Just how effective and true is NLP? I never trusted and always doubted that it works; the whole idea of categorizing human behavior and somehow managing to control interactions with fancy gizzle and applying it to pickup just seemed too dubious and cheesy to sound true. Have any of you used it, applied it and managed to make it work?

It makes sense that you should be skeptical since there has been a lot of weirdness in the seduction community about NLP and its mysterious power. Teachers who pitch NLP as a magic bullet that will give you secret mind control powers over women (cough, Ross Jeffries / Speed Seduction, cough) are doing guys a disservice since they are promising too much. In my opinion.

I have experienced and used the power of NLP in therapy and changework, which the area that I know it best (specifically in life coaching - I'm a certified NLP practitioner). Coaching and therapy is a context in which you're using NLP or hypnotic language in a overt way to help a client get from A to B. In that case you will already have built up rapport, gotten their attention (at least I hope so - client's paying good money for this...), developed a trusting coach-client relationship, and all that stuff. Your client should know what you're doing every step of the way.

In a club or bar or on the street, a lot of these baseline assumptions are gone. You may not have a girl's full attention or have it for very long. Deep rapport is not necessarily a given. She may not trust you yet - after all, you're just a random guy in a bar. Also, guys doing NLP in this context are trying to be covert, and are basically spitting complex, stilted language patterns that they hope will go undetected. (The SS patterns I've seen are long and elaborate enough that they would need to be memorized.) In a loud, distracting social situation, unless you're already very practiced at NLP, these patterns can come off sounding really stilted and weird.

The funny thing is, suppose you have already built conversational rapport with a girl and have her focused attention. In that case, your best shot at connecting with her on a man-woman level is almost certainly by just "being a guy" - flirting, being sexual, showing intent, and escalating. Obviously, great language skills can help you a lot here, but that's mostly about communicating your identity and message across to the girl. Not about which patterns you memorized and ran on the girl.

For me, "getting caught" acting like a confident, unapologetic man who is sexually interested in a woman, would be far better than "getting caught" doing any covert hypnosis/NLP "technique". The former is just a man being a man - no apologies. The latter feels sleazy and inauthentic to me.

What equilibrium said.

NLP's legit. Using it to pick up girls is not.

Despite its popularity,[13] NLP has been largely ignored by conventional social science in part due to a lack of professional credibility[13] and insufficient empirical evidence to substantiate its effectiveness.[14] It is difficult to determine the exact impact NLP has had; NLP appears to have minimal impact on academic psychology or mainstream psychotherapy and counselling.[14] At the same time, NLP has been adopted by some private psychotherapists, including hypnotherapists, who undertake training in NLP and apply it to their practice. NLP has gained popularity within management training, life coaching,[15] and the self-help industry.[16]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-lingu...rogramming

If it works then why isn't it accepted by the scientific community but only by the self-help industry?

I think this whole NLP seduction thing builds on the thought that women don't like you, don't want sex and you have to do incredibly complicated stuff to get laid. Like someone once said "Pickup is convincing the enemy to have sex with you".

I wouldn't even deny that it works in some way or another, but for seduction, its just unnecessary and puts your focus on the wrong things (the moral argument aside).

(05-01-2011 10:37 PM)cobrastyle Wrote:  If it works then why isn't it accepted by the scientific community but only by the self-help industry?

I think this whole NLP seduction thing builds on the thought that women don't like you, don't want sex and you have to do incredibly complicated stuff to get laid. Like someone once said "Pickup is convincing the enemy to have sex with you".

I wouldn't even deny that it works in some way or another, but for seduction, its just unnecessary and puts your focus on the wrong things (the moral argument aside).

Good post. Jeffries stuff is rediculous. Can´t imagine him or his discples pulling much.

There are two different questions when you are talking about NLP: does it provide some valid theraputic practices? Yes. Is it an accurate theory of the mind and/or superior to other forms of therapy? No

NLP shares many therapeutic techniques and concepts with scientific forms of clinical psychology (real therapy). These techniques can be effective, NLP practitioners learn them, so a good NLP practitioner can be an effective therapist.

BUT NLP has a lot of problems:

First: NLP makes a number of claims that have been proven false. The eye accessing cues aspect of NLP has no evidence behind it. NLP therapy cannot reduce anziety in one session.

Second: many of the techniques that NLP credits as so important are actually taken, without attribution, from other fields (see, e.g. unconscious competence).

Third: NLP has very lax accreditation standards. NLP practitioners require far less training than actual therapists. You can get certified in a matter of days.

(05-02-2011 02:50 AM)Jon Wrote:  First: NLP makes a number of claims that have been proven false. The eye accessing cues aspect of NLP has no evidence behind it. NLP therapy cannot reduce anziety in one session.

Yeah, like any art, there are better and worse aspects of it. My greatest interest is NLP is the approach it takes to analyzing peoples' use of spoken and other language as a means of helping them change in the way that they want. Which I think is one of the most solid parts of NLP and has a deep and well-respected heritage in clinical therapy.

The eye accessing cues are one of those weird "black magic" parts of NLP that I am more skeptical of. On the other hand, the more general underlying concept of sensory acuity - observing people's behavior (movement, body language, speaking, etc) gives you clues to their internal state - makes a lot of sense. It's harder to teach as a specific rule, other than something very general like "watch people and see what they do".

That said, I think NLP does best in areas where it provides broad philosophies, rules of thumb, and generalities. Of course, some NLP marketers have gone overboard promising very specific results and universal rules, and that behavior has unfortunately tainted the whole field. (Actually, it's a very similar problem to what we observe in the PUA marketing industry too - some bad apples exaggerate and overreach, some clients have a bad experience because of expanded expectations, and it leads some guys to write the whole thing off as nonsense, instead of being critical and evaluating individual methods or teachers case-by-case.)

