in teaching and some want to apply it for personal development. Because we at Alberta Live with Power NLP Seminars are passionate about providing you with the best possible NLP training we suggest the following guidelines when you are deciding who to take the training from:

• Does your NLP trainer have a recognized NLP Trainers Certification? Are they licensed as a trainer? Who trained them?
• How long has the trainer been training in NLP? Specifically, how long have they trained NLP Certification courses?
• How much experience does the trainer have, not just as a trainer but also as a clinical Practitioner of NLP? Did you know that some NLP trainers have never seen a client-yet they claim to be able to teach others to do so?
• How large are the training groups they train? If you are training with them to learn NLP to apply it professionally, you may wish to ask the trainer or school how they can support you to do this. This may not always be possible in a large training group where individual needs are not catered to.
• Can you speak to the main trainer directly before starting the training?
• Can you talk with one of their past students to get a training testimonial?
• How long are the courses? Live with Power NLP Seminars recommends that NLP Practitioner training be a minimum of 8 days in duration and Master Practitioner training be a minimum of 8 days.
• What are company policies on course payments, refunds etc.
• Are you allowed to ask questions during your training?
• What specific methodology is being used when training? What are the criteria to certify students at the Practitioner and Master Practitioner levels?
• What exactly do you receive as a result of your training? Make sure that any offers are made in writing and that you keep a copy of documents.
• Is the trainer qualified to issue you with a certificate in hypnotherapy? We add this point because many NLP trainers provide certifications in hypnotherapy when they are not trained to do so. You cannot teach someone to be a hypnotherapist in one day (which is what is claimed in some cases). Graduates are disappointed when they find that their certificate means nothing and they have to pay more money to get a recognised diploma or certificate.
• Will you receive support once the training is over? Is there someone you can direct questions to? What after course support is available?
• If the trainer utilises NLP assistants in the training course then how are they chosen? Do they know what they are doing or are they just tagging along for free training themselves?
• What are the complaints procedures - who can you complain to if you are not happy with the training?

I have been depressed for over 10 years. I find myself procrastination, unable to move. How do I get unstuck?

To answer your question, I would have to ask you more questions. How do you know you are depressed when you say you are? How do you know when to get depressed? How do you know when to stop? When was the fist time you recognized that feeling of depression? When was the last time you felt free of that depressed feeling?
If you were feeling consistently depressed over all these years, Congratulations. You mastered the state of depression.
You know what it feels like, when to get it and how to maintain it. The degree of consistency you had been demonstrating is commendable. Imagine if you could be that consistent in things you would rather be consistent in doing? You already know how to be motivated. You succeeded in motivating yourself to remain depressed, even if you do not recognize it yet.
Now, why do you want to get un-depressed? What is it you are not doing or have not been doing as a result of having had that depression?
Are you sure you want to be free of it? How sure are you? Are you sure to be sure? If you are sure, just close your eyes for a moment and imagine yourself free of that depression thing. What is it like? Where is that feeling you forgot how to have gone now? What do you see? Hear? Any voices, of people you know, may meet? What are you doing? How does it feel to be free of that old feeling that lingered inside you for to long. Kind of like a rotten sandwich that remained undigested you know that feeling.
Imagine yourself free of it. Free in the light, doing that which you like. Double it now. Would it not be great to be consistent in that good feeling? Being consistent is something you already know how to do. It's a piece of cake. After all you had been doing it for a long, long time. Make it even more consistent until it gets into your cells. As you do, imagine a stream of light just shining through your experience, erasing all that which does not fit in this good feeling of certainty that feeling good is great now.
Now imagine yourself doing that which you were not as a result of having had that old feeling. How easy it is. As you are doing it, just infuse it with consistency, that certain feeling of certainty that this which you are doing is already a fact. When you learned how to walk, you just did it, didn't you?
This is a good start for you.

