Is It Possible to Create Something More Effective Than NLP? Part 1

By Dr. Ethan CaldwellNLP Training

Is It Possible to Create Something More Effective Than NLP? Part 1

I have been practicing Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) for 25 years! I chose this provocative title on purpose, to reflect together with NLP specialists on the most important qualities of our approach. There’s no need for me to declare my love for it—my commitment is obvious and proven by time! I teach it with great enthusiasm and inspiration in “NLP Master,” “NLP Trainer” courses, and at numerous author seminars based on NLP, and I plan to continue doing so in the future!

By the way, before discovering NLP, I was deeply involved in game technique, participated in various personal growth trainings (attended the first wave of “Lifespring,” seminars on conflictology, video trainings). I was also interested in various schools of practical psychology: body-oriented therapy, transactional analysis, psychodrama, art therapy, Gestalt, Ericksonian hypnosis, and so on. It would be easier to list what I wasn’t interested in during the early 1990s in this field!

So, my choice was conscious, and it was love at first sight!

Even before encountering NLP, I was convinced that there are “secret knowledges” that help achieve effectiveness much faster than all known methods and training programs.

After 12 years in a theater studio, I realized that this art form had developed powerful psychotechnologies for working on roles, allowing you to change yourself! That’s essentially what the entire system of the Russian genius K.S. Stanislavsky is about. I was introduced to “Strategies of Geniuses” even before NLP. My first trainings were in second grade, using S.V. Gippius’s “Gymnastics of Feelings.” I was very lucky to have an extraordinarily talented director, M.B. Moskalenko! She introduced us to theater and opened the door to a wonderful world, more magical and at the same time more realistic than the one behind Papa Carlo’s closet door! The “golden key” I found in childhood was very tangible in all sensory criteria and five modalities—in fact, it was a whole set of keys for self-development!

In seventh grade, the rockets I built from metal pill cans filled with a mix of saltpeter, sugar, magnesium, and aluminum powder flew higher than the 16th floor, mesmerizing all the boys in the yard. These childhood experiments, based on knowledge I somehow acquired (no one taught me), and my participation in the school chemistry club from fifth grade (where we grew copper sulfate and red blood salt crystals), led me to chemistry. Since childhood, I was interested in special “recipes for flying to space” and the beautiful structures of “grown crystals!” My chemistry education played a special role in my life. It taught me meta-thinking: without understanding the structure (elements and their connections), it’s impossible to predict the properties of a system and its changes. The story of another Russian genius, D.I. Mendeleev, and his discovery of the periodic law (the table he saw in a dream) especially fascinated me! Few know that Dmitri Ivanovich discovered the fundamental law “methodically,” by reading specialized literature and systematizing information. Even then, I was always asking, “HOW?”

That’s why NLP immediately captivated me and has held my interest for so many years. What could be more interesting than meta-knowledge: how do we know what we know?

Looking back at the stages of my journey and far into the future, I want to understand a lot! To move forward more confidently, it’s useful to reflect more specifically and deeply on why we love NLP so much and what its weaker sides are.

Strengths of NLP’s Uniqueness

  • Epistemological quality (the question “HOW?” comes before “WHY?”, “BECAUSE OF WHAT?”, etc.).
  • Humanism and focus on development (an initial belief in human resources, modeling “human excellence”).
  • Transdisciplinarity (a unique combination of knowledge from different fields).
  • Practicality (all methods are born from successful human experience or have been tested in practice; the approach is result-oriented).
  • Technological approach (most tools are developed at the level of specific algorithms—techniques).
  • Speed of results (compared to many other schools of practical psychology, results can be achieved relatively quickly).
  • Wide range of symptoms addressed (from phobic reactions to improving professional performance).
  • Self-development of the method through modeling (best practices can be refined into models transferable to others, expanding the approach with practical findings).
  • Speed of specialist training (in the classic version, a few years, about 300–400 hours).
  • Originality (many practices/strategies were identified in talented/genius individuals).
  • Universality and broad applicability (can be used anywhere there is human activity).
  • And so on.

