By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht

Yesterday we started a discussion on successful NLP interventions. Here are a few ideas to expand the topic.

Content Vs. Content Free

Another secret that would work well for you as an active practitioner is to avoid working with content as much as possible. As an NLP practitioner, your job is not to provide your client a setting in which he or she can vent out their troubles and miseries. That’s what good friends are for, and you are being paid for something completely different.

In fact, it would be more helpful for your session if you prevent your client from venting out the negative emotions. One reason for this is, that you want your client to be fully absorbed in the process, for example if you use the States Chaining pattern or even the Swish pattern. You want their minds to be influenced and sometimes akin to make the resolution that lies within each NLP process.

With most of my clients I spent 10-15 minutes, and not more than 45 minutes. I do not let them dwell on the details of the issue, certainly I would not be willing to hear gossip stories, interpretations of reality and endless amount of sorrow. I am not a psychologist and in my training I was educated to be dealing with the end result, not with what happened when they were 3 years and 10 months old, on a rainy day in Boston.

The best setting for a successful NLP procedure is content free. That is, without taking actual details unless you need them. Most of the patterns and method you can find in this book are content free style. Their mind knows why they’re there, and in a subconscious level all the details are being figured out as you move ahead with the process. So your control over which detail goes where and why has no meaning.

More than so, dwelling on details might prevent the client from actually getting results. You cannot perform the Swish pattern, for example, by letting your client telling you the meaning of the color blue in the negative image or the reason that his hand looks dim in the positive one. These details have no meaning and if you give your client’s brain a chance to doubt the process, there’s a very high chance it will fail.