A shortcut to all this is as follows: all human experience has structure. The structure is logical even if based on initially illogical foundations of illogical beliefs. To change it and to change the resultant behaviors and decisions that lead to them, we need to understand the model we had created for our initial experience, and then delineate the illogicalities in it, replacing them with logical structures. Other techniques come as a supplement to it all and work only if applied within a well defined logical system.
I the absence of that we may be the students of "NLP" and never come close to comprehending what it is and how it works.
In essence it is beautiful, elegant and quick. It is easy to learn and to apply. So, you are not alone in your search for "truth". Perhaps you didn't look in the right place or did not ask the right question.
There is light at the end of the tunnel. Just close your eyes and feel it.

I am a beginning practitioner. How do I approach my work with clients? Where do I start? What tools do I use?

Before you decide what tools to use, you must understand how the client creates his or her experience. You must be sure that the problem you are presented with is THE problem. To do that, ask questions.
How do you know you have that problem?
How do you know when to have that problem?
Imagine yourself without this problem. What is your life like now? Describe? How do you know you are free of that problem?
If you could have that problem in ways that it would not be a problem, how would you do it?
Ask questions to an extent you have enough information about how the problem is a problem and how it is a problem and how does a person keep on having that problem. If a person has been having a problem for a long time, obviously there are some payoffs for having it. What is the secondary gain here? Once you are sure how the problem fits within the model of the world of your client, you can decide upon a technique or techniques to apply to either reframe the problem, change the structure of it, thus making it into something else, induce amnesia for it, or any other tools you have available to you.
Remember that tools are applicable only within the framework of the philosophy. The philosophy is really very simple. The main idea is that all human emotion and behavior has structure. No emotion occurs randomly. It happens very fast and is based upon a very logical structure.
In order to feel depressed, for example, a person must decide when to be depressed, recognize the context in which to feel depressed and also know when not to be depressed.
These decisions and structures happen on the basis of the meaning one had applied to a particular configuration of factors. Even though the symptoms of, for example, depression may be the same across many people, the underlying structure for its creation may be totally different.
How people create meaning? It is a learned behavior. For example, if a child had not received attention when it was a baby, it learned that having a voice does not lead to safety. If a baby was abused when crying, it had learned to associate expressing itself to pain. As a result that child may have been growing up timid, unable to express emotion and even fearful of close relationships. As it grew, it became conditioned in these patterns, especially because all the decisions it had been making were based upon a belief that "having a voice" was dangerous. The type of intimate relationships such a person would have developed would probably be based on control and maybe aggression.
A person may be 40 years old and come with depression related to loneliness. To help that person we need to delineate the structure of beliefs this person had been building depression upon. It is only then we can achieve a lasting change by shifting the logical structures underlying the emotion and leading to a behavioral outcome- sabotaging interpersonal relationships, for example.
Techniques we use are powerful as they are indirect. If told what to do, humans may agree and remain not able or willing to change. Knowing of having a problem and even its origins is not enough to lead to change. Something needs to occur at the "other than conscious level" for humans to spontaneously change. Change happens fast.
The art in all this is the ability for the practitioner to be generative and able to go through the implication structures underlying human emotion.
Many skills are needed to do that; observational skills (what signals are they giving unconsciously), listening skills (the Meta Model which is a transformational linguistic tool), language patterns applications to create a lasting change, and the ability to verify the outcome had been achieved.
In order to do it well, you must carry few hats simultaneously. You must be cognizant of the context and its objectives, be able to step into the model of the world of your client and from his/her perspective evaluate what and why they want to change, verify the outcomes from their perspective, simultaneously being aware of you achieving our therapeutic objectives.
Techniques are useless unless applied correctly and logically. Sometimes people think they have a problem but it is not the problem. Our job is to find the problem and help people get unstuck.
There is a very specific structure to what we do and it will work for you if you apply it logically.
Last week I helped a lady get rid of multiple allergies. I verified it by having the woman eat what she used to be allergic to and drink what she could not before. The structure to her allergy was a phobic response that occurred years ago. Her body reacted and developed chemicals in response to an emotional reaction. We had to eradicate the phobic unconscious response, and her physiology changed. Each case is different of course. Not all allergies would be treated the same way.
So yes, it is exciting and very rewarding. I love it and learn every day. It is like being an adventure traveler where each human is a mystery, a puzzle to be solved. The change we see is amazing and this is where the reward is. Good luck.