Weaknesses of NLP

  • Negative image due to the word “programming” in the name (the approach is mistakenly seen as a set of techniques for negative manipulation or even mind control).
  • Complex language (topics like the meta-model, anchoring, presuppositions, meta-programs are difficult for most people, including academic psychologists).
  • Weak connection with scientific psychology (the method lacks links to other psychological concepts, and there has been little scientific validation of its hypotheses and practices).
  • Lack of an objective history of the approach’s creation (it’s unclear how knowledge from other fields was used and how various components were discovered).
  • Eclecticism (most specialists must independently determine how different topics/techniques are connected).
  • No assessment of completeness, consistency, or logical structure of the main components (the founders never aimed to build a scientific knowledge base, focusing instead on “usefulness”; this is poorly addressed by educational organizations).
  • Emphasis on psychotherapy at the basic training level (some people lose motivation when learning therapeutic techniques they don’t find relevant or don’t plan to become therapists).
  • Unrealistic expectations from the “hyped” power of the method (basic training is built around the techniques, not the real needs of trainees; people are not taught to apply everything together on themselves or clients; individual consulting as a system appeared only recently in NLPt, which most NLP specialists still don’t master).
  • Limited work with high-level symptoms (there is little work with personal attitudes, self-concept, life meaning, life strategies, etc.).
  • Focus on local symptoms/requests, not the whole person (NLP specialists don’t address the organization of the whole personality and life).
  • Lack of a professional organization authoritative for the whole community (most well-known professionals are focused on certain leaders and lack motivation for organizing for the common good).
  • Blurring of method boundaries (weakly defined boundaries and poor specialist training, as there are no universally shared training standards or mechanisms for updating them).

Of course, all of the above is painted with broad strokes. If we go into detail, the lists of strengths and weaknesses could be much longer. Over the years, I have encountered various weaknesses of NLP, noticing them more and more clearly and thinking about how to improve the existing method. This was especially acute when developing educational programs in NLP.

Our “NLP Center in Education” is well known for its systematic, methodical, structured, and in-depth training. All these qualities had to be developed to fill in the gaps.

The guiding principle of this work was: NLP is a relatively young and developing field, still gaining internal coherence and overcoming certain eclecticism. This allowed us to take the position of researcher and developer. This led to many additions to the “NLP Practitioner” course (for example, descriptions of the mechanisms of most techniques and various comments on their use). Then, original topics, models, and techniques were created: “Four-Position Description,” “Rich Context,” “Systemic Reframing,” “Conflictogen Map,” “Three Types of Resources,” “Changing Meta-Programs,” “Belief Cascade Transformation,” and so on.

Passion for research in effective strategies made it possible to develop a whole series of original technologies in education and business. Studying general cognitive strategies led to the development of unique educational concepts and technologies that increase learnability, and studying special cognitive strategies led to technologies that form professional thinking (mathematics, chemistry, physics, linguistics, etc.).

Studying effective strategies of managers (middle and top levels), marketers, salespeople, etc., allowed us to create the original technology “Developing a Portfolio for Managing Professional Competence.” It is aimed at managing and developing the key success factor in business, helping to align KPI results and KPI processes. Together, they allow you to align a specialist’s competence with existing business processes in the company. Such technologies are almost impossible to find in modern management. Overall, business developments led to an even higher (meta) level in organizational development and management—our original technologies “Knowledge Retention in the Company” and “Implementing Five Types of Management in Business Practice.” In this work, we found a significant number of specific methods, generalized to the level of trainings and coaching.

As for NLP itself, an interesting effect emerged: by creating systematic new-generation NLP training programs in our Center (we’ve already had four different designs of the “NLP Practitioner” course), together with Alexander Gerasimov, we developed our own original NLP! On one hand, it incorporates everything created before us at the highest quality standards, clarifying, supplementing, systematizing, and operationalizing everything available; on the other, it enriches NLP with new topics, models, and techniques.

In our Center’s practice, we quickly came to a simple conclusion: it’s quite difficult to completely overcome all the above weaknesses of NLP within a single organization. This is something for all leaders of various NLP centers and members of the professional community to consider. Although collaboration between specialists from different centers also has many challenges.

Returning to the discussion of strengths and weaknesses, one more observation: no matter how differently we may view psychoanalysis, approaches by A. Adler, C. Jung, E. Fromm, W. Reich all emerged from it to some extent.

One criterion for the value and usefulness of a method can be its “fruitfulness,” that is, the significance of the ideas and tools it generates for future generations. Throughout my development with NLP, I’ve wondered: have many approaches grown out of NLP and become independent? How effectively does NLP itself evolve?

Of course, reflecting on the main framework of the above questions, we can reframe: strengths and weaknesses are relative, and can easily turn into each other. And that’s true! But if we take the evolution of NLP seriously, which many of us have loved and remain committed to, it’s worth formulating the “right” questions, the answers to which will help its further development:

  • Which parts of NLP need substantive, structural, and technological development?
  • How can NLP be made understandable to everyone?
  • How can NLP’s strengths be aligned with the best ideas in scientific psychology?
  • How can practical tools be made even easier and deeper at the same time?
  • How can the approach’s coherence, logic, and internal consistency be strengthened?
  • How can NLP be optimized and developed in its own best traditions?
  • How can all professionals’ efforts be directed toward holistic work with the person (not just local symptoms)?
  • And so on.

