I couldn’t stop laughing today reading about a bunch of people in NLP all discussing their imagined refusal or acceptance of “status certifications” I have decided to refer to certifications now in this way as they have absolutely no connection with the attainment of any skills and are mostly given out like the “special badges” you might get at school. It’s all pretty harmless except when such nonsense is used to then try and drive others to spend thousands of pounds on events so they too can obtain their own “status certificates”
At the recent Mindscapes event in New York Andrew T Austin gave a really insightful presentation on “imagined status” and hierarchy in the health sector. In many instances this hierarchy creates more problems than it solves and in my view in the world of NLP the same behaviours exist. People talk about “being granted” certifications like in some medieval feudal system, not realizing that all they are doing is unintentionally promoting the imagined status of the person “granting” the certification! NLP has so lost its way that now virtually everyone is a “master” or “genius” and quite frankly it’s embarrassing for those who advocate a professional standard of training and proper duty of care in teaching.
I suspect that this increasing desperation to position NLP in an academic, educational and medical context (again without any proper process and duty of care) will actually contribute to its downfall. The marketing hype in NLP has gone into overdrive with the endless “life changing promises!” The warning signs of a decline in NLP are already there with greatly declining interest in events, some longstanding NLP companies announcing the end of running NLP certificated events and one major NLP Training company currently in a voluntary arrangement with the VAT man owing a huge amount of money…
Often NLPers take themselves way too seriously proudly proclaiming their “qualifications” (aka imagined status certifications) totally unaware that they have absolutely no value outside those who issued it. Worse still more and more people are proclaimed as “One of the few etc” people highly skilled in NLP, it becomes quite ludicrous as there must now be thousands of the “few” in this category. Some trainers will even ask you to e-mail whatever testimonial you want and they will sign it off as coming from themselves in person!
There was a time when I was really quite pleased to describe myself as having taught NLP. These days I’d keep my period of training in NLP pretty quiet in the same way I would if I had been working at management level for Lloyds Bank or The Royal Bank of Scotland!
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