The Map is Not The Territory?

I must be getting old, either that or I am just getting tired. I’ve seen it happen to relatives and their peers who take up political causes, rage at the television news debates, get angry at the behaviour of the youth and lament for the nostalgia of times gone by. So I think I am definitely getting older. I’m also growing a bit weary.

That said, rant mode is now engaged. Again.

Whilst I know of a number of life coaches who are most excellent, are very successful in life and successful in their field, I’m getting a bit tired of receiving emails from “life coaches” making grandiose claims for their skills at coaching people to be successful, yet they want me to advise them on how to get actual clients.

Unemployed “life coaches”? Gimme a break.

Pardon my scepticism, but I can’t help but think that most life coaches are simply people who don’t want to work and would rather want to get paid riches by encouraging other people to do the work instead. Unemployed “life coaches” are surely a joke if ever I heard one, and I sincerely hope, merely a passing fad.

I’ve also seen 20-something-year-old “life coaches” advertising on their websites services for up to £5000 per session (yes, really). How they get the idea that this is realistic is beyond me, and if anyone were to be so foolish as to sign up for such coaching, well, fools and their money will be rapidly parted; although it seems not nearly often enough for most struggling life coaches.

However, one can only wonder what sort of problematic life a person actually has in the first place in order to have £5000 ready to hand over for some “life coaching.”

Five grand could actually be quite a good investment though, but a lot depends on just who you are paying it to. I did half an ‘O’ Level in cookery (I think they called it “Home Economics”) when I was a teenager and have attended a number of business courses. If you need coaching for a restaurant business, you could come to me.

I’ll be delighted to help if you pay me five grand.

In fact, I’d be really, really delighted. Or you could pay to go and see that rude man from the television who has probably never done a life coaching training in his life. Much of the value comes down to the experience level of the person you pay the money to, not who they did their coaching course with – which is contrary to what every life coach that writes to me seems to believe.

Meanwhile, I’m especially appalled by NLPers on newsgroups who flippantly advise “the fast phobia cure” for other people’s clients who may be suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as though the suffering of victims goes no deeper than the quality of the pictures that they make.

Based on a few books and possibly a week-long training course, a few self-appointed experts in human excellence profess to understand the situations facing combat veterans, war refugees, torture victims, victims of crime and so forth.

So rather than suggesting the newsgroup enquirer refers the client to someone more competent, the advice proffered takes the form of, “just dissociate them” and is cited so commonly as to have almost become a mantra used to relieve the most serious examples of human suffering. Bastards.

The effect that this can have is that it trivialises what is otherwise an excellent toolset for anyone working in the change-work and people-helping professions. I credit the development of “the fast phobia cure” (FPC) as one of the most important landmarks in psychological therapies.

The FPC is a fairly dependable and replicable process that demonstrates unequivocally that mental and personal change is both possible and practicable. It seems strange these days, but it was not so long ago that other self-appointed experts in human psychology suggested that such rapid mental change was not at all possible. Things such as the FPC changed all that of course, and for that, I am truly grateful.

What was innovated and begun by Bandler and Grinder is remarkable and created a massive evolutional leap in the field of improving the experience of being human for so many people who’s experience would otherwise have been less than desirable.

It created a field that enabled a number of spin-offs, creating new areas of research and development in human communications, psychology, therapies and so on that have benefited significant numbers of people. How wide then the gulf then between the practice and so many of the practitioners. Yet it seems that it is “NLP” that gets slammed by the critic, not the practitioners themselves.  This is a real shame.

To be clear – when the local math teacher gets caught dogging in the local car park, no one criticises or blames the field of mathematics.  When someone’s complicated mathematical theorem gets disproven, the field of mathematics isn’t invalidated, just that particular aspect of it.

So, whilst the technology is one thing, some of the practitioners can be something else entirely.  I do tend to get quite angry with NLPers waxing lyrical on their blogs and Facebook accounts how they are so excited to have “another client to play with – who says change work has to be boring” (genuine quote) and other such appalling and smug condescension, often to the expressed glee of their fellow NLPers.

I can only wonder how the naïve client would feel, who upon booking an appointment with someone they naively believe to be a professional, finds that their appointment is being used as an idle boast and status grab on social networking sites.

A similar game exists amongst psychotherapists who compete to gather status by seeing what they believe to be the most serious client group.  Some will fixate on child sexual abuse, others on PTSD, others on personality disorder, multiple personalities and so on.   Stories get exchanged about how extreme the “cases” are and the “interesting cases” get brought into the conferences and displayed to the voyeuristic masses.  It’s a strange world like that in psychotherapy.

In nursing, I noticed that pretty much everyone agreed that cardiology was “superior” to elderly care, and general medicine was somewhere between the two, but no one could really agree whether neurosurgery was more or less superior than cardiology.  The pediatric nurses weren’t really regarded as real nurses, just like the midwives.

And talking of social networking sites, why do so many male NLPers, who also use their profiles to try and promote themselves, fill their profiles with endless photos of themselves drinking and being drunk? I’ve seen a couple who have pictures of themselves rolling what is clearly a marijuana joint and smoking bongs.

It seems that some NLPers have a tendency to measure success by how good they feel and suffer an intolerable need to demonstrate how just great they feel at every opportunity, even if feeling great is artificially induced by chemical means.

I wonder if these are the same arseholes who shout in the street on Friday and Saturday nights after the pubs close, advertising their states of mind to anyone who cares to listen. Surely they can contribute to humanity and learn to stay in and express themselves more quietly on blogs instead?

I come from a professional clinical background (nursing) where a professional manner is demanded both in one’s working and personal life. Can you imagine a world where nurses, teachers, and surgeons publicly advertise their drinking habits in such a manner and discuss their patients/students on chat forums and social networking sites? It’s not just about appearances, it is about trust.

As a discipline, NLP is rapidly losing that trust.

I doubt that this is because of any inherent weakness in the NLP models themselves but more likely it is as a direct result of the collective behaviours so many self-professed “practitioners” of these models.

In my book, The Rainbow Machine, I gave the example of the appalling woman who demanded that I show her my “peak state” as some kind of proof of my authenticity, as though other people’s emotions and positive states are some kind of personal plaything designed to be shown off at gatherings.  I see so many references on forums to “eliciting positive states” and “installing states” and so on that I often question if the writers of such things actually have any idea that real people live in the consensual reality that exists external to the NLPers collective imagination.

Back in the days before I was banned from such forums, I sometimes wrote to such people and asked what actual experience they were writing from. All too often I was told that actually they hadn’t any personal experience of such things, but did know enough about them to be advising others. Quite how I can only speculate to imagine. Anyway, I get banned for being such a party pooper and that probably serves me right.  Reality can be a real bitch when it comes to knowing stuff; it just keeps getting in the way of a really good theory.

Rant mode disengaged. For now.


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