Looks like there's a new NLP book out. Stan Rockwell has reviewed the recently published, NLP: The Essential Guide to Neuro Linguistic Programming at the @PsychCentral blog. You can read the review here. I trotted along to Amazon.co.uk and found the book on sale for £7.58, which is pretty good value for a 464 page book. Conveniently I only remembered my self-imposed moratorium on book purchases after the thing was bought and leaving the Amazon depot.
Rockwell gives a pretty positive review; he does comment on the amount of jargon filling the pages and that can't be denied; but he he goes on to say that he's been using the techniques described in the book and doing the exercises and they've been working for him. My criticism here is that yet again we have a book re-packaging NLP as an easy guide.
What we actually need is someone developing new models, researching the effectiveness of what we already have or applying NLP in new and interesting contexts - as my friend and colleague Chris Mitchell does in her excellent Behaviour Management Toolkit reviewed by me here. I seem to remember John Grinder, one of the co-founders of NLP, talking in a YouTube clip of the need to 'replenish the well'. It's a good metaphor, as you would expect from Grinder, because of course if everyone draws water and the well is not replenished then eventually the well runs dry.
I've been having a fun time with NLP at the moment. I'm teaching the principles of NLP and drawing on my experience of using NLP as a therapist to groups of psychology students at the college where I work. Teaching this stuff has really helped me reach an even better understanding of NLP. In particular I'm really appreciating the 'explanatory power' of the approach when, for example, the class and I explore the psychology of negative emotional states - often called 'disorders' - though 'differently ordered' might be a better term; and I'm appreciating the creativity of NLP and the strengths based approach to therapeutic work: helping clients to access resources and creating choice about how they'd like to feel.
