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 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.
Whilst I know of a number of life coaches who are most excellent and are very successful in life and in their field, I’m getting a bit tired of receiving emails from “life coaches” making grandiose claims about 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 get rich by encouraging other people to work instead.
Unemployed “life coaches” are surely a joke if ever I heard one, and I sincerely hope they are 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 price 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 are easily parted, although it seems not nearly often enough for some struggling life coaches.
However, one can only wonder what sort of problematic life a person actually has in the first place 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 needed 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 any life coaching training in his life. Much of the value depends on the experience level of the person you pay, not on 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 clients who are suffering from 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 refer 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 such advice 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” 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 mental change was impossible. Things such as the FPC changed all that, of course, and for that, I am truly grateful.
The innovations and initiatives started by Bandler and Grinder are remarkable and have led to a significant evolutionary leap in enhancing the human experience for many people whose lives 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 is the chasm between the practice and so many practitioners? Yet it seems that it is “NLP” that gets slammed by the viewing lay-public, not the practitioners themselves.
This is a real shame.
To be clear – when the local maths 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 about 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 gain 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 disorders, 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 on whether neurosurgery was more or less superior to cardiology. The paediatric nurses weren’t really regarded as nurses, just like 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 from an intolerable need to demonstrate how 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 lives. 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, and as a discipline, NLP is rapidly losing that trust. I doubt that this phenomenon is because of any inherent weakness in the NLP models (plural) themselves, but more likely it is a direct result of the collective behaviour of 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, although they had no personal experience of such things, they knew enough about them to advise others. Quite how, I can only speculate and imagine. Anyway, I got 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 an excellent theory.
Rant mode disengaged.