As I mentioned, in my private consulting practice, I have already traveled a 25-year path—from a “beginner” consultant to a professional and author of my own technologies. Naturally, I have a serious question: what’s next?

All these years, my personal interests have gone beyond NLP, reaching into scientific psychology, especially in the following areas: general psychology, educational psychology, clinical psychology, and organizational psychology. I have also always been interested in modeling in fields such as art, education, psychotherapy, and business. The accumulated knowledge and practical experience in these areas drive me to search creatively at a fundamentally new level. My efforts over the years have been devoted to finding answers to the questions above. As I developed and gained knowledge and experience, NLP’s weaknesses became more and more obvious. Although, to be fair, many of them (such as vaguely defined scientific rigor) can also be attributed to other areas of practical psychology, making progress in this direction even more important.

At a certain point in my professional journey, I formulated my main tasks as follows: how can all the strengths of NLP be used to solve existing challenges; how, with modeling experience, by looking at the most authoritative psychological approaches (clinical personality concepts) through the filters of NLP, can we design a possible path for further development, operationalizing the best of what’s been accumulated there?

Solving even these two tasks would significantly change the image, effectiveness, and completeness of the approach. If NLP becomes a fully scientific, transdisciplinary knowledge, it will attract a much wider range of specialists! Everyone will benefit from this!

Let’s analyze NLP’s starting positions. The subject of NLP has always been specific aspects (patterns) of people’s behavior and thinking. Hence, the focus on solving local symptoms. On the other hand, solving something more concrete allows you to practically resolve even a small difficulty, but with obvious clarity and relatively quick, good results. In contrast, most psychological concepts look at the personality as a whole: on what basis is personality built, what causes people’s problems, what are the methods for solving them, etc. As is known, Freud already proposed his model: three levels of “I,” aligned with three types of consciousness, which later became the basis of his personality concept.

Unfortunately, NLP has not yet matured into an independent, coherent concept of personality. However, it’s worth noting that existing clinical personality concepts in psychology are quite theoretical, and many are not so practice-oriented or technological compared to most NLP developments. This is its advantage and main success. The “Logical Levels” model partially fills the existing gap in working with the whole person, but it doesn’t provide concrete answers on how to work with personal uniqueness, attitudes, individual lifestyle, and life strategy. Key questions remain outside the scope of specialists’ work.

NLP does not address the crucial question: why do some people “go with the flow of life,” while others consciously build their life path? Discussions about responsibility in the “Goal Specification” format do not reach the level of responsibility for building one’s life as a whole, and responsibility is not linked to the level of autonomy (subjectivity) of the person. That’s why, even after many NLP consultations and trainings, excuses and procrastination don’t disappear for people. And volitional regulation changes very little (or not at all)! Those who are already effective gain new strategies and, thanks to their autonomy and well-developed will, become even more successful! But those who lack this level of reflexivity, subjectivity, and volitional regulation only put “patches” on their most important systemic life problems.

The “psychoanalysis” of NLP in consulting usually comes down to searching for a thinking or behavioral pattern or analyzing a specific situation (for example, a conflict). But deep analysis of larger-scale patterns is left aside: it’s not recognized how past events determine the achieved level of personal uniqueness, affect current life results, etc. Higher logical levels—mission, vision—are often just declared. For many NLP specialists, they remain just nominalizations, which NLP itself was originally designed to combat (meta-model). Very few practical tools have been developed to help people find them congruently with their life experience.

It’s worth stopping at another important point. There is no clear analog to the concept of “life script,” as in Eric Berne’s theory, in NLP. Although, it would seem, it’s just one step to the concept of “Life Program!” Meanwhile, in the best psychological thought, these ideas have existed for a long time, starting with Freud’s student A. Adler, who introduced the term “Lifestyle.” This vector (the importance of life goals and the future, meaning of life, self-actualization, etc.) was continued in Western psychology by a whole group of outstanding psychologists: S. Bühler, A. Maslow, C. Rogers, G. Allport, V. Frankl, and in Russian psychology—S.L. Rubinstein, V.N. Druzhinin, and others.

So much useful and truly important knowledge has been accumulated! I see no reason to ignore it. It’s strange that the works of G. Bateson, N. Chomsky, subjective behaviorists, etc., were embraced by NLP, while much useful material in other concepts is overlooked as if it’s not our field!

One more important practical note. Working with complex symptoms as a psychotherapist, I realized long ago that NLP (like other schools of psychotherapy) lacks techniques for working with “difficult symptoms” such as anorexia, myasthenia, depression, etc. Specialists either don’t take on such cases or are forced to create complex combinations from everything they know, engaging in research and creativity (but few do this). Generative NLP, developed by R. Dilts (materials from our master course), only partially fills this gap.

