A Congruency Approach to NLP

I found NLP after doing an Exegesis course, the UKs version of Est. The space I was coming from was not about solving people’s problems or helping them achieve their goals but from my experience as a teacher. As a teacher the mission was to help the child’s mind/body system to achieve it’s natural potential. By doing this the child would have the power to then choose what they wanted in life. If the child could be ‘congruent’ in their thinking processes then they could be who they are meant to be. Of course that is a little bit of a challenge because each of us lives within cultural, social and personal environments that provide the context of one’s life. But I percieved NLP as a Meta Science providing the model to help adults free up and improve their mental processes to gain more congruence as mature adults. This congruence one can judge by observing representational system cues, the shift in unconscious physiology as individuals talk about their experiences and their physiology generally.
We noticed this shift towards congruency in course participants which we could only put down to the considerable number of simple exercises done. Exercises done with clearly defined guidelines so that they can’t be tainted by the chatter and story telling that people like to indulge in when in a group. This was of more importance than refining how to use the techniques that came from NLP such as timeline or allergy cures. These would not be taught until participants had a very good understanding of sensory acuity so that rapport and noticing unconscious indicators were at the core of the technique and a skill. Also essential was a skill of the fundamentals of language.
What has been interesting since then is watching videos of ‘the best nlpers’ and seeing that they are often missing the congruency we were looking to achieve. The practice of basic core skills creates the congruency. Experts do a ;lot of talking but often don’t walk the walk. Sure, the experts have great confidence and people applaud them in conversations and some of them have great knowledge around the science but that confidence scenario is part of human activity, it is how politicians get elected and media personalities, with litle real personality but a lot of glitz are created.
Consider this, does the success of NLP in the modern world marketplace keep reinforcing the idea that humans first and foremost need to have their ‘sh…t’ sorted out rather than advocating that at the core of humans having problems is that they didn’t complete their natural progression from child brain functioning to adult functioning. How come that while at school educators are expected to nurture the mental processing and flexibility of children, acknowledging that it is aprocess tha animals have to go through after millions of years of evolution, but when the child leaves school they suddenly become members of a world where we concentrate on unuseful behaviours and focus on how do we put right broken people.
Isn’t this what Graves’s emergent cyclical levels of existence (spiral dynamics) suggests?
The reality is that NLP therapists and coaches are doing a great job and should be supported but as far as human evolution goes they provide only a band aid for humanity. It is the science and message at the core of NLP that offers much more, but there is a problem. Like all animal species confidence and self belief are essential for survival. You can have all the knowledge and ability possible but if you don’t have that fundamental self confidence you are going to get eaten, you become the underdog, you are expected to be fodder for the marketplace.
Humans at the top of society have this confidence. A confidence that is rarely backed up with morals, ability or self awareness. Even religious Christian leaders in the uk show no sign of the self awareness needed to know that they will talk every Sunday to a congregation and get them to make verbal requests to a supernatural being which are never answered. If you advertised a bottle of plain water and called it a cancer curing liquid the law would quickly put a stop to your lies. There is no evidence that the promises that religions offer happen in reality. The absurdity of the Bishop of London praying by the Cenotaph to God to protect all our troops is missed by the population. The cenotaph is there because God didn’t protect millions of soldiers. And even though the Bishop acts in this absurd way she is also allowed to be in the House of Lords and have a direct influence on the laws of the land. Religion is a man made concept that keeps a few at the top in power and living a good life. For centuries the leaders of religion have written the script as they have translated and edited scriptures time after time. Children do not need a religion to tell them how to be good people. Without a natural ability to know ‘what works’, how to be good people, societies could not survive and flourish. Moses is said to have been given the Ten Commndments so that his tribe, the Israelites, woiuld know how to behave. But the people of that tribe were already behaving in line with the Ten Commandments, if they hadn’t there would have been mayhem and the tribe could not have held together.
It is time for the world to change.