(05-02-2011 02:50 AM)Jon Wrote:  Second: many of the techniques that NLP credits as so important are actually taken, without attribution, from other fields (see, e.g. unconscious competence).

Some texts that I have read do present NLP as this unified body of work, which is pretty inaccurate - it's a wild blend of a lot of different results from linguistics, philosophy, Gestalt and family therapy, psychology, computer science, neuroscience. Its practical standpoint means that "whatever works" tends to get assimilated into the NLP body of knowledge.

The reverse has also apparently happened - some authors have claimed that some of the commonly used therapeutic NLP patterns have made their way back into mainstream therapy without citing their origins.

(05-02-2011 02:50 AM)Jon Wrote:  Third: NLP has very lax accreditation standards. NLP practitioners require far less training than actual therapists. You can get certified in a matter of days.

That's true - a Practitioner course consists of about 100 hours of training and a Master Practitioner is about 200. So the certifications basically say that you've attended class, which is fine, but it's not the 1000s of hours of formal course work that a person gets in (e.g.) a university degree.

For me, the certification process was a great learning experience but hardly the final word. As with any skill, ongoing study and growth is the key factor. If a person wanted to really learn NLP well, I'd say the best way to do it would be to get a small, dedicated mastermind group together (maybe 4-8 people) and meet for a few hours a week to practice the techniques on each other.

In any case, for a man wanting to "get better with women", I think the promise of NLP is somewhat of a distraction. Will it screw you up? No. Anything you learn probably won't hurt and may help a bit.

But spending the same number of hours going out and working your core pickup/seduction habits and skills (i.e. approaching, communicating with women, making mistakes, and learning) is the most direct way to improve.

(05-02-2011 05:27 AM)equilibrium Wrote:  

(05-02-2011 02:50 AM)Jon Wrote:  First: NLP makes a number of claims that have been proven false. The eye accessing cues aspect of NLP has no evidence behind it. NLP therapy cannot reduce anziety in one session.

Yeah, like any art, there are better and worse aspects of it. My greatest interest is NLP is the approach it takes to analyzing peoples' use of spoken and other language as a means of helping them change in the way that they want. Which I think is one of the most solid parts of NLP and has a deep and well-respected heritage in clinical therapy.

The eye accessing cues are one of those weird "black magic" parts of NLP that I am more skeptical of. On the other hand, the more general underlying concept of sensory acuity - observing people's behavior (movement, body language, speaking, etc) gives you clues to their internal state - makes a lot of sense. It's harder to teach as a specific rule, other than something very general like "watch people and see what they do".

That said, I think NLP does best in areas where it provides broad philosophies, rules of thumb, and generalities. Of course, some NLP marketers have gone overboard promising very specific results and universal rules, and that behavior has unfortunately tainted the whole field. (Actually, it's a very similar problem to what we observe in the PUA marketing industry too - some bad apples exaggerate and overreach, some clients have a bad experience because of expanded expectations, and it leads some guys to write the whole thing off as nonsense, instead of being critical and evaluating individual methods or teachers case-by-case.)

(05-02-2011 02:50 AM)Jon Wrote:  Second: many of the techniques that NLP credits as so important are actually taken, without attribution, from other fields (see, e.g. unconscious competence).

Some texts that I have read do present NLP as this unified body of work, which is pretty inaccurate - it's a wild blend of a lot of different results from linguistics, philosophy, Gestalt and family therapy, psychology, computer science, neuroscience. Its practical standpoint means that "whatever works" tends to get assimilated into the NLP body of knowledge.

The reverse has also apparently happened - some authors have claimed that some of the commonly used therapeutic NLP patterns have made their way back into mainstream therapy without citing their origins.

(05-02-2011 02:50 AM)Jon Wrote:  Third: NLP has very lax accreditation standards. NLP practitioners require far less training than actual therapists. You can get certified in a matter of days.

That's true - a Practitioner course consists of about 100 hours of training and a Master Practitioner is about 200. So the certifications basically say that you've attended class, which is fine, but it's not the 1000s of hours of formal course work that a person gets in (e.g.) a university degree.

For me, the certification process was a great learning experience but hardly the final word. As with any skill, ongoing study and growth is the key factor. If a person wanted to really learn NLP well, I'd say the best way to do it would be to get a small, dedicated mastermind group together (maybe 4-8 people) and meet for a few hours a week to practice the techniques on each other.

In any case, for a man wanting to "get better with women", I think the promise of NLP is somewhat of a distraction. Will it screw you up? No. Anything you learn probably won't hurt and may help a bit.

But spending the same number of hours going out and working your core pickup/seduction habits and skills (i.e. approaching, communicating with women, making mistakes, and learning) is the most direct way to improve.

The last part of this post reminds me of a guy I know who only listens to tapes with titles like "Sublimal Confidence: How to unconscousily seduce ANY girl!" and who doesn´t even approach because he is too scared. Poor guy.

(05-02-2011 04:31 PM)Matt Wrote:  The last part of this post reminds me of a guy I know who only listens to tapes with titles like "Sublimal Confidence: How to unconscousily seduce ANY girl!" and who doesn´t even approach because he is too scared. Poor guy.

People like what's familiar and safe.

And if a guy wants to become an awesome seducer and ladies man, while staying safe and warm and fuzzy in his comfort zone and feeling like he's "working on things"... well, good luck.