The stock answer would be to what is an NLP Practitioner? is someone trained by a certified and internationally accredited NLP organisation.
This type of training will give a person the title – and the true NLP Practitioners continually dedicate their efforts to developing themselves further. This pursuit will foster them becoming highly resourceful NLP Practitioners, coaches and beings that use NLP techniques to facilitate change in clients AND themselves – both parties equally bringing transformation into each other’s lives.
In short, a NLP Practitioner is a change agent that empowers others’ via fostering deliberate mutual brain entrainment activity that enables them to achieve any desired result.
This is done by using conscious, excellent communication both with themselves and others. Of course, all of this is posited on the NLP Practitioners proficiency in creating rapport, being in their Now State, maintaining their integrity, and always being curious.
We cannot know what we do not know, yet we can be eternally curious about the unknown and open to exploring it.
NLP Practitioners trust that their training, which, for the most part, is trusting their subconscious abilities that they should have been trained in.When you take an accredited NLP Practitioner Training, which fulfills the criteria for a ‘proper’ NLP course, you can gain the title “NLP Practitioner”. Any other title does not count.
It’s a bit like trying to buy freshly squeezed orange juice. Some companies like to trick you by announcing their juice as “natural” or “cold-pressed”. If orange juice has not been extracted in the right way, with no heating, etc. the company can not use the label “freshly squeezed”.
The ‘true’ NLP Practitioner continues to enhance and develop themselves, even after their formal training ends. Like any artist, sportsperson or hobbyist, only through continued engagement and practicing their craft can they begin to bring improvement and progress.
Being a great NLP Practitioner can involve some internal struggle. This is how life supports greater growth and mimics nature in the way we have to come out of the dark into the light.
NLP Practitioners embrace their struggle – or areas of resistance within themselves and acknowledge and then confront resistance areas. This allows the possibility to reframe some debilitating beliefs and limiting decisions, ultimately setting them free of their stories, familiar past and predictable futures and finally freeing them up to fully engage with the abundance of life.
Whilst an NLP Practitioner does this process, with themselves they become proficient at guiding others from the dark into the light,
Anyone who seeks to know what an NLP Practitioner is, can look to what their NLP Practitioner has done for themselves.
It shouldn’t be an academic certification like some would like to reduce NLP to. NLP has always been classed as a science AND an art. The art form is important because it’s the NLP Practitioners personal development which allows them to understand your process of growth and apply NLP in their own unique way for you.
NLP came about through the process of modelling other spectacular performers in the fields of Family Therapy (Virginia Satir), Gestalt Therapy (Fritz Perls), Linguistics (Gregory Bateson – and others) and Hypnotherapy (Milton Erickson).
Those amazing people used intuition, spontaneity and sometimes just flying by the seat of their pants! If that process became purely academic, you would be lost as a person and de-humanised by becoming a label with prescriptive remedies, rather like a lot of the medical fraternity has become.
As humans, what we are is somewhat unknown. When your NLP Practitioner works with you, they are not interested in applying labels to you, they are untying the knots of ‘story’ and programming from countless years (yes even through the DNA or past lives).
This process is exciting and less stable than established processes or counselling or psychology, yet it is designed to work with people who are ready for real change. Therefore, your NLP Practitioner will only be interested in the subconscious processing and conditioning that is already installed.
So, what is an NLP Practitioner? It someone who is committed to transformation in their own lives and understands that only by working in the ‘control panel’ directly (the subconscious mind) can they achieve true change in each other’s worlds.
What is an NLP Practitioner? By Terry Elston
