Ask HN: Has NLP Helped You?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23516152

by praving5 • 6 years ago

1 2 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I recently came across this book on shaping human behaviours - https://www.nlpco.com/nlp-the-essential-guide/

This looks very fascinating to me and I want to dive deeper into it. I have 2 questions:

1) Has NLP helped you? If yes, how and if No, why not?

2) Where to get further training on NLP and adopt it in regular course of life?

ksaj• 6 years ago

You might be interested in Derren Brown's take on NLP. He started to study it, didn't like it, then spent years trying to not get certified. Eventually they snuck/forced the certification on him anyway. Really bizarre and perhaps a tad cultish.

In any case, NLP has some apparent actual science, but generously soaked in a huge dose of snake oil. If you ever take lessons on hypnosis, public speaking, self-help, etc, you see the exact same principles renamed and rejigged for the purpose at hand. Same concepts, different salesfolk.

If you want to fast-track your knowledge in the parts of NLP that actually seem to do something, learn rapid induction and conversational hypnosis instead. But even then you'll still have to entertain a certain amount of snake oil. A lot of rapid induction ideas only work on people actively trained to respond correctly - just like with the 1-inch chi no-contact punch nonsense. At that point, it is still interesting, but utterly useless in practice.

Every time these things become commercially viable, they forget that they only planned on stealing the good bits, and eventually add in all the fake stuff just the same.

There is a fellow named Igor Ledechowski that seems to be one of the only people who have studied these concepts in order to model the parts that work. Check out his ideas on conversational hypnosis. It seems people like Anthony Robbins have paid a lot of attention to this way of thinking, and it definitely seems to have worked well for Bill Clinton's impeachment trial.

praving5• 6 years ago

Thanks. This is a great piece of advise.

Ask HN: Has NLP Helped You?

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