4 Ways to Rapidly Improve Your NLP

1 – Watch and listen
During your NLP Practitioner training, you learned to watch and listen in a new way, focusing on certain visual cues and listening for certain figures in language.It’s vital that you continue to build upon this because calibration is the most under-rated skill in NLP.

Calibration consists of three essential steps:
– observe patterns
– draw inferences
– test inferences

Many people leave out the testing phase, or rely on instances instead of looking for patterns of behaviour.

2 – Diversify your rapport skills (learn more ways to create rapport easily)

Many NLP practitioners have one way (or one favourite way) of getting rapport. Those with a language preference will prefer to match sensory predicates. Those with a behavioural preference will prefer to match posture and gestures.

There are 1001 reasons you should go with your preferences and they’re geared towards preventing you from having to work at this. Familiarity is a trap. Staying so far inside your comfort zone makes you less flexible and therefore less effective overall.

So start experimenting. Get rapport by finding common ground. Practice building rapport by turning the relevant state up and down.

Above all, stop matching and start leading. You can’t really know if you have rapport with someone unless you can get them to follow you. And if you’re just matching, _they’re_ leading. Being led is not a skill. Rapport is something quite different.

3 – Practice your skills outside of the therapy/work context

This is my personal favourite and the greatest area of missed opportunity to get really good at NLP.

If you only practice your NLP in the therapy room, in the training room or at a ‘practice group’ you’re missing a whole host of opportunities ideal for your learning.

NLP isn’t a formal activity, it’s not therapy and it doesn’t require NLP-trained subjects to make it work. It’s a set of universal skills that can be practiced anywhere that two people or more meet and communicate. I’m not talking about doing changework on colleagues or passers-by. I’m talking about intentionally getting better at eliciting states, rapport, anchoring, calibration, meta-model and milton model language and all of the other everyday skills that underpin excellence at NLP.

4 – Take NLP to Master Practitioner level

Master Practitioner is all about raising your skills rapidly to a higher level. Note the comparative ‘higher’. The first thing you’ll do on the course is re-open your learning loops, allowing you to further refine your abilities naturally.

Then you’ll learn additional skills which will add to your capabilities, especially in any areas you’ve identified as being ‘gaps’ in your skill-set.

You’ll learn how to diversify your abilities and deliberately generalise them into every area of your life where you can benefit from the additional edge this brings.

For those interested in option 4, full details are here.

Whichever methods you choose, let me know what results you get.