I have achieved significant success with such complex symptoms when I started to explore how the symptom is connected to the person’s “way of living.” You could say that my entire practice pushed me toward thinking in terms of “lifestyle,” “life path.”

In my opinion, it’s also worth briefly discussing the expansion of types of consulting available in NLP. Currently, coaching is quite widespread, aimed at helping people achieve their highest potential. It can largely address the issue of NLP’s focus on psychotherapy in most people’s minds.

From 1995 to 2005, working very actively in Stockholm (3–4 times a year) for the Scandinavian NLP Institute, I first encountered coaching. At our “NLP Center in Education,” we immediately adopted this type of consulting, not so much for its new technologies (there weren’t really any), but for the idea of separating therapy from consulting on “life issues” and developing “effective life skills.” At that time, people were wary of psychological consulting, confusing it with psychiatric help, equating the psychologist with a doctor and themselves with someone mentally ill. I always wanted to help people build careers, increase professional effectiveness, and create a more successful life in the future. It turned out that we didn’t have many successful systemic tools for such tasks. This exposed even more areas for development. I had to model and design 80% of specific coaching methods during sessions or carefully, indirectly, transfer successful experiences from other clients in similar cases.

Again, coaching experience led me to a strikingly simple conclusion: it’s hard to help a person make significant changes, to change their life, without a systemic view of how they actually live!

As a result, my colleagues and I were forced to go beyond the NLP developed by the group led by J. Grinder and R. Bandler.

In cognitive psychology, research shows that most specialists who work actively for more than 10,000 hours in a field naturally become high-level experts and often create something original. My experience in all these contexts is approaching 20,000 hours, much of which is research, creative, and practical work.

To sum up, solving NLP’s challenges, clients’ “difficult” problems, and, of course, pursuing my own personal interests in self-development (both scientific and applied) allowed me to build my own original Professional Path, which became the foundation of my personal Life Path!

All this together pushed me even more to think about a fundamentally different level and scale of helping people: developing my own concept of “Personal Life Path Development.” It can be seen as a continuation of NLP at the highest logical levels, an attempt to solve most of the challenges mentioned above.

At the same time, the developed approach is an independent product of my own creativity, claiming to be a new concept in clinical psychology.

Let’s briefly describe it, showing how it addresses many of the discussed issues.

The Author’s Method Is Developed in the Following Structure:

  • Method goals
  • Basic concepts
  • Method principles
  • Mechanisms of change
  • Patterns of change
  • Models
  • Diagnostic tests
  • Coaching questionnaires
  • Change technologies
  • Techniques
  • Exercises
  • General structure of psychodynamics
  • Session organization requirements
  • Effectiveness criteria
  • Consultant work styles

Its main qualities are scientific rigor, practicality, structure, ease and depth of change, high systemicity, and speed of work.

The concept is presented as two interrelated and at the same time independent author’s technologies for helping people:

  • Personal Life Path Coaching
  • Personal Life Path Therapy

Personal Life Path Coaching is a coherent, structurally precise set of tools designed for a system of consulting sessions over a year (twice a month) to two years (once a month).

Overall, the method is based on the following basic concepts and tools:

  • Life path
  • Personal attitudes about self, the world, and life
  • Individual life stages
  • Classification of key (turning) life events
  • Belief cascade framing the attitude
  • Life stage mission
  • Meaning of life
  • Significant social environment of the life stage
  • Life options
  • Main contexts of self-realization
  • Author’s world
  • Lifestyle (system of daily life patterns)
  • “Life thieves”
  • Personal uniqueness construct managing experience
  • Subjective roles (as the main integrator of identity)
  • Main life obstacles
  • Highest potential
  • Life orbit
  • Map of significant social environment
  • Dominant type of social relationships
  • Social self-realization
  • “Gold standard of life”
  • Life effectiveness
  • Diagnosis of personal vulnerability
  • Main life obstacles to achieving the highest potential
  • And so on.

After reading this far-from-complete list, it’s easy to see that the language for describing a person’s (client’s) experience has changed significantly. Based on the specifics of coaching work (fast, easy, and deep), the tools themselves have changed.

The main principle for considering the structure of experience in the method is reciprocity. This means that all selected substructures (units of experience description) mutually determine each other. For example, you can trace how a person’s turning points in life reflect subjective roles, and how the main controlling role generates certain types of events. This allows you to look even deeper into the “matrix” of individual life experience and then perform a “reboot.”

The approach includes special diagnostic tests, coaching questionnaires, exercises, models, and techniques.

To be continued!

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