A friend contacted me today. She wanted to pick my brains as her company has offered to fund some training for her.  “So what do you recommend?”  she asked, via text.

Of course I picked up the phone immediately to get a better understanding, a clearer brief.  She was in a bit of a quandary because there was no particular or specific training that they had suggested, it was entirely up to her.  “I want a set of qualifications, more letters after my name, just something to give me even more gravitas as a trainer” she said.

After I pointed out that she is already a VERY skilled trainer (seriously – this woman is at the top of her game!) and I asked her if she’d done an NLP Practitioner Training. Turned out she hadn’t!

I was obviously quite shocked at this… “Seriously, Trudy, how could you have got to where you’re at without doing NLP?”… and we had a long discussion NLP and together we searched online for a course that would be close to her (she lives at the other end of the country, and has a young family, so travelling to our NLP training in Devon would make life difficult).

As she asked me various questions, and as I searched for her to find something local, it seemed that there is no obvious or clear routemap on the NLP journey.   In the end I sent her an email to explain the route more.

And here it is…  because if she needs this information, I’ll bet others need it to:

Dear Trudy

Lovely to speak with you today.  What a brilliant opportunity you’ve got here.

Here’s a little info on why I would study NLP as a great way to:

a) resource yourself – for whatever the future holds

b) give yourself more “letters after your name” (use the ANLP membership https://anlp.org/ and also INLPTA – http://www.inlpta.org/index.php/en/ )

c) as a flexible qualification that can be used ON yourself, ON others, and that you can train others to use FOR themselves

d) to upskill yourself on all the trainings you currently deliver – giving another dimension/angle, and further depth

e) to add additional trainings that you can create from NLP – eg: “NLP to understand your customers better”, etc

and finally

f) to use it as a coaching tool, when you are training one-to-one or coaching as a group.

ALL the above will be available to you just from the Practitioner level… the choice to go on and develop further would be yours after that.

The obvious route for this is:

• NLP Diploma (usually part of the Practitioner course)
• NLP Practitioner
• NLP Master Practitioner
• NLP Trainer

My advice to you would be to go for at least a 10-15-day Practitioner Training.  Then leave it at least a year before you even consider the Master Practitioner.

You could also do an NLP Trainer, if you want to specifically train NLP Practitioners, but believe me, putting together a practitioner programme is very hard work and time-consuming. You probably don’t need that unless you want to set up on your own.   And also the Master-Prac.  You don’t really need that one to use NLP at a highly skilled level.  Right now – the NLP Practitioner will give you all you want.

NLP is a big investment – don’t go for a weedy little job.

This is a BIG and transformative investment of both time and money, so make the most of it and don’t go for a weedy little job.  Forget the online courses and the 2-day so-called practitioner courses.  You want some real depth here.

You’ve already seen what’s on a typical  NLP practitioner training, from my website,  however we run these in Devon, so I know that’s just too far for you. However not all courses are created equal (and of course we are the best!) so if you can find one that’s closer to you then I’d be happy to look it  over and see if it looks like it has everything you need. Obviously I can’t vouch for anyone else’s training, but I can at least see if it looks OK on paper.

And remember the Matrix

I think that’s all you need to know.  Ooh – except for this.  Have you ever seen the Matrix?  The one where you can choose to unplug yourself from the Matrix and see everything….?   Well that’s what NLP is like.  Don’t expect to come out of this unchanged.  It’s confidence-building and great for understanding others’ motivations, coaching yourself and others, communicating better (both internally and externally) and packed full of tools.  OMG you’re going to LOVE it!

With Love

Sue x