If Someone’s P*ssing You Off With Their NLP (and didn’t mean to) – is it NLP?

(And can anyone hear you cry…..?!)

The foundation of NLP in practice is surely a fundamental emotional intelligence.

This tends to be coded at its simplest, in basic NLP terms, as rapport, calibration and state.

However, sometimes this seems to denote only a purely technical and instrumental procedure prior to committing NLP on someone!

In quantitative approaches to NLP training – i.e. training self-defined as excellent by the number of new models per day – I guess it is efficient to consign the more self-aware, somatic, relational, interactive, collaborative and generative NLP skills to a kind of luxury category, as optional extras even.

Insert, as they say, a Victoria Wood-type foreplay joke here…

It’s (sort of) funny how often I hear that someone’s manager/ friend/ colleague/ partner etc has been on an NLP course and now they are unbearable… oh dear,…oops.

So, my point.. can you actually call what you are doing ‘NLP’, even if it is an actual NLP technique, if you personally aren’t fully awake, skilfully calibrating and experientially learning in the moment how to communicate effectively with the other person?

If you are not truly looking, listening, patterning and responding to ongoing feedback appropriately and with a sense of creating a unique, living human connection …  then, with the best intentions and the sexiest NLP technique in the universe… what is that?

Of course we can all p*ss people off and get it wrong, and it wouldn’t be any fun if we couldn’t … but then what?

Only your NLP emotional intelligence skills will get you back on track – subtle, somatic, self-aware.. attention in the present moment, connection to self and other.

“If it aint rapportfulleee… then it aint no NLPeee”