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NLP Masters & Apprentices
Elroy Carter, esteemed moderator of the famous Mindlist said: "It just seems to me that NLP has grown so much that there is no real one definition of 'NLP practitioner', because there are just so many different trainer that teach practitioner courses, and they have their own ideas about what a practitioner is. In fact, I'm really curious as to what the higher level outcomes are for most practitioner courses out there."
This is both an interesting and an important question. I have taken a number of practitioner trainings and it is true that I have sometimes felt the trainers had no idea at all of the grander scheme of things.
I would put forth the general proposition that in all training (from PhD programmes to watch making, cookery and NLP) we have a basic progression from sweeping the floor to creating your very own idiosyncratic book of shadows.
Stage 1 has been omitted in many places, that's where you sweep the floor and generally speaking make yourself useful and start to acclimatise to the tools of the trade, the terminology and the ways of your elders and betters.
Stage 2 is the most basic, simplest little kiddie things that get you used to actually taking a tool and making a few practice pieces - yeah, they're gonna be wonky and won't hold together but that's not important because you're learning new skills as you do that. They won't give you the decent tools at that point because you'd probably break them anyway nor the real materials to work with. But even though you're still sweeping the floors most of the time, you are learning all the while, albeit with much frustration at your own inabilities at this point.
Stage 3 is when your master is starting to actually take you a bit seriously and considers you worth further effort. At this point, you become an apprentice and you get to use real tools for real. You may even be allowed to contribute to a real piece of work in a safe way. As time goes on, and your skill grows, you reach a point where you have learned what you can from your master and then you move on to become:
Stage 4, the journeyman. That's when you go out and stay for a time with as many other masters as you can to really deepen and broaden your understanding of the field. And then finally comes the time when you are ready to do your own original - ORIGINAL! - work at which point you become ...
Stage 5, a master.
That's the theory and a good process it is, too. Of course, it has broken down somewhen in the tenth century already when ruthless masters took on unsuitable apprentices just because daddy had a lot of money, and even more ruthless masters withheld vital information from apprentices and journeymen because they were afraid that they might lose their power in the process and the whole thing has deteriorated to the sham that PhD programmes represent these days (ah I look forward to the squawking that must ensue).
I'm not sure that at the time the current NLP training contents were cemented in, *anyone* had the foggiest idea what an NLP master would actually be like, could achieve, knew, could accomplish, could create. We still don't because the whole thing really starts taking off when you have more than one master (with all due respect to Mr. Bandler, indeed) and the journeymen provide the method of information exchange in the system as well as bringing in their own absolutely unique ways of doing things.
As no-one knows what the "adult" version of an NLPer might structurally be like (for one or two examples are NOT enough to really determine a structure with any degree of accuracy) of course you can't track back down from the outcome to how that might be achieved, and the result, predictably, is the mess we are in today.
It is my opinion (she said and started to duck as the stones began to fly) that most trainers of NLP are nowhere near the master stage themselves yet. As evidence I would cite the absence of radical and new material that has become apparent in the field over the last few years. Putting a widget on an existing slonk does NOT constitute a masterpiece and neither does picking up discarded bits from the master's floor and passing them off as your own with a bit of polishing, that's apprentice level stuff.
So we have apprentices training apprentices who never went through the floor sweeping stage to the most part and believing themselves to be masters.
Who's to blame?
People who cemented in training and certification programmes long before anyone knew what was going on and thus practically stifled further development in the field;
People whose overriding interest is to make money and who will certify just any idiot and thus make ever more idiots training other incompetents in return;
The general absence of free flow of advanced information as everyone who has the slightest talent for innovation sits on their ideas like a dragon guarding a bag of gold for fear that someone will run off with it and they will starve forthwith.
The general nastiness, distrust, unpleasantness, one-upmanship and small chunk infighting in the field.
What can be done?
Now that's a good question. Personally, I'd start a revolution and cut everyone's head off who cannot give a decent explanation of what The Map Is Never The Territory actually means and who calls themselves a Master Practitioner. Those who certified them would have to meet Lord Lucian for an extended period of time first so that they may repent before their death.
As this isn't entirely practical as of yet, I would put out a call to the Journeymen - and you know who you are! - to know that the future lies with you and your contributions to come. With your decisions as whom and how you will train when it is your turn and to wait until you are sure that you are indeed a master before having the nerve to start teaching others. To know that there is so much more out there than what is currently being presented that it takes your breath away if you allow yourself to consider it just for a moment. To foster a new and different form of co-operation with your peer groups and to really, really start developing a new mindset rather than the rampant intellectual poverty consciousness that is the bane of the field - this and any other where folk fight for scraps of status like starving dogs over a miserable piece of cracked bone.
In the meantime, I am personally always, always, 24 hours each and every day, asleep or adream, awake or abusy, at the big drawing board, doing the utmost I have to give to adjust my maps and to try and really *live* the promise and presuppositions of NLP.
Silvia Hartmann 2001
"Vires Per Virtutem"
Also see: The Masterpiece - An NLP Metaphor Teaching Story
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