NLP History 7 - buzz

A disquieting direction became obvious in the 1990s when, partly due to the legally-driven fragmentation of NLP practice, and partly due to lack of a defining and regulating structure to oversee the rapidly growing field, it seemed for a time that NLP could be (and was) promoted as the "latest thing", a panacea, or universal miracle solution. Dubious models and practices burgeoned, in parallel with bona fide. For a number of these new practices, profit, marketability or New Age appeal proved a stronger motive than realism or ethics.

Training too became fragmented. A plethora of trainers, some renowned, some New Age and charismatic, and some focussed upon niches, emerged, each with their own competing ideas of what training and standards were needed to become a "practitioner". As a result, today there is a range of in duration, quality and credibility of different practitioner training programmes.

In this respect, Platt (2001) comments critically that NLP needs to temper its claims, and accept it has limits on its effectiveness:

"Does that make NLP bogus? No, it does not. But the research and the findings of the investigators certainly make it clear that NLP cannot help all people in all situations, which is frequently what is claimed and what practioners assert... The immoderate claims that are made for NLP might be viewed a little more critically when viewed against this background."

Likewise the Irish National Center for Guidance in Education's Guidance Counsellor's Handbook (current as of 2005) includes the following caveat about excessive claims made by some trainers:

"Unfortunately, NLP has a history of so-called NLP Practitioners overstating the level of their competence, and of their training."


Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_neuro-linguistic_programming
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